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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.
For me it really wasn't about the lack of features. It was more on how easy it was to use as program. You have Feature X,Y, and Z on there, but if I have to navigate Menus A, B, C, and D to find that feature then I will not use that program.
... 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. Just yesterday, I was struggling with an Open Source mail server. Having to read separate (and usually incomplete) (not to mention incomprehensible at times) documentation on each component, THEN figure out how it all played together ... just to be honest, I briefly (briefly!) considered telling Corporate that we needed to just bite the bullet and go with an Exchange Server with full support.
Fortunately, I got this one working (again), and it's holding for now. But my #1 complaint is the lack of clear, easy-to-follow documentation. I love F/OSS -- I run Suse at home, and I've fallen head-over-heels for VirtualBox -- but this is my biggest complaint. We have a lot of brilliant coders working in F/OSS. We need to attract some equally-brilliant technical writers to donate time to explain how the stuff works in the real world.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Fonts. The default fonts for OpenOffice look awful. With Pages (word processor on my Mac), my documents look beautiful with no fuss. I don't require a thousand different features, either.
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.
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
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.
Drives me nuts. Try each new version of Calc, no easy "fill down" & its back to Excel. Other than that I use open source apps whenever possible.
It seems the developers have no concern whatsoever to test their new user-interfaces with users who will actually use their software. This causes miscommunication between the developer and the user-base, in turn leading to an alienation of both groups. It is paramount to learn to speak the language of the user, or the boat we want to sail will never land on a coast.
Besides this, I find the lack of clear and uniform documentation a big mishap in modern linux systems.
So, my complaint list:
1. Lack of user-testing
2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation.
3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
6. Too many configuration formats.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
9. KISS principle is broken too many times.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
This is a replacement signature.
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.
If it's open source and *doesn't* have a GUI, it's probably fantastic. My email, programming, backups, version control etc. is all open source and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But as soon as you add a GUI and plug in a monitor, the quality drops away and things start to get iffy. What happened with KDE4, for example, was unacceptable. You can't just dump everything and expect users to accomodate that.
And stability. A lot of open source apps are fantastic but they have rough edges - little bugs and issues. The way media managers like Rhythmbox and Amarok handle an iPod, for example: sometimes I get weird errors about mounting the iPod, or it doesn't behave properly when there's no free space left, and other little issues. They may not be show stoppers, but they're enough to give you a bad impression. The quality just isn't quite there.
And you know what the worst part is? This isn't getting any better. Open source GUIs are about the same quality now as they were a decade ago. Sure they're more capable, but all the rough edges are still there and don't seem to be going away. I've been using desktop Linux since Redhat 5.2 and I can honestly say the standards and general incompleteness, relative to the competition, are about the same today as they were back then.
I still use Linux on my desktop but I'm tempted to buy a Mac next time and use it as a front-end, while keeping all the 'real' stuff on a Linux box. But I don't want to manage two computers if I can help it. Ho hum.
I've dumped proprietary applications for the same reasons people dump open source alternatives.
And there's also the price of a lot of proprietary applications, it's often not worth the improvements I gain.
Chrome is also open source so by this logic it will very likely suffer the same fate and be dumped. Rather than go back to IE I have decided to retire.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
Many of the reasons leveled at open source can also be leveled at commercial software. I've seen more than my fair share of commercial applications that lack features, have critical bugs, and are definitely hard to use. While some of these problems may be surmounted by purchasing additional software or employing the services of a consultant, that is rarely an option for non-revenue generating organizations (never mind most individual users).
So why do people drop it? Lack of familiarity is one big reason. If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology. So if you're familiar with Linux, you'll probably stick to Linux. If you're familiar with Windows, you'll probably stick to Windows. Feel free to substitute Linux with your favorite open source application and Windows with your favorite commercial application. By in large, this barrier will still exist.
If that issues exists for technical people, imagine how hard it is for non-technical people to deal with similar problems. A function that is found in a different place or that works in a slightly different manner will cause a neophyte OpenOffice.org user to throw up their arms in frustration, call the product shit, and head directly back to Word. Many people are completely unwilling to adapt to change in a domain that does not interest them. (I've talked to some of these people, and intellectually they realize that OpenOffice.org is just different and that it would serve all of their needs. But emotionally they view it as a vastly inferior product.)
Sometimes bundling is a reason for adopting commercial products. I'm not talking about the bundling of software that you see with commercial vendors (e.g. the various Adobe suites). Rather I'm talking about the resources that are bundled with that software. When you download the Gimp or Inkscape, you get just the Gimp or just Inkscape. When you buy something like the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you get fonts and clipart that you can use in your projects. When you buy the Microsoft Office Suite you get clipart and templates. Looking at my Linux setup, I have only one or two graphic fonts and no clipart to speak of. Even though I have the standard DTP and graphics software installed under it. Now I don't mind that. Actually I prefer it that way. Yet I can guarantee you that the run of the mill user will throw up their arms in frustration because they expect that stuff.
And the list could go on.
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.
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'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."
Actually, every software is free to normal users!
Either you download and crack it yourself, or you have a friend who does it for yo.
That is the main point free software hasn't taken off, and everybody knows it.
I mean, when instead of Gimp, you can get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=adobe%20master
Then who cares about Gimp?
And instead of OpenOffice, you get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=microsoft+office
I mean, it's obvious.
Oh, and under Linux, the culture is quite different. :)
1. Because not everything runs fine under Wine.
2. The abilities to combine Linux tools into scripts and a mesh, glued together with bash.
Which I absolutely love. I could never go back. I'm officially spoiled.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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?
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.
Even though the documentation for proprietary software can be crap, it is usually light years ahead of what you get for most Freeware/Open Source/Hippieware/Whatever programs.
I hate it when I install something and I get a window with three greyed out menus. Somehow I am supposed to magically know to go edit ~/.korgodi/pyconfig/menus/anabling.cfg to turn them on. And when I look for documentation about this or even a damn README, I get a link to a forum where everyone is too busy arguing the philosophy of tabs vs. spaces for indentation to tell me anything.
I hate writing up the documentation as much as anyone, but your project is not ready to be released until you can give the user a document telling them how to use the stupid thing.
I'll give you a real-time example. I am going to attempt to find the format for conditional execution in gmake. I don't do development on this machine normally, so some fumbling will be necessary.
Step 1: 'man gmake':
What do you mean there's no gmake? I installed the dev package.
Step 2: search for where gmake is.
Let's check synaptic to see where they put it. No gmake in there.
Oh, they called it just plain 'make' in Ubuntu. Of course.
Step 3: 'man make':
Blah blah blah . . . purpose of make . . . startup options . . . damn there are a lot of them . . . THAT'S ALL?!!! . . . Wait, there was a SEE ALSO back there.
See Also The Gnu Make Manual. Oh, of course, I have one of those with me at all times. WHERE IS IT!
Step 4: Google
Type in 'The Gnu Make Manual'. There it is. Ah yes, a webpage with a format circa 1994. ^F conditional . . . See Conditionals. At least it's a link. Reading . . . I had wondered what the definition of the word 'conditional' was. Show me the stupid syntax.
Blah blah blah, examples that no one will ever use . . . oh wait, for once the examples are relatively useful. Okay, that should get me started.
So, that wasn't too bad as was as documentation searches go. But I still had to resort to Google. WRITE THE DAMN MANUAL AND INCLUDE IT. If I type 'progname -h' give me something useful. Put something in the Help menu. No, I don't care what programs you compiled it with.
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
Being free, in cost or in development model, is of little interest to me when I chooise software. I want the best software I can afford, and I can afford more than no cost.
Here's a short list:
1. Lack of attention to interface and usability design. This is not "eye candy". Consider: People think Photoshop is easier to use than Gimp. What does that tell you? (Responses that trash Photoshop users illustrate the problem.)
2. I get the impression that, apart from the corporate funded biggies, many open source projects are staffed by one or two people. That's not confidence-insipiring when I'm looking for software to use for years in the future.
3. Rushed updates often made to conform to an established schedule. If an update needs more time, don't release it.
4. Lack of innovation. Software innovation is really, really hard and no one does it well. However, open source software, more or less by intent, produces many slightly varied iterations of the same code. I.e., forks.
5. Hostile attitude to customers: One of the touted benefits of open source software is access online to developers and other cognoscenti for tech support. Although I suspect it happens with less frequency these days, too many open source users are met with hostile "code it yourself" or "I'm not interested in that..." responses when they ask for help with a problem. Online support forums should not run bugtracking software.That's a developer-only tool.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The problem with open source is the dependency chain becomes brutal. So you turn to a package manager like Yum or Fink to handle all the self consistency and installs, not to mention the updates.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
These package manager while saving you a lot of time on the initial install also couple all your apps together in unneccessary ways, so that updating one can break another. Or worse maybe it won't let you update at all.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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). The commercial alernatives invest in easy-to-use (watered down) configuration utilities that make it easy to set up. Contrast apache (perhaps the best of the FOSS) with IIS. Apache is in many ways a much better program, but the configuration is via a really obscure configuration file--and if you do something wrong you've broken it. ISS has a slick UI with nice dropdowns and checkboxes. MS spent as much effort on the UI as they did on the actual product. This is very different than FOSS.
Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.
I the long run there are probably only a score or so of free software applilications that are substainable. With the exception of these star applications (apache, linux, etc.) the real reason for using FOSS is that it's free. For example, if both MS Office and OO were both free, which would people choose? If they were both $99 (the home/student price of Office) which would they choose. Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
The fact is, in any product, people jump ship to 'something else'. They may jump from OSS to commercial, from commercial to commercial, from commercial to OSS, or OSS to OSS. The OSS aspect of it is a feature for some, but its the total featureset that gets compared. Sometimes, something is just better than something else. An anecdote about some hobbyists 30 minute hack behaving more poorly than a commercial product with man-years of polish behind it is about as useful as comparing some untalented developers get-rich-quick startup software hammered out in a rush for venture capital against a venerable project like Apache.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Mod parent down as offtopic, and then mod this up as funny, so that people with re-parented replies see it attached to something completely unrelated and have their heads explode trying to figure out why on earth they should mod down a perfectly good post !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Why is expecting your wireless nic to work "magic"? Why is not expecting an update for Windows or OS X to break a functioning nic "magic"?
That's all he was expecting - that it works. For him it "just work" on Windows. With Ubuntu he had to do a little bit of work, which he was okay with. Then it broke because of an update. So he fixed it again - he was okay with that. Then it broke because of another update.
Why is that him expecting "magic" from the OS? What kind of odd world do you live in, where you expect to get your socks ruined just because you change the laces in your shoes?
You what to know what would remove almost *all* of the driver problems literally overnight? Make it trivial to visit "nvidia.com", download a blob, type "./setup.pl" and have it install a binary driver. You know, kind of like how Windows or (I assume) OSX does it.
I *dont* blame the vendors for the lack of drivers on linux. I fully blame the kernel developers for their dogmatic refusal to stabalize the driver framework so it allows binary drivers. By "stabalize" I mean create a driver architecture that works across an entire swath of kernel versions. Most vendor supplied drivers seem have this need to be compiled first and thus require the kernel source before they work. That is bullshit. They should just sit around as a blob and work.
But alas, *that* dream will never happen because of some on the fringes of the open source movement close their ears and scream "not pure! not our fault! not pure!". Which is a shame because that single feature would instantly increase linux driver support hundreds of times over.
It *is not* the fault of hardware vendors. It *is* the fault of the kernel--more lightly, it *is the philosophy and culture of linux* that is what holds it back.
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
No, wrong. You didn't read his post carefully (or perhaps beyond the first sentence). He took the time to deal with his non-supported hardware, and then did an update. A normal thing to do. Updating software should --- SHOULD --- first, like people in the medical profession, do no harm. If a user has a particular configuration file tweaked, THE CONFIGURATION SHOULD NOT BE RESET TO DEFAULT. That's just stupid at best, and abusive at worst. He didn't expect magic, he expected reasonable behavior. I experienced the same thing on one of my laptops. I stopped updating after having to fix the configurations for my hardware the third time.
Look at it this way, if you perform a system update, do you expect your personal files to get wiped out and be given a clean home directory just because the filesystem driver got updated? Who would tolerate that?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Much like with racism, people get too hung up over general categories. Its not whether a piece of software is open source, or if it is free. What matters is if the software satisfies the user. The method of distribution, the cost, the license, the openness of the code, the status and quality of documentation, the level of support, the usability, the name, the aesthetics of the user interface, and many other factors all play into a user's satisfaction, and different users will appreciate different things, depending on what they like and their predetermined biases. Anyone looking to choose a piece of software should look into the pros and cons of that software and their budget instead of looking at just its label, open source or commercial.
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 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
Open Source nearly sank my career.
I've been a staunch advocate of OS for quite some time now. I'm the guy who asks the awkward questions at the meeting, like, "Why are we paying 40 grand for a vendor toolchain when GCC is free?"
Well, I found out.
I've spent the last few weeks trying to build a cross compiler on Cygwin. Here's what I went through:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I don't use Adobe products, period. But I can see why some people would get incensed at the GIMP and abandon it. A big part of it is the pace of development on the GIMP project, and another big part of it is the team.
The GIMP developers have, for the past dozen years at least, dismissed all suggestions that they are the de facto competitor to Adobe Photoshop. They are scratching their own itch, not scratching the itch that tens of thousands of graphic artists have, and if you want something in the GIMP, you better write it yourself. (No hint they'll accept your patch, either.) It's taken several years just to find competent developers who can get along with the GIMP project management and still work on CMYK or 16bpc or other important features. Those features are creeping along way beyond schedule, and just getting them onto the schedule took far too long.
I just got a bug-system notification the other day that said they're finally going to support write-protecting layers. Oh, wait, it just says they're laying the groundwork for a padlock icon on the layers menu, they'll get around to doing the actual write-denying behaviors "soon." I submitted that so many years ago that I've lost track.
Not counting nuances, the GIMP is still essentially feature-matched to Adobe Photoshop 5.5, a product that came out in the mid 90s. No wonder they don't want to accept the mantle of competitor.
[
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
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.-
... because making software is time consuming and hardwork and doesn't pay the bills.
The reason commercial software is preferred to free software is that commercial software is still better then free.
That and linux can't run windows apps perfectly, I would move to linux if it
1) had the same shell as say windows xp
2) was faster in performance then windows (i.e. games had higher framerates under linux and there was no bullshit compatability, things "just worked".
The best free software has a lot of great ideas but the problem is that software takes too much work and time from these guys lives without any compensation, they can't compete because
1) They usually over-estimate their coding skills
2) They code for themselves NOT for users
When making any program you're coding for that "motherfucker" the public, therefore you can't make a program for coders, you have to make a program for users, ease of use.
In the early days of video editing software, almost all video editing software was complicated for what joe user needed it for, finally for profit companies came to the rescue, companies like ULEAD for instance.
Take a lot of the pain of video editing out of video editing for the average user who just wants to mash up videos, cut paste, etc.
http://www.ulead.com/
Open source guys obviously don't use or are unaware of how to do things better, when any company or person hits on the "magic user interface formla" you have to copy it and make it even better for the user if there is room for improvement.
The thing is good software design is hard and time consuming for the output you get over time spent, it literally takes years to figure out how to build good software, since developing good software is extremely labour intensive.
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.
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.
The difference is that the wireless card's manufacturer doesn't support linux, and that is something that needs to be researched when changing OS. If you run XP on a MacBook or build a 'Hackintosh' you are going to have to be sure you have supported hardware.
Why should anyone expect different from linux? Just because it very often "Just works" on linux doesn't mean it always has to.
Have you ever installed vanilla XP on a machine and had to hunt down drivers for 10 different devices that are difficult to identify? Windows Update Driver search helps, but not if both the wireless and wired network cards aren't working.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
There is a vocal minority of computer professionals and users who operate off of an ideological model rather than a pragmatic one. They see moral issues where most of us only see an engineering problem. Furthermore they define themselves based upon their attachment to their ideology.
For the rest of us this is silly at best and downright exasperating at worst. Try working with someone who demands that a sub-par solution be used on political grounds and who casts your reluctance to do so as a moral failing, if not evidence of participation in an evil conspiracy of some sort. I really do think that people like that are mentally ill.
I make technological choices on technological grounds. I choose the solution that works best. I don't cloud my judgement with emotionally driven ideologies.
I use (and contribute to) open source products because they usually offer the best value proposition. When they don't, I look elsewhere. It is not wrong to support a proprietary solution. It is not wrong to reward those whose efforts have made your life easier.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Imagine a fork of Open Office,
Okay.
it isn't very likely
Try again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Of course, with the screen down to 640x480 and with a modal dialog up it may be just a little bit hard to back out and search the internet for the mythical command key shortcut you need.
Well, so what? If you don't know about the shortcut, you're no worse off than you're on Windows or Macintosh in the same situation.
Furthermore, on Linux, these kinds of dialogs tend not be modal; modal dialogs locking up the UI are a common misfeature of Windows and Macintosh applications.
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux all have these kinds of problems. The difference is that Linux has a lot more ways in which you can get out of them if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're no worse off than on the other platforms.