Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Open Source is a farse...

Author:Jussi Haro
Posted:8/3/1999; 3:40:14 AM
Topic:Microsoft response to Instant Messaging
Msg #:9038 (In response to 9037)
Prev/Next:9037 / 9039

Stephen Livingstone said

"I hope the days were everybody has 600 different versions of these Open Source applications become irrelevent"

and

"THe MS browser is much further ahead and useful"

and I say "Huh?"

Internet Explorer is the worst case example you could possibly be giving about "closed source" software being not "version different". What MS has been doing with IE is distributing many, many versions of the browser under the same "official" version number, without any documentation of what the differences are.

At one point, we had two Windows 95 machines with IE 3.x (can't remember the exact number) that even had the same IE build number but that had been installed at different dates. I guess the browsers should have been similar but they weren't - in most of the Javascript apps we were debugging, the two machines gave different JS error messages.

Even with the latest versions of IE, we're constantly running into situations where a page works just fine on our production machines and the just blows up completely in a client machine that has the exact same version of IE installed.

I even have a piece of Javascript still around that, when run on IE 4.0, will crash the browser and destroy the Active Desktop settings totally. Guess how this is achieved? Use eval() on a piece of code that has a string inside it that starts with a number and contains a hyphen. This is probably the wierdest bug I've ever seen and cannot possibly imagine how the hell it's possible to achieve. But it's there.

So, in essence, if distributing the source code doesn't make the software any better, not giving it away doesn't improve it either. In my experience though, the most stable software I've ever used anywhere are the (open source) GNU command line tools. I haven't ever found a bug in any of them, something I cannot say out of just about any other piece of software.

Sulka

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