Re: ARPA still undermining Ada

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

A couple of points in response To Tarjei's note.

First, I was talking about research projects where it is aboslutely vital
to have full access to the sources, because the whole point of the project
is to make language extensions etc to test out some research theory. That's
a different world from the world of mission critical applications.

Second, the free in free software means freely available, not free in $$$.
Now of course you can pick up a copy of any FSF software free, but as many
people point out, the lack of guaranteed maintenance etc. may mean that
the software is unusable, and $0 is not necessarily a good price for something
you can't use. One motto of Cygnus Corp is "we make free software affordable",
and this nicely goes to the heart of things. If you need to use free software
on a mission critical project, you need to think about maintenance costs.
You can maintain the software yourself (an option not available with
proprietary products), or probably more practical in most cases, you can
pay someone else to maintain it. That's what companies like Cygnus are
all about.

As to whether a particular piece of free software competes well technically
with some particular piece of proprietary software, that has to be judged
on a case by case basis. It would be a mistake to understand from Tarjei's
comment that proprietary software is always superior in all cases to free
software. That's just not so, there are lots of people and projects that
choose to use free software because it is the best technical choice for the
job (indeed there are systems, like Nextstep, where the vendor themselves
has decided that GCC is the best available compiler, and thus it is the
only one available).

It is equally silly for anyone to maintain that in all cases free software
is better than proprietary software. That's also clearly not so.

THe basic point is that, as I have stressed before, you should choose the
best tool for the job. If the best tool is free software fine, if the best
tool is proprietary software fine, that's just part of the normal
selection process.

In making this decision, you naturally take into account the extent to
which the availablility of sources affects your project, and as I mentioned,
for a pure research project this may be decisive, much morwe important than
cost considerations.