The people love Windows XP 10140

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, DFS wrote on 3 Aug 2005 22:32:03 -0700

The whole idea of software and ownership is a little odd to begin with.

Take an ordinary book. Unquestionably, I own the book. However, I don't own its content (unless I bind my own writings into a book, which is possible but not likely). The author, presumably, gets a royalty payment for every book sold. (The estate does too, for a certain amount of time.) One might construe this as "a license to read". Other issues ensue, such as the copying out of chunks of the book, by manual transcription, photoscanning, photocopying, OCR, etc., and including it in another work of my own that I sell. Somebody will scream in that case, as they should.

Software isn't that much different, though in this case the reading is far easier (it's done by the machine) and various output can be generated thereby. In a book, the only output is some bounced-off photons from the reading lamp.

As for quality -- what is quality? There's at least 5 metrics one can apply to quality:

- Performance - Stability - Usability - Flexibility - Maintainability

or some variants thereof. Of these, usability is probably of the most interest to the end user, though there's a case for 4 of the 5 being "top dog" (the fifth is from the standpoint of the developer, but more maintainability results in better software as well).

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.