Dan Goodman a écrit :
The barriers to entry for open source are considerable.
yes and no. opensource and proprietary software don't have at all the same life cycle. * For proprietary, needs only a handfull of programmers, work and skillness. Then if there is a market and no other solution, it will work even if the application is horribly programmed. You may have seen such apps :-(. If one happen to make a lot of money in the system, he can nearly lock the market with propriétary data format, for example, or dumping price for a moment. He can even give it for free to kill competitors (for a limited time). * In the contrary, opensource software usually come already done for some kind of use. Administration paid programmers to make some app impossible to find and get it opensource after that, some big company buy an unknown app and make it free and opensource to disturb competitors (openoffice). It was only in computing enfancy than a group of friends come with ideas and share them like did Linus. Sometime, an opensource project come from student end of grade work (many, for example qcad). If the project is usefull, it receives help from the community, else it dies. Proprietary software need good Human interface and minimal stability. Most cheap proprietary video editing software are horribly buggy, but still sell (not to speak about windows example). opensource software don't have such problems. Of course qualities come only when approaching stable release, in it's early day even opensource soft can be extremely unstable, but usually it dies, fork or become stable jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://valerie.dodin.org http://news.opensuse.org/2009/04/13/people-of-opensuse-jean-daniel-dodin/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org