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Converting Users to Open Source- Why Do You Care?
mack knife asks: "Here's a question for Slashdot readers: Why do you care what web browser/email client/etc people use? What do you care if Firefox catches on or not? Why do some people feel the need to convert others to their pet applications? Personally, I am a convert to Firefox/Thunderbird, but I understand that many users are happy with their Microsoft products; I'll mention what I use and why, but I won't harangue them on their apps' shortcomings, nor will I try to push an unfamiliar open source app on someone who is more comfortable with a 'mainstream' product. Some open-source proponents can be quite obnoxious about this, and I'm interested to hear why it is taken so seriously."
Why do we care? We care because what software other people use does indeed affect all of us. Not only do many of us work in the IT field and have to deal with all this poorly written software but it often makes things harder on everyone even if you don't have to deal with it directly. Take Internet Explorer for example... Thanks to things like broken CSS support web developers are forced to go to great trouble in order to create websites that display properly across different browsers and platforms. And what about the Word document format? Wouldn't it be nice if you weren't forced to use MS Office just to read the text file your coworker just sent you? You see... It's all about interoperability. All this technology is supposed to help us communicate, not lock us into one product or another.
In short: It isn't so much that we really care what software you use, it's that we care about your software playing nice with our software. If everyone in the world used software that supported truly open standards then we would all be more free to choose what software we want for ourselves.
The more people we convert, the more support for our projects and the better they will become sooner.
Exactly... we are the 'marketing team' of OpenSource. While Microsoft spends billions of dollars on advertising, OSS gets billions of people like us to spread it by web sites, forums, and word-of-mouth. When you're working for free, it's difficult to come up with the cash for a Super Bowl spot. Thus, OSS is reliant on its users to be its marketers and advertisers.
I do some free software development, and to be honest, I don't care much.
Having 10,000 or 10 'ordinary' users makes very little difference to my projects, if those users are not contributing code or at least bug reports. On the contrary, they might beg for support or make nagging requests for features.
Now I do try to give support to an extent (just being a nice person), but hey, I can't teach the whole world the basics of computers, can I?
There's nothing wrong with someone asking for a feature either, but if you get 200 emails asking for a feature, you're just annoying me and wasting time I could've spent implementing it.
So there are upsides and downsides to popularity.
Apart from that; I expect people to use whatever is the best tool for the job. It might be free software, but it might not be either. I'm not on any personal crusade to save the world or crush Microsoft.
But hey, that's just me.
I don't necessarily agree with all those reasons, but I definitely push Firefox and Thunderbird. I care because I'm the one my family/friends call when an Internet Explorer security hole destroys their PC, or when spyware grinds the thing to a halt.
Not to mention that openoffice and wordperfect and abiword can open word docs......
.doc format. It really is a bad situation.
With a little luck, yes... Things have been improving in this area lately but I might point out that often times even Microsoft can't properly support all their different versions of the
It really depends on the scenario. My default position is that I don't really care. Exceptions to that include:
Epidemic control - I want people to use more secure software on network connected machines for the same reason that I support mass immunization programs. Such steps reduce the number of vectors and, therefore, the rate at which harmful data can spread.
Support - I'm a geek, and my friends know it. they call me for help. I urge them to use free software (or Macs) to cut down on the number of support calls I get. (Or at least to make the support calls a bit more interesting.)
Politics of Open Societies - I want all information produced by my tax dollars to be made publically available. (I'm willing to accept some reasonalble limits on militarily and diplomatically sensitive data, but eventually everything should come into the public domain... even if it's 100 years later.) When it does, that data should be in formats that are not proprietary.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
For example, shockwave. Active X. Microsoft's Outlook used to default to a RTF attachment standard which Netscape couldn't read.
MS Access files are useless. As are Photoshop files. Quicktime & Windows Media videos are often not usable.
People need to design their documents and content in a way that they can be used on any computer.
The largest reason I push open source applications like Mozilla, Samba and Apache in my group (B2B and B2B sales for a major toy company) is that they perform better than the Microsoft equivalents, they're less costly to deploy and they result in fewer support requests sent to myself.
I can't count the number of times I've had people claim that Internet Explorer is reporting a server error. IE reports all problems as "server errors", not just upon receiving a HTTP response code of 500. As a result, I have to stop what I'm doing and look into the issue which is usually due to a timed out request or a DNS lookup failur, not a problem with the HTTP server.
"...Keep it Simple, Keep Listening to customers..."
As a customer, I keep telling Microsoft they have gone too far with thier EULA (arguably the worst in the industry). But they don't listen. In fact, it just keep getting worse and more control-freak city.
I have worked tech support for a few years now while I attend school. Having been on the wrong side of too many "My computer crashed and what do you mean you can't fix it sight unseen over the phone for free?" conversations, I can easily answer why some people are adamant about switching.
Simply because we are tired of hearing about all the problems people have out of something. We have suggested to our customers for a long time that they switch to various applications. Why do we suggest Firefox? Because people who use Firefox don't call every week when it is jampacked full of spyware to the point where they can't get anyway. We only get those calls from IE uses. Why do we suggest Mac or Linux? Because those users don't call every week with another computer crash. Why do we suggest any switch? Because the switch will make our problems less.
You may be happy with what you have, and in that case carry on. But for those who call every day with some sort of problem, please switch.
Without being overly argumentative, your basic premise is that with OSS *you* can provide better service.
...
I think you missed the point of the article. The author asks why do you care? In your car comparision you are in business of computer technology, if someone brings in a car to your repair shop are you going to turn away work? Of course not.
I think the real question the author was asking is "Why should you care when the business doesn't?". The answer, quite reasonably, is that you shouldn't.
Just my opinion
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
However, it does not further the species if I live in my parents' basement. I've found getting paid to write software is a nice way to make a living.
It's not an either/or proposition. It's possible to write software for profit and contribute to open source software.
I get people to use Firefox. It is usually faster and always more secure than what they use by default.
I encourage people to use something other than Outlook for the same reason.
For the rest, its less consistent. I got my cubicle neighbor doing documents in laTeX when Word kept choking over and over and over. Curiously, that's when I started using TeX as well.
For the OS kernel, I don't encourage people to change. However, I think it is self-evident that a much better kernel comes from open source development. I enter in as evidence Windows, linux kernel, and Mac's Darwin kernel. The open source kernels just catch more bugs and are easier to develop over. Here's an example.
I was developing a text editor (customizing, really) on linux. I also used DEC workstations, so I ported it to work there too. There was a problem with the POSIX function glob. It worked fine under linux. I downloaded the glibc code to look at it. Very straightforward. Then on Digital Unix it failed. I asked Dec for help. I sent them the code, explained it failed. No feedback. They coulda cared less if glob worked or not.
It was actually trickier. I later discovered glob calls ksh to execute under Digital Unix. It actually forks a process to do a glob. Ksh would either work on not depending on whether it thought it was calling glob from an interactive process.
So I talked to Dec again. Again, they coulda cared less. And, without having the underlying source code, I couldn't send them a patch - stuck with a broken system. So, I re-wrote the function glob so it would work under Digital Unix instead of using the POSIX library call.
You know, this happens all the time programming to closed systems. Little intricacies about what makes the system functions work or not are locked up, and the company could care less about your needs as a programmer. You learn to simply program around those OS and library bugs.
In an open source system, you learn to report them to the code owner and/or fix them.
I prefer the latter enormously, and it is my main reason for preferring open source systems for programming.
Most of the time, it's up to you to stumbled into bugs and then figure out the best solution
Name one bug you were the first to find in either MySQL or PostGreSQL.
I have never ever found a problem that a minute with Google didn't explain and show a workaround or solution.
The flip side of this argument is when you've a problem with one of your Oracle databases, you can always call up Oracle and complain.
Right. One cannot get support from MySQL AB or PostgreSQL Inc? Oh wait.....
Moreover, the fact that there is a new version, means bugs are actively being addressed and closed out. Many times, it's bugs you may not have hit yet, but someone else in the community has, and it's being addressed. With Postgres or MYSQL, it's not the same story. Most of the time, it's up to you to stumbled into bugs and then figure out the best solution.
Ok, I have had no experience of note with MySQL since I switched to PostgreSQL, and I was not happy with MySQL at the time (it is improving though).
However, I would suggest that you look at the archives of the pgsql-bugs list. Often times when a bug is reported, it is fixed in CVS within hours. And every time I have run into a bug in PostgreSQL it has been fixed in a later version. The last time this happened was with the multiple statements in a rule bug in 7.4.3....
Note that this is not the same thing as design limitations (such as requirements to vacuum the database) but these are being worked on too. Just not with the same speed because the solutions are more complex.
Not to mention the code quality of Oracle (even version 7/8) is way better than either Postgres or MYSQL.
Hmmm.... I have not seen Oracle's code. Have you? And you said you weren't a programmer.... I guess we can chalk this up to FUD.
IMHO, the later two databases aren't in the same league as Oracle anyway.
Ok. This is the only statement where you actually have a point. For a 100TB database, Oracle and DB2 offer much better parallelization capabilities than any open source database which is mature and on the market at the moment (with the possible exception of backplane but I don't know much about this product). There are a few other capabilities that Oracle has (RAC, etc.) which are still beyond what open source databases can reliably do without jeopardizing your data. So yes, they are in different leagues.
But if you don't need RAC, and you don't have a multi-TB database, PostgreSQL is probably as good a choice as any.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Okay, I'll bite...
1) Says who?
Logic, do you need to know who said it in order to think about it more, or can you just accept it as a different viewpoint? What's the purpose of every other species on this planet? That's right, to evolve and reproduce, that's it. So at the base level, our purpose here is to further our species through evolution and to reproduce. Humans have vastly overcomplicated lives and created all of their own problems through things like wealth and reputation.
2) How is writing code furthering the species?
Okay, think about it.. What runs on the computers on the space shuttles and probes? What runs on the computers at nuclear power stations? That's right, software! Now think of all the programs you use on a daily basis. Without them, you'd have to do everything by hand, which would take a huge chunk of time away from you actually doing something useful for the species/yourself/your family. Think about everything that you take for granted, it'll make your arguments better.
3) thinking along this logic, what race of the species will survive: the one sharing its work with others or the one making $$$?
Unfortunately, there is no way to determine this, because humans are such idiots anyway that we even bother to pose this question. Why shouldn't every race survive? Everyone has something to contribute, humans are just assholes when it comes to accepting that we should all be united, so we don't allow it to happen. We created money, why do we need to base everything on it? I don't think "hey, I should clean up this piece of trash because somebody might see and give me a million dollars," I think "hey, I should clean up this trash because it helps out everybody." Take a moment and stop being so self-centric and realize that without everybody else you wouldn't be around, so show a little respect.
Though I do respect your opinion, I fail to see any logic in your reasoning.
Popularity is not a function of hackability. Being poorly written and stupidly integrated into the low rings of the OS is.
Yeah, right.
It's too bad you're an offtopic post, because Media Player Classic really is a great thing to have in place of Windows Media Player. I had a codec pack install it for me (I forgot to uncheck the box) and it's everything you describe: fast to launch & play, simple UI, and it even plays MOV files (I always hated loading up Quicktime's viewer to see those).
Besides which, I get to charge more.
How does this work?
If things break half as often because of what I've done, I do half as much work, I can charge half as much again for my work and the customer spends 25% less on me than on a competitor advocating less, um, safe software. The customer's machinery also works more reliably, so they get more work done and live in less fear of stuff vanishing from under their hands.
IRL, I "visit" a typical Linux server (I do mostly servers) by remote control about twice a year and in person about once a year on average. OTOH I will typically need to visit an MS-Windows server in person about every two months (some better, some much worse). This makes the billable-time ratio about 3:1. "Aaak!" the traditionalist says, "you have 1/3 of the income!" Not so. I am able to support 3x as many clients, charge 50% more for my time, and yet provide double the value.
Workstation differences are even more pronounced, since users have a far greater ability to break things on MS-Windows, which synergises very effectively with MS-Windows' ability to spontaneously break itself.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
try this for installing firefox on windows.
:)
Go to command prompt and....
ftp ftp.mozilla.org
anonymous
cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases
cd 1.0.3
cd win32
cd en-US
get Firefox\ Setup\ 1.0.3.exe
There you go. Wasn't that easy? and all without using IE.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The phrase was "Adequate. Free."
"Free" is a compelling reason for many open source applications over the commercial applications. Other reasons for OpenOffice include better security, better translations to other formats, better handling of other languages such as Hebrew which are written right to left, better file locking, and availability on almost every full-blown OS known to mankind.
Friend, if you thing gnu.org is a corporate interest shell group, you've obviously never talked to Richard Stallman. His exposition of the "Palladium Initiative" from Microsoft, while a bit of a rant, was very clear on how he and GNU support freedom and development, not "corporate interests".
That the real corporate interests of users and programmers benefit from GNU is the reason it spreads so well. But freedom and knowledge are what it is based on.