Thread: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
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gerbick
2011-02-28 , 03:14
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#175
Originally Posted by rm42 View Post
Actually, with free software, if I need help with one program I have the option of looking for help someplace other than from where it originates. That is the beauty of it. Of course, that help may not be free, but at least I can always be guaranteed to have a way to keep a product alive.
I actually used to go to the alt.microsoft.<insert product name here> news groups as well as hit up places like SQL Team, 15Seconds.com and other sites as well as bother the ever-living **** out of Microsoft's BizTalk and (beta) .NET teams. They knew me on a first name basis.

And they helped me. In the closed source world, you worked around the limitations - much like Qwerty12 worked around the closed bits in Maemo 5. You're not 100% free from having closed source bits affect you.

But I get what you're going for and I agree.

Look at what is happening right now with the free parts of Maemo. We are now back to getting regular updates thanks to someone in the community that decided to pick it up. So far he is refusing payments, but if the community, or an individual person of company desires to do so someone could be hired to do the same. You can't do that with a closed source product that the originator has decided to kill or stop maintaining for some reason.
Which is all great... but what about the closed bits? The Community SSU for Diablo was awesome... then it just sorta fizzled out unfortunately.

I hope that Nokia continues to support it, then that's fine. But the moment that something goes wrong with the BME, then it's work around city.

Unfortunately, I am sure you were never given access to the code and given the opportunity to fix the bugs you might have found. Right? As an MSCE you were thought how to click your way into the implemented features and exposed interfaces, but not into the hidden APIs, code hacks, and plain old error codes that may lie beneath.
Was given as much source code as Nokia will give for the closed bits. I've worked around, even reverse-engineered a few dll's in my time. I don't even do that kind of stuff any more but I've seen this community (Qwerty12, et al) do some pretty cool stuff without having the source code, they did it via dbus or something other.

I've seen it both ways in open source with closed bits or closed source with... ok, closed (every)bits too.

Thanks for regarding that comment as profound - didn't intend for it to be. But in the end of the day, they're (to me) serving a rather self-serving addiction of the aforesaid categories. Whether or not it's bad, evil, good or wholesome, I'll leave that up to the person that's using it and want to categorize it.

I just use the tools to support my livelihood or my addictions.

Hello... my name is gerbick and I'm a gadget-aholic.

Awesome chatting with you.
 

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