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Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

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Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#11

Post by kiba »

kaitnieks wrote: post #5

I'll talk about the setup and configuration part. I mean this has been talked about to death but people still don't get it. And lately I'm starting to fear that maybe some people like it. This is especially visible when trying out various new programming languages. I have written exactly one .NET application in my life and I absolutely loved it that I could just downl... I mean buy the Visual Studio, install it and s…

I never have to messed with that. I just sudo pacman -S your-intrepreter-package here.

I never have to download a dedicated IDE for the language. I just grabbed emacs and go along with that. I never have to change configuration files and setting environment for each language.

I never use a debugger, just old fashion println.

Yet, I lived in the world of open source.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#13

Post by tptacek »

mattmcknight wrote: post #6

I think this misses the mark, at least in the enterprise world. What the commercial companies have is huge sales teams- sales personnel that know how to convince people to by their product.

It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime.

In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going through the buying motions, nobody cares. It just sits there. Nobody wants to depend on it, because nobody wrote a check for it, so it doesn't seem real.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#14

Post by halo »

cesare wrote: post #9

You're talking about the average user? It's simple: because they can pirate proprietary software and they always perceive something which has a price tag as more valuable than something which is offered for free. Something which has more (perceived) value but which you can obtain for free will always win against something which is offered for free (and thus is perceived as probably worthless). Sad but true. There are…

I don't buy it.

I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good.

There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software has beat commercial software (most notably in tech areas, such as Apache, or Linux versus other Unix-likes).

I think people should simply face facts: Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#15

Post by natch »

I dumped Linux, although I still use it in the cloud. And rather than saying "dumped" it would be more accurate to say I decided to NOT use a PC laptop with Linux, instead getting a Mac.

Why? Not for any of the reasons mentioned. One of the big things that convinced me was a little thing, the magsafe connector. I've seen laptops slammed down on the floor, and it's not pretty. Endless driver issues were another reason, but the magsafe was the clincher. That alone is worth the price difference.

So sometimes the reasons are not related to software. The larger context matters, including little things in that larger context.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#16

Post by cesare »

halo wrote: post #14
cesare wrote: post #9

You're talking about the average user? It's simple: because they can pirate proprietary software and they always perceive something which has a price tag as more valuable than something which is offered for free. Something which has more (perceived) value but which you can obtain for free will always win against something which is offered for free (and thus is perceived as probably worthless). Sad but true. There are…

I don't buy it. I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good. There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software…

> I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents.

I'm not saying this.

I, for one, prefer Gimp and Inkscape over Photoshop and Illustrator. I have coded my own plugins for Gimp and I write my own scripts (in various languages) to output svg (using Inkscape for additional free hand editing).

But I know that I'm not the average designer/sw user.

Apache and Linux are for tech-savvy users.

> Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.

This is obvious. What I'm saying is that, for most people, the opposite is true, because there's a psychological bias which is independent of technical value, user friendliness etc.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#17

Post by rbanffy »

kaitnieks wrote: post #5

I'll talk about the setup and configuration part. I mean this has been talked about to death but people still don't get it. And lately I'm starting to fear that maybe some people like it. This is especially visible when trying out various new programming languages. I have written exactly one .NET application in my life and I absolutely loved it that I could just downl... I mean buy the Visual Studio, install it and s…

Oh... The simple life of those who choose to have no choice... You just download the official tool set and program in the official languages against the official APIs.

As for the Java-related stuff, installing NetBeans is pretty much a no-brainer. It even comes with its own Java runtimes, if you want it to. And it can work with Java, PHP and Ruby. From phone apps to server apps running on those 1000-core Azul beasts. That's a range Windows can't touch.

Eclipse is a little harder to download (there is a bewildering amount of options) but it's one impressive tool stack and rightfully deserves that compliment people traditionally reserve to Emacs: it's a great operating system, lacking only a decent IDE.

To put it in other way, do you really want to hire a programmer who can't understand/install/adapt/make his own tools? It takes me about 15 minutes to be functional with any *nix box, given a decent network connection. With Windows, I need a little more time, but Cygwin is my friend.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#18

Post by rbanffy »

known wrote: post #4

Even today most Open source apps are developer (not user) friendly.

It's not a matter of friendliness. It's a question of choosing friends carefully.

I have seen proprietary software so friendly it ends up catching the digital equivalent of STDs

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#19

Post by derefr »

kaitnieks wrote: post #3
makecheck wrote: post #2

I think this makes some good points about how projects have trouble reaching users. The fact that people try a program 4 years ago and don't check back since, is particularly true. But I'd add one other big problem for open source: "anti-marketing", in the form of aggregating trolls. I don't have to Google far to find sites that apparently just crawl SourceForge and dig up whatever crap they can automatically generat…

These things can be fixed by automatic check for updates and preferably seamless automatic update, but the problem is that people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates. People don't like when they're asked too much questions ("Do you want to check for updates?" - Yes - "Do you want to download update?" - Yes - "Do you want to update now" - ffs just do it!) and they don't like if program does this…

You fix it by giving Windows and OS X package management. It's not something one app provider can do (well, maybe Apple could bundle it with iTunes...)

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#20

Post by dasil003 »

tptacek wrote: post #13
mattmcknight wrote: post #6

I think this misses the mark, at least in the enterprise world. What the commercial companies have is huge sales teams- sales personnel that know how to convince people to by their product.

It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime. In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going throu…

It's so true. In order to evaluate open source software you have to have someone competent set it up. However with a software vendor they can provide a demo and you can have different key levels of management evaluate it.

I think the problem is one of expertise and motivation. A software vendor will necessarily be an expert in their own product, and they have a huge incentive to sell it. Internal IT staff are not going to be expert in some random open source package. Their expertise is going to be domain knowledge, and their interest is just to make sure things are working smoothly. In theory they would prefer better quality open source software, but in practice they need someone on the hook to blame when things go wrong just as the brass does.

I think this could be changed though. If a corporation had the mindset that they wanted their IT to be a competitive advantage, recruited and paid accordingly, I think a large corporation could mop the floor using the right mix of proprietary and open source.

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