Fwd: altBrowser Question and MAC version of altBrowser...

[Dan Shafer]

>
>
>--On Monday, June 16, 2003 00:25:57 -0700 Dan Shafer <dan at eclecticity.com> 
>wrote:
>
>
>>>> And I would prefer a product I pay for and which is therefore supported
>>>> to a free, Open Source solution for which I'd be on my own for support.
>>>>
>>>
><snip>
>> First, my observation didn't imply that Open Source software support is
>> poor, only that I'd prefer to pay for software than to end up with a
>> poorly supported Open Source product in this case.
>>
>
>What is that I'm missing here?
>
Simply this: there are a LOT of Open Source products that either never have support or whose support fades into the sunset as the community using them declines and moves on. When that happens, there's no underlying "company" or organization to provide support, which often renders the product less than useful.

I don't speak C or Java or most of the other programming languages in which Open Source products are written. So the fact that they are Open Source is interesting to me, but in the end not very useful. I personally couldn't modify them if I had to. I'd have to hire someone else to do that.

I am aware that this also happens with proprietary commercial software, but my experience -- and that is all I have to go by -- is that it is more rare. And very often when it *does* happen, the company finds a way to manage continuing to support its customer base.

Microsoft just discontinued development of IE for Windows and for Mac. altBrowser, as I understand it, relies in part on IE as a plugin technology. (I believe it also supports Mozilla, though.) So IE is now a dead-end technology; as Web standards evolve, it won't. That makes it borerline useless to me. If the products on which it is built (like altBrowser) are Open Source and freely distributed, as one list member proposed, there's little incentive for the developer(s) to adapt to that change. OTOH, if it's a source of revenue, they might be  motivated to do so.

Long-winded answer, and I thought my original comment was pretty self-explanatory, but I guess not.

>Regards, Andu Novac
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