Ask Google or something, I'm sure that in it's 11+ year life that there are a couple of web pages about this subject. -- Muck Bandit 600n(With added ducktape); CG125(MSOHPR) "I've got a CG125, and I'm not affraid to use it." DS#1 ; DOMO#1 ; SH#2 ; ICQ: 166144431 Remove _TEETH_ to e-mail
Heh.. -- Muck Bandit 600n(With added ducktape); CG125(MSOHPR) "I've got a CG125, and I'm not affraid to use it." DS#1 ; DOMO#1 ; SH#2 ; ICQ: 166144431 Remove _TEETH_ to e-mail
They don't have to do the work for free but for most commercial applications there is a free equivalent which only has to be good enough. There's money in customisation and support but it isn't anything like the scale of money Microsoft are making on licensing. -- Colin Smith (Colin.Smith at archeus.plus.com) This posting is NOT guaranteed to be be virus free. The post was NOT checked for viruses at source and may be completely infested with viruses and trojans. You read it at your own risk. In fact, if you've alread opened the post, you're probably now infected with all sorts of viruses and well, that's just tough.
And all the above fall into the category of specialised requirements and support. Not your average systems or applications. Which is why I mentioned that by default software would be free.
I use and support mission critical software every day. I even get paid to do it. Ever heard of a support/maintenance agreement?
Sun take the Open Office code, improve it here and there license it to anyone who wants it and provide support under the name StarOffice. Many of the developers work for Sun and write code for Open Office and Star Office. If you depend on it and want support, pay for it. If you don't don't. It's a common business model for free software. No. A lot of it is self interest.
sweller : Most of them work for Sun. Lots of it is. Some specific 'free' software is written by people paid to do so. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Netscape (rip), Open Office, quite a lot of the stuff produced by RedHat & SuSe, etc. Linus, for example, is paid a salary but does kernel stuff as a full time job, near enough.
ogden wrote Not quite. Trusted Solaris is a tad different. I wish I could tell you how it differs but they would shoot me if I did.
That's my point support costs real money and no business is going to rely on software which may or may not get fixed sometime depending on weather the developer can be arsed, and if you have to pay for support then it's not free software is it.
On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 08:14:54 +0000, William Grainger wrote: True enough. Same as the way some people stay loyal to a particular brand of motorcycle, (or anything else, come to that). Aye.
M J Carley : But Gnome (et al) don't. while (fork()); It's perfectly possible for a badly written program to seriously **** most *nix systems.
Des Coughlan : Pardon my ignorance (yeah, yeah, I know ...), but how can a user-executed or non set-uid program, **** up anything other than userland files ?[/QUOTE] 'files' are not everything. The fork bomb will (eventually) prevent everyone except the superuser from starting a new process. Try it. And then tell me how the average user (i.e. the one currently running XP which came pre-installed on his PC World beige box) is going to know how to deal with it. It was just an example, a badly installed SUID program could be much more dangerous, and as for the previously mentioned numpty having to become superuser to change the configuration of his home PC - the possibilities are endless.
