Sun, 18 Jun 2006
Consequences of computing decisions
When I started buying Apple products a few years ago I realised I was making a conscious trade off. Namely, I was choosing just works over totally open.
I've read with interest the attention given to Mark Pilgrim's recent decision to choose totally open over any other criteria. It would seem for him now is the tipping point where openness is more important (and presumably) any downsides are less significant than before.
Personally, I made the decision to use a non-Free environment (hardware/OS/software) because it appeared to work "better" (for qualities outside of Open/Free-ness) than the other options at the time. A decision made in full awareness there may--or likely, probably will--be a time when the decision would come back and bite me. (Speaking of which, anyone know of a FLOSS plugin/utility for reading AppleWorks .cwk word processor and spreadsheet files?)
Observations at Open/Free-related conferences I've attended would suggest I'm not the only person with an interest in FLOSS to make the choice I've made. At times I wonder what negative impact the success of OS X has had on the speed of development of FLOSS environments. (I'm well aware my choice was at least partly based on the fact it was easier to live with a "open enough" solution than to put the work into making a truely Open/Free solution meet my other needs.)
At the moment my priorities seem to include "just work"-ness, design, open-ness and simplicity--I do not know of a hardware/software combination that currently excels in all these areas but I look forward to its birth.
I also wonder at what point in the future and for what reason I will decide that open enough is no longer open enough for me.
Posted at: 03:15 | category: / | Comments ()