On Tuesday, 18 September 2012 at 08:09:41 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
Is it any surprise the vast majority of *good* software is
either open-source or otherwise non-commercial?
It is?
Every time I try to switch from Microsoft Office to
Open/LibreOffice, I find them unusable. And those are probably
the best alternatives.
Every time I try to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, GRUB belches
at me, saying it thinks it's THE boot loader and it just cries
like a baby about how it wants to install itself on the MBR.
And it stops working randomly every once in a while when I put it
on the partition boot sector.
Funny, the only times the Windows boot loader ever gets messed up
is when I try to install Linux. Not when I happen to resize a
random partition.
And if you tell me GIMP or Inkscape or whatever take the place of
Adobe suites I'm just going to laugh.
Are they good? Sure.
Are the comparable with the commercial versions? Hell no.
Google Chrome? It's open-source, but it's driven by commercial
interests -- it's driven by the advantages it gives Google in the
market, even though it's "free" by itself.
Oh, and there's a reason people still use WinRAR instead of 7z,
as great as 7-Zip is. (Yes, the icons and toolbars DO make a
difference, even if you think that's stupid.)
In the programming world -- just look at how popular C# is.
It's not popular because it was open-source (although people
tried to make Mono) -- it's popular because it's got damn good
balance in terms of usability and IDE support.
And VS is a lot of $$$ to buy. Nothing open-source/non-commercial
about it.
Of course, there's good open-source software. No doubt about that.
But at the moment I can't think of one that took the place of
commercial software because people find it "good" and they find
the commercial version "not good".
And let's not go into computer games and such...
Managed by *programmers*
LOL, that's precisely why open-source software has a "steep
learning curve", as the creators like to put it.
It's a result of programmers not knowing (or caring) about making
good UIs, so they just think the users are noobs when they can't
use the software.
