While I regularly use and frequently praise open source software, there’s a cowboy element to it which often gives it a bad name. That’s the element that, for instance, sees some poor newbie (or even some experienced person) ask on a forum, “How do I do X”, and then has 50+ sanctimonious smart arses chime in to explain why someone would either be stupid to do that in the first place, or stupid for asking and not already knowing, etc.
That cowboy attitude also leads to this shite:
I’d like to understand: where is the professionalism in recommending that you upgrade to a beta version of software for “security and stability”? Sure, I recognise betas may have more features – but stability is generally not one of them, and it’s not the sort of thing that an IT department would appreciate seeing popup on user desktops.
This is yet another manifestation of the open source cowboy attitude that actually does the community such a disservice.
If you’re going to ask people to beta test, be honest.
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While I completely agree it’s weird that they would recommend that, there may be some truth to it. I’ve personally found FF 4.0 unusable. I had to downrev back to 3.6 after it locked up repeatedly on my MBP. Not only would it lock up, it would lock up my Mac, and that’s hard to do. May 5.0 IS more stable.