Ian Leader writes an interesting blog post on ‘Open Source, Email threading and Gmail Labs’. As he notes, closed-source, ad-supported software may be regarded as a fair trade-off in comparison to open source:

“This is probably a reasonable trade off: after all, users don’t just get free software (zero marginal cost) but free hosting, bandwidth and storage as well (real costs to the service provider). However it can be very limiting.” [emphasis his]

However, he cites the example of Google’s slow progress in fixing a minor problem as the flip-side. While it would be a five-minute fix in open source, it becomes a drawn-out hassle to resolve when the code is proprietary and protected. However much we try to balance all the factors, both open- and closed-source models have their up- and downsides in one form or another.

Posted Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 @ 12:32 am
Filed in business and productivity, science and tech

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