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Why Users Drop Open Source Apps For Proprietary Alternatives
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?"
You can be absolutely sure I am flaming. After using OSS ever since Linux was still a little baby, I've become attracted to the KISS model, which is excellent design. However, many linux utilities seem to miscomprehend this philosophy.
But, on your comments. 1-3 can be applied to many different software packages. I'll reinforce my statement a bit further here.
Lets take KDE as an example. KDE is the main viewing port of your Linux experience (given you do not use Gnome). It is a package which has had years of development time, a relatively large developer group and a large user group. We can all conclude that: if you make KDE better, you'll make the experience of the average user better. However, there is *no* controlled user-testing whatsoever. Even Windows, with all its problems, spends many man-months on just testing and researching the user-experience in a controlled manner, and learning valuable lessons.
On documentation: Even experienced Unix veterans have trouble finding the right documentation. We should wake up, and realize that complex multi-faceted software needs complex multi-faceted documentation, instead of spurious text-files, HTML files, online documentation, man-files, LaTeX/PDF documentation. Making this more uniform is a huge step and to be honest, I do not see the OSS guys doing anything about it. Commercial developments from MS and Apple however, show tremendous effort to reintegrate their fractured documentation. Again, I'm trying to paint in more colours than just black and white.
Lack of quality control. Closely related to #1. Most OSS comes without automated testing and detailed deployment systems which involve multiple independent parties. There are some good exceptions though, such as Blender. All-in-all, I often see fixes on one part introduce errors on another, which are often solved in the 'next-next-release'.
Ad #4: This certainly is an issue when these components are integral to the operation of many other components. A full-fledged OS consists of many thousands of components, many of them being dependent on each other. It is difficult for developers to keep an eye on the development effort needed to keep these components working together in a nice fashion. When someone suddenly quits supporting an integral component, it can create a cascade effect, causing many other developers to throw the towel into the ring.
Ad #5. Choice is good, but is not cheap. When you're basically giving away your software for nothing, you should understand that choice will put more strain on developers. Standardization is difficult, since you want to entertain the needs of many, but saves 'money' in the long run (in the OSS case, 'money' equals developer effort).
Ad #6. Yes, Windows has its history, but has tried to make things better often. Apple shows a very good picture. In Unix, I might be able to 'vi' every config file, but I'm presented with a different configuration language every time. To properly understand the configuration language, I need to read manuals, which are often poorly written or badly adjustable to modern world demands (eg. man-pages).
Ad #7. And with such a comment, you basically shoo away all the people who could actually make a difference. You're sailing a sinking ship, people are jumping in the rescue boats and still the passengers and crew maintain their expectations, course and heading. I'm very sorry to have abandoned ship, captain, but I do not see the shore you and me have talked about for so long.
This is a replacement signature.
I hope to god you are trolling.
"Excellent texinfo" my ass. Info sucks buddy. It sucks as a documentation format. The reader sucks. The arrogant way the GNU foundation spews "Man is obsolete, use our info docs" all over their crap.
Info was the second to the last straw that broke the camels back for me. FreeBSD and all BSD's in general have excelent documentation that is versioned right along with the rest of the utilities. All of it written into man pages, as god intended.
You want to know why linux has such shitty, fragmented docs? Blame the GNU foundation declaring the old one obsolete, hawking a shitty new version. They split the community into those who followed the party line and moved their docs into info and those who realized info sucks and kept their stuff as man pages. Thus to this day it is a crapshoot if any of the core utilities will have usable documentation.
And before somebody suggests pinfo or whatever that "easy to use" info reader is named, too late. I switched to FreeBSD and I ain't looking back. Info was a political move and dammit, operating systems should be political.
Some game programmer dropped the ball so now Linux sucks?
That is so utterly bogus and ignores the fact that crap like that is not limited to Linux.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That said, there is something to be said for doing things "correctly"
even if the UI isn't as easy as it could be. In this regard GIMP
handily trumps "dumbed down" competitors.
Um... The GIMP, a full-featured image editor, can handily beat competitors which slimmed-down feature sets?
New tagline: The GIMP, it's better than MS Paint.
Actually, I don't even think that's true. When it comes to the actual set of common features, I'll wager MS Paint is much easier to use.