On 10/18/09 14:38, Warp wrote:
>> Not true if time itself is money. I.e. you may "lose" some by wasting
>> hours/days/weeks on OSS software that doesn't end up working.
>
>    How much more do you lose by having to pay software licenses?
>
>    You can't claim that trying an OSS for a few days costs more than eg.
> buying a Windows license for 10 servers, for instance.

	I can somewhat sympathize with his viewpoint. Sometimes the cost of 
using OSS isn't apparent after merely a few days. It could be months 
after it's been adopted. Usually fixing the problems requires one of 
your employees to spend time working on fixing it. And sometimes the 
cumulative time spent on such "fixes" is more than if they had just paid 
for reliable support (which many OSS projects don't offer). Employee 
time is expensive (in terms of money).

-- 
If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

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On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:57:24 -0500, Neeum Zawan wrote:

> Sometimes the cost of
> using OSS isn't apparent after merely a few days. It could be months
> after it's been adopted.

That's not unique to OSS, though.

Jim

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On 10/18/09 17:38, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Sometimes the cost of
>> using OSS isn't apparent after merely a few days. It could be months
>> after it's been adopted.
>
> That's not unique to OSS, though.

	Perhaps - haven't spent enough time in the business world with non-OSS 
software.

-- 
When you die, you lose a very important part of your life.
                 -- Brooke Shields

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On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:11:44 -0500, Neeum Zawan wrote:

> On 10/18/09 17:38, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> Sometimes the cost of
>>> using OSS isn't apparent after merely a few days. It could be months
>>> after it's been adopted.
>>
>> That's not unique to OSS, though.
> 
> 	Perhaps - haven't spent enough time in the business world with 
non-OSS
> software.

Most of my IT career was with non-OSS software and working very closely 
with Novell's products (as a customer, beta tester, and forum volunteer) 
- some customers never fully utilize software no matter what the source 
is.

Jim

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On 10/18/2009 3:40 PM, Warp wrote:
> SharkD<mik### [at] gmailcom>  wrote:
>> Oh, and I forgot these:
>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SharkD/Bugzilla
>
>    So open source software often contains bugs. What shocking news! I had
> no idea.

The point is not that I submitted bug reports; rather it is that I 
submitted patches for several of them and they never got implemented. I 
suspect because only Internet Explorer was affected, and the devs don't 
use it.

Mike

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On 10/18/2009 2:03 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:18:04 -0400, SharkD wrote:
>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SharkD/Bugzilla
>
> Yay, you submitted bugs.  Still not sure what point you're trying to
> make.....or are you just trolling the OSS people here?  Because if you
> are, I'll happily ignore your posts.
>
> Jim

Who's trolling exactly?

Mike

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>  Another advantage is that OSS is often developed by several independent
> parties which are not driving their own personal gain with the project,
> something that is the rule with proprietary commercial software.

I'd disagree with that, in fact it's almost the opposite.  IME OSS seems to 
be driven by individual developers doing whatever they feel like doing 
whenever they feel like it, they have no requirement to implement certain 
features or to be ready by a certain date.

> OSS is
> user-oriented, doing what benefits the users the most.

You really think so?  Even with our own POV it seems that developers just 
work on parts of the code almost randomly without really much input from the 
users.  One day there will be a "oh I though about doing X and it turned out 
pretty well" post, there are never any "hey i've got some time to work on 
POV, what would you like to see" type posts.

> The primary goal
> of proprietary software is to benefit the company the most. In some cases
> this means putting features and restrictions which benefit the company at
> the cost of the users. This is the more likely the more of a monopoly
> status the company has. (Think of draconian DRM measures, for instance.
> Users don't want nor benefit from DRM,

Users benefit from DRM by getting the same product for cheaper, it's just 
most don't realise this.

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scott wrote:

> Users benefit from DRM by getting the same product for cheaper, it's 
> just most don't realise this.

Counter-example: Because of DRM, my CD recorder will only record CDs 
which contain a special marker. These CDs are 10x more expensive. 
(Becuase, if you're recording CDs, you're *obvoisely* doing so 
illegally, right?)

Thanks to DRM, I get to buy the same product for 10x the price.

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> Counter-example: Because of DRM, my CD recorder will only record CDs which 
> contain a special marker. These CDs are 10x more expensive. (Becuase, if 
> you're recording CDs, you're *obvoisely* doing so illegally, right?)
>
> Thanks to DRM, I get to buy the same product for 10x the price.

You're just a sucker for buying a recorder that can only record to those 
fancy-pants discs :-)

Anyway, sit back and feel comforted that your extra donations to the record 
companies mean they can charge the rest of us a tiny bit less for everything 
else they sell :-D

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>> Counter-example: Because of DRM, my CD recorder will only record CDs 
>> which contain a special marker. These CDs are 10x more expensive. 
>> (Becuase, if you're recording CDs, you're *obvoisely* doing so 
>> illegally, right?)
>>
>> Thanks to DRM, I get to buy the same product for 10x the price.
> 
> You're just a sucker for buying a recorder that can only record to those 
> fancy-pants discs :-)

It was a birthday present, actually. :-P

> Anyway, sit back and feel comforted that your extra donations to the 
> record companies mean they can charge the rest of us a tiny bit less for 
> everything else they sell :-D

I was feel rather resentful that I'm being taxed for illegally copying 
stuff when in actual fact the reason I wanted the thing was so that I 
could record performances of my own music which I therefore own the 
copyright to. I'm paying the music industry so that I can record my own 
music! WTF?

And besides, if you write some text on your webpage, you don't have to 
pay a tax to the paper print industry that you're "driving out of 
business", so why is the music industry so special? :-P

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