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From: dennison@telepath.com
Subject: Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)
Date: 1999/03/05
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In article <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:
> dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> > a) We don't want versions to be distributed publicly till
> > they are in good shape and installation glitch free,
>
> Strange that you inflict your "Beta" versions exclusively on your paying
> customers. I think the success of open source has been based on public
> releases feeding back to the developers bug reports. Having  run a
> GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many others are use to "feature-rich"
> pre-releases.

ACT's position seems to be that the "public" versions are suitable for use
only by students and hobbyists. If you are trying to do serious work with it,
well that's horrifying, but hey, its your funeral.

The implication in that attitude is that publicly released OpenSource
software is unsuitable, even dangerous for use in a production environment.
It seems to me that this is antithetical to the evolving vision of OpenSource
software. The power in an OpenSource product is in the userbase, not the
company behind it. Doing anything to discourage use of the software by
prospective users is tantamount to slitting your own throat.

The company I work for makes no secret of using all sorts of "unsupported"
Open Source tools (gcc, emacs, perl, tk/tcl etc), and apparently makes a
pretty good living for itself doing so. I suspect you'd probably be
hard-pressed to find a fourune 100 company that *didn't* have someone using a
public version of one of those tools to do production development. Generally
the support you get from fellow users on usenet is far superior to what any
company could provide. And in a real pinch, you can go into the source and
fix a problem yourself. If we do *need* guaranteed support from experts for a
particular project we would be happy to pay for it.


T.E.D.

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