[Info-vax] C99 stuff (Re: The Road to V9.0)

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>closed source works like:
>
>vendor produce product X
>   customer A use X as is

Customer A adds feature to X, gives it to vendor, vendor incorporates it.
Or customer asks vendor for feature and vendor incorporates it.

>open source works like:
>
>vendor produce product X
>   customer A use X as is
>   customer B hack X to become Y
>
>A does not care about what B does.

Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way, because if customer B's hack
gets accepted by a majority of the community it becomes canon.  And now if
you want support from other users, you have to be running the version Y
with that hack because that's what everyone else is running.

This can be a good thing because it promotes rapid advancement but it can
also promote rapid change for no reason.  It's a good thing in a field that
is rapidly evolving, it is a terrible thing for a commercial OS.

There's no reason you can't hack the closed source code either, it's just
that you can't put it out for distribution.  You can only use it yourself
or give it back to the vendor.

>Besides that then very few open source customers actually hack the
>code.
>
>My guess is that it is less than 1 per 10000 Redhat customers that do so.

It only takes one.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."