[FOSS] How does one respond to this line of questioning?

[Thomas Charron]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 12:22 PM,  <bruce.labitt at autoliv.com> wrote:
> Au contraire, no dumping.  I wrote a simulation from scratch, because none
> existed.  There are no ready made tools to do this, from anyone, using any
> language, for this system.  Was there something else that I could of used?
>  Maybe.  My previous experience in the field, lead me to believe not much
> existed.

  But..  Now your coworkers, (Im assuming op was a coworker), becouse
of the answer given, more then likely just look at it as being
zaelotry.  Instead of defending, for instance, using phython as a
tool, it feeds into a discussion about OSS versus not OSS.  Guess
what?  Free doesn't mean better.  It means different.

> There were NO requirements that were given to me, just get the job done as
> fast as possible.  I kept no secrets about what I was doing, or how I was
> doing it.  And anyone could check or validate my results by 1) examining
> the source code 2) running it themselves, if they needed insight.  There
> is documentation in the source, and a plain old ascii text file that
> reveals the basic concept.  I wrote the text file - and I coded everything
> based on the text file.

  Kudos for you.  You're obviously a better engineer then your peers.  Right?

> For what it is worth, after the fact, one can nearly always port or
> cross-compile the code to any obscure platform with many Operating
> Systems.  Face it, it is relatively *easy* to do so, (long, tedious, but
> almost mechanical,)  the hard part is generating the original ip,
> architecture, dataflow, to solve the problem.

  That utterly depends on the problem at hand.  But I agree.  Porting
and potentially 'reimplementing the equivilant' isn't as hard as
coming up with the fresh solution.

> I was slightly taken aback by the comment, 'non-standard'.  Everything
> that I do is 'non-standard'.  I'm inventing new things.  If I did
> everything 'standard' there would be nothing new.  How does one innovate
> if one has to do *everything* in a standard fashion?

  They don't.  But the emphisis should be on the technical reasons why
it was better to do it that way, not just 'Whatcha got against the Red
Sox (OSS).  YANKEES SUCK (Closed source).'

-- 
-- Thomas