GNU software - Motivations

Generally, developers have two main motivations behind using and developing free software. These fall into the two camps of Free Software and Open Source Software.

Note: The following are my summaries. Feel free to disagree and or freak out at my descriptions. Head to the sites in question for the full deal.
  • Free Software - because we're interested in the "freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software", having the source code is a prerequisite.
  • Open Source Sortware - because lots of people can look at and contribute to the source code, we make better software.

From a business standpoint, it comes down to money. Does the cost of this software plus the cost of maintaining it, make sense?

Free as in price is great. Not having to rely on an outside vendor for upgrades or modifications is even better.

From a developer standpoint, there is also a comfort level involved.
I like vim as my editor. I like Firefox as my browser. I like scripting in python and using apache with php for wed development.
Since I'm comfortable with these tools, I'm more productive with them.

We had a problem where users running multiple instances of a Foxpro app were unable to use stored printer settings. The user could print in portrait or landscape from the first app launced, but subsequent apps couldn't. In Dos Foxpro, a user preference file is used to store things like this. The first app locks it, and the other apps resort to a default. So, I wrote a python script using the pywin32 extensions to fix the problem. The script finds the next available config filename, writes it, and points to a new Foxpro resource file. Since these preference files are just a binary xBase format I could store the hex values in a big, fat list and create it on the fly. Then it's just a matter of invoking the Foxpro runtimes using these files.

The end result was a fix for a NINE year old bug in about four hours. Using the py2exe extension, we now have a simple front end executable.

Now that's just cool.

...and don't get me started on the number of times someone has wanted to install Acrobat when all they really needed was Ghostscript and a port redirector...



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