KDE's rough edges... what are your experiences?

[Duncan]

Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 27 Oct 2013 21:23:05 +0100 as excerpted:

>> Those commercial/proprietary model proponents do have a point, that IS
>> a weakness of FLOSS
> 
> I think the problem with this statement is mixing terms for orthogonal
> properties into one.
> A commercial product is something that is monetarized, a proprietary
> product is something that only one entity has source access to, a FLOSS
> product is something that is also available in source to anyone.
> 
> Since some of those labels are for orthogonal concepts, they can appear
> in different combinations.

FWIW, that's actually why I chose to use both terms, commercial/
proprietary, instead of just one or the other by itself.  The group of 
people (and their argument) I had in mind are rather specifically the 
proponents of /both/ concepts unified.  There's commercial software 
that's FLOSS, but this argument is unlikely to be made there, because 
it's hitting too close to home -- they're often built on non-commercial 
FLOSS components so they're in effect arguing that the choice of 
components they made was a poor one.  And there's proprietary software 
that's not commercial, but there too, this particular argument is 
unlikely to be put forward, because often, the argument actually applies 
to them to some degree as well (they scratched their own itch and then 
simply made the binaries public, but kept the sources to themselves).

So it's the specific combination of /both/ commercial and proprietary 
that tends to put forth this argument, and as I said, they do have a 
point, but it's my opinion that the balance of things is still 
overwhelmingly against commercial/proprietary, even if they do score a 
minor point with this one argument.

Tho arguably in ordered to make that clear, I should have specified 
commercial _and_ proprietary (both together, not just one), but I was 
attempting to abbreviate the concept and argument, and as often happens 
when I try that, someone came along to point out the gap I left with my 
impreciseness. =:^/

I guess I should be happy that people are paying enough attention to what 
I wrote to notice that gap. =:^)  Plus of course that's a common pattern 
on public lists/newsgroups/forums anyway; someone stakes out an original 
position, then others come along and expand on it, filling in the gaps as 
well as calling attention to cases where it doesn't apply, thus inviting 
further adjustment of the original position, developing and honing the 
now common work until the whole is a far better product than any 
individual would/could have posted on their own.  =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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