Ed Leafe wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2008, at 12:16 PM, Rick Schummer wrote:
>
>> I am not asking
>> them to continue the development of a tool on a completely different
>> platform and commit resource
>> expenses for a long period of time. I am talking about a short
>> effort with limited resources and a
>> huge long term impact to the community. Different all together in my
>> opinion.
>
>
> They are not at all different. In the VFP/Mac case, I had a list of
> over two dozen documented bugs that were known during the beta (yes, I
> had the cookies to show for them) that remained in the released
> product. All I had asked was for the top 6 (the ones that prevented it
> from being usable) to be fixed. No promise for future development was
> requested; just a few bugs to be fixed. I think the fact that they
> knowingly released a buggy product showed that marketing decisions
> were far more important than technical considerations.
I wish I could find that glitzy marketing material announcing VFP for
Mac. The marketing material in no way matched the experience of actually
using the product. A familiar story and Microsoft is hardly the only
offender in this regard.
I remember feeling strung along, too, with hints of service packs to
address the issues.
The VFP/Mac disaster is a case study of what can happen in the
closed-source proprietary application model - a vendor just shutting a
project down with no recourse available to anyone in the community. With
open source there's always a recourse: find and fix the problems
yourself, and share your fix with the community.
Paul
--
http://paulmcnett.com
©2008 Paul McNett |
