Decrepit Old Fool

Free software isn’t innovative… Okay Steve, whatever you say.

I’m not sure how people think M$ is going to change their paradigm in time before a huge loss. The denial of a loss of their power runs deep throughout the whole organization.

And this is where the IT divide exists…

Look, the reason that free office software isn’t considered mature is a lack of standardization. Not in not following standards, but in not having a significant market share, or a clearly identifiable throat to choke, a clear roadmap, clear funding cycles.

I read these things and see them all as positives, because it means the software is open source and not constrained. The problem with closed sourced non-collabrative projects is the constraints to the companies standards and intellectual property.

The way I think about it is by looking at Adobe software. You can tell Adobe was created by a company and is closed source because of how much it sucks. An open source programmer would be embarrassed to produce such filth and would be mocked by his/her peers. Thus no open source programmer would ever have created it. When your peers evaluate you not only do you tend to take pride in your work, but you tend to put out better work.

I dunno about that throat to choke, Ted.  Anyone ever successfully choke Microsoft’s throat for the productivity lost trying to get Office to do simple tasks, or for recovering lost data from old formats?

You want a pound of flesh? Well, that’s where the EULA comes in. Good luck collecting it.

The throat to choke is the support ticket that you can open 24×7, 365, although it tends to be more expensive at night these days. I’ve seen some efforts at this with OS vendors, but IME it hasn’t been as good. Now mind you, if MS product was good we wouldn’t be opening tickets in the first place, but good marketing says to sell beta as if it was ready, that way you can charge the client for participating in the ongoing beta program.

You can tell Adobe was created by a company and is closed source because of how much it sucks. An open source programmer would be embarrassed to produce such filth and would be mocked by his/her peers.

I don’t know which Adobe product you’re speaking of, but Acrobat, PDF, Photoshop, Illustrator, ImageReady and the PostScript language were all pretty good products. They’ve been sorta improved over the years, but you might as well blame Mac and Apple—they were the first platform for Adobe and the one that Adobe and Warnock took a cue from; Apple was extremely closed and proprietary —which is why their hardware products and software were hideously expensive, AND not well supported to boot. These days everyone looks at MAC with new eyes, but they were the original enemy of OS and the Antichrist incarnate. Hard to tell that to academics because they fall over themselves for the privilege of fellating Jobs—the reason macs were deemed easy to use was courtesy of the control imposed by closed hardware and development tools (no need to deal with 100s of accessories and add-on vendors with their crappy drivers that normally reduce lifecycle cost.)

Yes I know that you can download Lotus Office or whatever they call it now, but how many different programs should I have to install to access all my old work?

I can still read vi and Tex documents from the early 80s. Wordstar too, written in the CP/M OS, if I can find the interface to run the 5.25” floppy. 

But that’s progress dude (bet you can’t wear your clothes from the 80s either). Take a cue from me; as member of the blurgh commentariat I make you responsible for my public and worthless work. Better not hose it up Keep it ASCII clean in that little database that it’s stored in.

I think people are starting to realize that a ‘standard’ written by a closed-source company does not exist for the common good.

Likewise mandated standards that add cost and only limited functionally aren’t efficient either. In the 80s and 90s common Unix and CORBA was mandated in military use. However, it was seldom used, was designed by a bureaucratic committee, was very expensive to implement due to limited market penetration, and most wound up as expensive shelfware on the way to here.

I see value in standards that make sense.

The throat to choke is the support ticket that you can open 24×7, 365

M$ support has been a joke in the IT industry for years now. Send an email to M$ for Office 07 help and you get a bill for $295. Put up a post in OpenOffice support forum and you get plenty of geeks stepping in to help you out for free.

I don’t know which Adobe product you’re speaking of

All of them, or pick any one that has the Adobe name in front of it. It’s of my opinion: that program will slow down your system, take a ridiculous amount of time to load, perform slowly unless you have a $2000+ system, and annoy the crap out of you.

In Adobe’s defense I will say Acrobat is getting better, less troubleshooting needed, less lag, etc. But basically Adobe was smart back in the day and filled a void that existed in the software market. They then had brilliant marketing to get their product out. Which is where their success is due.

The Open Source counterparts to their software is much better. FoxIT Reader will run insanely fast on the slowest system you put it on and will run fast while working on multiple PDFs. I was doing research one time and had 10 PDFs opened. It took hardly anytime to load them and each one ran just as fast as having only one open. Oh and the system I was doing this on was a piece of crap socket A AMD (GAs don’t get much love). I dare anyone to try that with Adobe. ;-P

And now that Adobe has set themselves to closed standards and created a profit model around their closed software, all they can really do is attempt to improve upon their existing system. The same problem M$ is finding with Vista and their other software. Because it gets to costly to start from scratch you have to make small improvements to what you already have. Which leads to very convoluted source code. Whereas in the Open Source world you let other people re-create your ideas from scratch, and have them spend their resources doing it.

I’m not trying to set up a PC/Mac argument here, but would like to note that standardization is much less of a problem with the Apple platform. I use only free or shareware products, many of which are so innovative that PC users go green with envy (the Scrivener writing program, for one instance). But more important, almost all of them conform to the Mac standard, so that moving from one program to another is practically seamless.

I started out with PCs and DOS, back when using freeware and shareware was a real gamble. You were lucky if the programs even worked as claimed. So it’s a bit ironic that the biggest software company in the world is still at that stage. I broke my last tie with Microsoft when I switched to Firefox, and have never regretted it.