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

Dave, address the control issue at that forum.

Author:Ben Williams
Posted:8/3/1999; 8:33:41 AM
Topic:Microsoft response to Instant Messaging
Msg #:9060 (In response to 9043)
Prev/Next:9059 / 9061

For me, the most important reason to choose open source software isn't quality but control. I'm a student and my only professional software development experience has been through co-op work at a company that makes printer software. I was working on a product that ran on NT. We wanted to be able to submit print jobs to our product via the Unix lpr command. Luckily, NT provided an lp daemon. We quickly discovered that Microsoft had made a boneheaded design decision. When we submitted an lp job with a copy count, say 5, instead of passing the copy count on to our product the NT lp daemon would make 5 copies of the job and submit each to our product one-by-one. Not only did we have to process the file multiple times but large jobs with large copy counts would quickly fill the hard drive. MS tech support said there was no way to change the behavior of the daemon. Our only options were to write our own daemon or not support lpr. If we had had access to the source this probably would have been an easy fix.

Ever since this incident I've never understood how a software developer, web developer, or IT manager could justify purchasing and relying on a piece of closed source software knowing that they could get burned like this and not be able to do anything about it.

Sure, maybe closed source software can be just as good quality-wise as open source, but you can never be soure that a closed source developer is going to make the design decisions that fit your needs.

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