Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Absolutely. Volunteer projects will move very slowly and will likely not 
be nearly as spiffy as something you can buy off the shelf in a 
shrink-wrap box. (Like Quicken or other commercial products) They are 
also far more likely to appear "organically grown" than "designed". All 
of which is an incentive to go use what you can purchase commercially 
rather than wait for some volunteer freeware to show up.

Or, one could imagine that there is a good commercial potential here and 
figure out if its worth doing as a business venture. It would 
potentially produce jobs programming in Ada and profits for the people 
who put in the sweat equity of developing the initial software. It would 
almost certainly get done sooner and with a more "professional" look if 
a team of for-profit minded developers were working on it.

MDC


David Holm wrote:
> The problem is that when you are forced to pay for something you expect much more out of it than
> you normally would. If it's an opensource development that is carried out in peoples free time
> then you can not expect the same things to happen in the same timeframe as you would for a
> commercial application.
> 

-- 
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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