OpenOffice Illustrates Open Source's Limitations?

Cardbox writes "In his latest article in The Guardian, Andrew Brown asks 'If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?'. OpenOffice, he says, shows the limitations of the open source development model. Brown is not your usual ignorant Microsoft-bribed hack. He has himself contributed macros for OpenOffice users. Brown lists the problems and assigns causes. He adds: 'If OpenOffice3.1 becomes a blockbuster... it will be because large companies such as Sun, Google, and IBM have decided that open source is the cheapest way to gang up on Microsoft, because it means they need spend nothing on support.'"

Comments

Re:Alternate

[MBCook]

Maybe because it's not so buggy?

... it's kinda moronic to see the same bullshit modded insightful day in day out.

WINDOWS HAS PROBLEMS. I switched to a Mac about 9 months ago and I love it. I am VERY competent and I never opened that kind of stuff. I kept my system patched and never had any real problems (my computer was well maintained). Yet Windows still had problems. I've never seen a Windows box that never has problems with suspend and resume at least once in a while. I use my Mac daily taking it too and from school and almost never turning it off (just putting it to sleep by closing the lid). I've never had a problem.

Window's ability to freeze never ceases to amaze me. On well maintained computers, even those that are imaged every night and locked down, Windows freezes. Plug in my thumb-drive then login? I've got about a 1/5 chance of it just freezing. Pull the drive out and it finishes logging in fine. Random freezes with IE (if they want to bundle it and tie it in, it counts as the OS) and times Windows seems to run out of memory (despite having a half-gig). Restart the computer and it's zippy as new. The programs that cause this? IE, Visual Studio, AOL, Office, and tons of others. Why does Task Manager always take so long pop up, and force quit processes? Why is Windows Explorer so slow so often (oh, wait, that is basically IE now)?

And I'll just ignore all those other little things that shouldn't be there. Like why when I click a link in an IE window and switch to another, does the first window jump back up and steal focus away from what I was doing in the second window? That is about the most infuriating thing that happens.

Windows has come a long way from the Windows 95 days, that is a given. But it has barely moved since the Windows 2000 days. OS X is a dream to use and I've experienced basically zero bugs. Linux may not be as user friendly to set up, but once you get it working I never had too many problems and I could at least TRY to fix it myself or change the configuration. Compare that to Windows which seems to fight you tooth and nail to just try to figure out what is going wrong.

Windows is NOT bug free. I get to remember that EVERY SINGLE DAY when I am forced to use Windows computers at school and home.