Re: Market pressures for more reliable software

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Yes, presuming the company that made the product is willing to go this
route. (Free in what sense?) They have to see their future income as coming
from selling support or other stuff if they are going to give away the
program. (Not all software has this potential - do people regularly buy
support for, say, a computer game?)

If they *sell* the program with the source code, you *do* have the option of
fixing it yourself - but there may be real good reasons why they don't fix
the bugs themselves. (If its crap code, it may be real hard or impossible to
fix.) So saying "Yeah, it's a turd, but you're welcome to polish it up for
yourself..." doesn't really get you out of it. They took your money and gave
you crap and had a little salve for their conscience because they gave you
the source.

Now there might be something to the notion of software developed under the
Ada Developer's Cooperative License (or similar) in that the guys who build
the code only get paid if the code gets used and sold. The only way for that
to work consistently is if what they wrote is reliable enough for other
developers to have confidence in it and reuse it. There is incentive to fix
and improve components rather than pitch them all and start from
bottom-dead-center as is often done in C/C++ consumer software development.
Its not like you can sell the code up front and say "Tough Noogies!" if it
turns out it sucks. So presuming someone builds "Ada$oft Works (tm)" in Ada
utilizing subsystems and components under the ADCL, it might increase the
probability that the end-product doesn't suck because a) the developers of
the code have a stake in its quality and b) its written in Ada which
improves the quality right there. Could it help?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:zeQV6.7400$pb1.285004@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <40gfitgrvd8cgu27r3vfib6eptmapb3pfl@4ax.com>, Roedy Green
says...
> 4. Free Software. If it doesn't quite do what you want, you've lost
nothing but
> your evaluation time. Even better, you have more options than just trying
> something else. You can fix it yourself to do what you want, or pay
someone else
> (preferably someone intamately familiar with the code) to do it for you.
>