Slashdot Mirror
Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
Certainly some software might lacks polish, but the conclusion that if they didn't adapt in ONE day the software isn't as efficient.. that's really quite flawed uh.
In theory, that information would be very useful to the developers. In practice, it would have no value whatsover. The developers would do one of the following: a) ignore it b) ask for a patch c) treat the suggestions as a personal attack and launch a flamewar. Open source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
So, staff at The Saratogian have used Windows software for years and years and years. They moved to Linux for a day and found that things were different, and "different" was hard to learn. Why am I not surprised?
Here's what they said in TFA:
That sure sounds hard. Tackett had to spend days to reproduce templates and layouts that have been built up over years. Yes, doing that kind of work would be hard for anyone. I give this guy huge credit for accomplishing it. But I also give kudos out to Scribus for being able to support it.
You know, moving from one environment that you know really well to one that you don't - it's always hard. We Linux users have trouble, too, moving from Linux to Windows. Don't believe me? I did it for my work, and I'm constantly finding things in Windows that "just don't work right" or "work stupidly".
Linux is just easier for me. But I've been using Linux at home since 1993, and running Linux at work since 2002. Until 2009, that is, when I was "asked" to move to Windows for work.
This whole "move to Linux in a day" thing is a neat "publicity stunt within the journalism industry" (their words) but migrating in that short a time is very very hard to do. If you're going to move an organization to Linux, there are ways to do it so you won't stress your users too much.
The article mentions Scribus and Google Docs by name but dances around the GIMP, saying only that they used "free software instead of Photoshop." The GIMP's ridiculous name has cost it some valuable media exposure. How can the GIMP expect to be taken seriously by professionals when they don't even feel comfortable using the name?
To me, this is a good example of how free software development being divorced from dependence upon market success is sometimes a bad thing. A proprietary program with a name so bad that professionals avoid using it in print would rapidly be renamed. In fact, the name would probably be developed by a marketing team and focus group tested first to avoid the problem in the first place. But in the free software world the developers are free to stubbornly hold on to a frankly terrible name because there's a much weaker market success feedback loop.
Your post demonstrates another weakness of GIMP: the few knowledgeable and vocal members who publicly treat potential newcomers with distain, but yet wonder why they don't flock to GIMP and its abusive zealots en masse.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.