On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 02:52:17PM -0700, Andrew Plato wrote: > The adage "you get what you pay for" has real meaning. If you pay > nothing for something, you're getting a product that is going to be > lacking in many ways. Likewise, paying big money for extravagant > solutions is any better. There has to be some compromise between > inexpensive and quality. Open-source can fill some of those needs. > But I am not sure they can fill ALL needs. I don't think Crispin meant that the states should require the software to be acquired at no cost -- simply that the source code must be freely available to the state. When I worked at a medium-sized health care company, we would have _loved_ to have source code for the database system we were using to bill patients. The database and interface software was riddled with bugs, but we could fix none of them ourselves -- every bug had to go through the company that supplied the software. Fixes, when they came, were weeks away. There is no reason why open source software must be cheap or free. It simply allows for the end users of the software to make their own modifications, or hire modifications to third parties. I know that we would have loved source for our database application.. -- http://www.wirex.com/
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