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Comment by crocowhile | Hacker News Reader

>no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.

What? What is the financial incentive of fixing ANY of the classical open source software?

Well the Linux project has demonstrated that many companies who use Linux internally have financial incentive to keep the kernel working well.

That's probably because Linux has more utility for its audience than TeX does. Which is sad, as TeX's original goal was to provide typesetting for the masses, who are unlikely to ever use it for their typesetting purposes.

Nope, TeX's original (and only) goal was to help Knuth typesetting his books (TAOCP specifically) and he didn't think anyone but his secretary will use it.

Replying to someone else's statement with 'nope' and your own different understanding of facts is inane and rude. Either ask for a citation - which I'll gladly provide - or provide a referenced counterpoint of your own.

Assuming you're actually interested in some kind of discussion rather than just trolling, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908946, the same reference that's provided on the Wikipedia page for TeX if you'd bothered wondering where I got the information from, rather than just replying 'no' without any research.

The quote is: "TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, now and in the future."

A simple Google search for the statement above will reveal it's in almost every document ever produced on the topic of TeX, which suggests it may have been written by Donald Knuth himself.

Regardless, TeX failed for the masses because it was too complicated to begin with (the masses are not programmers, nor are they interested in "programming" their documents). WYSIWYG word processors and desktop publishing software do a decent enough job quickly with a learning curve orders of magnitude shallower, and rightly so since it's the learning curve that poses the greatest barrier to entry.

And while many attempts have been made to flatten that curve with various tools, I'm hard pressed to find a compelling competitor to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice in terms of ease-of-use.

People in general are far more interested in the final result than the "beauty" of the steps to produce that result, especially when it comes to the written word.

And still most majority of kernel hacking is done by private people in their free time. No mention of virtually every other software I use everyday. Think of drivers, often made and improved AGAINST a company will, by reverse engineering closed sources.

Money have nothing to do with open source. Sure they help, but if a project is not followed it's not because of money incentives.

That might have been the case 10 years ago but not today. According to G. Kroah-Hartmann, more than 80% of kernel contributors are full-time paid developers, the remaining 20% being spread among free-time contributors and companies who do not want to disclose their names. People contributing to gcc, mozilla or OpenOffice are all full-time paid developers funded by a company to do so.

Money is not everything, but it has a lot to do with everything, including open source. Linux would still have been a hobby operating system if a number of big players (Sun, IBM, etc) didn't get on the Linux bandwagon in the early 2000s.

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