Re: Learning C++
In article <7r4enbFourU2@mid.individual.net>, Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> wrote:
James Kanze wrote:
On Jan 11, 10:05 pm, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Brian wrote:
There's no denying there's tons of open source out there,
but so much of it is of low quality.
There are also a lot of high quality, long standing opens
source projects as well. The products my team develops use
several and they are a lot better quality than a large piece
of smelly proprietary software we have to use.
I don't know about lots; there are some reasonably good open
source projects, even if they're far from the majority.
I never said they were the majority. But everything on my home and work
desktops and servers is open source (OpenSolaris and Linux) and quality
wise it's up with any closed source alternative. The products my
company ships are based on a plethora of opensource packages and build
with gcc plus the one large piece of smelly proprietary software. We
have the source for the latter, so we know how bad it can be!
The very best software (in terms
of reliability) generally comes from more or less rigorously
organized environments, which puts most freeware at a
disadvantage, but a lot of commercial firms aren't that well
organized either.
Based on my fairly extensive experience, the organisation of open source
projects and commercial firms is pretty similar. There is a similar mix
of chaos and order. It comes down the the individual(s) who drive the
projects.
Agreed. The "environment" factor.
But it is not easy to maintain the healthy environment in the
commercial situation, where you are forever stressed out to the hilt.
In the end, if you need a program to do something, evaluate it
on its merits. Without letting open source or not influence
your judgement.
I basically agree with that, although the issue is more complex (did
anyone mention licensing?) when one is evaluation a piece of software to
be included within a bigger product.
To my opinion, it is time to reconsider all the major principles
of "doing business" and "licensing" is one of them.
The models that exist right now are not based on principles of life.
They are based on principles of sucking. As much as you can manage.
As a result, we have the whole planet in the miserable state it is in.
--
Programmer's Goldmine collections:
http://preciseinfo.org
Tens of thousands of code examples and expert discussions on
C++, MFC, VC, ATL, STL, templates, Java, Python, Javascript, PHP,
organized by major topics of language, tools, methods, techniques.