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From: <AndrewWatt2000@aol.com>
> 2. MIT / Berkeley hacker phase (for want of a more precise term) - utilities
> limited primarily to a fairly small circumscribed group freely shared (as far
> as I am aware)
This list doesn't correspond to my experience of computers at all. From the
80s to the current time, I have used a mix of open source, shareware, bundled,
evaluation and purchased software, on all of 9 UNIXes, WMCS, Mac, PC, and
TI Explorer OS. The best experience has always been with Open Source:
binary distributions feel like a ticking bomb--you just sit there waiting until they
break and there is nothing you can do (except swear and switch to another
application wasting your time).
Scriptable systems (i.e. where the user-level functionality is hackable through
scripts) with standard interchange formats seem to be a sweet-spot between
closed and open systems--you can still fix many things that go wrong, but
the developers are free to change their API implementations without creating
versioning problems.
Cheers
Rick
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