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?"

Comments

Re:Stability

[Quantumstate]

I find firefox 3.5 is perfectly stable. I in fact had a strange problem with hotmail and firefox 3 on linux where it would just crash after using hotmail within clicking about 5 links. So I find firefox 3.5 is more stable than 3 because I don't recall ever having it crash.

Re:Stability

[Bigjeff5]

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.

That happened to me when I tried to use WINE. No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it, either. Scrubbing it from the computer didn't work, I was obviously missing a config setting somewhere that I couldn't find. Fortunately I managed to get a free copy of Crossover and that worked for my needs. I still ended up ditching Linux after about a year for issues along the same line (not resolution issues, but audio and other issues that were ridiculous in my mind).

I recently read a book that described the problem perfectly, and basically explained why Linux, no matter how great it becomes, will never supplant Windows or OSX on the desktop. Mind you I am not anti-Linux, I think it is fantastic and in many areas the technology behind it surpasses the big players like Windows and OSX. That does not mean it is any good on the desktop, however.

That's because with Windows/Mac, programmers write programs for the user. With Linux, programmers write programs for other programmers.

The difference, when you think about it, is huge. If you're a programmer writing programms for other programmers, you want all output and input to be in the form of ASCII or UTF-8 text, so that it is easilly manipulated by other programs, all of the applications features will be accessible from the command line, and the holy grail of a successful operation (that doesn't need to spit out a txt file for another program) is no output whatsoever. "Chatty" programs aren't as easy to integrate into other programs.

If you're writing programs for the user, you want to make sure the user knows everything worked as it should have, so you pop up a status message. You have progress bars and percentages and so on and so forth so they can see that all is working as it should, and you make it as easy as possible. Using the keyboard may be significantly faster than using the mouse, but there has been no invention for the computer that makes input easier than the mouse. So for user apps as much as possible must be point-and-click. A lot of these programmers know nobody is going to use the CLI, so they don't put in any more than basic command line operability.

With programs written for programmers, the GUI is usually tacked on after the fact just to help users use the program, the interfaces vary widely from app to app, and the general useability of the GUI ranges from mediocre to piss poor. Very rarely is it actually good.

Contrast that with programs written for users, and the GUI is often designed before the program is. If you write an app with Microsoft's Visual Studio (which is designed to help programmers write apps for users), the default options start you off with a form to build the GUI, for which you add the actual application code later. The GUI is ever on your mind, and it impacts the way you write a program.

Lastly, with programs written for users, consistancy is key. That means Microsoft and Apple both have strong incentives to provide a very consistant framework around which app developers write their programs.

There is no such thing in the Linux world, and Linux developers would be outraged if someone tried it.

For some reason programmers writing programs for users tend to be more humble than their counterparts, too. I suppose being part of a small minority can make some people feel superior, though it really has no bearing at all on their ability to program.