Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 01, 2003 09:15 PM
Proprietary software vendors look to sell product, and keep selling iterations of that product.
Whenever possible, proprietary software vendors will purposefully obsolete their previous versions. Perfect case in point is Microsoft, but almost all engage in it to some degree.
Secondly, and this is especially important to government since, as you point out, they're in it for the long haul, proprietary software vendors die. All the time. I know an artist who has been using computers for 10+ years, and like a good professional who depends on computers, he made frequent backups and kept them. One day he was taking a trip down memory lane and went through all of his backups. He was horrified to learn that a great deal of his work was unusable because the software which created it no longer exists, and all he has is some proprietary data formats that he doesn't know how to deal with. No doubt much of his work will be lost forever. So much for making backups.
Finally, interoperability is the last thing a proprietary software vendor wants. In the bottom line interoperability is treated as a gift to the competitor. Open source is interoperable by definition.
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Some points I would've mentioned
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 01, 2003 09:15 PMWhenever possible, proprietary software vendors will purposefully obsolete their previous versions. Perfect case in point is Microsoft, but almost all engage in it to some degree.
Secondly, and this is especially important to government since, as you point out, they're in it for the long haul, proprietary software vendors die. All the time. I know an artist who has been using computers for 10+ years, and like a good professional who depends on computers, he made frequent backups and kept them. One day he was taking a trip down memory lane and went through all of his backups. He was horrified to learn that a great deal of his work was unusable because the software which created it no longer exists, and all he has is some proprietary data formats that he doesn't know how to deal with. No doubt much of his work will be lost forever. So much for making backups.
Finally, interoperability is the last thing a proprietary software vendor wants. In the bottom line interoperability is treated as a gift to the competitor. Open source is interoperable by definition.
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