OT: open source in general, fP, Windows, etc. (was: Re: Reface pricing)

[Fairlight]

On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 02:13:42PM -0400, Walter Vaughan may or may not
have proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> I have no doubt it'll be a successful niche player, but locking into
> GatesWare removes me from actual interest.

I take your point, but X11 as a desktop just doesn't have the penetration
yet.  Not enough apps, and if you go the VMWare route, you're basically
-still- locking into GatesWare, as you put it, just from a different angle
and to a 3rd party vendor.  Nobody ports more apps, no extra adoption.  No
extra adoption, no extra apps.  I think a large part of the problem -were-
the early pioneers.  People saw Corel try WP6 for Linux, saw a lack of
adoption and (I believe) eventual dropping of products (just like Adobe
dropped their offering for SCO X11), companies that followed later on were
more hesitant to make the investment.  If the big guys couldn't make it
work, how will the little guys?  I would guess that's the conventional line
of thought, although I think it bears re-evaluation a decade and a half
later.

What gets to me is people continually saying people don't want to pay for
apps running on a free OS.  People are paying for supported versions of a
free OS that can be had for nothing.  If they're doing one, they'll do the
other.  That whole point is really invalid, and has been for years.  You'll
always have your tight-fisted folks, those that simply can't afford a
lot, and then the companies that can afford to do things on a bigger scale.
But a blanket statement doesn't fit all three.

> I'm guessing that the real power of this is that it supports edits and
> field rewrites, otherwise I can't imagine JE getting so excited.

What I wondered about were really things like INKEY/WAITKEY.  I'm just
guessing because the only GUI work I've done in Windows has been through
Tk, but unless a widget is told to do so, does it actually bother with a
blow-by-blow transaction in a text field, or does it just do it after the
fact?

> Pricing?
>
> I'll be at the http://soaeosconference.sys-con.com and                  /
> http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2007                                /

On the latter, I just don't do conferences.  For me, they'd be pointless,
besides inaccessible logistically.  I need something, I just hit the docs
or -maybe- buy an ORA book if I really need more depth.  It's just not a
way I'd learn well, the conference thing.

As for the former...I just looked and (mind you, I was using lynx), but of
the four speakers, the only company I recognised was BEA, and I can't even
remember without looking what they actually -do-.  The list of topics and
even "SOA" itself is just a plethora of buzzwords...some of which have more
substance than others.

I'm just kind of focused on the actual "getting something done".  Past a
certain point in linux and OSS history, I found it useless to be part of a
"scene" or movement or to hope on every passing bandwagon just because it
was neat.  These days, I just want to get the specs on a job, quickly
research the best way to go about it, and get it done.  I have a specific
toolset that I like to stick within if possible, although I'll extend it
where and when necessary.  But if I just can't see hopping on all of that
stuff at once, or even a large portion of it.  It just makes for a very
diluted knowledge pool where you know very little about lots of things.
I'd rather focus and know a few things reasonably well.  Which isn't to say
that's what everyone takes away from these things, but it's what I would
without an eiditic memory implant.

> I don't pay per seat. Just time and materials. -- Walter

I won't argue that point, having made it myself over the years.  But fP's
probably never going to be open-source, so it's moot in this forum.

Even the products that -are- OSS...I find that the more a company backs
them, the worse they become.  That's been the recent trend, anyway.  Used
to be something would start out free and then a company swoops in, buys
it up, and it went downhill, got very pricey, or both.  But the ones I
really have trouble with...  Well my poster child is Zend and PHP.  I can't
think of anything I'd rather deal with less.  And I watched a segment of a
"Web 2.0" seminar that was on posted on YouTube with one of the top guys
from Zend.  If that's the kind of presentation they give, and the model of
thinking they're coming from, I can see why PHP is the way it is, and it
also perfectly explains why a seminar/conference is just useless to me.  I
was wholly, completely, and utterly unimpressed.  For as many buzzwords as
the guy had on the whiteboard and the apparent level of understanding he
had while instructing, I've seen 14yr old programmers with better grasp on
things that actually matter, literally.  

So I tend to be wary of open-source software from companies that act like
they're industry leaders just because they put stuff out there and call
it good.  So far, it's been a kind of mix leaning towards not-so-hot.
Those that understand the model and do it for the right reasons from the
beginning are often okay, if they don't get big heads.  MySQL is still
decent, for example.  Those that hop on for the wrong reasons and don't get
it...not so good.  I'm really not looking forward to Solaris going GPL,
if that actually happens.  I'm not sure how it -can- happen since it's
SysV...I haven't gotten to the finer points reading about that yet.  But
SunSoft has a dodgy history with software, open-source, licensing, and the
whole thing.  I'm -not- convinced they get it.  Be interesting to hear Ryan
Powers' take on it, given his immersion in Java.  But it's another industry
"leader" hopping on the bandwagon.  They've partially done so in the past
to mixed results.  I'm still not convinced some of these places actually
get it.  Sometimes I think they tout "open source" just to be marketable,
without understanding the finer points.

At any rate, it's still not applicable to fP, and I can't see it every
being so.  Sadly, it's one of the cases that I think -could- benefit the
most from doing so, unlike much of the big stuff out there.  It's the
packages that -need- extra resources nobody can really afford to pay for
that benefit the most and should really consider it.  But they often don't
have the foresight to be bothered with it.

mark->
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