Why Users Drop Open Source Apps For Proprietary Alternatives 891
maximus1 writes "Hard as it may be to imagine, 'free' is not always the primary selling point to open source software. This article makes some interesting points about subtle ways Open Source projects might lose to the competition. Lack of features is a common answer you'd expect, but the author points out that complicated setup and configuration can be a real turn-off. Moreover, open source companies may not do enough to market major upgrades. If they did, they might lure back folks who tried and dumped the earlier, less polished version. This raises the question: what made you dump an open source app you were using? What could that project have done differently?"
Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Using Firefox 3.5.3 and having no problems whatsoever. No crash in firefox happened that can't be attributed to adobe or flash in the last year.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides is Linus really "free"?
Yes, Hans is the one in jail.
My time has value too
Ah, I see, you are once again confusing the meaning of free. Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide. This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files. You can never be locked in to a particular plaintext editor, no matter how closed it is.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
Not directly, but there are some tangible indirect benefits to the software being free. Consider the Noscript/Adblock debacle. The Noscript author decided to make Noscript interfere with ad blocking for the author's ads. The community really did not like this and the Noscript author apologized and removed this feature. Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other add
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
On the proprietary side, some enterprising fellow or company would note that NoScript's users were less than happy, and that there was a market for a new player. This fellow or company would write their own script/ad blocker and steal some of NoScript's userbase, forcing him to change NoScript to keep his users. Writing it from scratch (and with the SDKs and IDEs "scratch" means most of the work is still already done for you) they may even make it better, or add features, and you'd have a better product.
I
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Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
"Lots of users" does not equal "a large percentage".
The number of people who use Windows but loath it could be twice the number of total number Linux users combined, and it would still be less than 5% of number of people who use Windows. There are not that many people who hate Windows, the vast majority of windows users love it, especially XP and even Vista now that they've got most of the bugs ironed out.
There will never be an open source replacement for Windows, if anything replaces it it will be a closed-source OS like OSX, because programming the bits that make Windows easy to use and acceptable to a large user base are the very bits that nobody likes to write. They are, in fact, a pain in the ass to write and there is no real sense of accomplishment. That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
With Windows, as well as with most proprietary software, some schmuck got paid to make sure all the bits that nobody likes to program work the way they are supposed to, and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it. This is one thing that open source developement is terrible at. Not bad, but terrible, and it is an area closed-source developement excels at. Usually the poor schmuck doing the GUI work is an intern or new guy making his way up the ranks, being told what to do by the high-paid GUI designer. Neither of those two exist in an open source project. If they do, it's very rare.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, where are my mod points when I need them.. your post is spot on. It reminds me of trying to find an open source replacement for Visio, so I could throw together some really simple circuit diagrams.
I found a good half dozen programs that had the basic functionality I needed, except that they all sucked, really, really, really hard. A lot of them had amazing feature sets and could do some incredible stuff, but when it came to the basic nitty gritty of .. clicking on an object ... rotating it ... scaling it... moving it from here to there... they all failed *miserably*. Half of them didn't let you scale objects, half didn't let you rotate them at all, the others only did 90 degree increments, etc. The most basic, raw surface of the interface of all these programs were simply unusable.
It doesn't matter if all the open-source apps were loaded to the brim with extremely powerful features, which indeed many of them were, if it's like pulling teeth to drop some objects on the screen and move them and point them where I want them to.
I eventually found a circuit drawing program a friend of mine was writing for fun, that actually did what I wanted pretty much, but then I realized I could get Visio for free from school through the academic alliance, so I switched to that, and the joy of having a gigantic company's worth of resources to make sure every little tiny piece of the interface works great became apparent. (except autoconnect. that feature sucks.) It makes it so much easier to just Do Work, and not Work at doing work.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly are you talking about?
If you want to talk about appearance, Desktop environments/window managers like GNOME and KDE are comparable to what you can find on Windows or Mac, unless you're talking about really old stuff like twm. Compiz Fusion gives Linux compositing that is just as good as (if not better than) Aero. Furthermore, Windows still doesn't have multiple virtual desktops like Linux has had for decades. I've come to rely on that feature for day-to-day use, and using Windows is downright painful for me these days. Sure, there is software that can add that functionality to some extent in Windows (and Mac OSX, I presume) but that isn't the same as having it available out of the box and having a compositing engine that can integrate well with it.
I've used OS X quite a bit and I still don't see what everyone in in awe about. It does what its supposed to, but there isn't really anything that special or unique about its interface these days.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>> Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
>
> Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
Bullshit.
I remember back when you bought a WinDOS machine you got proper install disks
and those install disks would work on any machine you had and would not bother
you with any mandatory license management nonsense.
THAT was a very handy thing. These days, such copies of Windows are few and
far between and are likely to be PIRATED if they are that u
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely.
I've used all kinds of OSes over the years, including Commodore BASIC/DOS and GEOS and AmigaOS (1,2,3) and MacOS (6,7,8,9,and 10) and Windoze (3,4,95,98,XP,wista) and Linux Ubuntu. When I was young and had tons of time to spare, I enjoyed hacking into my Commodore or Amiga to see what I could make them do, but now that I'm middle-aged I don't have many years left. I want my OS to "just work" like my car just works, so I can use my remaining time for other fun projects.
I gave Linux a fair shake, found it as frustrating as driving a Volkswagen Old Beetle that keeps breaking-down, and decided to go back to XP and MacOS. They cost money, but not that much, and that cost is offset by all the other free/libre programs like Firefox, Utorrent, Opera (not liberated but it is free), and so on.
BTW:
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck. That was pretty much the final straw that made me reach for my XP restore disc. What Linux needs is a user-friendliness consultant who is tasked to find all the problems that make the OS difficult for average people to navigate. Linux should be as easy to use as the Mac, or at least XP, and right now it's not even a quarter of the way there.
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Lastly, with programs written for users, consistancy is key. That means Microsoft and Apple both have strong incentives to provide a very consistant framework around which app developers write their programs.
There is no such thing in the Linux world, and Linux developers would be outraged if someone tried it.
Just like Apple and Microsoft, Gnome has Human Interface Guidelines (HIGs), and I'm pretty sure that KDE has them too. Unlike you, I think that Gnome and Apple applications follow their own HIGs pretty well, while Microsoft does not. For third-party applications, Gnome and GTK applications may be less consistent than applications developed within the Gnome project, while third-party Mac applications are surprisingly good at consistency. Third-party applications in Windows are even less consistent than Micro
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
Just look at Office 2007. Word looks and behaves nothing like Outlook or OneNote. In Windows, the big players tend to have fairly good interfaces, but as soon as you move away from the over-$100 realm of Windows software, you're in amateur land and the interfaces quickly devolve into a case study in worst practices. I find that I much prefer using ported Gnome software in Windows than many native solutions. Yes, Photoshop is a fantastic program, but I'd take GIMP over ArcSoft abominations any day of the week. At least I don't have to pay for GIMP.
This article should really be titled "Why Users Drop Cheaper Programs for More Expensive Ones". At least the open source solutions generally resist the urge to insert ads into their software and use a bunch of proprietary widgets.
Re:stop astroturfing (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, with the screen down to 640x480 and with a modal dialog up it may be just a little bit hard to back out and search the internet for the mythical command key shortcut you need.
Well, so what? If you don't know about the shortcut, you're no worse off than you're on Windows or Macintosh in the same situation.
Furthermore, on Linux, these kinds of dialogs tend not be modal; modal dialogs locking up the UI are a common misfeature of Windows and Macintosh applications.
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux all have these kinds of problems. The difference is that Linux has a lot more ways in which you can get out of them if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're no worse off than on the other platforms.
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The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare. In number they are greater, because you have almost 100 times as many users, but the majority of Windows/Mac users never have a problem with their system. Now, because of the num
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare.
Sorry but I beg to differ, I've *never* had a Windows machine where *everything* worked in the last 5 or 8 years while I've regularly managed to get all my peripherals of the moment to work in Linux, often without having to add anything from outside the distribution (the main issue being webcams which remain a major pain in the butt).
The only exception was laptops where, as excepted, the integrated stuff worked with the provided Windows version (as it did with the Linux system I replaced it with).
Regarding
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you missed his point, vendor lock-in is possible when the application is so difficult to develop and maintain that a fork would go nowhere.
Imagine a fork of Open Office, it isn't very likely even if there are a lot of things some people don't like about it. It's such a huge application that if it were developed on a volunteer basis, it would require a team of 100 coders to keep pace with its current developement, if not more. Organizing that many coders for a single project is difficult, and frank
Re:Let's change the definition! (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine a fork of Open Office,
Okay [go-oo.org].
it isn't very likely
Try again.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The early versions of Firefox 3 effectively crashed if you had a large quantity of bookmarks. It would work if you waited for the Bookmark processing to finish, but sometimes the wait period was over a few minutes. A version of Firefox 2 could crash if you clicked on Forward/Back at the right time, since
Open Source Browsers RIP? (Score:3, Funny)
Users "Graduate" to Proprietary (Score:5, Interesting)
I've lost count of the number of "casual" graphics designers to whom I have introduced to open source tools... they want to "do stuff," either within a web site or with their photos, but the name brand graphics tools are too expensive, so... they'll try anything, even something with a name as ridiculous and off-putting as "The Gimp." Then, once they become proficient, once they start to understand "layers" and "filters" and the like, they understand the required reading a bit better, and wonder what they are missing with the Adobe software. Well, they don't wonder, it's very clear: all the web and design magazines each month provide specialized step-by-step tutorials on how to do neat stuff with the popular tools, and never once mention open source beyond the "Annual Condescension" summary article about the "other" tools. These people take a stroll down the aisles at B&N and see tome after tome designed to help the Adobe user, and maybe -- in a particularly well-stocked store -- a copy of "Beginning GIMP, which just sounds icky. I've seen the same scenario play out with Audacity and Pro Tools: people learn how to edit with free Audacity, and then when they become savvy enough to realize what they are missing with the proprietary stuff -- either in the form of missing features or widespread community and commercial support -- they step up.
The pro creative tools have great "wannabe" appeal: working with Adobe and Pro Tools, the amateur wannabe artists feel like they're "more connected" to that professional world to which they aspire. Using the free open source tools just underscores -- in their mind -- that they are second tier. This is not to say that the open source tools are second-rate technically, just that -- in the eyes of the latte-infused graphics and sound editor pretenders -- they may not be quite as "fashionable."
Re:Users "Graduate" to Proprietary (Score:5, Informative)
The WONTFIX tag applies well to GIMP. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't use Adobe products, period. But I can see why some people would get incensed at the GIMP and abandon it. A big part of it is the pace of development on the GIMP project, and another big part of it is the team.
The GIMP developers have, for the past dozen years at least, dismissed all suggestions that they are the de facto competitor to Adobe Photoshop. They are scratching their own itch, not scratching the itch that tens of thousands of graphic artists have, and if you want something in the GIMP,
Re:Spot On! (Score:5, Funny)
UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.
I the long run there are probably only a score or so of free software applilications that are substainable. With the exception of these star applications (apache, linux, etc.) the real reason for using FOSS is that it's free. For example, if both MS Office and OO were both free, which would people choose? If they were both $99 (the home/student price of Office) which would they choose. Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
MS spent as much effort on the UI as they did on the actual product. This is very different than FOSS.
I can't think of anything more revealing - and more damning - than this.
The UI is essential part of your product - to treat it as an afterthought defines you as an amateur.
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The question is how you're making it for. I've made things for myself that have UIs that are incredibly cryptic but work for doing what I want to do. If I just throw it out there because it's better than sitting on my hard drive, well... You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
That is the KEY difference between FOSS and proprietary software, and it explains all the issues people have with FOSS right there. FOSS programmers are usually writing the program for themselves, and don't think about what other people might want or need with their program. Proprietary software programmers are -always- thinking about what other people might want or need, because they are NOT coding it for themselves. Half the time they could care less and wouldn't use the product they are writing anyway, but they end up making the better programs.
FOSS is great for developing the underlying technologies behind programs, but when it comes to actually putting something out there for the masses to use, they suck. A proprietary UI with a FOSS core can do extremely well, just look at OSX.
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Interesting)
For many FOSS applications the UI isn't nearly as polished as the commercial alternatives. This might be partially because UI designers want to get paid for the work (perhaps not a dedicated to the free community as sofware developers).
I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.
Other projects may of course be different. This was just my somewhat bitter experience with two fairly well known web apps.
Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
I strongly disagree with that. If I could point to a FOSS application and say "I did the UI for that", I would probably double the amount of commercial work I could get (assuming my work was any good!). I would also think that being the only UI designer on a FOSS project would be wonderful - think of the freedom!
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Stability isn't the only issue. GIMP and Cinelerra under Linux are heaps more stable than Photoshop and Premiere under Windows, but that doesn't draw me away towards the open source side. In that case, as mentioned in the summary, feature set is high on the priority list there.
I have done my best however to stick to FOSS as much as possible. I do prefer MS Office over OpenOffice, but I've stuck with the latter nonetheless, more because I *want* to like OO more than MSO. However, in the office, I've *had* to stick with MSO because while OO can read MSO originated files, doing a save/send in OO and then again in MSO and back again results in badly broken formatting. This isn't even MS's fault.
Try creating a file in AbiWord. Save it. Open it in OO. Edit and save it. Open again in AbiWord. Broken formatting. ODF is not the panacea of perfect cross compatibility that it could and *should* be, and you can blame the elitism in the ODF committee for sticking to a misconceived notion that they should only set the semantics of the file and leave the syntax up to the implementers. The result? ODF implementations that, while semantically compatible, break each others' formatting syntax.
Point? Oh yea, I have one. The reason that I moved my workplace away from open source software was because my illusion that ODF was the perfect answer to cross compatible documents was shattered when I accidentally opened an ODF file in AbiWord on another Ubuntu box, edited it, saved the changes, and found that it had made a mess when re-opened in OO. For me, the biggest draw away from MSO was destroyed, and my incentive to push upstream for ODF use was stymmied.
This is an example where a community effort concentrates on solving the *technical* problem and forgets that there's a real, on the ground problem that needs to be solved as well, that may or may not be totally technical in nature. It represents for me the largest endemic problem within the open source community, and it really needs to be addressed if we are to present the open source model as a serious alternative to the proprietary/patent/copyright system.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
What!? Cinelerra is the least stable program I've ever used, it dies every couple of minutes.
It crashes so much that the tutorial starts off [robfisher.net]: "Cinelerra is not perfect. Before long you will be familiar with the tendency it has to crash. This usually takes the form of all the windows suddenly disappearing. Thankfully this is not often a big problem because Cinelerra can recover from a crash very well. Simply restart it and select Load Backup from the File menu."
It crashes so much that the OpenSuse [opensuse.org] page on it has a section devoted to crashing, and running it within gdb as a matter of routine so it won't crash every time you close the "tip of the day" window.
It crashes on Ubuntu [ubuntuforums.org]. It crashes on gentoo [gentoo.org].
Its support for codecs (that actually work) is so sparse that simply finding a single path from source material to product is like crossing a minefield.
Cinelerra is the perfect example of a program that never really converged to a useful state, it just slogs on like a zombie year after year, half dead, because there is no workable free alternative. Can I blame any of this on the fact that it's free and open? Not exactly, but if it were proprietary, it would have disappeared completely years and years ago.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You're using the old definition of Stable. Stable v1.1beta is so much better. Please upgrade; we're no longer accepting bug reports against Stable 1.0, which was a developer-only release. You should have known this from the .0 -- we told you ages ago that 1.0 means broken, I mean, developer.
You really oughtta try some of the more experimental stuff.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Funny)
I've actually made a video in Cinellera once, and it isn't the crashing I remember. It's the fact that compared to a program like Sony Vegas, editing in Cinellera is like flossing with barbed wire. If you try hard enough you can get the job done, but it really hurts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed. Not so much with MSO.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed. Not so much with MSO.
Not really. Most end users can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. Hell, most programmers can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. It's easy to fix a small bug (like word count can't handle more than 65535 words, or paragraph indentation is inconsistent, etc.), but something fundamental like fixing an issue with the interpretation of a file format like is being discussed here isn't generally going to be fixed by a patch from some casual user, even a highly technically proficient one who is a skilled developer.
This is pretty much the same situation MS Office is in. It's not like MS themselves can't fix bugs in Office.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Stability isn't the only issue.
Indeed not. Cross-compatibility is a pain, for sure; I don't know if OO and Abi talk to each other, but they shouldn't be making life hardes for the users by pursuing different models.
For me, it's two things:
I hardly use any proprietary or commercial software these days, largely because the FOSS offerings do almost everything I want -- at the cost of some effort and the occasional cuss. But I would hesitate to recommend it to the averagely naive user simply because it's not as self-evident as it ought to be. That's not to say the commercial stuff is much better, but they have the money to polish the turds -- we don't.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an example where a community effort concentrates on solving the *technical* problem and forgets that there's a real, on the ground problem that needs to be solved as well, that may or may not be totally technical in nature.
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly, but there are a lot of problems that I think stem from this.
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
But I think there's also a subtler problem, one which, sorry, I'm probably going to do a bad job explaining but I hope you'll bear with me. The problem is that if you're a great brilliant technical developer, you're not going to even think about how to make your program simple. It's sort of a "not seeing the forrest for the trees" problem. You're going to be so smart about understanding all the complicated things your program does, and so well-versed at everything that can be done with your program, that you're not going to be able to understand what a new user will be thinking when he first approaches your program. You're just too close to the problem.
Now that probably still isn't clear, but have you ever tried to write out a complicated explanation, reread the explanation 50 times and had it make perfect sense to you? And what happens when you hand it off to someone else to proofread? They find a bunch of obvious typos and they come up with a bunch of questions (at least that's what happens to me). And then you suddenly realize that your mind was jumping over all the missing steps in your argument and all your typos because you had read it so many times and you knew what it was supposed to say. You weren't really even reading the explanation you wrote anymore, you were just replaying in your mind what you intended to write.
I think lots of technical things can be like this, and I feel like FOSS developers kind of get into this state where they're only seeing the program they meant to put out, and they're seeing how they're using their own software, but they have trouble coming at it fresh.
I mean, I'm not new to computers or system administration, but sometimes I open up a configuration file or read a new program's man page and think, "now what the hell is going on here?" Even in the same distribution, syntax and conventions flip around now and then. Accomplishing one simple and common thing might require changing multiple settings in multiple places, maybe even in different configuration files. The assumption is, I think, that you're not going to want to run a Linux server unless you're a genius who spends his whole day doing sysadmin work. And sysadmin stuff is one of the more well-travelled and refined areas of FOSS. What chance does something like GIMP have, where the developers might be such a different demographic than the potential users?
Honestly, I use various kinds of FOSS all the time, because it's often still easier for me than dealing with proprietary stuff, but I still see the problem. At work, on my Windows box, I'll often use Word instead of OpenOffice. Why? Just because OpenOffice takes a long-ass time to load up. Sure, there are also some formatting problems and I think OpenOffice is a bit uglier than word, but mostly it comes down to how long it takes to load the program and open a document.
So this is mostly just my opinion, but I think the solution (assuming you want t
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly
That's exactly the reason for the differences between FOSS and proprietary software - there's a non-trivial set of "other stuff" that's required to take a piece of software from a sort-of-useful but maybe buggy implementation to a polished application that provides a solid end-to-end user experience.
Things like market research into what your potential users actually want, high-level UI design, usability studies, deliberate architecting, and a significant test infrastructure are practically *required* in commercial software design, but I don't know if they get the same emphasis in FOSS.
You can hire a progammer without being one (Score:4, Interesting)
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
This is one of the common refrains of the anti-FOSS FUD patrol -- that 'all of us non-programmers have no control'. That couldn't be furter from the truth. It's actually a close relative of Microsoft's 'are you going to trust your business to code written by amateurs' FUD.
Truth of the matter is that the bulk of the code that goes into the major FLOSS projects is put there by people who are paid to do the work. It's not a bunch of lone wolves doing it for their own gratification. This means that they take their orders from the people who pay them to do that work. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to get a wanted fix into your (not so) favorite FLOSS project, you just have to convince a programmer (by hook, crook or paycheque) to do it.
This is quite a bit different than with proprietary software, where it has to be in the business interests of the program seller to fix what for you is a show-stopper bug. For example, when MS-Word for OSX first came out, it's multilingual support (especially for RTL languages like Hebrew) was abysmal. The Israeli government offered Microsoft 7million of dollars (plus a guaranteed bulk contract to fix it, but MS was more interested in using the bugs as a leverage point to force people to move from the MAC to Windows. Microsoft didn't budge on the issue until Israel's Department of defence paid a group of programmers $1/2 Million to port Open Office to the Mac, and ordered a halt to further Microsoft contracts.
So the moral of the story is: If you have a show-stopper bug in a FLOSS project, then hire someone to fix it, then sit back and laugh at the people who spend 10 times as much money working around similar problems in proprietary programs. If you then feed your fix to the greater community, then not only don't you have to support your fix, as the base code is updated, you also get to bathe in the good karma of having contributed to the greater commumity. That's what FLOSS is all about.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
To put your point as a car analogy; the FOSS world often feels like a car with an amazingly refined engine and one wheel; adding the other three would be boring and technically uninteresting busy work, so nobody does it. You end up with an engine that never breaks down and does 1E6mpg and not going anywhere.
Support (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest reason is the fact that there weren't expensive support contracts available for purchase. Employee turnover always exists and generally only one or maybe two people knew how to operate any particular system in the places where I have worked. Expensive support contracts allowed for someone else to do deal w/the turnover problem and kept it out of the hands of the on-site departments.
Re:Support (Score:5, Informative)
This is a reason that is always trotted out at times like this, but is it a myth? I've worked at a number of institutions and the place where I am currently at (note I don't work in IT), has over 6,000 employees and a very varied software set up for the various parts of the organisation. The only time, either here or at a previous job, I have ever heard of anyone receiving training in software use, or access to paid support from a vendor is when we recently went to SAP (funnily enough the training was useless).
It may be that all the training/support is provided to the IT department so they can support us I guess, but generally they only provide support for installation and desktop use, so I doubt it.
Re:Support (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several people on campus who use Linux. None of us has ever considered switching back to either Windows or Macs. Sure, there's a learning curve. As someone who had to learn DOS in the Good Old Days, it's no worse than that. Easier actually, because these days there are forums. I can't remember when I heard a useful answer from tech support for a commercial product.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go. No credit cards, no registration codes. When I have to use Windows to help out a colleague, I can never understand why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of it now that Linux has distros like Ubuntu.
So, anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that, yes, support is the big issue in getting people back to proprietary software. But that's not support as a non-IT person understands it. That's "support" in the sense that there's someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Continuity (Score:4, Informative)
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
To give an example, none of the scientific programs I wrote to display my graphs work any more because none of the 3D graphics in pylab work anymore. instead you can use Mayavi (much better but more difficult), but to do an install of that cleanly is a nightmare. So you switch to the Enthought distro with all that built in. But then the ENthought distro doesn't have a fortran compiler so all the scientific add ons that depend on that or use F2PY are busted. And so on. Sure you can if you try get it all to work, but your old programs seldom work anymore.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source. If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
(the problem with matlab's pricing is that while it's not so absurd for single seats if it makes you more productive, once you have a large group then everyone needs a copy to be interactive even if they seldom use it: then it becomes prohibitively expensive.)
Continuity: the package manager trap (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with open source is the dependency chain becomes brutal. So you turn to a package manager like Yum or Fink to handle all the self consistency and installs, not to mention the updates.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
These package manager while saving you a lot of time on the initial install also couple all your apps together in unneccessary ways, so that updating one can break another. Or worse maybe it won't let you update at all.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
Ease of Use (Score:5, Insightful)
For me it really wasn't about the lack of features. It was more on how easy it was to use as program. You have Feature X,Y, and Z on there, but if I have to navigate Menus A, B, C, and D to find that feature then I will not use that program.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why I still use Paint Shop Pro instead of photoshop - PSP does everything with half/tenth the number of clicks.
eg. I do a lot of paste screenshot from the clipboard - it's one click in PSP but in Photoshop I have to do "File->new, select 'size from clipboard' in the dropdown, click 'ok', then I get to paste the image".
Same with JPG images - in PSP I load one up, do something to it, click save, done. In photoshop there's a whole extra layer of dialogs to "set jpg options" when I go to save it.
It a
Difficulty In Using (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We have a lot of brilliant coders working in F/OSS. We need to attract some equally-brilliant technical writers to donate time to explain how the stuff works in the real world.
Those brilliant coders might have to explain to the brilliant technical writers how some stuff works. Seeing as the "separate (and usually incomplete) (not to mention incomprehensible at times) documentation" is also somewhat out of date since they've been busy hacking away on the code instead of updating the documentation. I don't mean explaining basic stuff but esoteric things like exactly what effects various switches and options have, if any of them conflict with each other, and so on.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why F/OSS is generally struggling despite delivering what some would consider equal or superior products. It seems people enjoy the hobby of building things, but once it is all built... its done. Seems a lot like building the frame for a car and putting the engine in starting it up and rolling it off the line. No manual, no body, no paint. Technically it works but it is still missing something.
I think it is more than just technical writers not donating time, I think it is people not donating ti
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Very much disagree. Are you expecting people to work outside of the working hours?
Not sure at what you're getting at here, maybe you got caught up too much in the word "work". Many coders code outside their working hours, few technical writers write documentation. Apart from some high-profile projects like the Linux kernel, also at work time is spent making stuff work, not making comprehensive technical write-ups about things. The result is that the code-to-documentation ratio is much higher, and unlike closed source they don't have the cash to hire someone to do all those boring parts n
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can completely agree with smpool7. He is telling you about the corporate side of it. Let me tell you about the personall, home situation side of this story.
In the early days when I did not have the money to purchase software I used opensource.
By using it I learned a lot and eventually became a UNIX administrator (with some additional learning and stuff). And when it works it usually does a great job. But now I got older, make more money, have a family, I simply do not have the time to delve into a program
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:5, Informative)
... is my key principle. I'm capable of RTM'ing and Googling to find answers, but especially as I get older, I don't have the time I used to.
Amen to that.
Not long ago, I was struggling getting vino/vnc to work under Ubuntu Linux (desktop edition). I spent hours Googling and trying to juggle conflicting and just plain wrong information. Eventually, I discovered the culprit was that IPv6 was enabled on Ubuntu by default.
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
Second, I was stunned vino/vnc would fail to accept connections if IPv6 was enabled but my networking gear didn't support it. I literally could not VNC into my Ubuntu desktop machine unless I disabled IPv6 on the Ubuntu machine, even if all my IPv4 firewall and tunnel settings were correct.
Third, I was stunned that the solution (which was remarkably hard to discover) was to hand edit some weird blacklist file so that I could blacklist IPv6. Nope, no GUI option to just frakking disable IPv6, at least not that I could find.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
I'll continue to use Linux, of course, but FOSS in general has a long ways to go.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
If only it were as simple as paying some $$$ and getting it to work. Unfortunately, it isn't. For me and many other FOSS users, not using Windows is not a question of money or even pr
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:5, Insightful)
When a network application doesn't work .. the first thing I would do is to use tcpdump (or ethereal/wireshark) to see whether the packets arrive properly. If they do, 'lsof' or 'netstat' to check whether something listens on the port the packet is destined for.. and finally 'strace' to see if the receiving application actually receives anything.
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
You expect end users to solve networking problems? on ANY OS??? Good luck with that.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, you should listen to yourself.
If I told somebody who was having trouble with their computer to do that horseshit I would fully expect them to punch me in the face.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's probably the OS's fault though though. Apple spend money on getting decent fonts for OSX, because decent fonts do cost money - real Helvetica, Gill Sans et al cost money. Money which OSS/X/Linux developers simply can't afford. Microsoft have the same thing with their new fonts for Vista/7/Office 2007, they spent money on Calibri etc and got great results.
Fonts are hard (Score:3, Informative)
Why aren't there any decent open source fonts?
Times New Roman was commissioned by the London TImes in 1931. Times Roman [wikipedia.org]
Helvetica [wikipedia.org] dates from 1957.
It's an extraordinary craft, and the expert practitioners are rare:
Bruce Roger's Centaur [From Typographic specimens: the great type faces [google.com]
Patents (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
Yep:
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html [freetype.org]
On Slackware I manually recompiled Freetype to enable the bytecode interpreter. Debian (and, presumably, Ubuntu) ship with the bytecode interpreter already enabled.
Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
I've always thought that the "monetary free" had to be pretty close to the bottom of the list for most corporate decision makers when considering open source. Or at least quite far from the primary selling point. Freedom could be a good argument. Cost ? Not really. (except as in "but if it's free then who is going to invite me for lunch ?")
Lack of Ctl-D to "Fill Down" in OO Calc (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Try each new version of Calc, no easy "fill down"
I remember using hot keys in the past to "fill down" in open office. I just checked and, sure enough, by default open office 3.0 (in ubuntu) uses ctrl-d to fill down in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's time for you to try again.
Lack of user-testing (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems the developers have no concern whatsoever to test their new user-interfaces with users who will actually use their software. This causes miscommunication between the developer and the user-base, in turn leading to an alienation of both groups. It is paramount to learn to speak the language of the user, or the boat we want to sail will never land on a coast.
Besides this, I find the lack of clear and uniform documentation a big mishap in modern linux systems.
So, my complaint list:
1. Lack of user-testing
2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation.
3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
6. Too many configuration formats.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
9. KISS principle is broken too many times.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
Re:Lack of user-testing (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my complaint list:
1. Lack of user-testing
2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation.
3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
6. Too many configuration formats.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
9. KISS principle is broken too many times.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
Ironically (Other than #5 and #7 needing rewording) that is the exact list of complaints I have against most of the commercial software packages I have to work with!
If you replace the word 'linux distro' with 'windows release' in #5, and replace 'unix' with the list of 20 frameworks used in windows for #7, then it is an exact match.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1,2,3: This sounds like a laundry list of complaints for any software.
4: how is this an issue of open source? The fact that anyone can pick up and run with a project is a bonus; try doing that with proprietary. If nobody has picked up something, then perhaps it wasn't worth saving in the first place?
5. Agreed, but some people like choice, and you can't go wrong with any of the major distros either.
6. You're kidding, right? So on Windows, you've got opaque, "blackbox" wizards,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I once had date (GNU coreutils) give the output "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 12nd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3172".
No you didn't... you probably typed "ddate" by mistake. As far as I can tell, "date" has never had some kind of silly easter egg like this (for exactly the reasons you describe - it would be BAD to do so)
And by the way, what's the reference in the joke?
ddate gives the Discordian date, rather than the Gregorian one that you're probably used to...
Security (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Security (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, you conveniently ignore the fact that I was hacked through this hole. So, that means the breach is known and actively being exploited.
Sure, the new application I chose *may* have a security hole as well, but the one I dropped *did* have a hole (and a big one I might add). Which would you choose given that knowledge? No, my logic is completely sound. It is yours that is suspect, perhaps influenced by ideology.
Works both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
I've dumped proprietary applications for the same reasons people dump open source alternatives.
And there's also the price of a lot of proprietary applications, it's often not worth the improvements I gain.
Several reasons ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the reasons leveled at open source can also be leveled at commercial software. I've seen more than my fair share of commercial applications that lack features, have critical bugs, and are definitely hard to use. While some of these problems may be surmounted by purchasing additional software or employing the services of a consultant, that is rarely an option for non-revenue generating organizations (never mind most individual users).
So why do people drop it? Lack of familiarity is one big reason. If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology. So if you're familiar with Linux, you'll probably stick to Linux. If you're familiar with Windows, you'll probably stick to Windows. Feel free to substitute Linux with your favorite open source application and Windows with your favorite commercial application. By in large, this barrier will still exist.
If that issues exists for technical people, imagine how hard it is for non-technical people to deal with similar problems. A function that is found in a different place or that works in a slightly different manner will cause a neophyte OpenOffice.org user to throw up their arms in frustration, call the product shit, and head directly back to Word. Many people are completely unwilling to adapt to change in a domain that does not interest them. (I've talked to some of these people, and intellectually they realize that OpenOffice.org is just different and that it would serve all of their needs. But emotionally they view it as a vastly inferior product.)
Sometimes bundling is a reason for adopting commercial products. I'm not talking about the bundling of software that you see with commercial vendors (e.g. the various Adobe suites). Rather I'm talking about the resources that are bundled with that software. When you download the Gimp or Inkscape, you get just the Gimp or just Inkscape. When you buy something like the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you get fonts and clipart that you can use in your projects. When you buy the Microsoft Office Suite you get clipart and templates. Looking at my Linux setup, I have only one or two graphic fonts and no clipart to speak of. Even though I have the standard DTP and graphics software installed under it. Now I don't mind that. Actually I prefer it that way. Yet I can guarantee you that the run of the mill user will throw up their arms in frustration because they expect that stuff.
And the list could go on.
Mortgage on my house (Score:5, Interesting)
If you aren't getting the same kind of coin, you aren't negotiating hard enough. Hint: know the selling points of the open source alternatives, and (obviously) arrange for a private after hours meeting with the sales guy, but without your colleagues.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You do know that this type of behaviour can get you fired? It's typically called "corruption".
My experience with Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
I thought I would try Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex), again, out on my Dell Inspiron 640m. I got everything installed but the wireless wasn't working, so I plugged it into the lan and did some googling. I had to edit several config files and use some ndiswrapper. For someone who doesn't code and doesn't work in IT, it was a pain but whatever. I got it working.
A couple days later, Ubuntu tells me I have auto-updated to install, so I say okay. It hoses the wireless. I go through the same procedure again and get it working. A couple weeks later, the same thing.
I've told this story before and got all kinds of apologist telling me various reasons why it happened. The fact is, I don't care what the reasons are. I went back to windows.
Re:Expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is expecting your wireless nic to work "magic"? Why is not expecting an update for Windows or OS X to break a functioning nic "magic"?
That's all he was expecting - that it works. For him it "just work" on Windows. With Ubuntu he had to do a little bit of work, which he was okay with. Then it broke because of an update. So he fixed it again - he was okay with that. Then it broke because of another update.
Why is that him expecting "magic" from the OS? What kind of odd world do you live in, where you expect to get your socks ruined just because you change the laces in your shoes?
Lack of a way to use binary drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
You what to know what would remove almost *all* of the driver problems literally overnight? Make it trivial to visit "nvidia.com", download a blob, type "./setup.pl" and have it install a binary driver. You know, kind of like how Windows or (I assume) OSX does it.
I *dont* blame the vendors for the lack of drivers on linux. I fully blame the kernel developers for their dogmatic refusal to stabalize the driver framework so it allows binary drivers. By "stabalize" I mean create a driver architecture that works across an entire swath of kernel versions. Most vendor supplied drivers seem have this need to be compiled first and thus require the kernel source before they work. That is bullshit. They should just sit around as a blob and work.
But alas, *that* dream will never happen because of some on the fringes of the open source movement close their ears and scream "not pure! not our fault! not pure!". Which is a shame because that single feature would instantly increase linux driver support hundreds of times over.
It *is not* the fault of hardware vendors. It *is* the fault of the kernel--more lightly, it *is the philosophy and culture of linux* that is what holds it back.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
No, wrong. You didn't read his post carefully (or perhaps beyond the first sentence). He took the time to deal with his non-supported hardware, and then did an update. A normal thing to do. Updating software should --- SHOULD --- first, like people in the medical profession, do no harm. If a user has a particular configuration file tweaked, THE CONFIGURATION SHOULD NOT BE RESET TO DEFAULT. That's just stupid at best, and abusive at worst. He didn't expect magic, he expected reasonable behavior. I ex
There is one single very simple reason: (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, every software is free to normal users!
Either you download and crack it yourself, or you have a friend who does it for yo.
That is the main point free software hasn't taken off, and everybody knows it.
I mean, when instead of Gimp, you can get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=adobe%20master [btjunkie.org]
Then who cares about Gimp?
And instead of OpenOffice, you get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=microsoft+office [btjunkie.org]
I mean, it's obvious.
Oh, and under Linux, the culture is quite different. :)
1. Because not everything runs fine under Wine.
2. The abilities to combine Linux tools into scripts and a mesh, glued together with bash.
Which I absolutely love. I could never go back. I'm officially spoiled.
Elitist culture a problem sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source is a lot better from when I first started looking into it 15 years ago but I still occasionally get hit by cultural attitudes of some of the software developers. To be fair, I understand that a lot of the projects are volunteer run and small scale, maybe one or two people hitting way above their weight and competing with large commercial corporations, but the documentation can be sparse. There's still an emphasis on getting software out rather than communicating what it does or how to help people to use it in some cases. More friendly introductions and more explicit guidance would be useful.
I think there are still a lot of elitist attitudes in the open source movement, with people "points scoring" - trying to prove they are more elite, more expert, and more competent than others and basing their sense of worth on proving they are better than others. Some of this filters into support forums where innocent questions from beginners can be savagely put down ("if you don't know how to do this, get lost newbie!").
The open source movement has come on a long way but could go a lot further in taking advantage of the large number of people who philosophically wish to support open source / FOSS/FLOSS whatever you want to call it but are not technical experts. Think of the large number of people who will pay extra to buy free range eggs / fairtrade food: they don't want to become small holding farmers themselves and look after chickens in their own back yard but they'll pay extra for food sources they believe in and fight furiously for it to be promoted as an alternative to be used in schools and government workplaces. Maybe think how the open source movement could learn lessons from this?
Documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though the documentation for proprietary software can be crap, it is usually light years ahead of what you get for most Freeware/Open Source/Hippieware/Whatever programs.
I hate it when I install something and I get a window with three greyed out menus. Somehow I am supposed to magically know to go edit ~/.korgodi/pyconfig/menus/anabling.cfg to turn them on. And when I look for documentation about this or even a damn README, I get a link to a forum where everyone is too busy arguing the philosophy of tabs vs. spaces for indentation to tell me anything.
I hate writing up the documentation as much as anyone, but your project is not ready to be released until you can give the user a document telling them how to use the stupid thing.
I'll give you a real-time example. I am going to attempt to find the format for conditional execution in gmake. I don't do development on this machine normally, so some fumbling will be necessary.
Step 1: 'man gmake':
What do you mean there's no gmake? I installed the dev package.
Step 2: search for where gmake is.
Let's check synaptic to see where they put it. No gmake in there.
Oh, they called it just plain 'make' in Ubuntu. Of course.
Step 3: 'man make':
Blah blah blah . . . purpose of make . . . startup options . . . damn there are a lot of them . . . THAT'S ALL?!!! . . . Wait, there was a SEE ALSO back there.
See Also The Gnu Make Manual. Oh, of course, I have one of those with me at all times. WHERE IS IT!
Step 4: Google
Type in 'The Gnu Make Manual'. There it is. Ah yes, a webpage with a format circa 1994. ^F conditional . . . See Conditionals. At least it's a link. Reading . . . I had wondered what the definition of the word 'conditional' was. Show me the stupid syntax.
Blah blah blah, examples that no one will ever use . . . oh wait, for once the examples are relatively useful. Okay, that should get me started.
So, that wasn't too bad as was as documentation searches go. But I still had to resort to Google. WRITE THE DAMN MANUAL AND INCLUDE IT. If I type 'progname -h' give me something useful. Put something in the Help menu. No, I don't care what programs you compiled it with.
A Short List (Score:3, Insightful)
Being free, in cost or in development model, is of little interest to me when I chooise software. I want the best software I can afford, and I can afford more than no cost.
Here's a short list:
1. Lack of attention to interface and usability design. This is not "eye candy". Consider: People think Photoshop is easier to use than Gimp. What does that tell you? (Responses that trash Photoshop users illustrate the problem.)
2. I get the impression that, apart from the corporate funded biggies, many open source projects are staffed by one or two people. That's not confidence-insipiring when I'm looking for software to use for years in the future.
3. Rushed updates often made to conform to an established schedule. If an update needs more time, don't release it.
4. Lack of innovation. Software innovation is really, really hard and no one does it well. However, open source software, more or less by intent, produces many slightly varied iterations of the same code. I.e., forks.
5. Hostile attitude to customers: One of the touted benefits of open source software is access online to developers and other cognoscenti for tech support. Although I suspect it happens with less frequency these days, too many open source users are met with hostile "code it yourself" or "I'm not interested in that..." responses when they ask for help with a problem. Online support forums should not run bugtracking software.That's a developer-only tool.
OSS a red herring? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, in any product, people jump ship to 'something else'. They may jump from OSS to commercial, from commercial to commercial, from commercial to OSS, or OSS to OSS. The OSS aspect of it is a feature for some, but its the total featureset that gets compared. Sometimes, something is just better than something else. An anecdote about some hobbyists 30 minute hack behaving more poorly than a commercial product with man-years of polish behind it is about as useful as comparing some untalented developers get-rich-quick startup software hammered out in a rush for venture capital against a venerable project like Apache.
The Failure of General Categorization (Score:3, Insightful)
GCC (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source nearly sank my career.
I've been a staunch advocate of OS for quite some time now. I'm the guy who asks the awkward questions at the meeting, like, "Why are we paying 40 grand for a vendor toolchain when GCC is free?"
Well, I found out.
I've spent the last few weeks trying to build a cross compiler on Cygwin. Here's what I went through:
How to piss off your customers (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen some saying bits of what I want to say, and I don't have mod points so I'll just do a "me too":
These are my beefs. Feel free to add more.
I care about technology, not ideology (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a vocal minority of computer professionals and users who operate off of an ideological model rather than a pragmatic one. They see moral issues where most of us only see an engineering problem. Furthermore they define themselves based upon their attachment to their ideology.
For the rest of us this is silly at best and downright exasperating at worst. Try working with someone who demands that a sub-par solution be used on political grounds and who casts your reluctance to do so as a moral failing, if not evidence of participation in an evil conspiracy of some sort. I really do think that people like that are mentally ill.
I make technological choices on technological grounds. I choose the solution that works best. I don't cloud my judgement with emotionally driven ideologies.
I use (and contribute to) open source products because they usually offer the best value proposition. When they don't, I look elsewhere. It is not wrong to support a proprietary solution. It is not wrong to reward those whose efforts have made your life easier.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How does t