Public domain software (Re: comments on Jim's and Jeff's addenda to the gTLD MOU)

["andi payn" <payn@null.net>]

Jim Dixon:
>> All over the world there are usenet news machines taking hundreds of
>> thousands of hits a day.  These are large, powerful, reliable machines
>> using public domain software.  I don't know any news machine using
>> commercial software that can outperform machines using public domain
>> software.

Jeff Williams:
>  Welll....  I don't know about that, Jim.

>  I must agree that much of the third generation public domain
>software is nearly as good as Commercial software.  Reliability is
>the only area that I might differ.

Well, of all of the OSs that I commonly use--MacOS 7.5.5 and 8.0, WinNT 4.0,
Win95, BeOS PR, OS/2 Warp 4, Solaris 2.x, and Linux-pmac 2.24, it's the
Linux-pmac that's most stable and reliable. Not only is it free, public
domain software, but the PowerMac port is currently in alpha release, and
it's still more stable than the other OSs that I use. Similarly, apache (the
alpha version of the port, running under linux-pmac) is more stable and
reliable as a web server (as well as being much more configurable) than any
of the servers I've used from Apple, Microsoft, and Netscape. Public domain
web browsers tend to be more stable than Netscape or IE, although this is
less of a valid comparison, because they're also much more limited in
functionality...

More to the point, I have fewer problems using bind and other public domain
programs under Linux-pmac to handle DNS and other Internet connectivity
issues for my network at home (using netatalk and samba and everything else
that tends to make things more complicated) than using NT Server 4.0 with
other commercial software for the same purpose at work.

In many cases, public domain software is not as reliable as commercial
software, but in many cases it's actually more reliable--mostly because
fixes to bugs are publically discussed and fixed very quickly. I'm not sure
which would be the case in terms of shared registry software. That's
something for CORE to look into, of course.