But you know, humans are humans, whatever their motives, and there's little if any functional difference between someone trying to be the best commercial programmer on their team or someone trying to be the best volunteer programmer on their team. The best programmer on any given software team is probably going to turn out superior code. Good code is good code, regardless.
For that matter, there's not much net result difference between the output of a mediocre wage-slave programmer who's just in it for the personal gain of a paycheck and that of a mediocre volunteer programmer who's in it for the personal gain of a bit of glory. Either way, you're gonna get mediocre code.
You know, I've never met a programmer of any stripe who *wants* to produce buggy code. Everyone always at least *tries* to do well. Some succeed. Others don't. Purity of intent doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the final code.
This is not a popular view. Read some message boards, and you see that the common belief is that commercial coders (say, Microsoft software people) are the running-dog capitalist lackeys of the programming community, shoveling poorly-tested code out the door after cutting as many corners as possible.
On the other hand, Open Source coders are the Noble Saints of software who lovingly hand polish each one or zero before gently positioning it in the glorious perfection of the final code.
Find a bug in Microsoft software, and it's "See? Those morons can't code for sh*t; their software sucks. Microsoft can just go screw itself; I'm NOT going use use that built-in error-reporting tool. "
Find a bug in Open Source software and it's "Nice catch! Must have slipped through the testing. File a bug report and if enough people report it, it'll get fixed in the next release!"
Two software bugs, two radically different reactions.
This particular issue has been bugging me since I wasted a day trying to chase down problems with Thunderbird, the Mozilla Open-Source email client. (By the end of the day, I was calling it Blunderbird.) Thanks to several hints from readers here, I was able to roughly define the problem area and devise a crude work-around. Alas, there is no fix: It's just a bug. It's a nasty one that affects a major function of a piece of major Open Source software, but still, it's just a bug, same as you might find in any software from any source.
Ironically, while figuring out a temporary workaround for the bug, I was surfing various support sites using Firefox, the Open Source browser.
I encountered this:
Open Source software is sooooo much higher quality than commercial, right?
Right?
I think it's partially a matter of expectations: for any piece of software, I expect it to have gone through QA and UAT testing proportional to the return. That is to say, I don't expect free software to have gone through as much testing as a $2000 application. I don't think that the programmers/developers are slacking off simply because they aren't getting paid or because there's a deadline (although, there is something to be said for racing a deadline), but I expect higher quality when I have to pay for it.
ReplyDeleteOf all people, I'm sure that you remember the massive amount of Shareware/Freeware games released in the late 80s and early 90s - the only upfront cost for them was the $1.00 for the disk (and they asked for more if you liked it). These games were of low quality - even for the time - and were filled with bugs, but we didn't care, because it was free. When Space Quest crashed, however, I was irritated; I paid GOOD MONEY for that!
I think it still all boils down to the expectation of "you get what you pay for" - if I pay more, I expect more.
I agree with you up to a point.
ReplyDeleteBut the Open Source ("OS" for short, here) fanatics don't feel that way. OS fanatics feel their favorite software is BETTER than commercial, and soften spout total BS about how it has no or few bugs, or etc etc.
There absolutely is top-notch Open Sourceware out there. And there absolutely is top-notch commercial software out there. they have different strengths and weaknesses.
OS software is always a bargain, even when it's not so good. And believe me, I appreciate free and/or inexpensive software.
But just because something's cheap doesn't necessarily mean it's worth using.
And just because something's expensive also doesn't necessarily mean it's worth using.
Software value is important, but it's only part of the story.
I think the fanatics you speak of have religious fervor about OSS to the point of fundamentalism, and that's pretty much always a bad thing. I'm a big fan of open source and use it whenever I can. And I agree with David on the 'you get what you pay for' angle. But I have no objection to well-written commercial software. For example, you'll have to pry Wordperfect from my cold, dead fingers. ;-D
ReplyDeleteIt seems that we're all in agreement here. I think Sue nailed it on the head by comparing OSS fanaticism to religious fervor. I didn't even consider OSS fanatics in my initial response; I tune out the OSS fanatics the same way I tune out the nutjobs on the subway :)
ReplyDeleteNow Sue has me thinking about the nice blue background in WP51...
Het Fred - you didn't load Photosynth before the browser crash? I did and got the same message. And here I was thinking Firefox was more "crash resistant" than that other browser - you know the one. What's its name? Ummm ... Micro something. Yep that's it, "micros ..." 'cause it's not used by many people. LOL. BTW, I'm not much use in a sensible conversation - I'm a biker.
ReplyDelete