xf86CheckBeta() and friends

[Keith Packard]

Around 10 o'clock on Nov 12, Daniel Stone wrote:

> It's bad because we don't want to walk the closed-source route.

While I may agree with you in fact, I disagree with this particular 
arguement.  It has nothing to do with closed vs open source; the reality 
is that most people *don't* rebuild X for themselves, and the 'beta' flag 
provides distributions with a mechanism for encouraging people to get the 
released version of software instead of continuing to use potentially 
buggy software.  

As the code is open source, this can't force people to upgrade, but it can
make it painful to continue running older code.

And, to that, all I can say is that whoever thought of this clearly never 
spent a lot of time doing tech support.  A working computer is far more 
valuable to most people than running 'approved' versions of software.  

Having your machine stop functioning because of some arbitrary time bomb 
is the worst kind of software torture; worse in many ways than dongles and 
other nasty closed-source tactics.

-keith


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