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Abiword: Support Expectations
bockman
writes "Abiword developers have put up a
letter,
explaining what they expect from their user community and what the
community should (and should not) expect from a volunteer-based open
source software project like theirs. A much needed reality-check in
these times when a large number of non-developers have joined the
Linux users world." This is a must read for anyone who uses any
open source software.
If I were Microsoft, I'd link to this letter without comment. As a business user, I'd be sore pressed to consider anything but Commercial software after reading this.
Please oh please update the webpage and test rpm builds.
If a person were to want to get abiword and downloaded their redhat 7.1 rpm, they'd be instantly ranting on the mailing list as it does not work for any possible install of redhat 7.1.
In fact they need to remove all rpms except for the gtk version as that is the only rpm that actually works.
also, add a list of all libs that are needed in order to use the product.
I am glad they make abiword, but having rpm's or packages that dont work for anyone except the deveopler that made it causes most of the grief I see on the mailing list. 90% of all pissed users are users that cant get it to work because of the bad rpm's and packages.
hey, if you guys dont have time for keeping the website up-to date, I volunteer to do it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Part of the reason many professional groups are unwilling to use open-source programs is because they just don't know what they're getting. If I, as a business owner am told that the product will be supported by a group of volunteers, I may be willing to go spend $100 for a product that will be supported. But, *ahem*, many pay software companies expire out their old versions so you're stuck with the product at some point anyway.
This is document was very well laid out, and might help to increase the popularity of open source stuff. Sure most of us just know how it all works, but unless Joe Public does, he won't see any reason to consider OSS. Probably the best line of this notice would be "We believe, however, that it's only because most newcomers do not realize what to expect - hopefully this text will set that right." Amen to that. Even if I had never used OSS before, I might be willing to give it a shot after all this has been laid out.
The text also does a very nice job dispelling the common myth held by regular software users that OSS requires you to be actively involved in the programming to use it. A very welcoming sense of "everybody can join, if you can, please help out in one of several ways."
If nothing else, this type of text should cut down on the number of bitch-outs directed towards OSS due to false expectations.
don't go flaming the programmers, FIX IT! the source is all there ready to be tweaked. You got what you paid for, and that's nothing.. The good part is with a MINOR amount of tweaking, fiddling, etc. (compared to writing something like AmiWord yourself) you can have a FANTASTIC word processor for FREE! Behold the wonders of open-source.
Then you can post your fixed version and get flamed too..
joy
Still, it's also easy to see why users have expectations. After all, they've been told by journalists that Linux is Ready For The Desktop. They've read spewing by zealots about how fantastically superior Linux applications are and how there's limitless free, quick support available from The Community. They've read the stuff on the Red Hat or Mandrake box and spent money for it. They've invested time in installing Linux and in creating work on it. I can understand why they're annoyed to be told, "It's free and it's my spare-time hobby so deal with it."
I accept that dealing with a desktop Linux installation is a hobby in its own right and that you have to spend time to make it work and deal with some things that justa aren't there. But it's easy to see why a lot of users don't realize that.
Then there are the free software whackos who think that they're owed the world on a silver platter. But that's a whole other issue...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think the AbiWord people are in a bind trying to catch up with something as complex (you can read that as crappy) as Word. That's a tough task for such a small group, and it's a thankless task (as their letter indicates has been the case) because you end up with luser unhappiness.
On the other hand, OpenOffice seems to do a much better job with the Word documents (limited set, mind) that I've worked with. That's probably the result of the corporate heritage of Star/OpenOffice which meant that, for some time, serious resources were thrown at the problem, and someone dug in and did the crap work required.
In short - AbiWord is getting crap because they bit off more than they can true, on a product whose user base tends to be whiny. They certainly have my condolences.
In my experience, there is a significant number of users that expect open source software developers to provide free product support. Product support is something from the commerical world. You paid for the software, so you are entitled to get help making it work for you. But open source software does not work that way. The users are expected to make an effort to read the documentation, to try to solve their own problems, and whenever possible, provide patches to fix bugs. You are not paying for the software with your money, so you, as a user, are not entitled to free support, or even software that works right. But when the software is good, and you make an effort to read documentation and solve your own problems, you will be rewarded with the knowledge and experience to solve your own problems again in the future.
I can't say I got that from the letter, but it is nice to see developers standing up from themselves. Especially in this day of "Free Software can compete with Pay software" it's great seeing someone telling it like it is. My favourite sentement:
The problem here is expecting too much all the time. Many of the more visible free software projects have made huge leaps in the past, and to many users that then makes them expect that sort of delivery to be the norm. If you deliver the best most of the time, it's expected all of the time. And as a developer, I'm flattered that users belive in a product and like it so much that the want to be able use it better. But as much as we love code, we also love just relaxing after work sometimes. The Abiword dev's want the software to get as good as it can be, but they also need to have time to work at their day jobs, cut the grass and walk the dog.
Perhaps in the future people will start paying for "free" software. That day, my friends, will be a glorious day.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
These guys make a great product, and put it out for free (beer and speech). They work hard for no money, and this letter is right on the money. If I don't pay for something, I'm not gonna expect tech support, or changes on my schedule. No one else should, either. It's like someone cooking up a meal for you, and serving it for free, and you picking it apart. This ain't Burger King, baby. If you want to have it your way, you need to help out and be patient. Hurray for Abisource making sure that people know where they stand
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
....you get what you pay for.
Guess what, the general public doesn't want excuses. Corporate IT folks dont want excuses.
They just want to get their work done.
The general public simply does not care that a small group of developers spends an amazing amount of time developing Abiword.
They just want it to work, and they want to call someone when it breaks. They want some hope that someone will fix it or can tell them how to fix it, or more likely, how to do the same thing in a slightly different way.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
For some reason they have concerns about reliability. They'd rather pay $30K per CPU for BEA WebLogic then download JBoss for nothing, even if they only plan on supporting 100 users. I don't claim to understand it myself, but in corporate circles open source software has this stigma attached to it.
Oh, it gets better: on the home page itself: "AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth."
When you compare yourself to the leading commercial product, and then fail to be comparable to that product... well, what would be "absurd" is expecting the newbies to not be disgruntled!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I think what he's saying is that as AbiWord evolves (gains more features and more people start to know about/use it), its user base grows. A lot of the new users are people coming from a Windows9x/ME/NT/2k/etc system and are expecting to find everything like it was on Windows.
To put it bluntly, most Open Source projects have not invested anywhere near 1/10th as much time in Documentation and GUI design as their Closed Source counterparts. AbiWord may be gaining in features on MS Word, for instance, but you can also go out to the store and buy "How to use MSWord in 30 Seconds every 10 minutes for total Idiot!". (As well as MS Word's own on-line help, which does work... sort of).
Until Open Source catches up in terms of GUI Design (ie. making things look preaty to the sheeple) and deals with the "Documentation Divide" then Commercial products will usually (and I'll stress the usually since there are always some exceptions), have Open Source products beat in terms of functionality.
Open Source will catch up (take a look at the first linux installation routines vs. the current Mandrake or Redhat), but it will take a little bit of time.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
You're pretty much right.
...
OTOH, it would be appropriate to replace non-working rpm's with a tarball. And a list of dependancies would certainly be a real useful feature.
That said, I haven't checked. Perhaps they do have a tarball. Perhaps the comment about non-working rpm's was an overstatemtent. And maybe it works on most people's systems (though in that case one wouldn't expect it to cause a full mailing list).
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Life is full of trade-offs. If you want to use free software because of all its plusses - robustness, freedom to hack it, lack of money, whatever - you might have to put up with some pain like building from source. (Although it could be argued that with a complete set of development tools that every free operating system - all the Linux distributions, all the BSDs - comes with, building from source is no pain at all.)
Too often we forget that being in the free software world, whether as a user or a developer, involves a slightly different set of rules from the Micros**t world.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Sure. Much of the so-called "functionality" of modren commerical word processors is, for most users, nothing but bloat.
All most people need in a word processor s enough to write a letter to grandma, or a twenty-page report for school. And if you need more, you don't want a word processor, you want a document preparation system - LaTeX, Framemaker, DocBook, etcetera.
Of course, I'm an old (by /. standards) curmudgeon who fondly recalls writing high school papers in Turbo Pascal IDE's editor and printing them out with a "near letter quality" 24-pin dot-matrix printer on tractor-feed paper...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I wish more Open Source projects would do this.
I mean it is great that Open Source projects exist, and they really help out a lot of people but it is important that those who are benefited reciprocate.
It is really a tragedy of the commons.
With successful Open Source projects like Linux, you have TONS of companies which base billions of dollars of business on these products.
Yet at the same time the Engineers have NO way of making money just by writing code.
The only way they can pay the bills is by joining a larger company like IBM that can act as a patron so that they can continue their work.
There are many examples of this:
- Linus works for Transmeta
- Alan Cox works for RedHat
... etc
What we really need to see happen is the users directly supporting the developers of these products.
Instead of downloading AbiWord for free. Why not donate $2-$5 through PayPal.
This would provide the ability for a few developers to work FULL TIME on AbiWord (or whatever) without having to worry about corporate bias.
They would be directly working for the client instead of for an intermediary (like IBM or Transmeta).
Freenet is doing this
I just wish it would catch on...
Which commercial products? It certainly surpasses Notepad. Is that a commercial product? When I checked several months ago it didn't measure up to WordPad, but that was several months ago.
... that may not be what they are TRYING to do. (Small, quick, efficient, portable, ...)
And in their list of intended goals it is made quite clear that they don't intend to produce the successor to Word.
Whether it meets your needs depends on what your needs are (and whether or not you can get it up). If you read their list of goals, then you have something valid to compare it against. It you compare it against your hopes
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's not that you get what you pay for. That's a lie told us by those selling the more expensive products. It isn't (necessarily) true in general, and more often not in free software.
It's that if you -do- get what you pay for, you can't complain.
AbiWord is much more useful than it's cost, but some people take that to mean they can just then start making demands. And people also don't know how to ask for the support that _is_ readily available.
And seriously, who the hell are these people calling when their software breaks? I've never even heard of someone having Word break and then picking up the phone to dial Microsoft. And if they did and started being beligerent to the person on the line, how much help do you think they'd get?
Reading this memo as an excuse of any kind is just wrong, because you don't need an "excuse" to not be able to hand the world to people who are irrationaly demanding it of you.
The enemies of Democracy are
I use Abiword the way I used to use Wordpad in Windows. The feature set is somewhere between Wordpad and Word and it loads up about as fast as Wordpad did. It works well enough for viewing most docs and knocking out quick little letters and so forth. I have Star and OpenOffice laying around if I have to work with something a little more complex but I don't bother with them that much. There is room for a solid lightweight wordprocessor like Abiword.
How is it "doomed"? Is the mighty fist of corporate America going to come smashing down on them and say, "hahah! you're so far behind us! you can no longer make your hobby word processor!" at which the developers will turn their tails and leave? So what if StarOffice is further along; big deal. Not as many people use the product. Big deal. They're not generating revenue. A large user base, outside of debugging and commentry, is NOT an integral part of the development process.
when salmon are outlawed, only outlaws will have salmon
Perhaps the Open Source community needs to impliment some sort of support system to better sort out issues.
When you call tech support for most commercial products, you get a dingbat on the other end who knows little more than a person who has already read the manual. If this person has no clue about what your problem is, they can escalate your issue to someone more educated in the matter. Has there ever been an email based support system set up to handle something like this? I.E.- an email sent to support@yourproject.org posts a message to a password protected board subscribed to by x number of support volunteers who provide basic support. These volunteers could escalate said issue to a higher authority, yet another board subscribed to by people who have fielded x number of previous questions, or whatever method you would use to define an advanced support person, or answer the issue on thier own. The advanced board could have subsets, say a group who can deal with RPM issues or something. For example, I don't know dick about solving RPM problems, but if someone was having dependency issues or whatever on a RedHat system, I could forward it to the RedHat users board.
It seems to me that almost any answer regarding most problems with large scale Open Source software can be found if you know where to look. Therein lies the problem. Most newbies / regular users have no clue where to look. Is this whole idea a pipe dream?
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
Everything they say in the memo seems reasonable enough, but they could have focussed a bit more on how much support you can get from the user community if you ask nicely. In most cases, I've found that the "community" provides support comparable to, and sometimes superior to, the support that I get for commercial products.
When I first began installing and using open-source software, for the first time, I was shocked by the high quality of the support that I received from both developers and other users.
The first "real work" I ever did using Linux was replacing an old MS Exchange 5.0 server with QMail. (yes, I know about the debates about Qmail's license or lack thereof, but that's not the point here) Not really understanding what I was doing, I posted some (in retrospect) truly silly questions to some of the qmail mailing lists. I remember one particular email that abused me for being ignorant and asking a question in the wrong mailing list (I didn't realize it at the time, but it was more of a general Linux question than a qmail question), and then continued to very clearly and concisely explain my error and point me in the right direction. Compare that to a similar situation with a commercial vendor, where the response would likely have been something along the lines of "the problem you are describing is caused by some other piece of software and we cannot help you."
In truth, I don't find the support process to be that different for Microsoft and Linux. If I have a problem with a Microsoft product, I search the Microsoft knowledge base, do a google search (including Usenet), and maybe post a question to the appropriate newsgroup. If I have a problem with a Linux or open source program, I search the LDP, do a google search (including Usenet) and maybe post a question to the appropriate newsgroup. The process is almost identical, and the results are pretty darn similar. If I want more hands on support, I have to pay a vendor (MS, Redhat, VA, etc.)
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I will start out by saying that I do not use Abi Word, nor do I plan on using it anytime soon. Being a developer myself, I actually agree with the Abi development team, but by hyping up the project, users get the wrong idea.
The first thing that caught my eye when I went to the site was the phrase "Word processing for everyone". With a catch-phrase like that, you had better be able to deliver on your promise. "Everyone" includes those rushed business execs who are too busy to become computer literate and need support *now*.
Maybe Abi should either drop the slogan, or deliver on it, before they give too many people the worng idea.
To each their own. At work, we run several key services on Linux boxes, due in part to the lack of security we've experienced in MS products in the past. However, our IT guys seem to have far more problems with keeping the Linux boxes up and running on a day to day basis. In terms of time spent supporting a product -- which is far more of the cost than the initial purchase -- Linux is lagging waaaaay behind Windows-based systems at our place. We use it for the security, not the cost.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Huh?
Ok, I'm the author/maintainer of wvWare - another MSWord parsing thing (www.wvware.com) and lead developer/maintainer of AbiWord. What are you talking about?
AbiWord isn't trying to build a word processor around any particular format. We have an extremely generic import/export mechanism that I co-authored, so that input and output can be trivially done to/from any format. We actually support more unique formats on the market than most common commercial word processors...
But import/export is a very boring and uniteresting part of a Word Processor. All of the interesting stuff goes on down in our formatting and rendering classes. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand. If you are indeed serious about this, come help out Werner and myself on wv or wv2 instead of re-duplicating our efforts.
Please mod this troll down.
Dom Lachowicz
cinamod@hotmail.com
AbiWord and wvWare Maintainer/Lead Developer
> Which commercial products? It certainly surpasses Notepad.
It's not in competition with Notepad. Notepad is a text editor, like vim, not a wordprocessor.
> When I checked several months ago it didn't measure up to WordPad, but that was several months ago.
But I don't know anyone who uses WordPad as a wordprocessor. Everyone I know uses Works or Word or Wordperfect. The only time I've ever heard of any using WordPad was to test Windows 2000's Unicode systems, not to actually write something. In other words, it doesn't measure up to a program that was so inferior to the competition that no one uses it even though it comes with Windows.
The problem, I believe is not only the fact that that documentation that you read wrong at many subtle points, but also that there *is* no possible "correct" documentation. Word files from version to version are not 100% forward compatable, little bugs in the Word code propagate oddities, and some things are "it does it this was on days it feels like it, and this way otherwise". Microsoft works with internal competition, and two teams with divergent code bases will get merged, and the pros and cons show in Word. Read some of the (surprisingly candid) Word for Macintosh team essays, and you'll realize that they can't even get it 100% right - and they have *full* access to all code and documentation, as well as the people who wrote it!
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
A lot of people don't have a clue what goes into a commercial software project. For example, Red Hat has only about 600 people. That is spread out through management, sales, marketing and support, as well as development. Now, Red Hat developers may be more productive than volunteers, since they are able to work on projects full time, but the vast majority of the work that goes into a new release of Red Hat Linux is in software written by the community.
.com era. They are not missed, either by OSS or Free software developers, or by profitable companies.
Microsoft's practices are harder to determine for an outsider, but they don't put in the huge amount of effort that the Abiword people think. For example, the Internet Explorer team is much smaller than the number of people working on Mozilla (in fact, it is smaller than the team working on Mozilla/ Netscape full time). The MS Word team is probably larger than the Abiword team, and support comes from a different group of people. However, if you email them and say, "Get this feature by tomorrow or I'm switching to something else!" they will have the exact same response as Abiword.
The days of 200 people working on a shell script to change directories using a web page went away with the end of the
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
at 3 AM at Perkins or Dennys... I'd be rich.
This is THE major problem with Open Source software. Since you can't make money with it, you can't commit yourself to it full time. Therefore you get a whole bunch of people who sorta work on it rather than a real programming team.
What does this get you? Products like Abiword that, while nice, admit publically that they can't compete.
What you linux kids need is a micropayment system or SOME kind of way to support your "Forget capitalism, I must give away the product of hours and hour of my work" attitude. If you could make $40K/year while working on your open project, you could do it full time! THEN we'd see some nice word processors, web browsers, etc. for Linux and *BSD. Please don't moderate this down to troll or flaimbait as it raises very real points.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
You'd think,
- give away the software (abiword)
- then make money by running a support center (bugs / hand holding)
well, we have seen all the 'services' companies with LInux go down the drain. why? b/c people who use Linux are already clueful. They know if something doesn't work
- fix it themsleves (this hardly happens)
- wait for the next release / rpm (this is where 90 % of the people are)
I don't think any one is converted to Linux just becaseu they saw a shiny 19.95 box on Best Buys.
There are however successfull LInux desktop deplyoment stories within Slashdot. Just do a search.
SO how do you make an IT dept adopt Linux? have an IT manager who is clueful. It is like when you choose an ISP, should you go for AOL or some niche isp who would let you run your own sendmail. We are talking about the AOL crowd here. Sure it is easy choice. But you grow out of it soon.
how do you make money off by offering value-add services to freesoftware? I haven't figured that out yet. If I did, I wouldn't be writing this from my office computer!
LinuxLover
> Sure. Much of the so-called "functionality" of modren commerical word processors is, for most users, nothing but bloat.
Like what? The equation editor - I know engineering students who find that very useful for school work. Full Unicode functionality - aka support for 1/5 of the world's population's native languages? Multilingual spellchecking? What?
>And if you need more, you don't want a word processor, you want a document preparation system
Most people want a simple, WYSWIG, omnipurpose tool, so that's what they use, regardless of what computer geeks think is right.
Theory is that you have some doc (hint, now you have to signe an agreement with Microsoft to get the actual doc for latest versions like XP, otherwise you get nothing). This doc is here, is big and is hard to understand.
Practice is that given that doc, you try to implement something. Fine the doc looks usable and complete. You code you parser, then when time comes, you test it. You start fidding your parser with sample files and start to find that it does not work: the doc is just plain WRONG (in fact you already discovered inconsistency while throwing up the implementation).
So please, before predending that this is just a park ball, just do it. And if you really want to work on such beast, either give a hand to Werner or to us (we are joining our effort on the problem).
And my recent experience in this area is just mainaining and improving AbiWord RTF importer. RTF is documented in a spec written by.... Microsoft.
Hub
All y'all who are complaining that this means they're not commercial-grade, etc.: You're right! But it doesn't matter! These guys don't care about that, and they don't need to, because they're spending their own time on it. Use it if you like, don't if you don't, life goes on either way.
sulli
RTFJ.
I wonder if a fellow could pay the rent with an IRC support channel and a paypal account. I should look into that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think I just heard KidSock volunteer to write the MSWord 97 import/export module for you.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far
Linux doesn't want anything -- it's an operating system, silly! Do you mean "if the programmers who write software for linux want it to be on desktops..."? Guess what: that's a diverse group including companies like Redhat, who undoubtably wants linux to be on a lot of desktops, and the people from Abiword, who just get their rocks off by writing neat software.
The authors of Abiword aren't responsible to "Linux," or Redhat, or RMS, or anyone else to maximize the user's desktop computing experience. If IT managers and John Q. Public don't want to use it, then fine. No skin of Abiword's back. They aren't after market-share.
That's the beauty of it. Nobody needs to tow the linux company line. If the author's of Abiword, first and foremost, wanted to make sure that their software was fit for all users and for corporate deployment, then they wouldn't have written their memo, and would quit their jobs and work on Abiword full-time, hire support personnel, etc., etc.,.
I don't think you should generalize about what the goals of linux programmers are.
/bluesninja
I've been working as a typist/word processor/document analyst for years now, and I HATE WORD! Word Perfect in its latest incarnation is nothing more than a Word clone, so it's not an option. I wanted to use only true open-source software, not proprietary like StarOffice, and I didn't need a whole suite. So I chose AbiWord. I'm a Linux newbie, and I was able to install AbiWord from the binaries (on Red Hat 6.0). The simplicity of the software is a refreshing change from all the packaged crap that wants to try to do everything for you (which is why I switched to Linux in the first place -- I've been working in Windows wayyyyy too long)! After reading the AbiSource letter, I signed up for both the developer and user mailing lists. If there are bugs in AbiWord (I haven't found any yet, BTW), I want to help fix 'em, not just whine about 'em -- maybe my years of being an end-user will finally amount to something!
There may not be prebuilt binaries for your platform. There aren't prebuilt binaries of commercial software for most platforms. AbiWord is probably ahead of MicroSoft here, and there's a chance that you can build binaries yourself if you need to, unlike with commercial software.
Complaining about bugs and missing features to places other than the proper channels will get you nowhere, and being rude about it won't help either. This is certainly true of all OSS. It's not true of MicroSoft, reportedly, but that's just because MicroSoft's proper channels are ignored by their programmers.
Getting support from programmers is difficult, in general, because they're busy programming. MicroSoft won't even let you talk to them. You can't demand a feature or to have a bug fixed from the makers of any software: what you want may be too difficult, or there may be more important things on the list.
The reduced functionality is what you'd have to expect from a newer program from a smaller group. It doesn't really matter whether the motivation is financial or not, a small number of people will write a program with fewer features than MS will. Hopefully the features that AbiWord has are the ones you want, and the features that are missing are ones that would just get in your way.
The letter is particular to AbiWord, but it applies in most of the parts to everyone, including MicroSoft.
How to Use <low qaulity M$ product that costs a lot of money> in <a smaller amount of time than the smallest amount of time on a book currently published> for $lt;redundant word or phrase desribing a M$ software user>
<grin>
I have an IQ of 6,000 that's the same IQ as 3,000 Windows users.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This rant is totally reasonable. My question is--who can I pay for supporting Abiword? Let's say I'm a business, and want a Free word processor, and Abiword fits the bill perfectly. But, I know that my secretaries will need some questions answered. And occasionally, I might need a feature implemented (e.g., I'll need some document conversion done for my old dos-based word processor WinWord) Let's say I'm willing to pay for this. Who will take my money, and enter into this contract? Dom? Ximian? Who?
- Linux kernel version 2.4.mumble has problems and people ask "how can this be releasable". It's not stable!
- gcc 3.0 is unstable for the first few releases and folks start whining about how this isn't a production-quality compiler
- AbiWord says that they're not providing commercial-grade support services and everyone gets honked off and claims that open source software can't work
Can you all just take a step back, breathe deeply and remind yourselves that in any software organization with more than 10 developers there are two versions of the software (at least):- The development snapshot (or mainline, depending one your local terminology). This is a stable release from the developers to inernal customers such as Q/A, release engineering and perhaps alpha testers for integration testing and embeded product testing.
- The release. This is the ready-for-prime-time code that will be supported and maintained by the company.
Are you seeing the parallel here? When Linus releases kernel 2.4.57, he's releaseing a snapshot that lets Q/A (made up of Q/A groups in numerous companies that sell Linux-based products) release engineering (the distribution vendors) and alpha integration testers (embedded systems customers) begin their test and release cycle. Same for AbiWord. Ximian, Red Hat and many others release AbiWord, but I doubt that they ever release it absolutely as shipped. Their Q/A process only begins when AbiSource creates a new version.So, here's the question of the day: why are people shocked when the developers start acting like developers and say "we're not going to hand-hold you"? Well, there's a few reasons. Obviously there are the folks who just wait for an opportunity to slam OSS. Then there are the people who have become confused and don't realize that the Mozilla developers or the AbiWord developers are just that: developers. Then there are the folks who get their priorities confused. They say that they don't want to deal with "big business software", so they go it alone. This is all well and good, but when you do this, you have to expect the other shoe to drop.
If you're downloading gcc 3.0 the day it comes out because you want the new features fast, great! But, don't be shocked when your code fails to work correctly because you have a hardware combination that was not well tested. If you'd waited for Red Hat 7.2, you would have found the optional gcc 3.0.x binaries with a big old wad of patches. Why? Because they tested it, patched it, and released it.
Get over it. Software support is hard, and there are people in the OSS world that do it well. But, to expect every project to come out the gate with good Q/A and support is just silly.
Really, is a $40,000 Mercedes all that much better than a $16,000 VW? It used to be that the more expensive cars had more advanced features like fuel-injection and ABS; but those are standard on almost all cars now.
Yet I know people who wouldn't even consider buying the cheaper car, even if they have to go into debt for the more expensive brand.
Word is complex, but I've looked at the Microsoft Word 97 Binary File Format [redbrick.dcu.ie] spec (and spent a good week starting to write my own parser) and I don't see the big deal
:)
I'll admit that I haven't seen or worked with the spec, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But from what I've read aout it... yes, the spec isn't too complex, but there's a lot of little gray areas in it and the actual implementation of the spec in Word itself is quirky, making it a bitch to emulate exactly.
In other words, supporting the Word spec isn't too hard, but getting a complex Word doc to render the same way in your app as it does in Word is hard.
Could someone qualified comment on this please?
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You see, companies that use software aren't truly interested in the quality of the support they get. Rather, what they're really interested in is the appearance of support. That is, all they really care about is that they know that there is someone they theoretically could call for help if they need it.
This is SO insightful (hint hint, moderators). Why don't people understand this? When people diss OSS because of support issues, I ask them to recall for me the last time they got good support (particularly good, FREE support) from a commercial closed-source software vendor. Their answer is usually "never".
You can get good support for commercial products, but you usually need to pay through the nose for it.
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At some point in my life as a network administrator, I had to realize that questions from my users were not going to get any smarter. Joe Six Pack is never going to learn how to fix and compile his own software. Never. He will only be able to a) use it or b) complain about it when it doesn't work.
My heart really goes out to the AbiWord team, and I find myself wondering about a bigger question. Can Open Source software really become mainstream (as in Microsoft/Apple-style mainstream) without help from a for-profit organization to support it? There are tons of new BSD (Mac OS X) users signing up everyday, but it is because Apple is selling it, not because it's great and Free.
I am not flaming here. I know, however, that as more people download and use AbiWord (or any other OSS), these problems with too-high-expectations are going to get worse, not better. With or without an open letter.
There were three bugs which were annoying me in 0.9.4, and all but one of them was fixed on 0.9.5. The one they didn't fix I was able to fix myself--an option that I would not have had if AbiWord was a proprietary product.
The source code to AbiWord is clean and readily readable, the user interface to AbiWord is very professional-looking, and it is perfect for my Spanish-language compositions.
Speaking of which, I really should get off Slashdot and start working on tonight's paper.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
engineering students make up "most users"? Methinks not.
Engineers and engineering students make up some users. Home users are another group of users. Linguists and anthropologists and historians are another group. Buisness executives are another group. And each group has their own demands on what they want.
For math-heavy texts, one would probably better off with a tool devoted to such things
Sure, if your life is writing articles to the Journal of the AMS, use LyX. But if you want to write up some physics notes one day, type a paper for the Ancient World the next, and write a letter home, it's a lot more convientent to have one tool to learn that does all of them okay, then to learn three.
Even programmers show this habit. Why do you think most programming on Linux is done in Perl and C? Because they're present on most systems, and you already know them.
people want a tool that lets them do the things they need to do in a simple manner
And what do they need to do? There are users for each of the features in Word. Anything you consider superflous in Word, would leave some people calling Microsoft rude things if it disappeared in the next version.
I'm sure that mediveal Korean support would be considered bloat, but, as I understand it, Word is the only wordprocessor that will handle mediveal Korean characters - it's the only tool that lets Korean historians do the things they need to do in a simple manner. Should Microsoft just blow off that market? How would that help them in other markets?
complexity and price are stronger negatives than lack of features that they never use
Complexity, as in making it hard to use and learn, is a strong negative. I've never heard an end user complaint about extra features, and as for me, I like using systems that I'm comfortable can support my needs - that I probably won't be in urgent need to do something that it can't support.
I'm not sure where price comes in here. For many users, both Word and Abiword are free, legal or not. Price hasn't stopped Word yet.
Of course if you have to be able to fix the source to get stuff to work (even if it's only a minor fix), then you can't argue with the people who claim "Linux isn't ready for the desktop - you need to be a programmer to use it." You can't have it both ways.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand.
I'm curious about this part, because I often see contradictory claims. MS and the previous poster claim that the 1997 Word spec is completely open and published. Does the difficulty lie in merely interpreting this spec (i.e. it's all there, but hard to implement), or does it lie in undocumented stuff that has to be reverse-engineered? Or is the 97 spec not the problem at all, and catching up to the Word 2000 file format is the major problem?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Who in their right mind would use a word processor for equations?
The person who wanted to get something done. Come on, I've used Word about as often as I've used TeX. If I want to write something in Word, I open up Word and start working. If I want to write something in TeX, I run to the library for a book on TeX, or load up the Gentle Introduction to TeX. Why should someone who needs to stick one or two equations into a text, not more than two or three times a year, have to dig through a book every time they want to add an equation to something?
Yes, if you're doing serious equation work, some form of TeX is the tool. That doesn't make it any easier for the person who isn't doing serious equation work.
Just curious here... A long time ago, the Abiword project refused to become the official (i.e. to the exclusion of "all others") word processor for GNOME. To this day, you can get GNOME and non-GNOME versions of Abiword.
Why is this assigned to the GNOME topic?
How can you seriously expect someone to help you, while you are asking other people to mod him/her down?
He doesn't seriously expect help from KidSock. KidSock clearly didn't study the design for Abiword; he clearly didn't know what he was talking about; yet he felt qualified to say what the AbiWord developers should and should not be doing. Guess what, they are already doing those things, and didn't need KidSock to tell them to do it.
Don't letyour ego get in the way of your goals, and you'll accomplish much more, and will be more respected.
They have already accomplished so much with AbiWord. They already have my respect.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I think that the underlying point is that it's difficult for them to keep up with high expectations when they are such a small group of developers. It seems to me that this is an example of a project that is, unfortunately, not benefitting from the strengths of open source development.
Ideally, when you have a project whose source is open, all users are free to contribute. The entire user body joins in the development effort and the project almost evolves by itself. That's how I understand the "bazaar" model of development.
OTOH, from the sound of this letter, AbiWord is not getting the benefit from a large user base. They still only have a small group of their users who contribute to the code or even report bugs through the proper channels. It sounds like they have fallen into the "cathedral" model, even as they are trying to be a bazaar.
So what's an open source project to do? I think they are on the right track. They need to mobilize their user base to report bugs and encourage more developers to contribute. Again, I don't mean this as criticism at all, but as encouragement. Open source is strong because everybody helps.
The staff of these purchasing departments must be populated by illiterates then. The EULA of every single software package I've ever seen disclaims all responsibility for fitness of purpose. Apparently, it must have some legal force because I've also never heard of Microsoft or any other major software house being held accountable for bugs.
On the other hand, one CAN hold a company accountable for not fulfilling the terms of a service contract. The purchase price of the software is irrelavent compared to the cost of that all important service contract. But guess what?! Most software houses aren't in the business of selling service contracts; they sell licences. It is the VARs and retailers that sell service and some of THEM will even support open/free source.
These idiot beancounters need to realize they should be paying for service not software. The software is just bits on a disk, a eula, and a Certificate of Authenticity. The service is what truly costs something regardless of whether the solution is proprietary or open source.
If the beancounters don't want to in-source support then they can buy it. Sheesh! but can beancounters be really dumb!
I think one problem with the open source philosophy is that is opens the door for companies like openosx. The people at openosx simply repackage unix apps to run on osx. however, they seem to make no mention of who wrote the software. for example if you look at this page they make no mention that they didnt write any of the software. Then they decide to charge $30 for their repackaging, and give nothing back to the community.
you can make the argument that the various linux distros do the same, but any of the good ones always give back to the community.
I feel that this practice will become even more of a problem in the future when a lot of the major open source apps come to maturity.
What should have happenned is that the distro shouldn't have been sent out with a broken RPM.
But given that it was, what Abiword should have done was put a big bold link on their web page saying that "Red Hat 7.1 shipped with a completely broken RPM. Click here to fix it." That link would take you to a page with two instructions.
1) download _this_ ( with a link )
2) rpm -i
Instead users poke around wonderring what the problem is and how to fix it. The version of Abiword online is much more recent but it talks about all these depends and stuff and so people aren't sure if it will work for Red Hat 7.1 or if they will have to mess around to fix it. Users don't want to screw around with that and so they just decide to save often and hope that it doesn't crash.
Also, it could be that Red Hat packaged that software themselves, I don't know.
And Red Hat's bug tracking site is not as easy to navigate as debian's.
And Red Hat doesn't do enough to educate users about how to update their packages automatically. With Debian it is the first thing that users learn how to do.
I respect Red Hat a lot. They hire many great programmers. They have done a lot for the Linux community. But they really need to work on user interface issues better.
Thanks for poisoning the well...
Hmm...I am beginning to wonder if there is anyway of declaring fundamental problems and not trolling. Its just like declaring the fundamental problems of politics, capitalism, and anything else I can think of. Fundamental problems simply do not exist in reasonable arguments.
Okay, Moderators? If by now you can't tell this is a troll then you really shouldn't be moderating. Given that this post is rated +4, there needs to be a reworking on who gets moderator privilidges...
Okay...I'm done with this article. Its just not worth it.
Because, what happens? You have an installed version of the system, but you would like fearture this-and-that. You go to (e.g.) IRC, to find out if you're the only one having this bug or feature request. Together with other IRC enthousiasts, you formulate quite an exact description of the problem. Next thing, you're reffered to the bug system.
You read the instructions on the bug system. Says: always get the very latest version before filing a complaint. Makes you use CVS and stuff instead of this simple Debian package you used earlier.
Now try to imagine that you, as a normal user, didn't give up at this point. Amazing, but OK. You checked out CVS, built the darn thing [got root access] and installed it. Bug still there, but sy least you're now free to file it.
Next, enter Bugzilla. To everyone who has ever seen Bugzilla I bet it's needless to say more. To those who haven't: it's like the cockpit of a plain. And I can't fly. Actually, AFAIK, I never got to filing a Bugzilla bugreport.
The core of this problem is, that for the sake of smooth functioning, the user has become part of the development system. And not just that, but it has become part of this in quite a high level, at least for some. Lots of people give up filing bugreports when they're confronted with all the protocol. It's like filling in your tax forms is easier. Often their bug might already been filed, but its hard to find it back, exactly.
Now of course this isn't a problem in itself. It gets problematic when:
Question is of course: where is the solution? I've found that many bug databases do function as a healthy discussion board. BugZilla does. But for many people it still feels like your bug is bound to get lost somewhere within the bureaucracy.
Some say they don't want to make bugfiling more attractive, because this keeps the quality of the bugs that do come through, high. This way, the AbiWord problem remains, of course.
I don't know. Maybe some kewl combination of a discussion board and bug system, where you can e.g. just discuss everything, and when you've found you've reached an important topic, you can mark it as a bugreport or feature request, and from there do the same things as in other BTSes (e.g. merge it with another report, etc.)
I think most current BTSes are modeled after the idea of maintaining bugs within a company, the closed source way. Being open, there might be need for another approach. I might be wrong, though.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
... simply wouldn't sell enough to pay for the administrative overhead. None of the cheaer alternatives to MS Word is doing well on the market, even before StarOffice was bought by Sun and made available gratis.
The only price that can compete with a market leader for office applications is $0, or a clearly superior product.
I guess I'll let myself be trolled...
:-) then you're shooting yourself in the foot.
My credentials: I'm a software engineer writing code for car engine controllers, and before that I wrote code for power station control systems, and before that I was at uni with a final-year project writing a 2-D CAD package using Xt. So I'm not completely clueless. If I so chose, I could spend all my free time over the next few months learning how to put this stuff together from step 1.
Thing is, I don't so choose. My PC is a tool, in the same way as my soldering iron is. If I have the choice of spending every evening for the next 6 months learning how to do a kernel recompile, or spending the money and having time free to spend with my wife, I'll choose the MS option every time. Sorry, but I've got a life to live, and spending the time learning stuff that's ultimately irrelevant to my actual interests is less important to me than getting on with my other interests (for the record, my current spare-time project is an open-source, open-hardware universal chip programmer).
To take an example, is your car a kit car? If you buy a kit car from a manufacturer, you've got a box of bits which with the application of maybe 6 months work, you can turn into a serious performance sportscar that's incredibly reliable, and all for half the price of the real thing. If you're really dedicated, you can even buy yourself just a load of sheet metal and tubing and build it completely from scratch! But most ppl don't - they buy a Ford or a Honda or something like that. They're not paying for a better car, they're paying for a car which they can drive off the forecourt and will take them where they want to go. It depends whether your car is a way of life, and you're prepared to spend every waking hour underneath it getting your hands dirty, or whether it's just transport. Some production cars are a more pleasant means of transport, but it's still just a way of getting from A to B.
And that's how software is for most ppl - it's a tool to do a job. If the tool claims to do the job but doesn't (or if the tool is welded into the box!
Grab.
I've been using abiword to write letters, and I don't have the latest version (what ever debian package is current for potato...). Anyway it does have some flaws but it gets the job done. It still can't compete with word for real fancy jobs (but word drives me NUTS when it comes to paragraph formating! Give me WP's reveal codes, PLEASE!!!)
I've also used WP on both windows and Linux. The Linux version is a little buggy, but at least it exchanges files with the windows version in both directions.
For the causual user Abi Word is more than usable right now. For the enterprise, Star Office might be a better choice. I like Abi Word's method of coding future features, they give the source file and line where to go to add the feature that is not yet there! (I bet they have received quite a few patches for new features!).
If more people would READ the text of the GPL license maybe they would stop flamming products like Abi Word. "This software is released in the hope that it may be usefull" or something like that. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Thank you Abi Word, keep up the good work.
GNU/Linux is not a [commercial] competitor of Microsoft. Mandrake, Caldera, Red-Hat are. They sell packaged open-source software for money, so they shall be worried not to release shitty packages, if they want to keep their customers.
GNU/Linux is a _technical_ competitor of Windows ...but this is another story.
Ciao
----
FB
Free Software/Open Source Software is not a homogenous group of developers. Even calling it a community is wrong... it's both more and less than a community*.
Different software developers have different goals as members of the FS/OSS community. (Of course, they have different goals in other contexts, also.) This means that to expect everyone to do things for the same reason is to be disappointed. Some are, indeed, out to destroy capitalism. Others are trying to grow a consulting business (the essence of capitalism). Others are after fame. Others are doing term projects. Others... well, I don't know all of the reasons. I don't even remember all of the ones that I've encountered.
To assert that FS/OSS programmers are doing something for some particular reason is to guarantee that is both wrong and right. Some of them are doing it for that reason. (And I say this without even knowing what reason you are proposing. [OK, so it's a bit of an exaggeration.])
* It's less than a community because it doesn't deal with the full range of human activity. E.g., thought members of the community may die, none of them are born (that happens in high school or college, and is hidden -- they are born elsewhere, and then migrate into the community).
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It sounds like you've never called the help line. Most people who answer them are ... sometimes I wonder if they have ever used the product that they are advising on. About a decade ago I decided that paying for commercial support was a waste of money. The companies were treating it as a profit center rather than a user resource.
And talk about not thinking your time was worth anything! I've spent hours on hold and gotten essentially zero in return. Well, this was toward the end of the time, after everyone started outsourcing their help desks. In the earlier period there would sometimes be someone at the other end who knew what he was talking about.
I admit that I don't find e-mail lists to be spectacularly helpful either, but at least I don't feel ripped off. It doesn't cost anything to ask for help, sometimes you get it, if you don't, it might get to the attention of the developer, and one doesn't need to spend hours on hold. Commercial support tends to lack all of those virtues.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's how I felt last year, but now...
... as long as I can co-exist with the rest of the office. That's the hang up. I hope to do cross-platform development using wxWindows (but again, I'll need to check this out more on the Linux end). But until I can log onto the LAN, there's no use. Afterwards, I just need compatible applications. So I'm looking into programs that run on both platforms. And Open Office is starting to look pretty good.
Have you looked at this month's version of Open Office? On windows I'm starting to consider migrating to it from MS Office. I will need to try it on Linux first, though. If I were on Win98, NT, etc. I'd probably consider KWord, but I can't get that to run on my Win95 box. What I find really missing is a good Netware connection, but Netware 6 is supposed to fix that. At that point I may just switch away from Windows
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You can get good support for commercial products, but you usually need to pay through the nose for it.
Are you sure of that? From hardware vendors, yes, but I haven't heard ANY good reports from people about software support. And that includes people who paid for it. (OTOH, smaller vendors do tend to provide better support, so perhaps...)
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Are you sure of that?
Even Microsoft offers pretty good support plans if you pay for it. I've opened a few Microsoft developer support incidents in the past couple of years, and yeah, it takes a phone call or two before you get escalated to an actual engineer, but once you do, the support is nice. They'll actually look at your code and send YOU code, and the incident stays open until it's resolved or you get your money back. '
Now, I don't know how expensive this is, because my company was paying for it (probably expensive, yet cheap compared to the cost of a team of our developers spinning their wheels while stuck on a problem for a week). As much as I like to bash Microsoft, I was pretty satisfied after the incident.
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