On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:04:31 -0700 Kent Borg <kentb...@borg.org> wrote:
> But there is no reason proprietary software can't be good, just that > that one pressure for quality is reduced when sources are kept secret. I think this doesn't hold up to practical scrutiny. I have seen plenty of horrible, ugly open source programs: everything Lennart Poetering has written, for example. Or ShareLaTeX which was (might still be) so bad that it won't compile outside the developers' unreproducible build environment. In my experience, the license has nothing to do with quality. What matters is people and time: enough people with appropriate skills and sufficient time will produce something good. Cut any of these and the results will not be good. Cut all of them and the results will be worse. How many mission critical open source projects are supported by too few people in their spare time? The only bearing the license has on this is that volunteer programmers typically aren't forced by managers and publishers to do the impossible to meet arbitrary release schedules. Of course, abusive management practices are not required of proprietary software as Larian Studios demonstrated with Baldur's Gate 3. So... yeah. License is not a measure of software quality. -- \m/ (--) \m/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@driftwood.blu.org https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
