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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?"
On the verge of dumping firefox after years of use. 3.5.2 was horrible. 3.5.3 crashed within the first 5 minutes of use. The #1 reason I would dump any SW product is stability. If it can't perform its intended function without crashing then nothing else matters. Lets just hope I don't need to switch to Chrome to get this to post.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
The biggest reason is the fact that there weren't expensive support contracts available for purchase. Employee turnover always exists and generally only one or maybe two people knew how to operate any particular system in the places where I have worked. Expensive support contracts allowed for someone else to do deal w/the turnover problem and kept it out of the hands of the on-site departments.
Maybe I'm entirely different than most people. I used to use a bunch of propritary applications...Office, AIM, Yahoo, mIRC....I switched to the open-source alternatives and I never looked back. For me, it was being able to jump between Ubuntu and Windows while maintaining the same "feel" as the other apps. Market major upgrades are lame. How many times does someone make a major upgrade that's really just more annoying features....didn't AOL just "upgrade" ICQ to use the same rendering engine as AIM Triton...quite honestly, AIM Triton was enough to make me switch to Pidgin full time. Obviously the windows people will stick with the applications that they're used to.
Second, at least with business programs, it's obvious that a programmer designed them them. GNUCash is the worst thing a business can use for their accounting software. They took a home checkbook program, added a couple of other accounts and considered it done. If you're running a business, just shell out the money for Quickbooks, MS Accounting, or Moneyworks.
Lastly, some development tools - yikes! Comparing gtk+ with Qt, Qt has wonderful documentation, the build environment was easy to set up and the integration with eclipse was great (I wish for a Netbeans integration one day but that was easy to set up too). It took me a few hours to get gtk+ build environment set up correctly where Netbeans could actually compile and link something. A make file would just be a nightmare!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The main reason I don't like the GIMP is that on OS X, it has a really horrible user interface.
The last time I dropped a FOSS application was because it had a security hole you could drive a truck through. I learned the hard way by being hacked. Suspecting this application, I spent a few hours crawling through the source and found it severely compromised. Fixing it would have taken way more time than it was worth given the readily available closed source alternatives.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I used to work at a very large worldwide telecom provider. You know the name whether you are in the USA or Russia or India or Japan or 200 other countries.
When we needed a new tool, we would "ask around" with our existing vendors. These vendors would either recommend the top 3 very well known apps or quickly partner with an up-and-coming vendor or lastly, but only if there wasn't a way to make money, suggest some open source tool. OpenNMS could have been used internally, but there was too much money on the line, so we have a mix of commerial apps - Netcool being one of them.
Why? Sales calls. Software costs money even when it is free. Time, effort, maintenance and other FUD concerns. Unless the free version is basically bug free and has proven commercial support, we can't consider it. Further, we'll never consider it unless someone knocks on the right door at the right instance. The "support" costs are simply too difficult to overcome for completely free tools. Generally, we pay someone else to install these applications too, so expert installation and support are required. If there isn't a sale person selling all of this, we won't bother looking at it. We aren't in the software business - even though we invented UNIX. We aren't in the computer business, even though we run 60K+ servers.
We do use free software - lots of it, but only the extremely high profile projects make it into critical systems with internal support alone. Oddly, spending $500 on some small, never-heard-of-it-before tool was easier than using a FLOSS alternative because, if you paid for it, then it was assumed that support would be provided. In reality, that small company would usually be an ex-employee who retired, but left their software running. It was so poorly written that only that person could maintain it. At the first new feature request, the cost became $50K + 15%/yr support. A nice extra retirement income when added to the pension. Not bad for 5 days of work/yr.
I now work at a small company. We avoid commercial software beyond what we **must** have. Our production servers DO NOT RUN on Windows-whatever-the-name-is-today. We do have a few Windows development servers, but only because customers demand it.
I can completely agree with smpool7. He is telling you about the corporate side of it. Let me tell you about the personall, home situation side of this story.
In the early days when I did not have the money to purchase software I used opensource.
By using it I learned a lot and eventually became a UNIX administrator (with some additional learning and stuff). And when it works it usually does a great job. But now I got older, make more money, have a family, I simply do not have the time to delve into a program or piece of software and make it work. That is why I go back to purchasing a license and simply use it.
The big difference between opensource (and I am talking linux and the software that runs on it, because that is what it means to me!) and purchased software is that I get a clear webshop where I can order the latest product. There is a very short manual with it, which basically tells me to click setup, or drag it to applications (OSX fan anyone?). After that it simply works, no hassle, no problems. When I use open source, I have to click setup and then usually I get into an interface which just ............. (And yes, there are exceptions!)
Main thing is: When I buy/pick a new piece of software:
1. I must be able to just use it. No inch thick manuals
2. When I have a problem, who can I call to solve it for me.
3. I must be able to easily find it the software. (no version 1.3.2.3.4.1.455.5.beta.stable.gz). Just version 1 or 2 or 3 and then I download and use it on a customer oriented website and not a technical one.
4. It needs to be interoperable, meaning, when I create a document, file, whatever, my friends, family must be able to work with it.
All in all: Opensource has it's advantages, we all know them, and I most definitly support them, but when I get older, have less time, i just want a product that works, and I am willing to pay for it........... and that is a very sad conclusion.
Maybe you'd like proprietary software more if, like the author of TFA, you were paid to sell it. Read on page two where the author promotes DropBox over a free alternative, providing a referral link as she does so. If you look on the DropBox website, you will find an affiliate program paying out up to US$50 for each referred subscription.
If you aren't getting the same kind of coin, you aren't negotiating hard enough. Hint: know the selling points of the open source alternatives, and (obviously) arrange for a private after hours meeting with the sales guy, but without your colleagues.
Free software makes money by selling books, guides, manuals etc. Therefore the software must NOT be very intuitive or user friendly. This way people are forced to buy the book to help them out. Bloat, bad design, general difficulty to understand the thing are regarded as 'features' and pluses by high level in-the-money OSS priests.
I've lost count of the number of "casual" graphics designers to whom I have introduced to open source tools... they want to "do stuff," either within a web site or with their photos, but the name brand graphics tools are too expensive, so... they'll try anything, even something with a name as ridiculous and off-putting as "The Gimp." Then, once they become proficient, once they start to understand "layers" and "filters" and the like, they understand the required reading a bit better, and wonder what they are missing with the Adobe software. Well, they don't wonder, it's very clear: all the web and design magazines each month provide specialized step-by-step tutorials on how to do neat stuff with the popular tools, and never once mention open source beyond the "Annual Condescension" summary article about the "other" tools. These people take a stroll down the aisles at B&N and see tome after tome designed to help the Adobe user, and maybe -- in a particularly well-stocked store -- a copy of "Beginning GIMP, which just sounds icky. I've seen the same scenario play out with Audacity and Pro Tools: people learn how to edit with free Audacity, and then when they become savvy enough to realize what they are missing with the proprietary stuff -- either in the form of missing features or widespread community and commercial support -- they step up.
The pro creative tools have great "wannabe" appeal: working with Adobe and Pro Tools, the amateur wannabe artists feel like they're "more connected" to that professional world to which they aspire. Using the free open source tools just underscores -- in their mind -- that they are second tier. This is not to say that the open source tools are second-rate technically, just that -- in the eyes of the latte-infused graphics and sound editor pretenders -- they may not be quite as "fashionable."
Open Source is a lot better from when I first started looking into it 15 years ago but I still occasionally get hit by cultural attitudes of some of the software developers. To be fair, I understand that a lot of the projects are volunteer run and small scale, maybe one or two people hitting way above their weight and competing with large commercial corporations, but the documentation can be sparse. There's still an emphasis on getting software out rather than communicating what it does or how to help people to use it in some cases. More friendly introductions and more explicit guidance would be useful.
I think there are still a lot of elitist attitudes in the open source movement, with people "points scoring" - trying to prove they are more elite, more expert, and more competent than others and basing their sense of worth on proving they are better than others. Some of this filters into support forums where innocent questions from beginners can be savagely put down ("if you don't know how to do this, get lost newbie!").
The open source movement has come on a long way but could go a lot further in taking advantage of the large number of people who philosophically wish to support open source / FOSS/FLOSS whatever you want to call it but are not technical experts. Think of the large number of people who will pay extra to buy free range eggs / fairtrade food: they don't want to become small holding farmers themselves and look after chickens in their own back yard but they'll pay extra for food sources they believe in and fight furiously for it to be promoted as an alternative to be used in schools and government workplaces. Maybe think how the open source movement could learn lessons from this?
It comes down to one thing, price. The more someone paid for something, the less likely they are to admit that it doesn't work as they would like. Most of the time people didn't pay anything for any Open Source Software that they have, therefore when they get frustrated they drop it. On the other hand if someone paid over $100 for software, they are much more likely to stick with it and work through the frustration.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Very much disagree. Are you expecting people to work outside of the working hours?
Not sure at what you're getting at here, maybe you got caught up too much in the word "work". Many coders code outside their working hours, few technical writers write documentation. Apart from some high-profile projects like the Linux kernel, also at work time is spent making stuff work, not making comprehensive technical write-ups about things. The result is that the code-to-documentation ratio is much higher, and unlike closed source they don't have the cash to hire someone to do all those boring parts nobody's volunteering for. Usually the documentation ends up being what someone wrote after messing around with it in order to make it work, but usually that refers only to what he was trying to do and he's not assigned to keep that documentation current.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1,2,3: This sounds like a laundry list of complaints for any software.
4: how is this an issue of open source? The fact that anyone can pick up and run with a project is a bonus; try doing that with proprietary. If nobody has picked up something, then perhaps it wasn't worth saving in the first place?
5. Agreed, but some people like choice, and you can't go wrong with any of the major distros either.
6. You're kidding, right? So on Windows, you've got opaque, "blackbox" wizards,
7. I stopped reading after this, assuming you're just flaming or have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
body massage!
This is why I still use Paint Shop Pro instead of photoshop - PSP does everything with half/tenth the number of clicks.
eg. I do a lot of paste screenshot from the clipboard - it's one click in PSP but in Photoshop I have to do "File->new, select 'size from clipboard' in the dropdown, click 'ok', then I get to paste the image".
Same with JPG images - in PSP I load one up, do something to it, click save, done. In photoshop there's a whole extra layer of dialogs to "set jpg options" when I go to save it.
It all gets old real fast.
No sig today...
I think you missed his point, vendor lock-in is possible when the application is so difficult to develop and maintain that a fork would go nowhere.
Imagine a fork of Open Office, it isn't very likely even if there are a lot of things some people don't like about it. It's such a huge application that if it were developed on a volunteer basis, it would require a team of 100 coders to keep pace with its current developement, if not more. Organizing that many coders for a single project is difficult, and frankly it probably wouldn't take too long before the fork was terrible compaired to the main branch.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
Again, it is possible that someone could make a new office application, and people would certainly try (there are already alternatives out there, but by and large they suck), but as long as Open Office is the only serious free competition to MS Office, you're stuck with it if you want (or need) all the features.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
For many FOSS applications the UI isn't nearly as polished as the commercial alternatives. This might be partially because UI designers want to get paid for the work (perhaps not a dedicated to the free community as sofware developers).
I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.
Other projects may of course be different. This was just my somewhat bitter experience with two fairly well known web apps.
Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
I strongly disagree with that. If I could point to a FOSS application and say "I did the UI for that", I would probably double the amount of commercial work I could get (assuming my work was any good!). I would also think that being the only UI designer on a FOSS project would be wonderful - think of the freedom!
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The magic is that Linux works with the hardware at all is amazing. It's been hacked counter to the support of the companies providing the hardware. They create the drivers for Windows, and do jack shit for Linux. I know you come from a "I just want it to work" point of view, but you have to realize that your point of view is what allows companies to keep fucking you over with license fees and software that is explicitly designed to limit your rights and what you can do (DRM, HDMI, etc.)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
This is one of the common refrains of the anti-FOSS FUD patrol -- that 'all of us non-programmers have no control'. That couldn't be furter from the truth. It's actually a close relative of Microsoft's 'are you going to trust your business to code written by amateurs' FUD.
Truth of the matter is that the bulk of the code that goes into the major FLOSS projects is put there by people who are paid to do the work. It's not a bunch of lone wolves doing it for their own gratification. This means that they take their orders from the people who pay them to do that work. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to get a wanted fix into your (not so) favorite FLOSS project, you just have to convince a programmer (by hook, crook or paycheque) to do it.
This is quite a bit different than with proprietary software, where it has to be in the business interests of the program seller to fix what for you is a show-stopper bug. For example, when MS-Word for OSX first came out, it's multilingual support (especially for RTL languages like Hebrew) was abysmal. The Israeli government offered Microsoft 7million of dollars (plus a guaranteed bulk contract to fix it, but MS was more interested in using the bugs as a leverage point to force people to move from the MAC to Windows. Microsoft didn't budge on the issue until Israel's Department of defence paid a group of programmers $1/2 Million to port Open Office to the Mac, and ordered a halt to further Microsoft contracts.
So the moral of the story is: If you have a show-stopper bug in a FLOSS project, then hire someone to fix it, then sit back and laugh at the people who spend 10 times as much money working around similar problems in proprietary programs. If you then feed your fix to the greater community, then not only don't you have to support your fix, as the base code is updated, you also get to bathe in the good karma of having contributed to the greater commumity. That's what FLOSS is all about.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I can confirm this experience with Ubuntu by schnikies79 (788746), a similar sequence of problems with Ubuntu updates breaking stable and working wireless connections on an HP laptop. I had to discover and make a similarly frustrating and time consuming sequence of fixes.
This problem was discussed extensively in the Sep 5th article on slashdot: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/09/05/195219/Microsoft-Attacks-Linux-With-Retail-Training-Talking-Points
To avoid repeating myself, I posted: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1359331&cid=29327329
It seems we are running into some unintended consequences, side effects imposed by a combination of the FOSS philosophy and the limitations of UI development, where the first users are the developers themselves.
Linux, does not permit reliable installations of devices, because of a lack of a stable binary interface. We all want Jo Internet to walk into a store, look for a fat penguin (Tux) on the box and know the gadget will just work.
Similarly the packaging and update schemes' assume control and overwrite (break) locally updated configuration files by default (I have no idea why anyone would permit that in the packaging architecture but apparently it does).
FOSS user interfaces are naturally enough initiall designed by the developers, for the developers. Most FOSS is built by a small group for their own use, so that's perfectly natural and ok.
It's not ok, if we then assume it can be packaged up and dropped onto the public, sorry... but I think that's massively naive.
Jo Internet, the public end users, expect that UI's have been designed for them, by the developers. They also expect it to be tested. They expect it to be intuitive and to do the right thing. No one reads documentation, a small amount of context sensitive hints are borderline tolerable.
There are many shades of grey with Doc: some technical areas (graphics, audio, Video editing, etc) may tolerate some documentation just to connect common domain knowledge (Terms of Art) to sophisticated software features.
That's a big difference in expectations.
I have worked with software development folks for more than25 years, I still do. Developers may be brilliant, but creating usable UI's for end users is not generally one of their talents, neither is writing comprehensible documentation.
I have seen entire and valauble product lines killed because of this inherent inability. What makes it worse is that most developers think they are good at it UI's, ego's get in the way, a lot, I have no clear idea why.
These three challenges: fat penguin labelling for retail devices and machines, stable user system configurations, and usable end user oriented UI's are what is holding linux distributions and FOSS back from expanding it's market share.
Until the community can recognize the root causes of the problem, very little will change.
I am a supporter of FOSS and linux, philosophically, professionally, personally, but I am also a realist about building software for end users
I am sure the FOSS apologists will (once again) leap on my post to tell me why I am an idiot, so let me save you some time; I do know that I don't know how to tweak every obscure config option, no one does, that's really the major point.
With any software, either FOSS, or closed source, if you have to apologize for instability, inoperative devices, or explain how to use an App, the software is broken.
IMHO Linux/Gnu/FOSS will remain a niche OS for Geeks; sadly, Jo Internet loses out in the long run, because of these apparently immutable and inherent limitations of the FOSS culture.
I would be delighted to have this opinion proven wrong; constructive ideas welcome.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.