"phil hunt" wrote in message
. ..
On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 10:06:30 +0100, Keith Willshaw
wrote:

"phil hunt" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 20:15:39 +0100, Keith Willshaw
wrote:
[regarding compiling open source software]

Piracy is irrelevant consideration to open source software. It is
relevant to proprietary software, where it can reduce revenues,
which is likely to cause open source to predominate over time.

Its highly relevant when software costs a shedload of money
to develop. Developing software that does complex tasks
like process simulation costs a LOT of money and contrary to
popular belief many software companies walk a line awfully
close to bankruptcy. Finding that your software can be bought for
$2 a time in Beijing is mighty disheartening

Then perhaps the proprietary software model is outdated, at least
for some application areas. Had a typical Linux distribution been
made by traditional proprietary techniques, it would cost $ 2
billion to develop. Yet it was developed anyway, without being able
to recoup revenue by sale of copies.

I don't know how many people use process simulation software, so it
may not be a good example. But I'll use it anyway -- you can
imagine I'm talking about a different application area if you like.

Someone writes a simple program to to process simulation. it isn't
very sophisticated, but it does the job for the needs of that one
user. He releases it as open source. Someone else finds it *almost*
fulfills their needs, and extends it, giving their changes back to
the first person. A third person works for a largish company and
realises that with a bit of effort this package could be useful to
them -- so they add to the code and can use it. Eventually, the
package gets more and more features applied to it, and can do
everything the proprietary packages can do.


I'm aware of how open source works and for some applications
its great. I have used GNU emacs for may years for example.

As I said, I don't know much about process simulation, but there are
open source packages that have been extended in just that way.


Process simulation is VERY different. For one thing the knowledge
base is often proprietary and we spend a lot of money licensing
that technology but more important a process simulator is
a massive piece of software developed by teams in multiple
locations around the world. The other issue is that the
output is safety critical, getting it wrong at best results in
a millions or billions of dollars being spent on failed designs
and at worst you kill a bunch of people. For this reason the
testing, QC and vaildation process is long and involved.

A new release typically takes between 50 and 200 man years
of development and testing time.

For operating systems and office suites, they are. In the UK, the
main customer for these sorts of software is the state. The same in
most other countries.

Cite please.

I seriously doubt the UK Government owns the majority
of PC's in this country

I never said it, did, only that it owns more than anyone else.


Then by definition they arent the majority purchaser, just another
large customer.

Keith