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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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: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."?

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.