On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 03:23:50PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > Avoid rar, it is non-free. > > > > Thank you for the warning, Andrei, but I am more interested in the > technical aspects to learn about the formats. But your argument is > valid and I may decide not to use non-free software for this use case.
When it comes to software, "reliable" and "non-free" tend to be mutually exclusive. Is Windoze reliable? If not, do you have the source code so that you could fix bugs? Even if you have the source code, are you allowed to fix bugs? Is the firmware of your hard disks reliable? Or your BIOS? Mine are not, and without the sources, I can't even find out what causes the problem, let alone try to fix it. If there is support for your hard disks or mainboard or some non-free software from the manufacturer, and is that support helpful? I haven't seen any helpful support for those yet from manufacturers. But most of the time, when there's a problem with some open source software, you can get a helpful response almost immediately. And problems are being fixed. If not, I can at least try myself. What is more reliable? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
