There's no free (open source) lunch

I am grateful that Ipswitch's Roger Greene noted that open source software is not free.

The cost of software must include installation, configuration and maintenance, and depending on the particular software and your environment, this can run from insignificant to many times the purchase cost of the software.

This is true for both open source and commercial software. Similarly, the responsiveness of the vendor to bug reports can range from poor to great, irrespective of the commercial/open nature of the product - the only real difference is that in open source software, if you are desperate enough you can fix it yourself.

In evaluating software products, purchase price (or lack thereof) should be low on the list of criteria. Just as I assume Greene does not automatically purchase a product with the highest price on the assumption that it must have the highest quality, he should not dismiss an open source product simply because there is no purchase price attached.

Tom Payerle

College Park, Md.

Down with e-mail marketers

I couldn't agree more with Mark Gibbs' column on e-mail marketers. The value of the industry would go up significantly if some of the recommendations he put forth were in place and consistently observed because the quality of the lists would be that much better. The rest would snowball from there.

Unfortunately, the industry looks at it more as a pure numbers game (how many e-mail addresses for how much money), knowing that a certain percentage of people don't want to receive the messages but factoring that into the equation. It's obstinance and fear of change that are preventing things from moving to a more healthy paradigm.

Imagine how valuable a list would be if everyone had confidence it was 100% legit.

Jason Mandell

San Francisco

Crime and punishment

Regarding Mark Gibbs' recent column on "Crime and punishment and technology", substitute teacher Julie Amero may be computer illiterate, but so is the school administration and board. They leave the computers on all the time? Computer use isn't monitored and access is uncontrolled? And they're too "budget conscious" to implement filtering? Why aren't these people being prosecuted?

I spent two and a half years teaching computers to fourth and fifth graders at a local elementary school. Total enrollment of 70 in a town of 800. We had a lab of sorts and a couple of computers in each classroom. There was no budget for server-based filtering. But students couldn't use the computers without a teacher present. Computers were never left on (even though they were G3 iMacs - less likely to be targets for malware). And one of my first projects was to install pop-up blockers on every student-accessible machine. We had one incident, caught immediately by the supervising teacher. No outcry. No prosecution. The student was (mildly) disciplined. End of story.