Hi,
ext Stephan Jaensch wrote:
> First of all, my viewpoint as a user: I want as many apps
> as possible. Choice is always good. I own an iPod Touch,
> and I can say with confidence that my criteria for selecting
> an app is always functionality, quality (hard to gauge since
> there is no "try before you buy", so I'm judging by user
> ratings for that) and price. As a user, I don't care about
> source code availability.
Without source code availability others cannot help in fixing
the bugs in the application or start maintaining the package
when the original package maintainer goes away (as they always
eventually will).
I.e. source code is some level of guarantee about the functionality
and quality being there for the long term, even if the author gets
other priorities. If the software is such that you need to invest
time to learning it, then also long term matters. If it's e.g. a
game that you'll play through once, then it's not so important.
Source code availability matters then more for the possibility of
being able to verify things that cannot be (easily) verified from
the binary alone (e.g. security, actual changes between versions etc).
- Eero
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