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."

Comments

For a day?

[kangsterizer]

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.

Re:For a day?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

EXACTLY!

My companies IT refused to install Visio on my machine (citing some limited licensing issue) so I installed Inkscape todo some vector drawing.
I very quickly picked it up and can do all sorts with it.

That was over 2 years ago. last month IT installed Visio for me since I had some other peoples drawings to edit and DAMN did it take me forever and a day todo some of the simplest stuff SIMPLY because I didn't know the equivelent or the visio way of doing some things. I know visio can do most of it (except equation drawing, sup perfect sinwave :D) because others in hte office use it daily YET I took some time because it was new to me.

Re:For a day?

[calmofthestorm]

I'm a huge FOSS fanboy but I'd rather gouge my eyes out than use the GIMP for even the simplest of tasks.

Re:For a day?

[Darkness404]

Depends on what you are doing and where your past experience lies, myself I'm not a graphics person and before using the GIMP the most advanced image editor I had used was MS paint, so while learning The GIMP was hard, I don't think it would be any harder than learning Photoshop (and paying $200-ish for the privilege).

Re:For a day?

[slim]

I'm a huge FOSS fanboy but I'd rather gouge my eyes out than use the GIMP for even the simplest of tasks.

Really? Why?

I use GIMP any time I need to work with composite images. I've learned how to use it. I'm perfectly happy with it. I am lost in Photoshop, because that's not the interface I've learned.

Re:For a day?

[Animaether]

That depends on what they were doing.

Obviously one shouldn't expect to learn a different application through-and-through in just a day.

On the other hand.. if e.g. Google Docs did not use a bolded B button to turn text bold, like every other application going with that defacto standard, but instead went with a normally-written T - for Thick - which those in the graphics industry might instead think is to insert a text field, I could well-imagine that the learning curve would be much greater than it had to be.

As such, I'm far more interested in -exactly- what problems they faced, rather than the uninformative single-sentence conclusion, and hope that they plan on communicating these problems back to the developers, if not already done so.

Re:For a day?

[uvajed_ekil]

When I was an unexperienced driver at 18 years-old, and had never owned a car, I bought one with the first manual transmission I'd ever touched. The first day was nearly a disaster, stalling repeatedly, lurching and shaking about, and requiring multiple attempts get moving from stops on hills. Simply driving was inefficient and slow (despite the car being a pretty nice old sports car), and required all of my attention. But I got used to it -- so much so that the next four cars I bought also had manual transmissions, and one was a newer, nicer version of that same car. Like the free and open source software mentioned here, manual transmissions take a bit of practice, but they are cheaper and can be at least as efficient (more mpg than older automatics, less maintenance), and being more in control is nice. A one-day test is a nice start, but that is nothing to make a decision on.

Re:For a day?

[jellomizer]

Open Source software has its strong points however it really depends on the target user groups.
Most (Most means more then 1/2, and Not all) Open Source projects have a limited financial funding behind it, and is built with a rather loose organizational structure. So it is really software designed to fill the need of the programmers, others are copies of commercial applications. But there isn't the intervention of the PHB and Marketing and Sales. However these groups that we like to classify as hinderance to your job actually really help the product especially when you are releasing software for non Techies.

Re:For a day?

[slim]

I'd love to hear some examples -- because again, GIMP is all I know.

It seems to me that any functionality and interoperability missing from GIMP could be addressed with Script-Fu

Re:For a day?

[Grond]

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.

Did you read the article? They produced one issue with free software, but they've been working on it for a while. For example, "News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day's pages in a layout program called Scribus." Not all newspaper articles are written within 24 hours of going to print. Many are the product of several days or even weeks of work. The article implies that although only one issue was produced with the free software, it was the product of more than one day's work.

These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.

You're exaggerating. What proprietary newsroom software has kept the same interface for 20 years? Even Photoshop 1.0 was only released exactly 20 years ago, and of course much of the interface has changed and furthermore I'd be surprised if anyone at this paper had been using it in production for 20 years.

Your point that we shouldn't read too much in to the difficulties the paper experienced with free software is valid, but you're overstating the case significantly.

Re:For a day?

[quixote9]

Yeah. The inefficiency is all the software's fault, obviously. The part between the keyboard and the chair always knows how to use anything unfamiliar perfectly the first time.

Re:For a day?

[twidarkling]

Having used both Photoshop and GIMP, on both Windows and Mac platforms, I can tell you that yes, GIMP is harder to learn. I spent more than half an hour in GIMP trying to figure out why, when removing the white to transparency in a picture, it made the whole thing translucent. I still don't know why or how it happened, since all I did was use the "colour to alpha" tool, which is supposed to turn that specific colour to transparent. Also, trying to manipulate text boxes is a bitch and a half.

No, Photoshop's easier, even if it's expensive.

Re:For a day?

[adamdoyle]

GIMP is currently switching projection engines, at which point it will have high-bit level support. I wouldn't dare use it for image creation, however, for photography it handles everything I need. It has layers, a levels dialog, a paint brush and an eraser. For digital darkroom stuff, what else could you possibly need?

Re:For a day?

[grumbel]

Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.

While I agree with that, I have some doubts that their view would have changed a lot if the test would have been done for weeks, month or years. I have used Free Software pretty much exclusively for the last 10+ years and a lot of stuff still just feels broken and/or incomplete, compared to the proprietary stuff I used back then. The reason is simple, professional proprietary software is developed to solve a problems people have, if it is not good enough, it might get overrun by a competing product. Free Software on the other side might start with solving somebodies problem, but after that it often just ends up being stuck in maintenance hell. Nobody goes out to actually analyses what people are using the software for and how it could be improved for that usecase. Either it kind of sort of already fits or people will be stuck with a half finished solution for a long while to come.

See Gimp, that multi-window interface has been an annoyance for what? A decade? Yet we still don't have that fixed. We might get that fixed in the next big release, maybe, but thats 10 years to long. Same with higher color depths, it has been a request feature for ages, even got a fork (FilmGimp/Cinepaint), yet mainline Gimp still can't do it. In the commercial world you might have quite a bit of an issue if you let users wait for ages, yet in the Free Software world that is pretty much standard. The only exceptions to this seems to be the commercial endeavorers like Ubuntu where they actually optimize the software for the user and not just randomly patch along.

Of course, thanks to it being Free Software I can go and patch it myself, but often times that is just not practical.

Re:For a day?

[slim]

It's supported layers for as long as I can remember.

In fact, one objection might be that you can't use it effectively without first understanding layers.

Not sure what you mean by fine control of selections - adjusting a selection can be a bit hit and miss, but I blame that on my working on large images on an underpowered machine.

Re:For a day?

[Lehk228]

the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.

Re:For a day?

[gyrogeerloose]

While I'm told by friends who are designers that Adobe Illustrator is a much more powerful product (and I believe them), I really struggled with it.

Illustrator is much more powerful; unfortunately, it's also a real bitch to learn. Once you do, though, it's amazing what can be done with it beyond plain vector drawing. Being able to apply Photoshop filters to a vector drawing is almost enough to justify the effort to learn it all by itself. Of course, whether or not it justifies Illustrator's ridiculous price is another matter altogether. I'm still using an ancient version (that I know is gonna break one of these days following an OS update) because I can't afford to upgrade to a newer one.

Re:For a day?

[r00t]

when removing the white to transparency in a picture, it made the whole thing translucent. I still don't know why or how it happened, since all I did was use the "colour to alpha" tool, which is supposed to turn that specific colour to transparent.

It is "supposed to"??? Why, because that's what it means in Photoshop?

My expectation would be that the amount of the chosen color is used to determine transparency. In your case (you chose white) only pure black would remain opaque.

I will admit that having both alpha and layer masks is complex, but I'd be surprised if Photoshop didn't have this complexity as well.

I think you'd be better off making a color-based selection, paying attention to the feathering and anti-aliasing options. Better yet, use the magic scissors tool, which is sort of a freehand-select that snaps to edges. Hit the quickmask button to fix any defects, especially if you selected by color and there might be areas of that color within the object you want to keep. Once you have the selection, make that transparent or just invert it and copy the object alone.

Remember that the selection, the alpha channel(s), and the layer mask(s) are all interchangable and invertable. You can move the object outline from one to another.

Re:For a day?

[r00t]

Gimp has all that.

Hint: to run filter tools on masks, you can enable quickmask mode (a toggle button in the corner) or you can convert the mask to/from a regular layer.

Re:For a day?

[grumbel]

the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.

You contradict yourself. If Gimps interface would be perfectly ok, then there wouldn't be a problem in Windows, yet you admit right there that it doesn't work in Windows, therefore its broken.

And no, blaming it on Windows doesn't make the issue go away, implementing on optional MDI way to handle windows in gimp on the other side would and thats what basically every commercial app does.

It is one thing to say "I have no time to fix that", but once you start to go the "Fuck you, I don't care about your problems" route you just give Free Software a bad reputation for no reason.

Re:For a day?

[turbidostato]

"Your example of gimp is hilarious, as it demonstrates exactly what the newspaper concluded."

No, it doesn't. By large.

There's a big (unstated) prejudice in this article which is that there's some magic tidbit in licenses such as they affect the technical merits of a software. As if some code lines were forbidden under GPL but allowed under an EULA or the other way around.

The Gimp is either technically sounded or it isn't with it license having nothing to do with it. The technical abilities of some program reside on its source code, not the distribution license!

You can discuss all day long about Photoshop being better fitted to the task than GIMP or the other way around, that Apache is better fitted than IIS or the other way around, without even mentioning their respective distribution licenses.

Re:For a day?

[PinkyGigglebrain]

Maybe you should check it out again before making disparaging comments about it.

Just last night I was working on a multi-layered composite image for some cover art and it was working great. Not quite sure what you mean by "fine control of selections", with GIMP I can select and position image elements down to 1 pixel resolution without a problem.

Since I've never used Photoshop I'll refrain from making comparisons about it, other than for someone who can't afford it, doesn't want to pirate it or can't run it since they use Linux anyway it might be worth their time try using GIMP.

Re:For a day?

[turbidostato]

"The reason is simple, professional proprietary software is developed to solve a problems people have"

That's wishful thinking. Professional proprietary software is developed to make money, not to solve people's problems. As such, within proprietary software as soon as you can reach your goal (making money) more effectively by locking in customers or lobying with third parties instead of fulfilling users's need, there they'll go.

All of your rant -not to say there are not valid points, goes for some project management objectives that while probably easier to find within open sourced software packages are in fact independent of the distribution license.

There's a lack of market aceptance (on some markets) about paying for development instead of product licenses that explains what you see much better than the distribution license used.

Can you imagine something like "I was about to use a 'for' loop here but oh! since it's going to be GPL'ed I'll use a 'while' instead".

Re:For a day?

[Shinobi]

No, the REAL advantage is that you work natively in RAW, in a non-destructive manner, letting you do proper digital exposure going far beyond anything Levels in Photoshop or GIMP can. Ergo, darkroom work.

Re:For a day?

[grumbel]

goes for some project management objectives that while probably easier to find within open sourced software packages are in fact independent of the distribution license.

The difference is that in a commercial piece of software it is not the developer making the decisions. If the boss says the users demand X, then the programmers will have to implement it in one form or another. With non-commercial Free Software the developer is making the decisions and requests by users are either ignored or even actively blocked. Of course you can have commercial Free Software, as in the Ubuntu/Canonical case, then you can basically have best of both worlds. The problem however is that Ubuntu just can't fix all of the Free Software out there, they don't even have enough man-power to just pack and support it. So yeah, its not the license, its just a development model that is very common in the Free Software world.

Re:For a day?

[Gordonjcp]

Have you filed a bug, or even a request with the development team?

Contrary to what people seem to think, a lot of software isn't developed with ass-backwards misfeatures because that's how the developers like it, they're developed like that because the developers don't know any better. If you tell them what you want, with a couple of good examples of how it *should* work, you'll probably get what you want pretty quickly.

Re:For a day?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

However, how often does a local paper need to work with 20 layer images?

Ask the folks in the advertising department. Probably they regularly do a lot more than resizing new photos. The fact is, professionals prefer PS not because it is "what they know", but because it does what they need. Even excusing the convoluted UI, GIMP *does not* fill the needs of *most* professionals.

Re:For a day?

[Ritchie70]

In the US, it's comparatively rare to see a car (except the very very cheap or the very exotic) that isn't an automatic transmission.

People who don't know how to drive a manual transmission are, for the most part, smart enough to know that they don' t know how. I don't really think we need a law, thanks.

Personally, I haven't driven a manual transmission since 1997 or so (and it was a customer's car while I worked at an auto repair place.) I could probably still do it but it wouldn't be pretty.

My current car is a VW with DSG, which is a computer controlled "manual" transmission, more or less. (No, it isn't a fluid automatic, it has gears and clutches.) I can tell it when to shift if I want but my 10-mile, 30-minute commute is very tiring if I do so.

Re:For a day?

[sortius_nod]

One thing I find highly amusing is their claim that the proprietary software is "efficient, reliable and relatively fast".

Having worked as support in a large media company, I can assure you that the proprietary software is the biggest problem with publishing. The makers are slow to fix any bugs, if they ever do, they don't adhere to any standards (software will output 2.5GB pdfs for a single page, wtf?), and the interfaces are usually throwbacks to the 1990s if you're lucky. There was many a day that the paper almost wasn't published due to this software failing just before deadline. A number of the journalists and reporters took to writing things up in notepad then copy & pasting it into the publishing system as they'd lose their stories continually otherwise.

If you add to this that most of the journalists barely knew how to use a computer, let alone how to use these specialised systems, well, maybe dumping something new on them wasn't ever going to work. Proprietary or otherwise.

A one day "test" isn't exactly a test, it's a toe in the water. The water may be cold, but it doesn't mean you should run screaming from it.

Re:For a day?

[nickspoon]

I knew someone was going to point a case like this out, which is why I said it doesn't always work; yes, this happens. Occasionally there are decisions made by developers which seem stupid to users, perhaps are stupid (in this case it does look to me like the developers made a mistake in ignoring the bug). These cases are, in general, annoying problems faced by a minority of users.

But that doesn't mean that the general ethos is "oh, the user is stupid, the developer knows best". That is largely down to individual developers and - in the case of big projects like Firefox - project managers, who are often developers themselves.

In addition, I think it's a little unfair to apply this only to FOSS projects. If there's a (non-security) issue in Flash, for example, sending an e-mail to Adobe is unlikely to make them fix it. In practice I imagine that commercial consumer software is just as bad, if not worse (given that there is often no public bug-reporting system at all).

Re:For a day?

[forkazoo]

the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.

Except that on X, the interesting Windows Managers we had ten years ago have mostly given way to WM's that have gone out of heir way to be similar to Windows behaviors in many ways in order to be more familiar to people who are used to Windows.

Just because a design decision was 100% correct ten years ago, doesn't mean it can't be re-evaluated today. (P.S. Classic Windows style MDI sucks harder than current GIMP. Don't do that to 'fix' things!)

Re:For a day?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Do not use, or can not use?

Don't *want* to use. Because (at this point in its development) GIMP often does not do what they want, and many find the UI unusable. Things could change, and I would embrace GIMP is it did what I do with PS, and did it well. Adobe is the sole reason I still have a Windows machine (yes, I could get PS for OSX, and may very well do that).

Re:For a day?

[CrashandDie]

Actually, even though I'm quite in favour of manual cars, sports cars are probably the last car you want to have a manual on. Anyone who claims that sports cars (and I mean high end) should come with manuals has never tried to drive a Lamborghini on normal roads or even worse, through Paris.

And no, the Miata isn't a sports car in my mind ;)

I also am very much in favour of not allowing people who learnt to drive an automatic to drive a manual. It's a completely different world. On an automatic, right is forward, left is stop. An ape can do that. Understanding the clutch, and how to use it properly is something which requires many hours of practice and good instructions.

Most European countries will require many hours of driving lessons with an instructor (that is, driving in a special car owned by the company that teaches you to drive, where the instructor also has pedals and can brake, switch gears and whatnot as easily as the student). As I recall, the average number of hours to get a full licence was something like 30 hours driving with an instructor. When you get the piece of paper that allows you to drive, you know how to control your vehicle (even though it doesn't really show with some people).

For Europeans who never got around driving in the US, here's what it's like: zombies. Everyone drives at exactly the same speed. When someone hits the brakes, everyone hits the brakes. Try to imagine being on a relatively large road and having 5 lanes of cars around you. Cars take over from the right, cars merge from lane to lane after indicating for a second, and without looking if it's clear, people go over the speed limit in hordes ("But officer, everyone was speeding!", also, the first rule of driving I heard was "don't go faster than the others, and you'll be fine"), and everything is utterly and completely dumbed down. "Watch out, you may have to get off in about 200 miles, getting closer, just 100 miles, steady there dude. Almost there, just 50 miles to go. OK, get on that dedicated lane, it's just for you. Yes, it goes for 5 miles just to exit the interstate, but we never know, you may miss a big massive gap on your right, they kinda sneak up on you. No, you can't go in that lane anymore now, it's too late. Sorry." This video exemplifies typical american highways.

There are three things though, of which I approve in the US driving style: being able to make a U-turn nearly anywhere (absolutely required considering the configuration of most down-town/suburbia perpendicular roads), being able to take a right turn even though the light is red, and the fact that a pedestrian can cross nearly anywhere, in the middle of a 5 way crossing, or a busy two-way lane, and be absolutely unharmed.

What people need to understand is that "to each his own" driving style makes absolute sense. In the US, you can't go fetch a loaf of bread without a car. You can't go meet up with friends without a car. Every road goes on for decades, and you'll be hard pushed to find a bend on a road. There's a reason why Europeans tend to make fun of Americans for not making cars that can turn, they rarely need to use the steering wheel. Here's an example, I just zoomed in at random. It doesn't make sense to have a manual, because most of the times you just stop at a red light, then accelerate, stop at a red light, accelerate. Rinse and repeat. Most Europeans will freak upon seeing an American highway the first time[1].

Europe, on the other hand, isn't square, at all. There are intricate road scenarios with curvy bends, blind corners, cities with streets so small you have to pull in your side mirrors in order to squeeze through. Again, here is a random example of a European city. There is no logic, hardly any prediction. Y

Re:For a day?

[mevets]

I've only used them on mac + gimp on linux, but from my perspective - which really is I wanted to cut and paste boobies onto a photo I had - I found both of them nearly impossible to use. With GIMP, I did load an image, but what followed that was a bit like an acid trip. Stuff would appear, disappear, change on its own. It was intriguing for a while, but like when that little bouncing ball reaches the corner of the TV, I lost interest.

Photoshop was different, at one point I'm pretty sure I had 50 copies of the image in little icons bordering the playing field, and a corresponding array of little tools that I could use to play with my images, if only I could convince it to let me actually do something with one of them. At one point, I thought I had, but it turned out I made the image my screensaver. It took me far less time to accomplish nothing in Photoshop than in GIMP, so Adobe deserve some credit for making it less trippy and more annoying.

Eventually, I printed both images, and with an x-acto knife, glue and a scanner, got the desired result. Didn't take nearly as long, and would have been much cheaper but for the gouges in the dining room table.

Re:For a day?

[radarsat1]

Being able to apply Photoshop filters to a vector drawing is almost enough to justify the effort to learn it all by itself

You can do that in Inkscape. At least in version 0.47 included in Ubuntu 10.04. Check the "Filter" menu.

Re:For a day?

[Draek]

No, Photoshop's easier, even if it's expensive.

*Technically* true, but your phrasing implies that Photoshop is in any way, shape or form what a sane person would consider "easy". A better way to phrase your statement would be "No, Photoshop's slightly less nightmarish, even if it's expensive".

Photoshop is a prime example of what happens when your Marketing department gets to make the engineering decisions for you, it's a program that tries to do a hundred things and does all of them badly, something that's painfully evident in its whole interface. The GIMP is worse these days, yes, but that's because they took a... perhaps not "good", but at least "workable" interface then caved in to the hundreds of morons who asked it to be more like Photoshop, managing to create something that's even more convoluted than the program it tried to imitate.

I'm an amateur photographer, not a designer (either web, print or any other media), I'm not a graphic artist, I'm not a painter, videographer or any of the hundred other markets Photoshop tries to cater to, so my experience certainly won't be universal. But for me, I'd much rather have a specialized tool such as RawTherapee, LightZone or even Adobe's own Lightroom and do all the "adjustment for web" with ImageMagick than deal with either of those attrocities.

Re:For a day?

[Draek]

Since you've barely used propietary software for ten years, let me tell you: it's the same thing. Windows' terrible CLI, something that's been bothering admins and power users since at least Windows 2000 has only now been somewhat addressed with 7's PowerShell. And let us not talk of the wait we had to get proper, usable PNG support in IE, and I fear if it weren't for Firefox et al we'd still be waiting.

It's cute, this idea of yours that the commercial world is like one of those wildlife docummentaries you see on cable, where only the best survives and the mediocre dies a bloody death in the hands of their superior brethren, but reality just doesn't work that way. The smaller guys cut corners to lower costs and compete on price, the big guys make mediocre products because, hell! you ain't switching to the smaller guys anyways and we both know it, and those in between somehow manage to have the problems of both smaller dev houses and the big guys at the same time.

In fact, I'd say on average the F/OSS ecosystem is better, even, as you need at least some degree of love and interest in the subject matter to start a particular project, which means you'll be more willing to spend your time in it even if your idea doesn't prove as successful as you originally thought it was. While in the commercial world, "not as successful" is "not as many potential buyers" is "won't make as much money" is "we'd be better off investing elsewhere" is "stop wasting time in that money sink and get to work elsewhere!", which ain't pleasant when you're one of the few that *was* intersted in the idea in the first place.

Re:For a day?

[Myrimos]

In the US, it's comparatively rare to see a car (except the very very cheap or the very exotic) that isn't an automatic transmission.

A quick google search suggests that 16 percent of cars in the US are sold with manual transmissions. I'm not convinced this is "comparatively rare."

Re:For a day?

[teh kurisu]

Not unless the experienced manual driver had either a very stiff clutch or a very slack brake pedal, because they should feel completely different. Applying pressure to the brake pedal as if it were a clutch shouldn't be enough to put the car into a skid.

Re:For a day?

[mpe]

When I was an unexperienced driver at 18 years-old, and had never owned a car, I bought one with the first manual transmission I'd ever touched. The first day was nearly a disaster, stalling repeatedly, lurching and shaking about, and requiring multiple attempts get moving from stops on hills. Simply driving was inefficient and slow (despite the car being a pretty nice old sports car), and required all of my attention. But I got used to it -- so much so that the next four cars I bought also had manual transmissions, and one was a newer, nicer version of that same car. Like the free and open source software mentioned here, manual transmissions take a bit of practice, but they are cheaper and can be at least as efficient (more mpg than older automatics, less maintenance), and being more in control is nice.

In the case of older automatics you typically have 3 forward gear ratios as opposed to 4 or 5 in a similar manual car.
In some places passing a driving test in an automatic means that you can only drive an automatic. Whereas someone who passes a test in a manual can drive either a manual or automatic.

Re:For a day?

[tehcyder]

People who don't know how to drive a manual transmission are, for the most part, smart enough to know that they don' t know how. I don't really think we need a law, thanks.

The point is, as it's obviously easier to pass the test in an automatic, you need to differentiate those who can use a manual from those who can't, or otherwise every idiot would pass the easier test in an automatic, and never get to learn how to use a manual properly, even though in the UK that's much more likely to be what you'd end up driving.

If in the US almost all cars are automatic anyway, any law would indeed be unnecessary.

Learning curve

[commodore64_love]

I bet if they switched from their Windows software to a Mac OS software, they'd experience similar results. It's inevitable that when you jump from one style to another style, you'll experience some slowdown in the work.

Re:Learning curve

[AnswerIs42]

Nope, not that much of a difference between mac and PC versions of Desktop publishing software. I use both nightly at work... and I work at a newspaper.

Really though, news rooms should not even touch all of that stuff.. they write the articles and the editor places them in the document, final document gets sent to me where I do my voodoo and make 4 color post script files and PDFs and generate plates for the presses.

Could be useful as well as interesting

[jd]

If the reporters wrote up the specific problems they were finding (such as what was slow, what was particularly difficult, etc) and submitted them to the developers, the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from. Sure, some of the issues will be ones of "X doesn't work the way Microsoft does it" - annoyances that slow adoption rates but not really bugs per-se. But there will likely be other comments along the lines of "in reporting, it would be very useful to do Y", or "as an editor, back in the cut-and-paste days I could do Z but this is so hard to do in software" - things neither FLOSS nor commercial WP/DTP does well, that FLOSS could potentially overtake on.

Re:Could be useful as well as interesting

[Shinobi]

Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself, despite him not being a programmer at all, just an advanced hobby photographer. He spent almost a week laying out what, how and why, writing a couple of pages of structured and well-described suggestions.

Re:Could be useful as well as interesting

[braeldiil]

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.

Re:Could be useful as well as interesting

[ScrewMaster]

Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself, despite him not being a programmer at all, just an advanced hobby photographer. He spent almost a week laying out what, how and why, writing a couple of pages of structured and well-described suggestions.

I don't find that hard to believe at all. The thing is, if you're a programmer working in the software department of a larger organization, you will have other people whose job it is to find out what customers need. That information is ideally codified into reasonably detailed specs and passed on to the software engineering staff.

Your typical small software house or open-source project doesn't have that luxury: developers usually are required to deal with end-users directly, and depending upon their personalities (and general level of professionalism) that may not work very well. True professionals in any field try their best to leave their egos at home, and when they get to work accept that there might be a better way of doing things. In a word, openmindedness. It's especially important when it comes to user-interface design: it truly does not matter how great a solution you feel you've created if your users think it sucks. When that happens, you go back to the drawing board and figure out something better. But the first step in that process is an admission that you're not perfect, and that your work can, in fact, be improved upon.

Re:Could be useful as well as interesting

[ddt]

For future reference, suggestions are better received when they come with funding to write them, even if the pay is very modest.

Googled Docs

[knifeyspooney]

FTFA:
...and the reporters have filed their stories in Googled Docs instead of Microsoft Word.

I guess they meant they used free-as-in-beer software for that edition -- or whatever Googled Docs are. (Perhaps you get them when you type TheGoogle into a Word document?)

Google Docs != F/OSS

[ronocdh]

FTA:

the reporters have filed their stories in Googled Docs instead of Microsoft Word.

Since when is Google Docs considered free and/or open source software? I thought most of the free software movement agreed that cloud-based solutions were a big threat to software freedom. RMS must be rolling in his—er, make that Ben Franklin....

Re:Google Docs != F/OSS

[slim]

Great, I'll just go and make my fork...

Summary inaccuracy

[PrecambrianRabbit]

While the summary states that they used free and open source software, the article only states that they used free software. Their writers used Google Docs, which is free but not open source, instead of Microsoft Word.

Moving to other software

[kge]

When we moved at our office from one ERP system (novell based) to another (SCO unix based ha!) we too cursed and yelled at it first. After using the program for a year we got the hang of it. Some years ago the system was moved to (Suse) Linux (at my advisal) and now we would not know what to do without it.
When I decided to go from the Atari ST to PC in 1994 I had the choice of Windows, OS2 and something called Linux.. I switched to Linux and have not regretted it. Now at the office we run some Windows only stuff on Windows Xp in Virtualbox instead of native, almost all computers are converted to Linux. No one complains about lack of features. Open office does the job nicely, Firefox is standard issue and Thunderbird is our mailclient of choice.
You can not expect people to switch systems in a day without hiccups but people will adapt.

Sounds lame but

[CODiNE]

They proved a newspaper can successfully be made using only F/OSS. One day? Imagine one year with a programmer or two tweaking the software to work just how they want it. It could blow away the existing stuff and enable a resurgence in amateur newspapers.

Re:Sounds lame but

[JustinOpinion]

One day?

I believe the transition took longer than a day; but they only used the 'alternate free workflow' for a day.

My evidence is that in the article they say:

News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.

(Emphasis added.) Also in the video at about 0:18 the narrator says:

Paul Tackett, our newseditor. He's been our Scribus hero of the week. Our Ben Franklin man of the week. Man of the month, really. Putting together the paper on, um, learning a new software; putting together basically the whole paper.

(Emphasis added.) It sounds like they've been working for nearly a month, behind the scenes, to make the transition possible. It's still impressive, of course, since replicating an existing layout and workflow is difficult even when all the software works perfectly. But this certainly wasn't just one day's worth of work.

Classified ad paper

[innocent_white_lamb]

I set up the computers and provide technical support for a small publishing company that prints two weekly classified ad papers (place your classified ads for free, the paper is sold at gas stations and convenience stores); about 15,000 physical papers are printed weekly. Plus there is an online subscription available for people to purchase
 
    The software is a combination of stuff that I wrote myself (the ad database, the program to create the plates for the press, etc) and Scribus, Gimp, and OpenOffice. LTSP is used to support thin client terminals for the staff that enter the ads into the database. Apache and sendmail for their web/email server.
 
The whole operation runs on Centos 5.
 
No worries about Windows viruses and everyting runs on automatic pilot as far as I'm concerned, most of the time.

clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[SuperBanana]

These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.

Decades? Quark Xpress, one of the more popular packages, fell out of favor after just over a decade and changed considerably with each release. Adobe CS (along with Quark's lethargy in going to Mac OS X, insane software license activation, and always-buggy releases) drove Quark virtually out of business; they've barely survived. CS's UI was completely different, but people still loved using it.

And you do realize that Adobe CS is updated almost yearly, right? The interface is *mostly* the same, but things do change- a lot of new technology is introduced.

Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day

Wrong, actually. You think a bunch of professionals in a production environment did it with no preparation whatsoever? Wrong. If you read the original article, they did it first for ONE, WEEKLY publication. Then did it for ONE *daily*. Then they did it for all the papers at once.

Sorry, but I've used inDesign to public a monthly 30+ page newsletter, and tried to use Scribus because the organization couldn't really afford CS. There's no comparison whatsoever. Why? Well, it probably has something to do with Adobe spending quite a bit of effort working with their users and doing everything possible to make the software do what the users want.

Like it or not, the open-source community has proven to be relatively horrible at listening to its user base; half the time, you're told "if you don't like it, fix it yourself." Can you imagine getting that kind of response at a restaurant when your steak is undercooked? At your mechanic's when he says "that rattle, it's not harming anything"? You may like to tinker. Much of the world just wants something intuitive and that WORKS.

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[PitaBred]

If the rest of the world wants to pay the developers to build that software, I'm certain that many would jump at the chance. The fact is, people get something for free and then they bitch when it doesn't do everything they think it should do, because it's never been something important to the developers.

Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[TheGreek]

If the rest of the world wants to pay the developers to build that software, I'm certain that many would jump at the chance. The fact is, people get something for free and then they bitch when it doesn't do everything they think it should do, because it's never been something important to the developers.

Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?

That would depend on whether or not I'm telling passers-by that they're schmucks for shopping for food at supermarkets instead of growing their own free food.

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[GlassHeart]

No, they bitch because some advocates told them that free alternatives are just as good or better.

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?

That depends. Before he does that, are a bunch of people running around telling everybody to stop eating their store bought groceries and to eat from my garden instead?

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[the_womble]

Like it or not, the open-source community has proven to be relatively horrible at listening to its user base; half the time, you're told "if you don't like it, fix it yourself."

I was taking you quite seriously until I got to that.

Do proprietary software vendors always add every feature you request? Open source developers, like proprietary developers, MAY act on feature requests if they think its worth doing. Open source gives you the additional option of fixing it yourself, or paying someone to do it.

A good many open source developers will also be willing to to add features they think are unnecessary if you are willing to pay for it - do Adobe give you that option?

The restaurant analogy is completely broken: open source gives you the choice of no-payment but you take what you are given (e.g. like being invited to dinner) or you can pay the developers (then your restaurant analogy almost works).

Open source is not going to work as a cheapskate version of a proprietary product. You should use it because your prefer it, or because you want to avoid vendor lock-in, etc.

Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry

[the_womble]

The problem is that the FOSS alternatives are often better - I would say usually better for commonly used apps.

The problem is that they are not better for every single app from the point of view of every single user. I do not view that as a problem.

For my usage open source is usually superior, with the exception of Excel for really big spreadsheets (even that is not really something I do any more either) and spreadsheet graphs. That is well worth putting up for, for the advantages of FOSS:

1) Linux had had repositories for years, MS might add an app store to Win 8.
2) Firefox is hugely better than IE, especially given the extensions available.
3) Lyx is the best way I know to write nice looking documents quickly, and Latex is good for more complex stuff (I have in mind things that would NOT be easy in word, and would probably involve writing stuff in VBA).
4) Okular is faster and has a better UI than Acrobat Reader
5) Kate is an amazingly good text editor.
6) Qood Libet music manager has a people column (so you can browse composers and performers at once in an unclutters UI), edits info on the files themselves (so if you add a missing composer label and copy the file to another device its still corrected), and generally does things write
7) Linux has multiple desktops to organise my work. Windows does not.
6) KDE is hugely customisable: being able to set things up to suit myself helps productivity, and makes the best use of screen space on my laptop. The desktop UI I have is far superior to Windows cramming everything onto one bar or the MacOS equivalent which always seems to end up incredibly cluttered.
7) The remaing apps I use regularly (Sylpheed, Akregator) do what I want reliably and simply.
8) Pulse audio lets me play two streams at once, and move them between sound cards. Kids can listen to a story while I listen to music, for example.

Linux users have a hard time with Windows too

[Jim Hall]

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:

News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day's pages in a layout program called Scribus. ... For today's print edition, Tackett has duplicated the familiar components of The Saratogian from scratch, with the goal being that you won't know the difference between the look of today's paper and tomorrow's. ...

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.

Surprised they even got out!

[telso]

For today's print edition, Tackett has duplicated the familiar components of The Saratogian from scratch, with the goal being that you won't know the difference between the look of today's paper and tomorrow's. Likewise, photographers Erica Miller and Ed Burke have used free software instead of Photoshop for their pictures, and the reporters have filed their stories in Googled Docs instead of Microsoft Word. Online Editor Steve Shoemaker is posting video and stories to a free website, in addition to the regular site at saratogian.com.

Considering how much needs to be done in such a short amount of time, newspapers tend to use massive collections of templates and integrated scripts if it will save even a few minutes during a production night. Even if the new templates and scripts were prepared in advance (bug-free and fully-featured, I'm sure), those doing layout would be put at an incredible disadvantage, even if they knew how to use the new programs at the same technical proficiency as their current ones (which I'm guessing they didn't).

A copy editor (who spends most of his job laying out a paper, not finding typos, despite his title) at the Montreal Gazette, a daily in a large city, describes transitioning from QuarkXPress to InDesign over a month or so, in stages, with certain staff and sections learning how to use the new system each week. Anyone who thinks trying new specialized software for one day will result in anything other than total chaos is kidding themselves. ("Hey, we switched from Drupal to Joomla for one day and it was much less efficient and took a lot more time.")

Also, the headline and summary are not completely correct: the paper used free (as in beer) software, some of which was libre and open source, some of which was not (Google Docs, likely the video site).

More evidence GIMP needs a name change

[Grond]

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.

Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change

[FoolishOwl]

Too true. The name GIMP is outright offensive. When I've mentioned it in conversation to non-FLOSS people, I've usually felt a need to apologize for the name. I'd guess that some organizations would be concerned about legal trouble -- discriminating against the disabled is illegal (in the US, anyway), and using "gimp" out of context might be interpreted as discriminatory.

Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change

[FoolishOwl]

Come to think of it, I wonder if this is part of the reason Canonical has dropped GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation.

Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change

[agnosticnixie]

Yes, why are those people so easily offended. I mean, they don't even want to use the Batch inspection tool chain and history or the Natural illumination gyrating grid enhancer restorer extensions.

Sidenote: the complaint has also been put up on the mailing lists by people who contribute, it led to flame wars and edgy "why so PC" by other oblivious twits with the maturity of 12 year olds.

Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change

[Grond]

This is BS. You don't actually mind the name, just THE ACRONYM. Any reason you're FORCED to use the most common abbreviated name instead of forming one of your own, or worse, USING THE FULL NAME?

Don't want to say "gimp"? Fine. So call it IMP, GNU-IMP, Image MP, etc. If the name bothered anyone all that much, they'd just use CinePaint instead.

Except when I want to point people to the homepage, gimp.org. Or when they launch the program and see GIMP in giant letters on the splash screen. And in their dock/taskbar. And their task switcher. And the titles of books written about it. And all over the Wikipedia page. Face it: GIMP is the de facto name of the program. If individuals try to call it something else, it will only lead to confusion, and a name change is too minor an issue to make an effective fork. Change needs to come from the project leaders recognizing that it's a stupid, counter-productive name that costs the project respect and marketshare.

I barely use it

[YesIAmAScript]

But I find horrifying problems every time I try.

Make an image with two layers. Set one to 50% transparency and put it top. Now try to move one on top of the other and resize it to line up a few points in the images. I for example was trying to line up the wheels in two car silhouettes.

In the GIMP, the layer you made 50% transparent turns opaque while you try to resize it, so you can't see how to line up the layers. What a mess.

I went home later and did it in Photoshop CS3 (that own, but only at home) and it worked fine, remained transparent during resize.

I know it's free and all, but if you make your living doing image editing, the GIMP is absolutely no substitute for Photoshop. You'll easily waste more money in labor than you saved not by buying Photoshop.

Re:I barely use it

[pjt33]

Works for me in GIMP (2.6.8 on Linux with nVidia closed-source drivers). I'm sure I remember it working in earlier versions too, because I've done just this for years.

Re:I barely use it

[YesIAmAScript]

I set the layer opacity to 50%.

You're saying there's another opacity slider that overrides the layer opacity during a resize?

Well, that's interesting to know. I'm not at all sure why I was supposed to guess that. I would presume that a layer when being resized would be no more opaque than it is when it isn't being resized.

Re:I barely use it

[Magic5Ball]

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.

Re:I barely use it

[TheGothicGuardian]

In the GIMP, the layer you made 50% transparent turns opaque while you try to resize it, so you can't see how to line up the layers. What a mess.

You simply did not utilize the many settings that are directly presented to you in the toolbox when you select the scale tool. There's an opacity slider so you can set the transparency to whatever you want.

Re:I barely use it

[arose]

Let me link to a comment in response to a UI complaint about Photoshop.

Can we drop the double standard that GIMP has to be magically intuitive?

Re:I barely use it

[JohnBailey]

I set the layer opacity to 50%.

You're saying there's another opacity slider that overrides the layer opacity during a resize?

Yes. If you look at the tool pallet the bottom section often has quite a few fine controls there. In the case of layer resize, the option to make it use a given degree of transparency is there. I didn't know about it myself up until a few minutes ago. But layer scaling isn't a tool I often use.

If you think about it a little.. There are drawbacks to having the layer go transparent by default too. If instead of a fully occupied layer, the layer you want to resize just contains an already cut out image on a transparent background, or some text, do you really want that to go transparent as you resize? And can you make the resize go opaque in Photoshop independent of the layer opacity.

Well, that's interesting to know. I'm not at all sure why I was supposed to guess that. I would presume that a layer when being resized would be no more opaque than it is when it isn't being resized.

You're not really supposed to guess. You are supposed to learn the way the program works if you want to use it to it's fullest extent.. This applies to every program on every OS. And a second tool is always harder if you are trying to make it work like the first one.

Photoshop is not that straightforward either, despite the cries of how intuitive it is. It's familiar. That's all. In Photoshop (from vague memory) Some modifiers appear on the top of the window. Easy to miss. As easy as the missed opacity slider that you missed.

A friend of mine was having problems getting the cropping tool to allow him to make the crop he wanted in Photoshop. He didn't notice the aspect ratio was defaulting to a specific fixed one, and he wanted to do a freehand crop.

To echo your point.. Why should he be expected to guess the check box need to be unchecked?

Re:I barely use it

[Registered Coward v2]

Let me link to a comment in response to a UI complaint about Photoshop.

Can we drop the double standard that GIMP has to be magically intuitive?

Well, if GIMP ever is to advance beyond a dedicated group of diehard users it needs to be much easier to use = and an intuitive UI goes a long way to doing that. To paraphrase - "the bitterness of hard to use lasts long after the sweetness of free is forgotten."

rename it

[YesIAmAScript]

The name The GIMP is ridiculous. It should be called Ogg GIMP. That'll fix it right up.

Re:In honor of July 4th and Ben Franklin?

[game kid]

You philistine. Haven't you seen his saying, "They who can give up OpenOffice to obtain a 30-day Word trial, deserve neither OpenOffice nor a Word trial."?

Paul Revere and William Dawes - I'm too tired

[Locutus]

This made me wonder what it would be like now if Paul Revere and or William Dawes had said, after a short ride, 'this is hard and hurts my butt. My throat hurts from yelling so much so thanks but no thanks. I'm done with this freedom stuff.".

Or how about if the citizens decided it would be easier to just stay home instead of risking life and limb, and many giving up their lives, instead of fighting the British army.

Life can be difficult but you almost never get anywhere without change or some effort.

LoB

It isn't just using the packages!

[whizbang77045]

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but it takes me quite a bit of time just to find the right software package. I have to look at what's available, what each is intended to do, then dry run the candidates.

I wonder if that was done in this instance, before using the package(s) for a single day, and deciding they lacked merit.

Probably mostly insignificant

[sznupi]

Look at many places where familiarity with such nuances of EN is practically nonexistant. GIMP is still barely used.

Build own open source

[devent]

Why aren't newspaper come together and build or enhance an open source software, just for the need of the newspaper industry? Like Google is doing with Android, car manufactures doing with Linux, supercomputer engineers doing with Linux, etc.

The license should be GPL so nobody can just take the work and get an advantage over the other. But if then every newspaper pay the developers the costs should be just a small fraction to the costs they need to pay now.

It's like with Linux, where a lot of companies are paying the developers, but the cost per company remains very small, comparing to paying for licenses or build an own operation system.