On Saturday 12 July 2003 02:21 pm, Michael Havens wrote:
> <Please add to the list and we will discuss it as a group>
> 1. Vulnerabilities are fixed relatively quickly.
>
> 2. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy,
> distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it
3. For things released as free software, if the company that makes the
software goes out of business, the software lives on, instead of you suddenly
having to invest major bucks in another product and the migration to that
product.
4. You never have to worry about the company that makes the free software
hiking your license fees 500% in a 2-year period like some other company that
we won't mention has a habit of doing.
5. Free software tends to be more reliable than non-free software, due to the
lack of deadline pressures that allow more thorough bug-fixing and
bug-checking, and the larger pool of potential beta testers that allow
detecting bugs before an actual release.
6. If there's a bug in free software, you can either fix it yourself, or hire
any programmer on the market to fix it. You don't have to beg MegaCorp to
please, pretty please, fix that bug, please?! (And the bug doesn't get fixed
for years, if ever).
7. If a new revision of your operating system is released, you can re-compile
Open Source against that new revision to take advantage of its new features
and to insure full compatibility between the Open Source application and the
new revision of the operating system. For closed source, if the vendor
doesn't upgrade your application and it doesn't run on the new version of the
OS... you're S.O.L., sorry.
8. You never have to ask permission to use Open Source in novel ways, such as,
e.g., providing access to an Open Source program via the Internet so that
your remote salespeople can run it without having it installed on their own
laptop computers. With proprietary programs, if the vendor doesn't offer
licensing terms that match your needs, sorry, you can't do it.
--
Eric Lee Green
mailto:eric@badtux.org
Unix/Linux/Storage Software Engineer needs job --
see
http://badtux.org for resume
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