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On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 04:12:05AM +0100, sergio masci wrote:
> And what REALLY gets up my nose is the argument that having access to the 
> source means the user can fix it. Please, give me a break. Having access 
> to the source actually means that you have a garantee that you can't be 
> charged for minor fixes made by someone else. Who in their right mind is 
> going to spend weeks trying to understand how GCC works in order to fix a 
> bug in their own program. What they will actually do is try to figure a 
> work-around

There is a reason why GPL software is most used by organizations with
lots of programmers on staff. Look at how incredibly advanced, say, the
git revision control system is. It's used by programmers exclusively,
and for that task is just brilliant work solving a very difficult
computer science problem. Complex and not as user friendly as it could
be, yes, but for the user group it was designed for there is simply
nothing even remotely like it available commercially. (open source is a
different matter and there are a pile of other revision control systems
similar to it ;))

Now lets take the example of leading edge open source 3d solid geometry
CAD programs. Another very difficult comp-sci (and geometry) problem.

What's available? Well, I guess you could say Blender, but it's not
really for CAD. BRL-CAD fits the bill, but it's actually an ex-US
military project dating back to 1979. There is also an open source
constructive geometry *kernel* available, aparently funded by a bunch of
industry partners, but it's useless for an end user. In the end, how
many mechanical engineers are good programmers?


That said, implementing new features can be surprisingly easy. GCC for
instance has whole howto's available on how to port GCC to a new
architecture. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc.html
Similarly the Linux kernel has tonnes of documentation descripting how
to implement new drivers, be it for a peice of hardware or a new
filesystem. Recently I added an essentially new feature to a library one
of my open source programs depends on, and got it accepted into their
tree within about a week. And if anything, being able to see the source
code of every part of the system can be really important in trying to
debug your own software, even if only to convince yourself that you're
the one at fault.

- -- 
http://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 
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