RE: Jakarta POI - HWPF for word files

Scott,

[Commercial software houses] don't care too much about existing users, all

they care about is their income.

With free software, this isn't a problem.

I think this is a universal problem. The only difference is that instead of a
Corporation abandoning a low/no profit product, it is an individual who has
changing priorities. Certainly there is nothing that keeps a corporation from
giving away its products after they run their course (look at Visual C++
Express, and the new Borland compilers/IDEs). And there's nothing that keeps
opensource/freeware developers from pulling their stuff off the net when the get
a full-time job or have a baby, or get married, or move to the Caribbean. 


-Bob Cozzi
www.iSeriesTV.com
Ask your Manager to watch iSeriesTV.com


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Scott Klement
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 10:28 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: Jakarta POI - HWPF for word files

This is often the case with this "free" software. Most of the time, 
people are doing it in the spare time, however frequently the unemployed 
(i.e., recent grad students) are doing it to play in the sandbox and to 
get their resumes out there.

This is a risk with ANY software, not just the free stuff. Look at all the 
people who were using OfficeVision!  How about all the people who were 
running HP-UX on their HP3000 servers?

My experience has been that commercial software is discontinued far more 
often than free software.  FAR more often.  why?  Because as soon as the 
management of a company decides that the software isn't profitable, they 
drop it.  They don't care too much about existing users, all they care 
about is their income.

With free software, this isn't a problem.  People distribute it because 
they enjoy it, and so it doesn't have to be profitable.  Frequently, it's 
kept around long after it makes sense to keep it around, simple because it 
doesn't cost anything to maintain.

Even better is open source software, which is usually free, and you get 
the source code.  Because there aren't restrictions on who can host it or 
who can change it, the original developers can stop working on it, and 
you're still not left in the lurch.  Even if nobody is developing it, if 
you find it valuable, you can keep using it and make any enhancements 
yourself if you really need to.

I don't know how many times I've had to re-do an application because the 
commercial software vendor got bought by a larger one that discontinued 
the original product, or when a commercial software vendor discontinued a 
product simply because they didn't think it was profitable or had a 
future.

However, I've never once had a system that had to be re-done because free 
software was discontinued. And, I use free software a lot.

As for HPWF, it's absurd to complain about the fact that nobody is 
developing it.  It has never reached a point where it was useful software, 
the only people who have used it are developers who were in the process of 
writing it.  Nobody is left in the lurch with HPWF.