Abiword: Support Expectations 412
bockman
writes "Abiword developers have put up a
letter,
explaining what they expect from their user community and what the
community should (and should not) expect from a volunteer-based open
source software project like theirs. A much needed reality-check in
these times when a large number of non-developers have joined the
Linux users world." This is a must read for anyone who uses any
open source software.
I have ony one request for all developers (Score:4, Interesting)
If a person were to want to get abiword and downloaded their redhat 7.1 rpm, they'd be instantly ranting on the mailing list as it does not work for any possible install of redhat 7.1.
In fact they need to remove all rpms except for the gtk version as that is the only rpm that actually works.
also, add a list of all libs that are needed in order to use the product.
I am glad they make abiword, but having rpm's or packages that dont work for anyone except the deveopler that made it causes most of the grief I see on the mailing list. 90% of all pissed users are users that cant get it to work because of the bad rpm's and packages.
hey, if you guys dont have time for keeping the website up-to date, I volunteer to do it.
RPM Doesn't work? FIX IT.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Then you can post your fixed version and get flamed too..
joy
Playing catch up with MS is a losing game w/o corp (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the AbiWord people are in a bind trying to catch up with something as complex (you can read that as crappy) as Word. That's a tough task for such a small group, and it's a thankless task (as their letter indicates has been the case) because you end up with luser unhappiness.
On the other hand, OpenOffice seems to do a much better job with the Word documents (limited set, mind) that I've worked with. That's probably the result of the corporate heritage of Star/OpenOffice which meant that, for some time, serious resources were thrown at the problem, and someone dug in and did the crap work required.
In short - AbiWord is getting crap because they bit off more than they can true, on a product whose user base tends to be whiny. They certainly have my condolences.
In Other Words (Score:4, Interesting)
Guess what, the general public doesn't want excuses. Corporate IT folks dont want excuses.
They just want to get their work done.
The general public simply does not care that a small group of developers spends an amazing amount of time developing Abiword.
They just want it to work, and they want to call someone when it breaks. They want some hope that someone will fix it or can tell them how to fix it, or more likely, how to do the same thing in a slightly different way.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far.
low expectations (Score:5, Interesting)
For some reason they have concerns about reliability. They'd rather pay $30K per CPU for BEA WebLogic then download JBoss for nothing, even if they only plan on supporting 100 users. I don't claim to understand it myself, but in corporate circles open source software has this stigma attached to it.
The ABIword java port will fix this issues (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure. Much of the so-called "functionality" of modren commerical word processors is, for most users, nothing but bloat.
All most people need in a word processor s enough to write a letter to grandma, or a twenty-page report for school. And if you need more, you don't want a word processor, you want a document preparation system - LaTeX, Framemaker, DocBook, etcetera.
Of course, I'm an old (by /. standards) curmudgeon who fondly recalls writing high school papers in Turbo Pascal IDE's editor and printing them out with a "near letter quality" 24-pin dot-matrix printer on tractor-feed paper...
Right on! (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean it is great that Open Source projects exist, and they really help out a lot of people but it is important that those who are benefited reciprocate.
It is really a tragedy of the commons.
With successful Open Source projects like Linux, you have TONS of companies which base billions of dollars of business on these products.
Yet at the same time the Engineers have NO way of making money just by writing code.
The only way they can pay the bills is by joining a larger company like IBM that can act as a patron so that they can continue their work.
There are many examples of this:
- Linus works for Transmeta
- Alan Cox works for RedHat
... etc
What we really need to see happen is the users directly supporting the developers of these products.
Instead of downloading AbiWord for free. Why not donate $2-$5 through PayPal.
This would provide the ability for a few developers to work FULL TIME on AbiWord (or whatever) without having to worry about corporate bias.
They would be directly working for the client instead of for an intermediary (like IBM or Transmeta).
Freenet is doing this [sourceforge.net]
I just wish it would catch on...
Support System (Score:3, Interesting)
When you call tech support for most commercial products, you get a dingbat on the other end who knows little more than a person who has already read the manual. If this person has no clue about what your problem is, they can escalate your issue to someone more educated in the matter. Has there ever been an email based support system set up to handle something like this? I.E.- an email sent to support@yourproject.org posts a message to a password protected board subscribed to by x number of support volunteers who provide basic support. These volunteers could escalate said issue to a higher authority, yet another board subscribed to by people who have fielded x number of previous questions, or whatever method you would use to define an advanced support person, or answer the issue on thier own. The advanced board could have subsets, say a group who can deal with RPM issues or something. For example, I don't know dick about solving RPM problems, but if someone was having dependency issues or whatever on a RedHat system, I could forward it to the RedHat users board.
It seems to me that almost any answer regarding most problems with large scale Open Source software can be found if you know where to look. Therein lies the problem. Most newbies / regular users have no clue where to look. Is this whole idea a pipe dream?
Re:Can't have it both ways... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't you realize you are speaking heresy?
I think you've hit upon the fundamental problem with Open Source. It's not that Open Source is a bad thing, it can actually be quite good. But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market. Or even have a signifigant impact upon it because of consumer expectations.
I've never used AbiWord and don't know what it's like. But imagine what these guys could do if instead of giving it away for free, they sold it for $15 off their website.
It may not make them rich, but I'll bet that could provide a steady income for a handful of people who could work full time to continuously improve the product.
Furthermore, by charging $15 for a product, they limit their user base to only those people who feel the product is worth something. But they also will realize that it's substantially cheaper than Word and won't expect quite all the same features.
I think one of the problems with catering to just the whackos who think everything should be free, is that these people think stuff should be free because they identify no value with the product or really the developers time.
It's the old complaint about Welfare. When people receive $500/week from the government for not working, they don't see any value in actually working. Now not everybody thinks that way, but there is a substantial sub-culture of the world that does.
If I had a $ for every time I had this argument (Score:5, Interesting)
This is THE major problem with Open Source software. Since you can't make money with it, you can't commit yourself to it full time. Therefore you get a whole bunch of people who sorta work on it rather than a real programming team.
What does this get you? Products like Abiword that, while nice, admit publically that they can't compete.
What you linux kids need is a micropayment system or SOME kind of way to support your "Forget capitalism, I must give away the product of hours and hour of my work" attitude. If you could make $40K/year while working on your open project, you could do it full time! THEN we'd see some nice word processors, web browsers, etc. for Linux and *BSD. Please don't moderate this down to troll or flaimbait as it raises very real points.
Re:Can't have it both ways... (Score:4, Interesting)
If they are only making $15 per copy, they can't quit their day jobs, but now they need to cater to the people who want a $15 MS Word replacement. If people are actually shelling out money for a product, they can feel better about demanding support or immediate bug fixes or the like. Small business doesn't get the same benefits of large business (being able to say, "Screw off, we don't want to add those features. They are plenty of other customers, you're no loss.")
At least until AbiWord get to 1.0, anyways, they really shouldn't charge anything for it. Maybe they could sell support, but I feel that involving money is a bad idea here and will only make things more hairy.
People really should learn what to expect from things that cost them nothing. When I get something for nothing, I appreciate when it helps me at all, I don't bitch when it doesn't constantly impress me.
Just my 2c, anyway
From a "document analyst" standpoint (Score:2, Interesting)
Who can I pay for support? (Score:3, Interesting)
The big question... (Score:2, Interesting)
My heart really goes out to the AbiWord team, and I find myself wondering about a bigger question. Can Open Source software really become mainstream (as in Microsoft/Apple-style mainstream) without help from a for-profit organization to support it? There are tons of new BSD (Mac OS X) users signing up everyday, but it is because Apple is selling it, not because it's great and Free.
I am not flaming here. I know, however, that as more people download and use AbiWord (or any other OSS), these problems with too-high-expectations are going to get worse, not better. With or without an open letter.
Re:What you're really paying (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to reply here, although this reply really covers issues mentioned in several of the responses to my previous post.
First of all, why does everyone assume it's the IT guys' fault here? We're a small software house. Half of the guys here have been playing with computers since they could type and could set up a Linux box in their sleep. And those are the developers. The IT support guys are, obviously enough, much better with sys admin stuff. They certainly aren't MS-trained McSysAdmins.
It's true that we're running some key services (in our case, public-facing web, FTP, e-mail, CVS, yada yada) on Linux boxes. However, we're also running other key services (file servers, database servers, all our backups, etc) on Windows 2000 boxes. They get way more absolute workload than the Linux boxes, with the possible exception of the CVS host. As I mentioned before, the reason we switched to Linux for the public-facing systems was a "near miss" involving MS security, and a subsequent investigation by management and change of policy.
I'm sorry to disappoint the Linux advocates here, but I'm comparing several properly set up Linux boxes with several properly set up Windows 2000 boxes, both administered by skilled people. The simple fact is that the Linux boxes aren't staying up for months at a time, and the Windows 2000 boxes don't just fall over every five minutes. Both systems are reasonably reliable, but when the Linux box falls over, it consistently takes longer to track down the problem and get it back up and running.
In that respect, Linux is costing us more for maintenance than Windows 2000, as I said in contradiction of the first post I replied to. The saving is in terms of reduced security risks, and hence reduced risk of both an expensive-to-fix breach and a priceless loss of customer confidence. We consider this to be worth the extra effort to support the systems.