competency vs insanity

competency vs insanity

Posted Jan 13, 2006 16:49 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)
In reply to: by tajyrink
Parent article: Flash players for Linux

"though no-one really sane person will start to extensively use a non-open non-standard format"

The majority of IT people do just that every single day, and there's no question of their sanity. Quite the opposite, I'd argue that only an insane person would avoid the use of a very powerful tool simply out of unfounded fears of the tool suddenly ceasing to work anytime during the lifetime of the material in question.

Openness is useful, *very* useful, but it is still just one point out of many to look at when evaluating a technology. In many circumstances the efficiency of some proprietary tool is going to be worth a lot more to a particular project than openness. Part of being a competent (and sane) IT worker is being able to make those sorts of objective evaluations and coming up with the best solution, not just the most open solution.

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