[LAD] Releasing source code is not enough, I think...

Florian Paul Schmidt mista.tapas at gmx.net
Tue Jan 21 15:47:54 UTC 2014


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Sorry for the duplicate, John, pressed the wrong button ;D

On 21.01.2014 14:11, John Rigg wrote:
> I'm inclined to agree with Fons here. There seems to be a growing 
> culture of expecting Windows-style hand-holding for free software. 
> In the Windows (and Mac) world you pay money for this. I think
> it's unreasonable to expect the same level of support from unpaid 
> developers. (If they have the time to do it that's great, but it 
> shouldn't be taken for granted).

Interesting. I had a discussion on a related topic with Filipe on IRC
just a few days ago: What kind of choices should a software make for
the user? In our example it was the usability (inversely correlated to
the number of actions required by the user (mouse clicks, etc.)) of
e.g. a free connection patch canvas vs. e.g. a mixer strip which
restricts the signal flow to be linear for a usecase of e.g. adding a
plugin to a plugin host and getting sound out of it.

My opinion is: It is very much OK for a software to make choices to
streamline common usecases if it happens to be not at the expense of
the freedom to accomplish the more complex task. In our example this
would be a mixer strip abstraction over the free patch canvas, but
where the user has the option to change to the free patch canvas if
desired.

I see it somewhat similarly here. Providing binaries for software does
not restrict the user from downloading the source package and
compiling the software itself. We're not discussing providing binaries
ONLY, but providing binaries as convenience for a common usecase.

Have fun,
Flo


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