On Wednesday 04 June 2003 14:35, Russ Wright wrote:
> Hmmm
>
> I am also interested in what they said, but I will say this. I paid
> $100 for a video driver that is fantastic. I have excellent 3D support
> and my display is quite good far better than the open source driver I
> tried to use. To me it was worth the price.
That's what it's all about really. If a company provides you with a good or
service worth paying for, then patronize them! OpenSource has great ideals,
but there will *always* be ClosedSource software out there doing the hard,
painful, and often unrewarding work of creating products and supporting
end-users.
Take OSS for example - back before ALSA existed, I actually bought a license
to support hardware that the FreeOSS driver would not. To me, at the time, it
was worth the investment to forgo some headache that was a great waste of
resources.
Yeah, I don't know much about Xig myself. Heck, I can't bring myself to
personally pay anyone for an X server (never have been able to deal with
that, even back in the days where eXceed/xwin32/etc were common). If I need
support for a newer card, I'm willing to put up with cvs builds and alpha
quality drivers to get a piece of hardware to work.
Experience is costly. The *man years* of knowledge that leads to the ability
to play with alpha code without fear of destroying something important is
very expensive in both time and resources.
Users need commercial alternatives. For them, it is far less costly in both
time and resources to pay for someone else to deal with the headache.
Personally, I'm fine with that :)
Likewise, if something breaks on my car, I'm far more likely to pay someone to
fix it than attempt to waste the time and resources to fix it myself. Just
think of all of the good hacking time wasted taking apart obsolete mechanical
machinery ;)
> I cannot speak for their attitude toward open source, however, I will
> say they had excellent customer service and patiently answered all my
> questions.
I, too, wish to see Derek's online battle with them now. Not that I would
probably ever buy an X server from them, but I hate recommending vendors to
customers without some understanding of the vendor's reputation.
-- - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>(This message bound by the following: http://www.nks.net/email_disclaimer.html)
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