open source
I love the whole world of open source. The latest thing I've stubled across is Sun Microsystems open source DTP apps called Open Office. It's basically a free series of tools to rival Microsoft's Office tools: Word, Excel, etc etc. Seems pretty good from what I've heard.
The beauty of Open Source is that when something fucks up it'll get fixed by one of the million or so people out there using the tool. My Mac version of Microsoft Word crashes, shits itself, hangs up my systems and generally makes for an arsehole workflow. Don't even start me on the friggin paperclip bastard helper, yet there are never any updates or support worth anything at all. You pay for the pleasure of this poor-performance software. Yet if it were open source someone out there would create a patch and make it available, generally for free. Granted, with no revenue why or how would a company exist. It's the quandary. Still, if Word were made open source code-meaning the base application would need to be bought (could be peer-to-peer copied but so can every application)-then people, who weren't being paid an average wage and put under shite deadlines, shipping schedules-thanks to share holder commitments (Indesign version 1 was released faulty due to this very reason)-and stress, could solve the problems. Would solve the problems. So why not do it?
Anyway's, here's a good article at CNET-about the Open Office suite-to read:
:: Sun's open-source odyssey
quote for the day:
"Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent. "
- Miguel de Icaza
The beauty of Open Source is that when something fucks up it'll get fixed by one of the million or so people out there using the tool. My Mac version of Microsoft Word crashes, shits itself, hangs up my systems and generally makes for an arsehole workflow. Don't even start me on the friggin paperclip bastard helper, yet there are never any updates or support worth anything at all. You pay for the pleasure of this poor-performance software. Yet if it were open source someone out there would create a patch and make it available, generally for free. Granted, with no revenue why or how would a company exist. It's the quandary. Still, if Word were made open source code-meaning the base application would need to be bought (could be peer-to-peer copied but so can every application)-then people, who weren't being paid an average wage and put under shite deadlines, shipping schedules-thanks to share holder commitments (Indesign version 1 was released faulty due to this very reason)-and stress, could solve the problems. Would solve the problems. So why not do it?
Anyway's, here's a good article at CNET-about the Open Office suite-to read:
:: Sun's open-source odyssey
quote for the day:
"Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent. "
- Miguel de Icaza
posted by brent c. airey at 6:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home