From: Mike Linksvayer (ml@justintime.com)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2000 - 13:03:29 MST
"Peter C. McCluskey" wrote:
> Bug compatibility isn't very important.
Depends on whether "bugs" have become expected behavior
or even relied-upon features. In any case "bug-for-bug
compatibility" is a pejorative. I should have said
something like "provides a seamless replacement for".
> Marketing is a hard part of that strategy.
Very hard.
> If the primary goal of the
> company is to get rich shorting competitors, users will have good reason
> to doubt that the free software will be well maintained - the authors are
> almost promising to lose interest in it once the effect on the proprietary
> producer's stock is complete.
Obviously if the company had half a brain it would do
everything it could to ensure the software could and
would be picked up by free software hackers. Off the
top of my head: don't invent a new license, have
a source repository and mailing lists set up (trivial
now with the advent of sourceforge.net and competitors),
use accepted build/config tools from the start, hire
a few people from the free software community...
Mike Linksvayer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:29 MST