On 10/23/13 11:24 AM, David L. Johnson wrote:
On 10/23/2013 12:33 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
The program I filed the bugs with is one that wishes to take on a
commercial program in the marketplace. And they add new features,
some of which are inevitable buggy. But the attitude exhibited by not
fixing existing bugs is very unprofessional. If you are a business,
with competition, you want tools that work, not tools you spend a lot
of time finding work arounds.
3. When the new version comes out, and the developers have broken
something, they say it's a "regression". Oh, BS!! That's just
political spin for not saying they screwed up and didn't catch it. I
would appreciate the pure honesty of admitting a mistake than
political spin.
4. My impression is, for most open source software I've tried over a
period of time, the quality assurance/testing program to look for and
find bugs is seriously flawed. Some bugs are blatant, and I ask
myself, "How did they miss that?"
I look at those complaints, and wonder that you don't see such issues,
and worse, with commercial software as well.
Invariably, there will be bugs in any sophisticated software. The
question that arises for me is, are they important to the developer? I
think, when the developers are being paid for their work, they are more
attentive to fixing the bugs, as their next paycheck depends on it.
These days, when I do suggest software, it's often a program that has
both free and paid versions. My theory is, that programs developers
will be more attentive to bugs in the free version as the incentive is
to get you to purchase the more sophisticated paid version. I don't
think very many people, when finding a lot of bugs in the free version,
will opt to purchase the paid version.
For me, the difference
between commercial software and open-source is that, when you do have a
problem, you have a chance, with open-source software, to actually ask
for help from the person who wrote it.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think smaller developers are easier to
get in touch with.
For example, this list is
well-populated by the actual developers of LyX, who are very helpful.
Which is what I'd read online, and why I'm going to try LyX. Also,
because it's a typesetting program. And I want better output than the
average word processor.
Commercial support will connect you with a call center full of people
reading from scripts.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I've found the smaller vendors to be much
more helpful than the larger vendors.
I have a file management program on this Mac, and when I found a
problem, I ended up talking via email about the problem. We finally
figured out what triggered the problem, but I'm not checked for an update.
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 24.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.1.2
