Windows Embedded Blog

funny.... yep folks ther is no "Free Lunch" you have to pay folks to work some where some time.... you can play games with numbers all day long... but then you try to get free food and other basics ... wups! need money!

"He would say that, wouldn't he!"

As a WinCE (by now, pronounced strictly as "wĭns", with an appropriate facial expression) dev, I'll tell you that my shop discovered the hard way that for all intents and purposes, WinCE (5.0) is supported WORSE than the FREE, unsupported Linuxes. And don't even get me started on the tool chain (both PB and eVC/VS2k5!). And it's certainly no less buggy.

At least when we paid for OSS code we got no-nonsense support, tight turnaround times and direct access to devs. Now we're paying for the code only, which no one out there has a clue how to fix.

Mike, the original SlashDot poster (you have some reputable sources for the "Competetive" tag posts, eh) listed some product names and sums in his post titled "Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?". The sums were quoted totally out of context, without even listing what they entitled one to, once paid. You then appended a-kind-of-innocent-but-we-all-know-what-I'm-talking-about remark "Got to make you think, right?"

Here's what then: when you PAY "for FOSS code", you're normally paying for SUPPORT, not the code itself, because according to most FOSS licenses no one can charge you for the code itself beyond the S&H tax. When you pay for WinCE or any other MS product, you're paying for code only (with all or  portions of it being available as binaries only AND you have to agree to some scary EULA to even get any sources at all), NOT for support. Buying commercial software that comes with source code is no different than buying any other commercial software (e.g. Qt, which is dual-licensed), thus has nothing to do with FOSS in and of itself.

"free support through the newsgroups and monthly chats" is a joke: when I seek support, I'm not looking for "yes, this is a confirmed issue with product blah" response, I'm looking for patches. Anything beyond that is PRICEY (do you feel like publishing a couple of quotes here yourself? I wouldn't want my posts to be post-moderated or erased for disclosing "confidential information"), and all too often results in the same "yes, this is a confirmer issue" response.

THOSE are my issues with WinCE support, with original SlashDot post and your blog entry. ANY software is "expensive" once you consider the full life cycle, both commercial and plain vanilla unsupported FOSS, you're just paying in different ways for each. FOSS with commercial support is expensive because supporting complex code is HARD. Closed-source and "shared-source" (R)(TM) commercial software support is usually JUST AS EXPENSIVE FOR EXACTLY THE SAME REASON: supporting complex code is HARD.

As for original poster mentioning going from "$3300/seat" Qt to "$700/seat" MSVS2005 and C# (apples and oranges)... What can I say, if they were able to easily achieve the SAME goals with C# as they were with Qt, then the person who originally chose Qt should probably be fired as incompetent, they picked the wrong tool for the job to begin with, and this has nothing to do with FOSS or pricing. But even then, and despite the apples and oranges comparison that it is, DO compare what kind of support and upgrades each of those licenses entitles you to!

And no, I'm not interested in providing any more feedback on my issues, I'm past this stage now. MS wasn't able to resolve any of my issues (which happen to be MS bugs, you know!), not even with paid support, so there's hardly any point in going over it again.

"tired dev" is right on the money.  We are at "gold preferred status" or whatever it is called as a direct OEM, and we get almost zilch for support.

It was worse for CE.  The patches I submitted for the CE 3.0 IrDA (you guys should be careful about snotty remarks in the source code about HP, particularly when you are trying to fix a bug of theirs, but do it incorrectly) were never used, at least up to 4.2, I hope to never have to use 5.0 or 6.0 to find out if the code was fixed there.

It is a big joke around here about calling Microsoft for support.  "They won't know anything or be able to help you, but at least they are nice about it".