CNet Promotes Essential Open-Source Software to Joe Public 227
Zool writes "A feature is currently running on CNet explicitly promoting open-source software alternatives for typical home users, with programs rated and compared to commercial offerings. Although there's no mention of the Linux advantages to home users, the list is extensive and certainly written with the intention of snagging wider open-source adoption and understanding in the mainstream. 'Why should you care about open source? You should care because the vast majority of common applications, even complex commercial stuff like Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office, have free, open-source alternatives. And this point is worth reiterating: open-source software is free. No cost. Zero. Zilch.'"
Hard drive photo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hard drive on grass photo (Score:5, Funny)
It has been an long, hard drive to for the developers to get the software out in the open - and they did it all while on grass.
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And anyway, I think computer parts would make for fantastic lawn art.
Re:Hard drive photo? (Score:5, Funny)
Free as in Beer then Free as in Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this may be the better approach in introducing people to free[dom]/open source software. People don't understand at first the implications of free[dom] software.
After the hook of 'free', then people can learn about the freedom aspects. Of course if they clue in right away the importance of freedom, all the better.
Re:Free as in Beer then Free as in Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Most non-free software provides this functionality as easily as free software.
Re:Free as in Beer then Free as in Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
There are always two factors to choosing software:
1. Price of the software.
2. The amount of time it takes to acquire and learn to use said software.
Example:
Given the choice of purchasing the expensive Photoshop or downloading user unfriendly GIMP for free, which will the average user do?
The answer is they will pirate Photoshop for free and Win/Win!
But seriously, most people tend to go with what they can their hands on for the least amount of trouble. Most people think that Windows and or MS Office is free because it comes with the computer
Re:Free as in Beer then Free as in Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather Free AND Legal! (Score:5, Insightful)
The message that needs to be gotten across is "Free AND Legal". I've had people express complete disbelief in my claim that they can have Legal Copies of software for free (beer) -- to the point where they were pretty sure I was lying or making it up.
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I could very easily hop on over to thepiratebay.org and download MS Office, but I like OpenOffice better.
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That all depends how you define "better". In most cases I find that end users define "better" as "more convenient" which essentially boils down to:
Re:Rather Free AND Legal! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is unfortunate. I think this is one of the more overlooked problems in trying to gain widespread adoption of open source alternatives, even if it is on Winblows.
I am in university, and the attitude from many first-year CS students I have spoken with is that "Linux sucks", even if they have only used PuTTY on their Winblows boxes to program their small C apps to the server with GCC. And they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course. It is ridiculous. They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary software, and some even choose to use Vista just because it is the "latest".
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I'll take GCC of MSVS any day (MSVS has a nice IDE, but the compiler is screwy)
KDE is definetly better than Explorer in terms of features and looks (though I do like the actual explorer file browser better, the handling of auto-arrange, and snap-to-grid are better and more useful IMO than Konqueror's tabs)
Linux? I spend more time trying to install/fix Linux than getting to do what I want. The exception is Ubuntu, which makes Windows look a
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I've seen a lot of OSS zelots not give commercial software a try, and just rant against it for no good/valid reason, just as I've seen people blindly flock to closed source software over free-as-in-beer open source because "people actually pay for it, it must be better". Neither is a good mentality. Both sets of software have their advantages.
I am a free software zealot, probably you were talking about people like me, too.
About trying "commercial" software, I spent last week trying commercial free software, I think you mean "proprietary" software, as in "non-free", or "non-open-source". There are valid reasons not to try proprietary software. There are technical reasons to reject some stuff just based on their licenses, for example integration issues. Strategical reasons too, licenses are more important than the quality of the actual product mo
Re:Rather Free AND Legal! (Score:5, Insightful)
That right there is the problem. GIMP isn't just a little weird. It's off in its own world. Most GIMP defenders write it off and say "use a better window manager", but the reality is it just doesn't play well with the normal usage patterns most window managers are coded for. And of course it's a much bigger issue on Windows, where you can't change the UI.
Don't blame the user for not understanding when you throw something at them that works totally differently than every other program they've ever seen.
And they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course.
Why pirate it? It's free unless you want the high end editions. If you're the type of person who doesn't know why they should or shouldn't be using Visual Studio, you don't need the versions that cost money.
They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary software
Because to most people, especially home users, it doesn't matter. Most of them would never be able to do anything with the source code, nor would they have the money to pay someone who could. And they like having a company to call for support.
Proprietary data formats, however, are a completely different story. Those are bad for everyone but the maker of the software.
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That too has its advantages and disadvantages. What's worse, calling Microsoft, only to have them tell you its HP's issue, while HP insists the problem lies with Windows, or going online to a forum, and being told to RTFM? Even in terms of support, proprietary software can be just as bad as open source.
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You have to figure that Adobe, Microsoft and other know this and not only let it happen but in a way encourage it. Yes they try and gt you to pay but not to hard. They walk a thin line so as to get those who can pay to do so but let those other off.
If they really wanted to enforce their copyright they could publish the software on CD-R media where every disc is unique and
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Misleading Story Content (Score:2)
But that's not true at all. There is no bar at all for a company to charge for their software. They must provide the source, and it must be freely distributable (assuming we are talking GPL), but MANY companies charge for Open Source software.
Also, such a statement ignores that there are many different "Open Source" licenses. People automatically think "GPL", but it's certainly not the only one. And with so many issues
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Well, if its GPL they have to provide the source anyway. Why spend the moolah unless you really need the support for the product?
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What they can't do is charge £5000 for the binary and then another £5000 for the source -- additional charges for the Source Code are limited to covering cost of media and delivery.
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They *only* need to provide the Source Code to people that *they* distributed the Binary or Source to. And they can CHARGE for that initial distrobution.
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New marketing idea: let's call it Freedom Software. Then everyone will use it or else they're with the terrorists!
Does this matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does this matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free Speech is Not Free Beer (Score:4, Insightful)
That point is worthless, or some negative value. Because open-source software is free speech , notfree beer. Plenty of open source is $free, but there's plenty of paid products that include the source code. It's harder to prevent people from redistributing open source, to collect the money from something they can copy to others without paying. But that's copyright violation, which CNet is now promoting, even though it makes its own income from that same protection.
Lanxon is the MP3 and digital music reviewer for CNet. Next time he says anything defending music industry copyrights, or his own on his articles, readers should remind him. Maybe by republishing it under their own name.
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I'm having trouble thinking of any.
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Trademarked, and they protect it well. That's why there's Fedora.... and CentOS.
Another undistributable: MPlayer. Breaks DCMA garbage.
Another: the libcss and friends. DCMA shit again.
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That's not a product, that's a trademark.
Only in the USA. The rest of the world can run emerge mplayer to their hearts' content.
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If the point is to introduce new people to software, it only make sense to talk about the applications that they will want to use and the licenses that cover them. Most of the people that would be learning about free software wouldn't be
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And the other (non-GPL) license often offers exactly the same terms as the GPL, including the open source, but explicitly limits the redistribution.
The point is that "free" software has lots of different meanings, some subsets, some complementary but respecting different kinds of transactions (eg. reading the source vs not paying for it). CNet's statement was the grossest oversimplification, which made it wrong.
Re:Free Speech is Not Free Beer (Score:5, Insightful)
The free speech education can come later, but please, quit arguing semantics because all you do is give the entire OSS movement a bad name. Joe Sixpack will see some idiot blathering on about how free speech does not equal free beer and think we're all just a bunch of whining hippies. Then he'll never use OSS because he thinks there is a religious ideology behind it.
Show him good "free as in beer" software, then later on, if he's interested, educate him on why "free as in speech" is important too. Please do us all a favor and don't try to ram ideology down Joe Sixpack's throat.
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That market education is a slow process, usually self-driven by consumers. Eventually people will want to by the SW equivalent of their cars with hoods never welded shut, but at first th
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Don't rant at me for correcting their mistake. Rant at CNet for mentioning the source code as a benefit for everyone.
FWIW, open source is not really an ideology, but a development technique. That has important benefits to consumers in quality and, yes,
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I just think CNet is doing a pretty decent job of "marketing" open source products to the average computer user. Because really, that's what advocacy is: marketing.
I don't think the average person reading that article would make the logical leap from
Fluff (Score:4, Informative)
Journalistic integrity, thy name is CNET.
Bigger list (Score:5, Informative)
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Open Source Alternative http://www.osalt.com/ [osalt.com]
Pricelessware is a fairly good resource for finding free software in general (lot's of propriatary freeware) http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/ [pricelesswarehome.org]
freshmeat gets updated daily with lots of OSS. Though it has a Linux bias, there is a LOT of cross platform software available http://freshmeat.net/ [freshmeat.net]
SourceForge seems to be updating its list daily now as well.
I guess the debate is over (Score:2)
Does this mean that the debate on the difference (or the lack thereof) between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech is finally and officially over? It's about time [slashdot.org].
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By the way that journal entry proposes that there are only two main ways to make money off of open source. Yet you left out the one way the majority of people get cash from open source development. Open source is a software feature that many companies are willing to fork out cash for. They do so by hiring cod
Gimp vs Photoshop? (Score:2)
While this may be a familiarity issue, I'd like to hear from someone that really has dug deep into both and has a fair assessment of the two.
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If all you do is crop and polish the occasional JPEG from your digital camera, you might not notice. But if you're any kind of professional, Gimp is a joke.
And even with Photoshop not exactly being a paragon of good interface design, Gimp manages to be much, much worse.
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If all you do is crop and polish the occasional JPEG from your digital camera, you might not notice. But if you're any kind of professional, Gimp is a joke.
But isn't the point? Most average users will only want a photo manip program to clean up their digital photos and help them store them. Photoshop is bloat for anyone except the advanced user -- even Elements seems a bit overdone. The idea is to sell OSS to people and show them that it has the functionality they need without all the excess that they don't. Most average users aren't going to need one-one-hundredth of what is in Photoshop, whereas Gimp may allow them to easily clean up their personal photos
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That's kind of self-contradictory, isn't it? If Photoshop is too bloated for most users, and Gimp bills itself as the OSS Photoshop, shouldn't Gimp be too bloated for most users?
Picasa or Paint.NET are better choices than Gimp for such users, IMO.
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But maybe it's just me.
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As for your list, layers and filters are the absolute basics of a graphics program. An "insane amount of formats supported" is nice, but matters not in the least for most users who only use a few common ones. Photoshop is also quite scriptable. And pretty much nobody who wants to use GIMP have the knowledge or time necessary to customize the source.
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Perhaps they are the absolute basics of a PROFESSIONAL graphics program.
That is not something that can be generalized to everyone.
Something along the lines of "Gimp-lite" would be very welcome.
Gimp is much more like photoshop than the other win32 image apps
you would tend to use for simple photo manipulation.
Nice article! (Score:2)
Knoppix
VirtualBox
MPlayer (the Hungarian one, not MS)
GParted
GRUB
NT Password Recovery Here [eunet.no]
Cinelerra
FilmGimp
BitPim
NMap
RDesktop
VNC
And the best of all... Debian and Ubuntu
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Too bad they didnt mention tools in my favorites: ... GParted, GRUB ... NMap, RDesktop, VNC...
Yeah, because people get extremely excited when they start... um... partitioning drives! And booting the operating system! And they can, like... find out that no ports are open on their system, whatever that means!... and it's good to know that you can use the computer from some other place - if only they had another computer.
Let's face it, there's a TON of good open source software, but a lot of it isn't exactly "marketable". You can't sell open source to people by telling how much butt GRUB kicks. ("Y
Be careful with the free statement (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Be careful with the free statement (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point. But...
A coworker went to Staples and purchased a version of McAfee for home, even after I told her AVG would do everything she wanted it to, and for free. I got the impression that she didn't think something that didn't cost anything would be able to do what she wanted...
Too bad. You missed a great opportunity--you should have sold her a copy! No, I'm not being a smartass and saying you should have taken advantage of her. Well, actually, I guess I am--not being a smartass, but it seems that some people insist on being taken advantage of, and she evidently is one of them.* If they insist on burning money, you might as well help them put that money to good use! From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html [gnu.org] And, in case it wasn't clear up until now: "In order to contribute funds, you need to have some extra. If you charge too low a fee, you won't have anything to spare to support development."
So charge as much as you can! Hell, charge more than the commercial offering and throw in some support. And if you've got a guilty conscience, a) get over it or b) send some money to the FSF. If you really don't need money, tell them you're an "authorized distributor" and they can make a check out to "FSF" with the name of the software in the memo line.
Richard Stallman wants software to be capital-F-Free, as in hackable, usable, modifiable. I don't think he has ever once said that people should give away their time. If you're spending your time extolling the virtues of Free software, you should get paid!
* See also the recent thread about the $199 WalMart PC that is in a bigger-than-needed case because people think bigger == better. The last thing I need is another fullsize tower, but I would have bought one in a second if it were the size of a Shuttle PC.
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No. But that is how Slashdot refers to it, so since we're here on Slashdot right now, I figured I'd refer to it the same way so that people would know what the hell I'm referring to.
Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out [slashdot.org], November 12, 2007.
Don't offer bad alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
No matter what people who wish it were otherwise say, OpenOffice is a piece of junk. It's huge. It's buggy. It has difficulties using other formats. It explodes frequently. It requires massive Java-ware installed on the machines of otherwise happily non-bloated users. It's worse than anything Microsoft has shipped.
Point people toward Abiword, or point them toward Google apps, but don't push
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And.. Java is now bad. It works well in my opinion. Too bad it doesn't work for you.
As a first-hand look at OO, it works for me. Ive used it since it was StarOffice. It always works on their own files and only has problems when you try to open hidden formatted files.
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Technical Communication is your specialty? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about objectivity?
I know a number of businesses and private people who use Open Office every day exchanging documents with others without a hitch, whereas I have never heard of anyone who gave it up because it was huge, buggy, or had difficulty using other formats.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Open Office is a very beautiful thing for everyone I know personally who has ever tried it.
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Funny thing is, last week I paid a visit to a client. They have Firefox and OOo installed on every machine and have so for a number of years effectively, yet one of the directors still mentioned being glad to use MS Office back home.
I couldn't blame with him. Being
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That said, I feel the same way about Office 2000 and newer. I've stuck with Office 97 (and Office X for Mac OS X) on any personal machine. As for the newest Office, the ribbon looks OK, and I think Live Previews of formatting is a great idea, but I can live without those and am happy to stick with Office 97.
Also, I haven't tried OOo in maybe a year and a half or mo
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Seriously? Well, you have now. I tried out OpenOffice, and the word processing application just suddenly quit while I was in the middle of typing a sentence (I think maybe the 3rd sentence of the document, so I hadn't saved yet). I restarted it, and started re-ty
Re:Don't offer bad alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
1. You *almost* sound like you were paid to write that.
2. Your statement is inaccurate on many levels.
3. You provide no basis for your opinion. Care to back up your statement with some evidence?
Every experience that I've had with OpenOffice has been a good one. Its fast, provides all the features that I'm looking for without being too bloated, and sometimes handles the Microsoft formats better than even MS Office does. I hazard to suggest that if OpenOffice was as bad as you suggest, that Cannonical would not have picked it as Productivity app of choice for Ubuntu. And I believe a fair number of other distro's provide it as well.
Before posting a bash like that against an open source project on an open source oriented web site, you should probably have something to back up your statements. Otherwise, your just blowing hot air out your arse.
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My problem with the original post was that he doesn't claim its his opinion. He states it as fact, and as a fact, its wrong.
For every person like you, theres a person thats the opposite. I have to use MS office for work, and every time I have to edit a report or a plan in MS Word, its like pulling teeth. Its clunky, difficult and extremely frusterating for
On the nose (Score:2)
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Firefox bested IE because it was *better*. It offered an improved experience. For OSS to really shine, it needs to stop just trying to be "like" Office, "like" Photoshop, etc. etc. OSS apps need to innovate, offer something new and *better* than what it's trying to replace. Until that happens, the only thing OSS software r
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bought copies of Star Office. Some of my older copies
pre-date the sellout to Sun.
Your bluster only impresses other Lemmings.
Open Office is not "OSS". It's a commercial app with a well
established history that was bought and "opened".
or otherwise) ceases to not try to emulate the market leader then
there will be a flood of whining to the effect that being different
equals being user host
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As a user, I find Open Of
Osalt (Score:2)
Free? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Open Office extensively and have never installed MS Office despite having an MSDN subscription which provides it for "free" for the last 5 yrs. I do this out of principle, but this decision has cost me. There are incompatibilities present that have cost me time and effort.
I own Adobe Photoshop because Gimp would cost me dearly in time and effort. I've tried many times, but Gimp is really not a PS replacement.
And while Linux is "free" and my company's products support it, the userbase is comparatively small to our Windows base and the costs of using it, learning it, keeping up with it, and maintaining product support are astronomical (per user capita) compared to Windows.
That said, there are a huge number of open-source packages that are not only free but save me an enormous amount of time and effort. Thunderbird is far more time-friendly than Outlook has been to me. Firefox. Python. Ruby. Ruby on Rails.
Others save me money by proxy. My web host uses Open Solaris, for example.
Open Source software has a very important niche within enterprise and home use. But a large number of the mainstream packages that most home users would use will frustrate those folks with quirks. Some things are only free if you value your time at nothing.
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My experience is quite the opposite. More like: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine. It certainly takes time to switch from what you already know (new computer users would be better off learning Unix in the first place) but once you know enough to get around, the savings in time, effort, and other frustrations are huge, even more than the cash eaten by the Windows tax.
You count Microsoft Office as free, even though you've paid a lot of money to get 'free
VLC (Score:2, Informative)
Shifting my business focus (Score:2)
I've been working a steady contract supporting .NET development and MS products but I'm letting this contract run out in January so I can devote more time to supporting F/OSS development and applications. I may be a bit ahead of the curve but MS development is just so hideously boring. Plus I'm getting a lot more calls about alternatives to Vista and I'm curious if the market is really there or if it's just talk. I'll let you know how it goes. Worst case is I end up taking on more Windows support and co
It's free except when... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bravo! (Score:4, Interesting)
Bravo. It's nice to see a main-stream media outlet offering this kind of coverage of FOSS.
I've experimented with FOSS for a long time, and have wanted to switch for many years. Last spring, I did, once and for all. I now use Ubuntu 7.10 on my home system, even for gaming. (I was surprised to find that many companies are offering a Linux version as well as Windows.)
In my opinion, meny FOSS projects are ready for the main-stream. They simply need some good publicity, and a following.
What about Avidemux? (Score:2)
Thoughts About Perceived Value and Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
First a bit of background, I am a general all-around tech support person for an island with a population of approximately 15,000 people (on the South end of the island). Most of my clients are either retired and/or are tech-shy.
As a dedicated user of Open Source software I consistently advocate it to my clients as a solution for many of their needs. The attitude that I run into time and time again that if you are not paying out the wazoo for software then it can't be any good. Many won't even try a piece of software unless they pay for it.
I have taken to creating a DVD or CDs of Open Source programs (particularly OpenOffice.org), charging for them and donating that money back to the respective project. It's a system that seems to be working for everyone - clients feel they are getting something valuable because they paid for it and the projects are getting much needed donation money.
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Ummm... Why? What about the open source aspect of these applications makes them better than anything else?
The attitude that I run into time and time again that if you are not paying out the wazoo for software then it can't be any good. Many won't even try a piece of software unless they pay for it.
That's unfortunate for them. Free software can be and is effective. Hell, a lot of r
Forget promoting Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Expecting people to switch en masse is not reasonable until the UI is completely idiot proof and requires no advanced diagnostic. Even Ubuntu is not there yet.
A better strategy is to promote open source software running on Windows. Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Open Office etc. all run on Windows. Introduce users to these great apps and allow them to use them at their own pace. They can even run the open source apps side by side with the MS equivalents if they like. Since most open source apps run on Windows and Linux, it means the underlying OS is of less relevance.
Later when Linux for the desktop is more mature they can be tempted to move. It may even be that Dell / Compaq etc. off cheap machines with Linux on them. If the apps are the same then the pain in moving is so much less.
CNET Used To Have Linux Downloads (Score:2)
Joe Public doesn't care about free as in speech... (Score:3, Insightful)
(This is in response to the tag freespeechisnotfreebeer.)
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There's no 100% perfect way to create software. Closed-source methods have turned out software that is just as good as open-source.
I'd consider myself l
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Actually, this guy and I share about the same outlook. I've searched Sourceforge for a neat OSS project to use and found that 90% of the projects I find have no source code available, and don't look like they're at all active. There's a neat description which is what originally lured me to the project, but there's no software or source of any kind available.
I think that is a failing of source forge and not open source. Anyone can register an open source project on source forge. It will get deleted after a while if you let it completely stagnate. The problem is, in generally, everyone forgets your failures and remember your successes. If you search sourceforge, you have to wad through everyones failures.
There are a million closed source failures. There is just no way to search for them all. They either are on someone hard drive or deleted. If you have troub
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Q. Why is this so clumsy?
A. The trick is to use Perl's strengths rather than its weaknesses.
--- Larry Wall in 8225@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
The same can be said of OSS or anything for that matter. For SourceForge you may want to use the advanced search http://sourceforge.net/search/ [sourceforge.net], and specifically use the "activity" fields to narrow down your search.
If you have javascript enabled then the easiest thing to do would be to press the filter button on the search results page and m
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Thing is, with most of these OSS programs, there's actually a way for the geek to fix it quickly and go back to doing something else
OSS = written by hobbyists - no surprise then (Score:2)
Exactly. This is a trend I've seen in OSS applications. Most of the time, they're miles (or even light years) behind their proprietary competitors. GIMP? Can't support advanced color spaces, needs to replicate all the Photoshop features (however, as I'm not user of Gimp nor photoshop, I can only say what I've heard). OOo? The MS compatibility phantom is luri
Lazyness can be worth paying for (Score:2)
Also, the more money you have, the more your time is worth. I 'waste' more money now to save me time that I never would have paid in college. That's because in college I had a lot of time but not much money, where as now I have a lot of money but not