Originally Posted by olighak

I see I´ve hit a sore spot.

Much of the OSS seems centered around amateur programmers, people that are not paid for creating applications but paid for perhaps at best paid for something else such as creating hardware, and that hardware just happens to need some firmware. Many of them are programmers during evenings and weekends, and sometimes that can´t compete with the open.

Well Apple does not depend on Quicktime for its livelyhood does it? I don´t remember being charged for downloading and installing it. How much of Apple´s revenue is generated by Quicktime?



Freedom ok. Well there´s also freedom in being able to install useful commercial apps, as long as I can choose which one I install, right?

If the company is just making software to dump on the hardware, which is their primary business, then obviously making software is not priority number 1. In business most people can only count up to priority 1 so you can guess which side is going to suffer. The software side.

I can get paid support from multiple companies for a lot of commercial software, in case of enterprise systems. In smaller software I´ve often emailed the code´s programmers themselves with suggestions, some which make it into the release and some which don´t. But they then rely on the software for their paycheck and hence are more prone to listen to suggestions.

Weren´t you talking about FOSS programmers being the equivalent of volunteers earlier in this thread? Some volunteers are obsessed with what they volunteers and are better than many professionals in the trade, but instead lack the time to do the volunteering. I´m better as a mechanic than some of the one´s I´ve taken my old Volvo´s to, but that still doesn´t mean I want to open up a Reparation and Restoration shop on the side, I just can´t do it proper justice as something else takes priority.

With FOSS I am just as screwed, as with commercial apps, if the original programmer stops developing it, no one else picks it up and I either don´t have the time or can´t program. Am I any better off with the amateur in that case than the commercial programmer?