Because I can't afford to pay someone to add the features that I want, and I don't have the skills to add them myself, the openness of the source is inconsequential to me. But I don't have the desire to be any of those things, and I do not want to invest the time and energy to learn those things for the few times I would use them. I could also learn to be a gourmet chef or a cardiologist. Sure, I could learn the skills needed to make complex changes to complex programs myself. In a commercial setting it might not be so bad, but I don't want to do it again at a personal level. Organizing a pool of money and corordinating that was a pain. It wouldn't have worked without other people contributing to pay the programmer as I couldn't have afforded his services on my own. I paid up and it worked that time, but it cost me a lot of money. Several others pledged money and we were able to pay a guy in Germany named Ben Bucksch to make the change. The last time I funded a change was in 2002 when I pledged $1,000 towards a programmer who would add Netscape roaming profile support to the Mozilla Suite (long before it was Seamonkey). I am also no stranger to trying to fund changes to free software. The latter is most certainly beyond my skill set. There's a big difference between doing that and the example of adding ZModem support to a terminal emulator like Putty. The last one was a patch for F-Spot to add a thicker highlight outline to the selected photo thumbnail. I have also contributed patches to programs where I had the motivation, need, and skills. Writing the occasional 100 line Perl script is as complex a program as I have needed (or want) to write. However, being aware of these benefits doesn't mean that one always has the ability to take advantage of them. Oh, I don't deny that there are benefits to free software. > some other kind of improvement to open source software occasionally. Even I have managed to contribute a patch or > I don't believe that one has to be a professional programmer to see the I think that point is lost on the Richard Stallman's of the world. Open-source software is as closed to me as closed-source software because I'm not a professional programmer and I can't afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to hire a programmer to implement the things I need. I'm not rich like Mark Shuttleworth and I'm not a programmer like Jonathan Corbet. I went with what worked for me and it was worth the money. It wasn't until Kitty was forked from Putty last year that zmodem support was added. People have been asking for that feature in Putty for a few years. Most free software seems stuck at being 80% finished where paid-for software can afford to go the extra bit and do things right.įor example, I've had zmodem support in SecureCRT since 1998 and it's an important feature for me. It also means the company can pay their programmers to do the non-fun hard stuff like fixing hard bugs, fit and finish, and proper QA. I can expect good customer service when I pay for it compared to most free software projects that don't understand what customer service is. Paying for support, even if I never use it, is a nice safety net. It's the same reason that people pay for Nagios XI instead of using the free Nagios, or pay for Red Hat Enterprise instead of using Fedora, or pay for VMware vSphere when they could use the free ESXi, VirtualBox, or Xen. I don't mind paying for the things that I use when I get value for what I pay. I find the money worth it because their support has been top-notch. They have families to feed and mortgages to pay. > And why does it start at US$ 129? why would anyone spend hard-earned money on that of all things?īecause the people who make it are not running a charity. Nothing has come along that's convinced me to switch, so I've stuck with it. For my needs it's far superior to any other tool, free or commercial, that I have used. It's a cross-platform terminal emulator with telnet, ssh, and serial support.
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