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

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday, 2013-10-28, 09:42:07, Duncan wrote:
> 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. 

I see. I read the / as a way to suggest replacability, especially since the 
context on the "other side" was just FLOSS not something like FLOSS/.....

> 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).

Exactly. So it is important IMHO not to repeat the omissions but to show that 
the comparison was non-sensical in the first place.

> 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.

I don't think they have a point because they conciously conflate areas to 
which there criticism does not apply into the same abbreviation.
More over using an abbreviation that covers the one aspect of the competing 
product that has least to do with their allegded advantage/disadvantage 
comparison.

> 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. =:^/

Well, you could have used a + instead of /, same number of characters, no? :)
Anyway, I was mostly commenting on the second part of the comparison, see 
above.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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