Re:The Cathedral and the Bizarre
by zzo38computer on Saturday December 14, 2019 @11:39PM
(#21794495)
"However the problem is that the open source user may not stumble on this magical fraction and the invisible iceberg of buggy, ill-conceived open source lies submerged ... open source uses massive amounts of user time trawling through defunct and buggy applications and posting to forums ..." Regardless of what you are looking for (open source computer programs, closed source computer programs, television shows, books, etc) some won't be so good, or might be difference what you need for your use, and so they have reviews about such thing.
"An awful lot of popular open source is inferior reverse-engineered copies of existing commercial software (Gimp, OpenOffice etc)." Is Gimp a reverse-engineered copy of existing software? Just because it is similar to some proprietary software does not necessarily mean that it is a "reverse-engineered copy" of it. OpenOffice presumably involves the reverse-engineered formats of Microsoft Office, although now there is LibreOffice. Both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice each have some features the other lacks. What is "inferior" may also depend on your opinion, because in some cases it isn't so clear, and in some cases it may be inferior in some ways but superior in others.
"If open source programmers do innovate and their innovation is good then its just as likely to be swept away from them by the corporations who have the capital to exploit it." In my experience that doesn't always happen. Many features first implemented in GNU/Linux systems are things that they did not implement similar features in Windows until much later.
"... the Linux desktop still lags behind Windows and the interface looks stuck in the 90s." Actually, I think both in Linux and Windows many programs try to be too fancy, but in Linux I can change the window manager and all of that stuff easily and still works. I uninstalled the desktop environment, and I think it works much better than Windows ever did, actually.
"Good software is properly documented, does not break and does not require hand-holding to use it." True, but that isn't the issue; the issue is customizing it.
"An awful lot of popular open source is inferior reverse-engineered copies of existing commercial software (Gimp, OpenOffice etc)." Is Gimp a reverse-engineered copy of existing software? Just because it is similar to some proprietary software does not necessarily mean that it is a "reverse-engineered copy" of it. OpenOffice presumably involves the reverse-engineered formats of Microsoft Office, although now there is LibreOffice. Both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice each have some features the other lacks. What is "inferior" may also depend on your opinion, because in some cases it isn't so clear, and in some cases it may be inferior in some ways but superior in others.
"If open source programmers do innovate and their innovation is good then its just as likely to be swept away from them by the corporations who have the capital to exploit it." In my experience that doesn't always happen. Many features first implemented in GNU/Linux systems are things that they did not implement similar features in Windows until much later.
"... the Linux desktop still lags behind Windows and the interface looks stuck in the 90s." Actually, I think both in Linux and Windows many programs try to be too fancy, but in Linux I can change the window manager and all of that stuff easily and still works. I uninstalled the desktop environment, and I think it works much better than Windows ever did, actually.
"Good software is properly documented, does not break and does not require hand-holding to use it." True, but that isn't the issue; the issue is customizing it.
Love of money is the root of all evil.