Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!kontron!optilink!cramer
From: cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: free versions of complex software (Re: So let's talk about FSF)
Message-ID: <492@optilink.UUCP>
Date: 23 Sep 88 16:16:07 GMT
References: <780@proxftl.UUCP> <600@sering.cwi.nl> <2133@stpstn.UUCP>
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA
Lines: 46

In article <2133@stpstn.UUCP>, aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
> >is a thousand times better: EVERYBODY can get it, it doesn't
> >cost ANYTHING and we get SOURCE!!!
> 
> Yeah, sure, but the source won't compile, and it costs you more
> programmer $$ to make it compile than it would cost you to buy
> the unbuggy commercial product to begin with.
> 
> Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad

This whole discussion can be boiled to the immortal epigram, first coined
about BSD 4.1 UNIX, "Free university software is too expensive to use."

If one is interested in software for academic study, or because you enjoy
hacking, then free software is just splendid.  On the other hand, if you
are trying to DO something useful, much of the free software isn't 
worth the bother.

I should point out that some of the companies which purport to 
"commercialize" free university software, and thereby make it useable,
trustworthy, clean, brave, etc. aren't real impressive.  In particular,
Unipress provides support for EMACS that's about as good as no support;
what Sun has done with BSD UNIX leaves me strongly unimpressed.  The
manuals are clearly sent to the printer without a human looking them
over (text jumbled on top of other text in section headers); the software
is no more reliable than the standard distribution, and you don't normally
even get source to find and fix the problems.

In particular, one of our people transferred a file from a Mac to a
Sun.  Macs use a different end-line convention -- CR, not LF, and CR LF.
This guy would do MORE FOO.C, and not only would MORE die, but it would
make the window he was working in go away as well.  As near as we can
tell, MORE doesn't bother to check if a line will fit into some internal
buffer, goes off the end, and returns some code to Sun Windows that
makes the window go away.

Yes, the problem was readily reproducible.

As much as it is going to pain a lot of you to hear this, most of what
I've seen of UNIX software wouldn't be salable on the PC -- it isn't
built to even the quality standards of Microsoft.

Clayton E. Cramer
-- 
Clayton E. Cramer
..!ames!pyramid!kontron!optilin!cramer