Comment Key benefit is that *others* can go under the hood (Score 1) 705
The author complains:
"The idea seems to be that Open Source is better than closed source because you can "tinker" with the code. But how many people actually do this? Hardly anybody in real life"
Depends what you mean by 'hardly anybody' - sure, Joe Average user isn't going to be recompiling OpenOffice before writing a letter. But I'm sure I suspect many tens of thousands developers have benefited from tweaking open source software at some point, and in many cases have submitted the patch back to the project.
The bigger point though, is that there are millions of developers out there, who can *potentially* fix a problem. And if the issue matters to one of those developers enough, there is nothing fundamental standing in the way of getting it fixed.
Compare that to the world of commercial software, where if there is no business case for making a fix , or if the company that makes the software has gone bust, you won't get a fix, period.
This doesn't mean that OSS is perfect, or bug free. But it does mean that users of OSS benefit indirectly from the ability of others to make changes and fixes to the code, even if they themselves don't have the ability or inclination to do so.
(e.g. this is it a large part of the reason that an OSS package like Imagemagick supports just about any image format under the sun)
"The idea seems to be that Open Source is better than closed source because you can "tinker" with the code. But how many people actually do this? Hardly anybody in real life"
Depends what you mean by 'hardly anybody' - sure, Joe Average user isn't going to be recompiling OpenOffice before writing a letter. But I'm sure I suspect many tens of thousands developers have benefited from tweaking open source software at some point, and in many cases have submitted the patch back to the project.
The bigger point though, is that there are millions of developers out there, who can *potentially* fix a problem. And if the issue matters to one of those developers enough, there is nothing fundamental standing in the way of getting it fixed.
Compare that to the world of commercial software, where if there is no business case for making a fix , or if the company that makes the software has gone bust, you won't get a fix, period.
This doesn't mean that OSS is perfect, or bug free. But it does mean that users of OSS benefit indirectly from the ability of others to make changes and fixes to the code, even if they themselves don't have the ability or inclination to do so.
(e.g. this is it a large part of the reason that an OSS package like Imagemagick supports just about any image format under the sun)
