--- Dustin Puryear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> To open up another avenue of discussion.. But can it
> also be said that more 
> open source than commercial software is written by
> self-trained or 
> hobbyists programmers? Could this result in the
> average open source program 
> being written poorly, or at least not with the same
> rigor as commercial 
> programs?

Sure, but nobody should expect the average open source
software to work well "right out of the box", whereas
it is reasonable to expect commercial software to work
well, since we pay $ for it. We usually test the heck
out of it before putting it in to a production
environment. Or, we rely on the reputation of a
specific OSS package.

Agreed, there are a lot of crappy OSS and OS
programmers out there, but all we can really do is
point fingers and jeer. Given enough programmers|will
power|time, even crappy OSS can get better.

I don't think it is productive to measure OSS and
commercial software by the same yardsticks. But, I
don't know what the yardsticks are for OSS.

> Perhaps we should take Microsoft out of the
> discussion and only include all 
> other commercial software. It's too easy to attack
> Microsoft code, and they 
> are certainly not the major supplier of [all]
> software. Let's consider open 
> source vs. commercial-code-without-Microsoft to keep
> the conversation on 
> track. And if someone brings up Microsoft I'll bring
> up Sendmail as a 
> counter example.

Good enough.

John Hebert

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