Devine, James wrote:
>
> even if one gets programs for free, version 1.0 is likely to be buggy.
>
apologies for continuing to waste bandwidth on computing matters, but
i would like to address your point above: while your fear is, in
general, justified, there are a couple of points: the reason why 1.0
is often a buggy version is that it is the first version of the
software to see the light of day and having only been tested so far
by a few engineers (with incentive not to find bugs), it is prone to
have more bugs. however: 1. with free software, many pre-release
versions (0.8, 0.9, 1.0alpha, etc) are released to the open source
community and tested by a larger community than just the developers.
2. most commercial software makers are aware of the negative image
of the version number 1.0 and circumvent it by just releasing their
first version as release 2.0 or some such.
--ravi
