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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope
sebFlyte writes "In a recent speech at the ACCU conference in Oxford, software design guru James Coplein said that unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down. He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'"
There are a lot that are contributing that don't get enough credit.
To those people I say thank you.
Now back to work code monkeys!
What? My ears are ringing... can you repeat that?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Uh ... you mean proprietary software such as ....
Apple's iLife suite? Horseshit. How about Apple's suite of professional video apps? Garbage. Hmm, Adobe's suite is also junk (along with the rancid piles of dung they'll be inheriting from Macromedia). ProTools? AutoCad? How about all of those proprietary games? All of them stinking and rotting piles of excrement. I'm sure I could go on and on but there's no question that proprietary software is uniformly crap.
Now, by contrast, we can place our hopes on OSS, all of which is completely bug-free, extremely easy to install, and documented by poorly paid but well intentioned doctoral students in English. OSS is our savior and gace. God Bless OSS.
When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Yup, that's software quality alright. I mean, look at windows for workgroups 3.11, and compare it with crap like XP or 2000 - we've lost so much stability, and performance, these modern OSes are just rubbish compared with the old ones. Don't get me started on how bad OSX is!
Another bit of software that's been getting worse is Photoshop. I mean, have you ever tried using version 1? You can do _so much_ more than you can with the current version. They just keep removing features with each new release, and the software gets worse!
It's the same with databases. It used to be that everything used fixed length fields, and really restrictive character sets. That meant that people like Mr Rénauld-Smythe could rely on always being refered to as Mr Renauldsmyth by their gas company. Nowadays, that kind of attention to detail and users is completely absent.
And it's not just in ways like this that software quality is going down-hill. Customer services is going to the dogs! I remember when, if I wanted an update to my software, I could write a letter, then wait for a week to get some floppy disks with a patch on. Nowadays I have to connect to some huge wide area high speed network and download the patches myself! Just because the software companies want to save the cost of postage! Well I ask you.
In every way, from speed, features, stability and customer service, software is getting worse and worse. I was so glad when Open Source came along and changed it! No sooner had Microsoft scrapped the excellent Windows 3.1 environment, and replaced it with the dreadfull Win95 one, but Linux came along with - X11 and twm! I thought quality and useability like that was dead!
And that's not all. I remember when configuring a PC let you insert your own IRQ numbers and decide what drivers were loaded into what RAM segments - and then, DUH, Microsft figured they should do all that for us - as if we weren't clever enough to resolve hardware addressing issues ourselves! Imagine my delight when I found Linux. I spent _many_ happy hours manually configuring my drivers, I can tell you! That's the kind of quality I wanted.
From the simplicity and ease of LaTeX, to the high performance and slick modernity of X11, there's nothing that OSS hasn't done better than their so-called rivals. It's true that some things are getting worse - ReiserFS instead of Ext2? I don't think so! But the for most important things, like printer configuration, and having a fully skinable CD player applet with it's own LISP based configuration language - well, Open Source is way out in front.
P.S. I was disappointed to see that Opera is making such poor software - that's why I'm sticking to Netscape 2.1
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See, wasn't that easy? And if you don't like the command line, there's aptitude (ncurses) or synaptic (GTK).
- Kevin B. McCarty