Ethics Violation in XFree86
I am a Debian user. Doesn't Debian have an ethics
policy? What about software, even free software,
whose technical documentation plainly and bluntly
lies about its capabilities? I refer to XFree86's
pervasively well-documented feature of supporting
multiheaded (multiple monitored) systems. I have
just spent some $450 for a monitor and a card,
based on my perusal of the technical
documentation, and attempted to hook up the
monitor to my PC, beside the other one. It took me
a week to delve into the documents, write all the
scripts and put everything together. Only to
discover at the end of my money and time that
nothing worked or could work. I would have been
better off to buy a 19'' monitor, had I not been
misled --- only now I can't. My money is spent on
an unusable monitor. And I'll bet that I am not
the first or the last to be caught so.
While I appreciate the efforts of those in the
free sofware community, I also fully well and
reasonably expect developers not to knowingly tell
outright lies. There is an expectation raised in
the minds of those who use documentation which is
technical that it is, indeed, technical and meets
a higher standard of truth than mere expository
literature. The expectation is given further
given merit when the documentation is that of a
widely used package and normally, usually meets
that higher standard of truth for everyday
purposes. The ethics violation is worse when it
occurs in such a situation.
What good is free software when people are
deliberately misled about what it can do? How many
rotten apples in the barrell does it take to
infect the good ones there?
Regards,
Jesse Gilman
The Atlantum
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