On Tue, Nov 18, 2003, Tal, Shachar wrote about "RE: Version control (was: Re: What's wrong with this code?)": > If only the small integratable single-minded tools were *easily* > integratable, I suspect Rational would have gone of business a few years > ago.
Why do they need to be "easily" integratable? What if it will take your sysadmin a whole day to do this integration? And what if you pay a services company (like IBM previously mentioned in this thread) to provide you with a turnkey solution? Nobody said ever said that every user should need to install and configure free software on his/her own. You might ask, "well, if it costs me money, why is the free-software solution any different from the propriatry one?" Well, there's a big difference. The free software solution won't charge you by user (haven't you ever seen developers shout across the open space "please log out of the version control software, I need a license!"?). The free software solution will still be available when you decide to switch to a different platform, CPU, or operating system. If a bug in the program seriously annoys you, you can hire someone to fix it for you (with commercial software, you'll need to beg the manufacturer to fix it or give you partial sources.) Note, however, that some special scenarios - like 100 people working full-time on a single huge code - are simply not useful in the free software world, which is why you don't see free software catering to those needs. Also, free software tends to cater to the needs of people who write it (namely, developers) rather than managers and so on. The managers sometimes don't like it. For example, in a previous workplace I was asked to switch from Bugzilla to a commercial bug tracking software (that was "integrated" with the version control system). It was horrible - while bugzilla allowed me a lot of freedom and a lot of power (to discuss bugs with others, to pass bugs between developers), the commercial one was very rigid and very manager-oriented (most of the decisions required manager rights to be done, it was impossible to write comments on bugs, etc.). For me (and some other developers), the commercial solution was simply WORSE than the free software one. But it wasn't us making the decision of which software to use - it was the managers, and to them the commercial software was more appealing. And if you think that free software is hard to integrate, wait till you here this: while Bugzilla was useful to us out-of-the-box, the commercial product had so many problems that we couldn't use it until one person worked on it for nearly a month (!) tweaking the myriad of scripts, parameters and other crap that came with it. So much for easy integration... And at no point did anyone stop to ask "why are we paying thousands of dollars for this crap?" -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Nov 18 2003, 23 Heshvan 5764 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |And now for some feedback: http://nadav.harel.org.il |EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
