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From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Motif -> Open Look look & feel
Message-ID: <1990Jul14.231757.5833@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 90 23:17:57 GMT
References: <9007062359.AA01925@shamash.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Sender: news@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu (Usenet News System)
Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
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> People who advocate free software have NO idea how critical quality
> is!

This type of thinking has, quite simply, not been born out by experience.

Without a doubt the three most significant advances in software in the
past century have been Unix, X, and TCP/IP (the latter two attributable,
in part, to Unix). I can make a strong argument for these (and PLEASE,
don't mention ANYTHING produced by Microsoft, which is a marketing
company not a software company, as being a competitor). Each of those
systems was available in source form at little or no cost.

Smart vendors[1] realized that the "network" is a tremendous programming
resource; one which could not be afforded by almost any commercial
concern. Wanna find the bugs in your code? Post it to the net. You'll
get not only bug fixes but enhancements and extensions more than you
can believe. So how do you make money? You sell a supported version
and you charge for the support. Those people who MUST have a reliable
system will pay for it; the rest will contibute to it's enhancement
(like the old adage in science "There are two kinds of people in science:
those that read the literature and those that contribute to it.")

Whether or not people like Stallman are correct on philosophical grounds
he has proven to be correct on practical grounds. After all, a lot of
people are making a living selling TeX support but you can still get it
for free.

Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh

[1] Actually, most of the money to be made is by startups and entrepre-
neurs. To date, few if any large vendors have been smart enough to realize
this which is why we are getting a VMS which is POSIX compliant rather than
a Unix which runs VMS applications.