A Brief Intro to Open Source Software (Page 2 of 3)
Categories: Homebrew & DIY Building & Hacking
Free
Sounds fantastic for the consumer, doesn't it? Maybe there really is such a thing as a free lunch. What does it REALLY cost? The reality is that it depends on how smart you are and how much you know about compiling and installing software.
The bottom line is that it costs you time. Now you have to manage all the problems you might encounter without any help at all.
Unless, of course, you want to give money to the people who wrote it. Then they'd be glad to help.
Here's a handy table to help you under stand the costs:
| End User | Cost |
| HomGeekius | Freee! |
| HomSapiens | You might have to buy a book or pay some author to explain it to you. |
It works out very well for people who know how computers really work inside, and marginally the same for people who would tend to buy software.
Trust
But who do we trust? Can we really trust all these starving grad students to not screw it up and cost you months of data when it erases your hard drive?
The answer is nobody. We can't trust any of them. We can't trust commercial software to get it right or even to be ethical about it, if some recent news is any indication. We can't trust a pack of grad students to not put dangerous hard-drive deleting code in their open source zombie shooter game. And nobody is going to guarantee that your software won't have a latent bug that will crash all the airplanes and power stations on December 31, 1900.
Instead of trust, though, we have another tool at our disposal: our eyes. We can read the code to see if they messed up. That's better than trust. It's like the public radio station having completely open books so their contributors can see where their money goes vs. trusting some aid agency to not use 90% of your contribution for beer and pizza.
In short, we can't really trust any of them. But in the case of open source, we don't have to trust anyone because we can check. And if you're in management and don't really understand this stuff, you can hire someone who does, leaving you free to make pretty Power Point slides (or "Presentation" slides if you're using the free OpenOffice.org suite).
This is all a great deal for the consumer, and even a greater deal if you're a HomGeekius and are able to get by without buying support or books and other stuff.
But it's really better than that.
Page « Previous 1 2 3 Next »
RSS
