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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?"
Open source sounds good at first. It's really like one of those stories where someone sells their soul to the Devil in the end though.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Can't say I agree completely with your list, but I'll add to #3 "Lack of quality control" an aspect I'd call #11 "Lack of reliability".
I once had date (GNU coreutils) give the output "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 12nd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3172". Now, at the time, it was just an amusing prank, but if I had a critical script depend on the date output...
I see this as an inherent problem with open source software -- anyone can contribute and the package maintainer can't be expected to review all the code. If the author did such a prank on say Microsoft's payroll, he'd be fired after the first bug report, a powerful incentive to behave. But there's no such incentive for the hobbyists coding for GNU.
And by the way, what's the reference in the joke?
At the risk of burning karma and being modded Troll by the FSF fanboys, one of the obvious answers is: Because the proprietary solution might be better (either in general or just for that person/company's situation).
OSS does not instantly make a project better than its proprietary alternatives. OpenOffice is alright, but I still use (and pay for) MS Office simply because I feel it is a better product (again, my opinion, YMMV). Having said that, I do use GIMP over Photoshop but that's mostly because Photoshop is so ridiculously overpriced. If it dropped to a reasonable price I might buy it.
No, I am not a Microsoft fanboy, and yes, I do use Linux (for my HTPC and fileserver, at least).
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible
the federal minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 an hour.
only a tiny minority of end users will ever read or write a line of code - or have easy, immediate and affordable access to anyone who does.
vendor lock-in is perfectly possible in FOSS - it only requires a sufficiently resource-intensive project.
a project that demands a continuing investment in money and manpower only the mega-corporate backer like Google can provide.
I've been exploiting your mother's big ass hole for quite some time.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist. Please don't mod me down.)
I write bullshit
>>>That's because with Windows/Mac, programmers write programs for the user. With Linux, programmers write programs for other programmers.
That's about right. I suppose if I handed my Linux laptop to a programmer he could have fixed the 640x480 problem with a little coding, but for average users that's beyond their ability. (And the Netscape ISP Web Accelerator problem was probably unfixable without rewriting Wine.)
BTW I noticed some people marked me "troll".
That's okay. My opinion is MY opinion and is not going to change just because of a few junior high insults.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>So basically you found a bug (in the application, not the OS), didn't actually Google to find out you can move buttons with the "Alt" button
>>>
Ubuntu's not part of the Linux OS? Interesting. I thought it was, but still this "bug" is pretty inexcusable. What kind of shitty testing does Ubuntu have if a user can resize a window to 640x480 and not be able to undo the mistake without digging through a 1000-page manual? What is this? 1985??? Even videogames go through minimal testing to make sure users don't get stuck in inescapable situations (i.e. characters trapped against walls).
Furthermore even if that resizing problem did not exist, I still couldn't get Netscape ISP Web Accelerator software to connect on Linux. Even with Wine it wouldn't run properly because it was not designed for alternative OSes like Linux or Mac. It only likes Windows.
.
>>>started complaining about it Slashdot?
>>>Gotcha. I totally get the +5 Insightful here.
Nice sarcasm. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings by criticizing your love, but I really don't care. A PC is an appliance, not a girlfriend, and if it doesn't work properly with Linux Ubuntu, than I'll choose something else that DOES work. (i.e. The original XP it came with.) Yes I'm being deliberately harsh, because I get tired of dealing with geeks who treat users as if they are worms. If your OS is not user-friendly, take the criticism and FIX IT, don't whine about the stupid user or throw a juvenile temper tantrums.
Yes there are some stupid users, but there are also some stupid programmers as well. It goes both ways.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And here is the typical level of "knowledge" exhibited by Microsoft marketing people:
Stability isn't the only issue. GIMP and Cinelerra under Linux are heaps more stable than Photoshop and Premiere under Windows,
Most likely rest of anti-FOSS comments are written by Microsoft astroturfers like this one. Especially ones that claimed to use Linux and "abandoned" their whole production system over some trivial UI issue.
The only real problem is marketing, the rest is strawmen.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Great, but let's say I'm just a lowly "user". I'm not a developer and not the Israeli government. Now what? Dip into my personal savings, come up with a few hundred thousand dollars to pay a team of developers to make OpenOffice load quickly on my Mac? Or maybe just pay $80 for an iWork license?
I feel like I've had this exact argument before. It's not FUD. FOSS is great in many ways and I use it all the time. But the question was asked, "Why do people try FOSS and go back to proprietary software?"
At least part of the answer is that developers are often paying attention to their own needs (or to their employer's needs) and not necessarily everyday users' needs. To the extent FOSS has made progress in user adoption (and it's made quite a lot, actually), I think it's because you get people like Mark Shuttleworth, who has seems to have put some focus on making Linux prettier and more user-friendly (though I still can't get behind the orange/brown color scheme).
Now if you're a developer, you can very well take the stance that the program is serving your purposes and you don't care about users. Fine, then don't complain about everyone using proprietary alternatives rather than your software.
But if you were to ask how FOSS developers can attract and keep users, my advice to a lot of these projects would be, "Get better at soliciting and responding to feedback." You want to stop people from dropping OpenOffice and buying MS Office? Go ask a bunch of non-technical heavy Office users what they don't like about OpenOffice. You want to get more people to use the GIMP? Go talk to graphic designers ranging from "professional" to "amateur" and see what they have to say about the GIMP; take their responses seriously. If you want to know why people are still buying Soundforge instead of using Audacity for free, then find a way to hunt down some Soundforge customers.
I guarantee you that there are reasons other than FUD. But if you're some random individual person, it's generally going to be easier, cheaper, and less trouble to buy a proprietary alternative than to hire a team of programmers to build you the application you want.
Right, but the point is, the common "lowly user" is equally powerless in each case. They can't rewrite the code, they can't afford to hire someone else to rewrite the code. The issue is, which does what I want/need better fresh out of the box?
Now I'm not saying that won't be OpenOffice. It might be OpenOffice. But if it's not, it's going to be cheaper to buy Office than to pay developers to rewrite OpenOffice for you.
The most you can do in either case to get a change made is to submit feedback and hope for the best. Now I know Microsoft brings "lowly users" into their labs, studies how they use computers, ask for feedback, and use that research in their development. Is OpenOffice doing all that?