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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

#31

Post by joe_the_user »

jfarmer wrote: post #29
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…

I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms.

Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is complaining about Linux having. I can navigate files with vi but has always been the least intuitive system I could imagine, like brainfuck but not a joke.

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

#32

Post by omouse »

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.

That's not a problem, you just bundle it together. Java applications and PC games have done that for years.

The only tricky part is that developers constantly complain about downloading some new programming language just to run a program. Guys...it's the year 2009. You can buy a terabyte hard-drive for a few hundred bucks and your 'net connection isn't that slow anymore.

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

#33

Post by omouse »

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…

I assume you're talking about noncommercial free/open source software.

I imagine it's very easy to deal with Red Hat, the PostgreSQL company, SUN/Oracle (who the hell owns MySQL??), etc. They all have sales teams and purchasing departments and all that jazz.

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

#34

Post by omouse »

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…

Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial.

Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.

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

#35

Post by kiba »

silentbicycle wrote: post #28
kiba wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

I am not sure what is your point. The fact that tedious work is left around is in fact due to the lack of incentives for open source developers, not any instristic structure of open source itself.

Lot of them are non-profit, so of course they don't even try that hard. What do you expect, hard core ass kicking software?

Sometime, you will find hard core ass kicking software.

I still remember fanastic open source games like battle for wesnoth that are easy to install on window, and even more so on linux with pacman or apt-get. It look like it can compete with any reasonable indie game.

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

#36

Post by silentbicycle »

kiba wrote: post #35
silentbicycle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

I am not sure what is your point. The fact that tedious work is left around is in fact due to the lack of incentives for open source developers, not any instristic structure of open source itself. Lot of them are non-profit, so of course they don't even try that hard. What do you expect, hard core ass kicking software? Sometime, you will find hard core ass kicking software. I still remember fanastic open source games…

> I am not sure what is your point. The fact that tedious work is left around is in fact due to the lack of incentives for open source developers, not any instristic structure of open source itself.

Agreed, and this is "Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software".

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

#37

Post by halo »

omouse wrote: post #34
halo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial. Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.

I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free".

I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

That said, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even my misuse of wording is accurate.

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

#38

Post by ciupicri »

flogic wrote: post #21
halo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine.

At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't really support styles, or if it supports them they're too complicated to use. Nobody knew who to use them, so we did the formatting by hand.

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

#39

Post by omouse »

halo wrote: post #37
omouse wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial. Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.

I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free". I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous. That said, in the…

I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

It would be called noncommercial open source software or noncommercial free software.

The point is to separate the aspect of buying software from the availability of its source code and whatever freedoms are associated with that.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

omouse wrote: post #32
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.

That's not a problem, you just bundle it together. Java applications and PC games have done that for years. The only tricky part is that developers constantly complain about downloading some new programming language just to run a program. Guys...it's the year 2009. You can buy a terabyte hard-drive for a few hundred bucks and your 'net connection isn't that slow anymore.

[deleted]
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