[KevinH]

Hi Arios,

The reason we do not work on it professionally is not in any way related on what people spend their money on. I could care less what people spend their hard earned money on. The issue is that most commercial software is bug ridden (see the intro of Office 2016 for the Mac, complaints about Oracle databases, long standing bugs in Microsoft Office that no one bothers to fix, etc, etc,) with no real way to get changes made or bugs actually fixed.

With open source software, you can scratch your own itch so to speak. If a bug exists you can publicly report it and a test case and get it fixed (have you ever seen public bug databases for commercial software - they are few and far between). I volunteer my time for Sigil, because I like using it and wanted to add a few features to make it more useful to me (and hopefully others). I do not do it professionally because I used to develop software professionally but retired from it long ago. I am now much happier being a university Professor who researches using econometric methods, teaches Business Analytics, and who loves ebooks and reading and likes to program for the fun of it.

All of that said, given a choice of a production system using open source software vs proprietary software, I would always choose open source so that I could control every aspect of what I am doing, and can fix bugs that actually impact me without waiting for some company to admit their mistake and possibly spend years fixing the bug.

I guess most people simply do not understand the motivations for why people volunteer for open source software, nor do they understand the reasons why open source software is now being used to power most of the projects out there.

I have been volunteering my time on open source projects for over 25 years including the first Mach Microkernel port of Linux that Apple did, linux kernel graphic driver bug fixes, supporting powerpc Linux, porting the original Java Development Kit to Linux (the Blackdown Project), OpenOffice ppc C++ bridges to Java, C, python, the OpenOffice lingucomponent project, MySpell, small patches for R-project, and now Sigil. I do it to keep my old programming skills from getting too rusty and to keep learning new things.

So give me open source software over proprietary anytime. With Open Source, I can always either do it myself, or hire someone to make the changes I need if I can't.

KevinH