Microsoft are going to provide "Service"

[Lobster]

Through a spokesperson, Ozzie declined interview requests, but in a widely circulated company memo he noted that "complexity kills. It sucks the life out of (software) developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

No it is another ozzie at Microsoft
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar ... 40305/1013

Oh Ozzie - just use Puppy and be happy . . .

[MU]

The idea of earning money with internet-applications is not new.
Just in the past, those apps had bad quality.
JAVA was too slow, others had no real advantage to Desktopbased apps.

I think the idea is not bad, it would help programmers to get money.
For example I might say: "I will spend 2 month to get a working comfortable printing system for puppy".
I will take 5 Euro - until 1000 people have payed, then it will be released as free software. I could use a webbased registration-check for that.
That would be fair, no?

The problem with microsoft is:
they would not do it, to get a "salary" for their work.
They try to maximize their income, so they will try to offer things you don't really need.
Example is their new virus-scanner.
Very low quality compared to concurent products, but easy to get with this annoying "your computer is not safe"-Popups.
Where the heck does someone deactivate this annoying message?
It even came up after I installed "Spybot search and destroy" if I remember well.

So if even I (used Windows many years) don't find out easily how to deactivate it, how shall a "Housewife" find it?
She just might buy it, to get rid of the nasty messages

You're right, let's stay with puppy

Mark

[Lobster]

I think the idea is not bad, it would help programmers to get money.
For example I might say: "I will spend 2 month to get a working comfortable printing system for puppy".
I will take 5 Euro - until 1000 people have payed, then it will be released as free software. I could use a webbased registration-check for that.
That would be fair, no?

I wonder if we are in a position to do something like this? It would be a way of generating some income if programmers had a list of programming tasks they did not relish but were prepared to do if a target donation could be achieved. Maybe somone has ideas on if this is good, feasible or advisable?

[raffy]

Tomas of Slax has been doing it another way: he invites programmers to commit to do certain tasks, naming his price up front. For the solution to a unionfs bug discussed here sometime ago, he was reported to have paid $800.

As there are real needs out there, people can experiment with different ways of responding.