Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by flogic » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 8:29 PM UTC

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…

Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 8:32 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #11

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.

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by silentbicycle » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 8:37 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #11

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.

You missed the part about deployment, though. Most users aren't going to install Python (or whatever) for you, and that complicates things.

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

#24

Post by arohner » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 8:45 PM UTC

smokinn wrote: post #7

kaitnieks wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates Really? Where does that come from? Because one of the things I love most about running Ubuntu is that everything just stays up to date on its own. I'm always very wary of installing something myself and will nearly always take the apt-get route unless I really need that very latest feature. Whenever I evangelize running linux, (which is very rarely) th…

There's one other benefit of Ubuntu that is worth pointing out: there's only one source of automatic updates. The auto updates on OSX and windows drive me nuts because every app has their own updater with their own UI and their own preference for whether and when and how to update.

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

#25

Post by pyre » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 8:59 PM UTC

natch wrote: post #15

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…

How did MagSafe -- a hardware feature -- convince you to switch to OS X? Plenty of people run Linux on Apple hardware. Not to discount your decision, but MagSafe wasn't really the deciding factor.

> Endless driver issues were another reason

Really? Not to discount your problems, but if you choose your hardware wisely there aren't that many problems. That said, a lot of 'driver issues' are to blame on the manufacturer (i.e. NVIDIA sometimes has massive drive issues even on Windows; back in the 90's ATI was know for their atrocious driver support on Windows).

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

#26

Post by kiba » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 9:06 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #23

kiba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You missed the part about deployment, though. Most users aren't going to install Python (or whatever) for you, and that complicates things.

You can make a window executable with py2exe.

http://py2exe.org

Really, everything is going to be pain on window in comparsion to Linux. Since linux was orginally made for programmers by programmers, life is going to be a piece of cake.

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

#27

Post by tptacek » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 9:20 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #20

tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goi…

I really think the problem is simpler than that; in most enterprises, I think there's literally a company neurotransmitter that doesn't get activated until someone has to cut a check. Until your project gets JBoss-big --- hell, even after that --- nothing you do is going to get open source taken seriously.

I base this in part on a number of friends who have hugely successful open source deployments in their companies (BSD/pf firewalls, for instance), and who are locked in a constant struggle to keep those deployments from getting "upgraded" to "real software".

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

#28

Post by silentbicycle » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 9:24 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #26

silentbicycle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part about deployment, though. Most users aren't going to install Python (or whatever) for you, and that complicates things.

You can make a window executable with py2exe. http://py2exe.org Really, everything is going to be pain on window in comparsion to Linux. Since linux was orginally made for programmers by programmers, life is going to be a piece of cake.

Ah, yes, sunshine and lollipops. Like configuring sendmail. :)

I use (and really like) OpenBSD, actually, but the point that the article is trying to make is that while open-source users usually tolerate a fair amount of configuration, spotty documentation, etc., those problems can sit ignored in plain view, and people trying out open source stuff may get the first impression that it's incredibly rickety. (And in some cases, they're probably right.) Tedious detail-work such as setting up a smooth installer is very important, particularly for people who aren't themselves programmers.

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

#29

Post by jfarmer » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 9:42 PM UTC

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…

My experience was the opposite. I started programming with C and Perl. How are you supposed to do that on Windows?

Setting up the system to be able to run compiler commands from the command line is very hard on Windows.

On Mac/Linux/UNIX you get that all for free, out of the box, and every tutorial on the web makes sense. With MS it's always some crazy proprietary thing that is hard to find good documentation for (at least it was ~10 years ago, when I was starting to program).

I never got serious about programming until I switched to Linux (I use a Mac, now) because it was just too hard to get started on Windows.

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

#30

Post by joe_the_user » Sat, Sep 12, 2009, 9:45 PM UTC

mullr wrote: post #8

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…

But there's a catch, isn't there? There's always a catch. At work (Big Company TM), we call it the "MS Happy Path." If you're on it, you're golden and life is good. The overall development experience is great. If you're not, well, sucks to be you. With the other choices you probably have a way out. Even if there's no scaffolding for you, you can at least implement something yourself. Granted it takes more time up fro…

Wow,

This is the first time I've heard anyone else describe the happy-path phenomena, yet I previously talked about it any time anyone ever asked about the goodness of MS software.

I'd also mention that the Happy Path is also a verbose path. I recently looked at a C# application and a C++ application that each did about the same thing. I was amazed to find the C# app had least ten times the source code. Moreover, the C# app seemed to be coded in the proper C# way and worked generally well. The main thing is that the problems that it did have (memory leaks) were utterly, irrevocably, totally, completely unsolvable...

So there are trade-offs in all these things that are very "unobvious"...