Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1696 mails)

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > > My wife has prepared both individual and business taxes for clients for
> > > > many years, both before and after she passed her CPA exam, and has tried
> > > > many of the "industry standard" solutions, both those for professionals
> > > > and those for the general public.
> > > this simply shows how much proprietary programs are buggy.
> This is true. However, unfortunately, it does not automatically follow
> that open source is not.

Ditto;  there is no shortage of Open Source software that is 'crap'.
Even some of the popular packages, when rolled out in an enterprise
environment, fall down pretty hard.  I won't name any in order to avoid
the inevitable you-flamed-my-favorite-XYZ response;  but they are
numerous.

On the other hand there are many very high quality proprietary software
packages.

The Open-Source-good-proprietary-bad attitude is not productive and is
even off-putting.

> The barrier to adoption gets steep rather quickly, once we move beyond
> those who know and understand "the cathedral vs. the bazaar" (Tip of the
> hat to Randall Schwartz for the concept.)

You also fight a very steep up-hill battle in just marketing.  Make a
target market aware your project even exists is a tough slog.

> > > Open source software have proven to be better (in the security and
> > > stability and exactness sense) than any proprietary one.

This general of a statement is meaningless.  There are no shortage of
Open Source projects with hopeless security track records.

> It is blanket statements like this that tend to make "outsiders"
> question the impartiality of the open source community's assertions in
> general. 

Well, there is no mistaking someone who would say something like the
above as impartial.  The speaker clearly is not.  So the outsiders would
be correct.

> If you say "have *often* proven to be better" that is not as
> broad an assertion, but one that is more likely both to be true and to
> be believed.

Even that is too broad to really mean anything practically speaking.
You could say Open Source X is more secure than it's proprietary
equivalent Y - but even then you need to be able to cite something
concrete and in both cases make sure you are talking about current
releases [and not, for example, lingering perceptions from Outlook 97].

> > > However, when it's easy to make a lot of money from selling software,
> > > it may be difficult to find somebody to make it for free... for
> > > obvious reason.

Open Source != free.  Somebody paid.  Most mainstream Open Source
projects are developed and maintained by people who are paid to develop
software;  either directly or indirectly (the Open Source project is a
used or required tool).  This has been demonstrated by studies and
surveys multiples times.

> The barriers to entry for open source are considerable.
> Not insurmountable, and I am thoroughly convinced that it can eventually
> be done, but that is one area where government intervention might be useful.
> Unfortunately, it sounds like it is more "business as usual" inside the
> Beltway (US's capital district, for those of you who might be unfamiliar
> with that term, or its related "beltway bandit", a.k.a vendors to the
> government.)

Yep.

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