[QGIS-it-user] Sosteniamo il futuro

[Stefano Campus]

Ricordiamocene ogni tanto, sia come individui sia come comunità
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http://www.spatialys.com/en/opinions/

Fighting misconceptions about Open source

This paragraph tries to address some misconceptions that are sometimes seen
in exchanges with users of Free and Open Source software.

As a general rule, if you use a Free and Open Source software, you should
not expect any level of support from anyone, unless you have made an
arrangement with a service provider. Depending on the project, willingness
and available time of other users or developers of the software, you might
get an answer. But you should consider it as an exceptional priviledge, a
matter of a luck, certainly not as a due. Your general expectation should be
that you should be ready to be your own support if you do not explicitly buy
support from someone else. And that is actually the main strength of Free
and Open Source software: you are not dependent on anyone else to do
whatever you want with the software. This is what makes open source software
fundamentaly different from proprietary one. The corollary is that you
should not expect anyone to feel concerned by the issue you face or your own
needs. Expecting bugs to be corrected because you reported them is not an
efficient way of getting them fixed. Sometimes someone might actually fix
the bug, because it was important to them... or to another entity who has
funded the fix.

Free (as in "freedom") and Open Source does not mean gratis: the end-result
might appear to be gratis, but the work that has been needed to reach that
result is - generally - not gratis.

If you are using a Free and Open Source software that is important for your
operations, you should consider to engage actively with its community,
either by spending time to take your own share of the burden of maintaining
it, or by funding its maintainers. If everybody expects others to
participate/pay for them, projects will end up dying.

© Spatialys 2014-2020



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