Beat Rubischon wrote:
Hello!
Am 07.10.08 14:33 schrieb "Jeroen Massar" unter jeroen@unfix.org:
Better then to pay the closed source folks and let them do it, as they will also maintain the changes for yo.
Each day I work with Open Source and Closed Source tools and applications. Usually I see commercial software coming with a better usability and OpenSource with better stability and performance.
I think it all depends on where it comes from and how much the authors of the tool love it and how much time they can spend on it.
The major advantage for OpenSource is the visibility of the code - no code monkey is able to hide 20 years old buggy crap when he needs to provide the sources. Believe me, this is a great motivation for a lot of coders out there ;-)
Which is why for instance that great Open Source thing called Linux contains so much junk I guess ;)
Yes, the visibility is there, but there are only few people who can actually understands what it does. That nice Debian prng issue of late comes to mind as an awesome example here, even though it was very visible that it was changed, clearly nobody ever really checked upto then, thus it went completely unnoticed.
Even more, when you pay licenses host or by CPU, which means today _per_core_, why should a commercial software supplier optimize their binaries?
To be better, cheaper, faster etc than the competition? Or to just make sure that there is no competition as they suck compared to what you do. Some people pride their work ;)
Even simple tasks like using a commercial compiler instead of gcc, which gives 10-100% additional performance, is often not done as the compiler costs $1000 extra - compare this with the several hundred thousends the scoftware company usually earns per year...
ICC++
But gcc is getting quite upto par actually as a certain company has donated a lot of code to the compiler to beef it up quite a bit. I am one of those 'commercial' folks who also does open source stuff, and for a certain project has one single challenge: be better than everybody else. That includes making it very scalable and very fast. If those components where not in there, then what would be the fun.
Again, it all depends where you get your stuff from, and like mostly everything you can vote by not using it.
Greets, Jeroen