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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?"
Using Firefox 3.5.3 and having no problems whatsoever. No crash in firefox happened that can't be attributed to adobe or flash in the last year.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
This is a reason that is always trotted out at times like this, but is it a myth? I've worked at a number of institutions and the place where I am currently at (note I don't work in IT), has over 6,000 employees and a very varied software set up for the various parts of the organisation. The only time, either here or at a previous job, I have ever heard of anyone receiving training in software use, or access to paid support from a vendor is when we recently went to SAP (funnily enough the training was useless).
It may be that all the training/support is provided to the IT department so they can support us I guess, but generally they only provide support for installation and desktop use, so I doubt it.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Firefox crashes? This is news to me.
*Glances at several windows with a god awful amount of tabs which have been open for.. days? weeks?*
You sure you've not got a foobared installation or messed up profile?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
... is my key principle. I'm capable of RTM'ing and Googling to find answers, but especially as I get older, I don't have the time I used to.
Amen to that.
Not long ago, I was struggling getting vino/vnc to work under Ubuntu Linux (desktop edition). I spent hours Googling and trying to juggle conflicting and just plain wrong information. Eventually, I discovered the culprit was that IPv6 was enabled on Ubuntu by default.
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
Second, I was stunned vino/vnc would fail to accept connections if IPv6 was enabled but my networking gear didn't support it. I literally could not VNC into my Ubuntu desktop machine unless I disabled IPv6 on the Ubuntu machine, even if all my IPv4 firewall and tunnel settings were correct.
Third, I was stunned that the solution (which was remarkably hard to discover) was to hand edit some weird blacklist file so that I could blacklist IPv6. Nope, no GUI option to just frakking disable IPv6, at least not that I could find.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
I'll continue to use Linux, of course, but FOSS in general has a long ways to go.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
I thought I would try Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex), again, out on my Dell Inspiron 640m. I got everything installed but the wireless wasn't working, so I plugged it into the lan and did some googling. I had to edit several config files and use some ndiswrapper. For someone who doesn't code and doesn't work in IT, it was a pain but whatever. I got it working.
A couple days later, Ubuntu tells me I have auto-updated to install, so I say okay. It hoses the wireless. I go through the same procedure again and get it working. A couple weeks later, the same thing.
I've told this story before and got all kinds of apologist telling me various reasons why it happened. The fact is, I don't care what the reasons are. I went back to windows.
Gone!
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
To give an example, none of the scientific programs I wrote to display my graphs work any more because none of the 3D graphics in pylab work anymore. instead you can use Mayavi (much better but more difficult), but to do an install of that cleanly is a nightmare. So you switch to the Enthought distro with all that built in. But then the ENthought distro doesn't have a fortran compiler so all the scientific add ons that depend on that or use F2PY are busted. And so on. Sure you can if you try get it all to work, but your old programs seldom work anymore.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source. If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
(the problem with matlab's pricing is that while it's not so absurd for single seats if it makes you more productive, once you have a large group then everyone needs a copy to be interactive even if they seldom use it: then it becomes prohibitively expensive.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm running Firefox in Mac right now. If it counts, I barely ever restart my macbook (it just goes on standby), so if that counts, Firefox has been running for 7 days (taken into consideration that it's usually in standby at night etc). I currently have 120 tabs open, and albeit it's getting a little slow now, I'm having no problems at all. This is on a new model MacBook Pro 13", 2.26 GHz and 4 GB RAM, Firefox 3.5.2, Mac OS 10.5.8.
This may be more of a legal issue; Microsoft and Apple both have multiple patents on font rendering. It may be the case that the OpenOffice.org developers actually wrote code to render fonts properly, but had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
Palm trees and 8
Yes, it is sometimes difficult to enable functionality that is NOT PART OF THE FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEM YOU PURCHASED.
The early versions of Firefox 3 effectively crashed if you had a large quantity of bookmarks. It would work if you waited for the Bookmark processing to finish, but sometimes the wait period was over a few minutes. A version of Firefox 2 could crash if you clicked on Forward/Back at the right time, since a Javascript security hole wasn't properly patched. Thus, don't claim Firefox is immune to crashing.
Firefox can also crash if Adobe Flash player crashes, and effectively crash if there's rapid-fire CPU spikes from either plugins or Javascript, where sometimes is just easier killing Firefox rather than waiting for it to finish. (Note that Firefox is currently single-thread and single-process.) At one time, I paralyzed Firefox simply by right-clicking on a Flash application; Firefox became unusable until the context menu closed, and the CPU-spike mode prevented the context menu from accepting input.
Of course, if a stable version of Firefox is crashing, then you can worry. However, you would need to know ahead of time that you can switch profiles using "--profile-manager" as a command line option, since disabling extensions doesn't always work. Then, you need to export and import the bookmarks, passwords and other stuff if the profile does happen to be corrupt; although Firefox doesn't exactly support exporting passwords.
I once had date (GNU coreutils) give the output "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 12nd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3172".
No you didn't... you probably typed "ddate" by mistake. As far as I can tell, "date" has never had some kind of silly easter egg like this (for exactly the reasons you describe - it would be BAD to do so)
And by the way, what's the reference in the joke?
ddate gives the Discordian date, rather than the Gregorian one that you're probably used to...
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Try each new version of Calc, no easy "fill down"
I remember using hot keys in the past to "fill down" in open office. I just checked and, sure enough, by default open office 3.0 (in ubuntu) uses ctrl-d to fill down in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's time for you to try again.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Why aren't there any decent open source fonts?
Times New Roman was commissioned by the London TImes in 1931. Times Roman
Helvetica dates from 1957.
It's an extraordinary craft, and the expert practitioners are rare:
Bruce Roger's Centaur [From Typographic specimens: the great type faces
I've seen some saying bits of what I want to say, and I don't have mod points so I'll just do a "me too":
These are my beefs. Feel free to add more.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I gave Linux a fair shake, found it as frustrating as driving a Volkswagen Old Beetle that keeps breaking-down, and decided to go back to XP and MacOS. They cost money, but not that much, and that cost is offset
No, it isn't. XP and MacOS cost money, and they have just as many usability problems as Linux.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck.
It shouldn't happen on any OS, but the same thing happens with Windows and OS X. The difference? On Linux, there's a simple way out: you can grab any window and move it around with Alt-Mouse-1. It's documented and it's a useful shortcut anyway.
On Windows, you have to hack the registry in order to fix this kind of problem.
Everyone always talks about the GIMP, and about how it doesn't measure up to Photoshop. I haven't used Photoshop, so I can't really comment on that, but every complaint they bring up seems to not be an issue with Krita. Just to comment on the issues you mentioned, it does support write-protection for layers, and it has a wide variety of colour-space options. It supports:
- CMYK (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)
- Grayscale (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)
- L*a*b* (16 bit integer per channel)
- LMS Cone Space (32 bit float per channel)
- RGB (8 or 16 bit integer per channel, or 16 or 32 bit float per channel)
- YCbCr (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)
Is there something I'm missing that makes Krita unusable for professional work, or is it just not widely known?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet that is a big deal is compatibility with proprietary systems.
If I'm a photographer who's working with another photographer, I can't send them my gimp files, and them them open them in photoshop. I can't open their photoshop files in gimp.
It doesn't matter how good a FOSS video editor is, All the other pros are using AVID or final cut, and we can't work together on anything.
If I have a recording to be mastered externally, the studios are set up to work with pro tools.
You can't have one person off in their own little bubble while the rest of the team is working together on different software. Choosing to use a FOSS program immediately isolates you from the rest of your peers.
If you are a lone person working freelance, FOSS is possible. I can edit wedding photos in gimp, and edit some audio in audacity, and get the job done. But larger production places, the work flow is more like an assembly line. after doing your job, You send off your work to the next guy. If you are ever expected to work as part of a team, you have to use what the rest of them are using. In these cases, a FOSS alternative, even if it works better than the proprietary alternative, breaks the chain, and is useless.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Coders are now preferring Visual Studio Express and GoogleCode over MinGW/Cygwin and Sourceforge, and for a good reason.
If you look at most open source software packages, they are basically copy-cats of proprietary software -- FROM SEVERAL YEARS BACK!! Lots of cool new features of programs like Mac OS Finder, Windows Explorer, Photoshop and Dreamweaver either magically appear in open source programs years down the road, or have some competing feature that nobody wants except the coder and his friends. Many of us are still waiting for a good open-source alternative to Adobe Flash. Hopefully, HTML 5 will help out somewhat in the meantime.
Windows Aero -- with all of its flaws -- looks good out of the box. Microsoft doesn't make you forage for the graphics and the libraries, or *gasp* create them yourself. Microsoft also goes out of its way NOT to copy Apple's Aqua interface. Commercial companies, in general, follow some rather fundamental design principles that most OSS developers neglect. KDE turns options into requirements, which is illusory and abandons the mission.
The barrier of entry for OSS development is lower than that of a commercial software company. This attracts coders who don't know what they are doing like moths to a flame. They end up copying the next person without understanding that person's motivation, inspiration, life experiences, etc.
Then there are people who develop OSS just to flip the bird to "the capitalist pigs" but are really just egotistic bullies. Working with this kind of divisive, oppositional mindset helps nobody.
When you look at open-source development options, you see lots of questionable names and faces. Not everyone sleeps well at night knowing that a program named "Python" is running on their machine. This has been one of _several_ elephants in the room regarding open source, I believe. Ironically, if they kept to the KISS principle, someone would probably create a programming language named "Lucifer."
People assume that they can produce portable programs by coding them in Java. History has already shown that Java is bloated, unreliable and insecure. Coding in Java is beating a dead horse. People are starting to say the same thing about OpenGL on Windows.
Overall, OSS developers, in general, need to look beyond their noses. They need to actually talk to people -- REAL PEOPLE, AND LOTS OF THEM -- to see what people want, instead of making inaccurate assumptions based on lofty generalities ("people want options") or acting snobby. This is called "market research." OSS developers who wish to be competitive should actually do some research before complaining.
Imagine a fork of Open Office,
Okay.
it isn't very likely
Try again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're problem with moving windows in low resolution is FUD as well as plain ignorant. For someone who claims to have used many OS's you might want to at least show some proficiency with something other than Windows to back up your claims.
Windows XP loses windows off the screen all the time, and there is no way to get them back because the only draggable handle is the title bar. I can't even express the frustration this has caused me over the years due to buggy video games and such causing resolution problems.
However, it is a standard feature of most Linux desktop managers (gnome/kde/etc) that any window can be grabbed at any location using ALT + LEFT MOUSE. So, with even the slightest proficiency you would have had no problems at all.