Please see below..
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Frank Knobbe wrote:
On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 21:08, Paul Schmehl wrote:
I'm right there with you, Frank, on one condition. You hold *every*
software vendor to the same standard.
[...]
If we're going to require that software vendors produce flawless products,
we're not going to have many software products. Even Postfix, which *to my
knowledge* has never had a security issue, has had numerous bug fixes.
(And I think so highly of Postfix that the first thing I do when I install
a new OS is replace sendmail with Postfix.)
Heya Paul,
well, there is a difference between *free* stuff you choose to pull from
the Internet and run yourself. Community driven projects should require
that everyone running the product is doing there part to fix flaws (even
if it just means reporting it to someone who can fix it).
They pretty much do. That is if the application is one that users have
found worth supporting.
The difference is with products you *pay for*. If you *buy* a product
you trade your money (perhaps chicken in other parts of the world) in
the amount considered to equal the worth of the product. You should
expect to receive a working product in return.
My beef is that we started to accept broken products, and we assumes the
task of fixing broken products ourselves. That task should not fall on
us but on the manufacturer.
So can I assume that you would allow a vendor to remotely patch your
system?
We need better methodologies for finding bugs in software.
Right. But we also need better methodologies for vendors to fix their
products. The emphasis here is on "the vendor fixing the broken
product". It should not be a burden on the consumer, but on the vendor.
Like I said, Do you REALLY want a vendor to install patches for you?
And yes, I'm not targeting Microsoft in particular, although they are
the most blatant abusers of consumer rights. I intentionally included
all manufacturer of commercial software products.
I think Frank that your starting to point out a problem for M$ and other
vendors. They don't have the money to support there products any longer.
M$ has somewhere like 20,000 payed programers, How many programers are
working on open source products? 100,000 plus, maybe more. How do you
expect a company like M$ to compete? I don't think they can.
Denis
Cheers,
Frank
