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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?"
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.
... 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.
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
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
Imagine a fork of Open Office,
Okay.
it isn't very likely
Try again.
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