Richard Stallman: Sage or Misunderstood Genius?

"The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents"

Richard Stallman, giving his reasons not to use C#.

Incidentally, he also has some...unusual views regarding web browsing:

"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."

Back in my university days (somewhere in the Pre-Cambian era), writing just such a program as this was our introduction to C (granted, we didn't use good old wget but instead we built our own process to do the same thing that used the Berkeley Sockets Library instead).

UPDATE 29/06/09: A member of the Debian Mono Group responds.

The saga of TurboPower

Up until about six years ago, one of the big players in the Delphi 3rd party component market was Turbopower. Their component suites extended Delphi functionality significantly and were used by thousands of developers. Then, in early 2003, Turbopower closed. The scuttlebutt was that Turbopower had been bought by a Casino Software company who developed not in Borland*, but in various Microsoft languages (remember, this was the era before C# gained the traction it now has) and all the Borland* programmers in Turbopower were now reassigned elsewhere.

This sort of thing is remarkably common in the software industry, and as commenters to my last post on this topic pointed out, a powerful disincentive to choose commerical products to base development on. The theory is obvious: unlike open-source products, there is the risk of development resources drying up or stopping, with the worst case scenario being withdrawl of the products (such as the recent brouhaha over Oracle buying and then eviscarating Virtual Iron in favour of their own virtualization solution).

What makes Turbopower different to the usual tale of woe is that they released all their components as open source, and development has continued to this day (the Abbrevia suite of compression components, for example, has 20 registered and active developers on SourceForge, and support and development of them is still going strong).

As I've mentioned before, I'm not dogmatic on the whole closed vs open source war - both have their uses and their advantages, and anyway, a good rule of thumb for us developers is to use whatever tools allow us to get the job done on time and without too much drama, but I do think what happened with Turopower components was probably the best solution.

Incidentally, I'm considering using the aforementioned Abbrevia to implement compression of save files, when I get round to implementing them.

*I use 'Borland' deliberately here instead of Delphi, as Turbopower catered for much more than Delphi, e.g. with C++ Builder and Kylix versions of their components available.

Commercial vs Non-Commercial Development Tools

In the comments to my earlier post, Mario Donick rightfully reminds me of an important factor in choosing development tools: price.

I'd like to ask a followup question: assuming the same price-point for a commercial and non-commercial tool, and all other things being equal (e.g. featureset, license terms, multi-platform compilation and so on), are there any non-ideological reasons why someone would choose the non-commercial tool?

(I want to specify non-ideological reasons because to many developers, supporting smaller companies or the open source development paradigm are obviously important)

And as a second followup, how do you think the answers to this question given by Roguelike developers compare to those given by developers in other areas of software development?