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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Open source vs Closed source... What makes Open Source tick.
From:       John Tapsell <johnflux () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-07-30 8:22:04
Message-ID: 43d8ce650907300122n7cac1cfdr7315075684ebedf3 () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/7/30 viwe lolwane <ghostnet2000@gmail.com>:
> Ok Everybody is attacking me, now here is my response.
> Well in open source the disadvantage is , unless a project is viewed as a
> winner it will not attract and
> retain volunteers to work on that project.

So.. exactly the same as the closed source world then.  A project that
isn't a winner will fail to attract customers and funding and will
die.

> further more the members of an
> open source team must at
> all time made to feel that they are making a contribution. this at sometime
> can leave some of the parts
> of the software being left to gather dust without being maintained either
> because they are being seen as
> unattractive or useless.

Yes, programmers tend to 'scratch their itch'.  If everything thinks
that doing something useless, then it tends not to be done.  That
sounds more of a good thing to me :-D

> This bring me to  my next point how many open
> source projects have been successful?

Well, Debian has around 40,000 packages in main.  That doesn't really
indicate how many are successful, but it provides some clue.

> Individuals are unlikely to  devote a considerable portion of their spare
> time if the project is [not] viewed as winner,

Well, if nobody wants the project, stands to reason that nobody works
on it.  Sounds okay to me.  But your definition of "winner" seems a
bit strange.  Some people code to learn, for example, or to just plain
have fun.  If it achieves that goal, then it doesn't matter if nobody
uses it.

> from this I can asked a question did linus, believe that Linux will be
> widely utilized when he started the OS.

Nope, not according to his own comments.

> I think he did not, maybe he did the point I m making here is how can you be
> sure that a project will be a winner.

You can't.  But Linus wanted to have fun and to learn.   He achieved
would presumably have achieved that whether or not Linux was
successful or not.

> but How every one knows that their
> API is crap, if they never seen the code,

API is what the programmers see.  So of course we've seen their API.

> they
> never tested the code. Microsoft must have thousands of testers to perform
> inspections and walkthrough and correctness
> proving. One might never be sure that the product is 100% without defects,
> but microsoft OS must be closer to that.

Lol, you should talk to the wine guys.  They would very much disagree with you.

You are forgetting that Windows has the burden of backwards
compatibility.  It is far far harder to produce a good API which is
both API and ABI backwards compatible all the way back to Windows 3.1
than it is to start again afresh.
I really don't think you'll find anyone, Windows or Linux user, that
would argue that Win32 API is nicer than the Qt API.

> How many testers does KDE have?

Not sure - thousands?  But let's just say that get bug reports faster
than I can fix them :-)

John
 
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