OSNews

and companies' obsession with so-called intellectual property and vendor lock-in encourages them to force users into the role of unquestioning consumers.

As a geek who generally does not use open-source software (what I use at work excluded), I find this highly insulting. What he talks about is not necessarily a product of open-source communities, but rather computer enthusiasts in general always wanting to learn more and understand what they are using. Open source simply takes it a step further into the source code rather than just the product.

But the example which HE uses to start the article is a poor one, since any geek probably could have solved the issues.

This article is stupid as hell.

Sure, it has its merits but it make it seem that the technical merits of open source software are a hindrance to the development of computing in general.

Somebody show this dude the Firefox brochure please.

What is missing here is that the bane of open source users are not meant to be products of beligerence but are purely reactionary to the limitations of the closed source alternative.Hence,the open source paradigm should not be seen as an end product out to destroy standards and but an evolving developmental model to assist where the closed version falls short.

Edited 2008-01-13 19:49 UTC

Why go through the trouble of changing "Free Software" to "Open Source" in the title?

1. Free software users expect open licenses and no activation methods
2. Free software users expect regular upgrades and patches
3. Free software users expect to work the way they choose
4. Free software users want control of their own systems
5. Free software users explore
6. Free software users expect to help themselves
7. Free software users don't fear the command line
8. Free software users learn software categories, not programs
9. Free software users expect access to developers and other employees

I didn't get past the part where it says we're all defined by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman.

Is there an ascii emoticon for regurgitation?

Eureka. Man plugs in video monitor, then writes dissertation on why he's a genius. Only joking, halfway anyway. The chap was able to fix the problems because he knows a lot about computers and the owners of the problem computers either don't or don't want to. Happens every day. In a way, no further explanation needed.

So the more interesting question is whether the ways of open source software improve your problem-solving skills. Granted immersing yourself in FOSS will make you more knowledgeable about computers, but will it help you with all sorts of other things? Improve clarity of thought, rigour of approach, analysis, lateral thinking? If the writer had addressed a few of those, this could have been a very interesting article. As it is, I felt that he settled for a series of comfy assertions. They're all familiar ones to FOSS people, but being assertions they're not really of much value on their own and could and should be challenged to see whether they stand up and work in practice.

If they don't stand up, after all, one would have to ask oneself whether FOSS was worth it and provided any real benefits over competing approaches.

I think the article is rather good at defining the characteristics that old-school software houses needs to at least consider, before trying to sell anything on an open platform.

It is of course a very generalized description of the differences between the two majorities; the majority of open OS users and the majority of closed OS users. Thus there's of course many on one platform with the behavior of the majority of the opposite.

With that said, the old-schools doesn't necessarily have to change their products to comply with all these characteristics, it's simply a reminder saying that a user-forum with periodical staff visits and that continuous focus on quality and functionality are both very good ideas. And that any effort selling support to private users on open platforms would be waste of advertising funds.

I think the article can save a company or two from failing big time and save them from spending money in the wrong ways.

I stopped reading after this:

How on earth can Adobe make that conclusion when they have NO PRODUCTS for Linux? the last time I had a look, there were legions of end users on Linux waiting with baited breath over the opportunity to purchase Framemaker for Linux. Months before the promised released Adobe turned around and canceled the project.

It has NOTHING to do with 'not paying for software' it has to do with the fact that as end users we're not going to turn around and purchase a piece of proprietary software that is marginally better than the opensource version.

Visualise this; is Photoshop really thousands of dollars better than GIMP? sure, I'm willing to accept that Photoshop is superior to GIMP (thats no debate), heck, I love it, and use at home (academic licence as am a student). The question isn't whether one is better, but whether one is so significantly superior to justify such a large price.

Maybe if Adobe sold Photoshop say for NZ$150-NZ$200 for a copy, you would sell a lot, but asking for thousands of dollars for the same piece of software - please, Adobe needs to learn a little thing called 'value for money'. Unless their product is delivers thousands of dollars more in value than GIMP, no one will purchase it.

Even if you take the price out the equation; you still have the remaining issue - all of Adobes non-Windows version are absolutely crap. They truly are. From their crash happy flash plugin to their bloated reader - its a litany of bad programming right throughout the product range - written by, quite frankly, intellectual pygmies who value 'teh written code fast' than ensuring that when they do write their applications it is portable and it actually performs as well on those alternative platform as the original host platform.

Working at a university I see a lot of trends that people talk about. Its easy to spot these when you have seen thousands of students cycle through your program. The attitude that Open Source users are more capable looks like its true on the surface. But its just an illusion. The real problem is that there are two types of IT people, as I like to label them, the geeks and the 9to5'ers.

We have students who just went in to IT because they thought it would be a good career. These are the 9to5'ers. They do the minimum learning to skate by. And nothing is easier to look good at running than Windows. Thats not to say it IS that easy to do well, but with a little knowledge its pretty easy to look like you know what your doing. These people don't touch linux or unix because it requires a lot more effort to learn it to any degree of proficiency.

Then we have the true geeks. They would be doing this no matter how much it paid. They are the type of people that just think about technology all the time. These people put in whatever effort is necessary to learn whatever they want. Some of these people end up in Open Source. Some stay in Windows. Either way they are experts at what they do and know a scary amount of stuff.

I know many 9to5'ers who pretend to be Windows admins. I dont know any 9to5'ers who pretend to be Linux admins.

The nine things he cites about Free Software users are effects, not causes, of the difference.

Sure, Free Software users aren't afraid of the command line, and are used to thinking of completing tasks versus using programs... but that's got more to do with the current nature of Open Source software (many solutions, usually different from the Closed Source most of us grew up with...)

Open Source users are the ones who sought out something different, and it's THAT kind of behaviour that makes them different. It's got little to do with the software itself. That helplessness fostered by some programs he thinks he sees probably has to do more with the kinds of programs those non-geek users seek out.

For the most part I agree with what the author of the article wrote. Although there are certainly ample exceptions to what he describes, the exceptions prove the rule. The differences between Free Software users and your typical Windows users are primarily ones of expectations and what constitutes the comfort zone of percieved competency.

Free Software users tend to be quite flexible and pragmatic when it comes to expectations-they are not as quickly disappointed and simply resign when confronted with something that does not work as expected. Additionally Free Software users tend to develop a sense of competency about most of the routinely performed task, as stated in the article Free Software users think in terms of categories and not in terms of product names-this means that when something does not work as expected one simple resorts to using another tool to get the job done as opposed to being confronted with a situation where something is simply undoable because a particular product does not allow for it.

Being able to choose a particular tool, and awareness of the limitations of particular tools, their relatives strengths and weakness, and how these tools are just means to the ends of the task at hand leads users to a degree of competency.

To touch on one moment which underlies much of what the author was saying: Microsoft and the propietary culture of Microsoft applications have done a serious disservice to computer users over the last 10 years. When I talk with average Windows users they tend to be more functionally crippled, more ignorant about how anything works(or conversely why somethings dont work), and largely incapable of understanding that a particular product is but an instance of a category of software and as such replaceable with other software of the same kind.

This situation is not new, but it has deteriorated greatly over the last 10 years-I attribute this primarily to 2 trends -1) a tremendous surge in the number of casual computer users, whereas 10 years prior relatively few used computers at all. 2) a progressive crippling of the UI of Windows software through multiple versions of development.

Q: What is the number 1 problem which Windows users have ?
A: Where is the file I just created, downloaded, copied, saved ?

Most Windows users have 0 grasp of the directory structure which underlies almost everything they are doing. Most Windows users no longer even know of the existence of a file manager (aka Windows Explorers). Of course Microsoft has also encouraged this: Firstly by naming the file manager Windows Explorer the possibility of confusion with Internet Explorer reaches the highest of possible hights, then the ungodly long and counter intuitive directory naming scheme and gobs and gobs of subdirectories which make travering the directory tree difficult and unrewarding, then by hiding, by default, much of what is actually present in the directories, forcing you to go to options to click on things to be able to see what is there, and even then still not having direct access to all of the files due to layer upon layer of obscure pseudo security mechanisms.

Then of course why does one need a file manager- you already have links to My Computer,My Documents, My Share Documents etc. on your desktop-that each of these in turn are nothing but "views" of particular directories, directories in a tree, is completely lost on most Windows users. I have great empathy for my fellow Windows users/lost souls, they are hopelessly overwhelmed by an utter lack of transparency, by their inability to form some kind of mental picture of how things are organized on their computers, never really knowing where anything gets saved and wasting untold hours using the "search" function for the PDF file they just downloaded from the internet.

Oh how ironic it is that people used to criticize the lack of UI consistency in Free Software desktops-but just look at the current Windows Desktops arround-and I am only speaking of XP not Vista!. Each major proprietary software product is using its own widgets, has its own UI, hell even Microsoft has a half a dozen various widget sets- this is mayhem and chaos for the mere mortals forced to used this system everyday. It has been YEARS since I was confronted with a similar level of UI inconsistency using GNOME.

The vast majority of Windows users do not even have a clue as to what an Operating System means. For the overwhelming majority of Windows users the INTERNET is "Internet Explorer". Although Microsoft Office is a proprietary additional purchase, most people who use it consider it to be WINDOWS, much like the equation between INTERNET and IE.

It is positively discouraging how ignorant(unknowing) the majority of Windows users are-but my point is not to point out the obvious, but to point to how this ignorance has been manufactured, breed, designed and sought by Microsoft.

One could of course argue that users should not need to know these things and that it is a sign of UI failure when users must know these things- but this line of thinking of computers as appliances, stands at total odds to what Windows portends to be. The UI of an appliance should never lead to confusion -appliance UI means radically delimiting the ways something can be achieved to things which are immediately discoverable, so optimally there should be one way to perform a specific task, and appliances are task specific-ie. they are only good for X number of things.

Whereas Windows wants to be best in every aspect of computing(media, gaming, office productivity etc.)
With Windows you always have 10-15 different ways of doing things and most users will have mastered 2-3 ways, yet which 2-3 ways are chose,leads to a fragmenting of collective usage experience. The abuse of metaphors in the Windows desktop leads to a crippling in the ability of most to grasp the abstract relations at hand, leaving users out in the cold, lost, quickly overwhelmed and continuously frustrated by their own apparent failures.

The utter lack of transparency on the UI level of Windows makes users scared to experiment and try things-one wrong click somewhere and all of a sudden something changes and one has virtually know ability reconstruct the changes that were just made. Most Windows users do not know what a WINDOW is! What the difference between a window and the desktop is, or what that right mouse button is supposed to do! They click things once which require a double click, they double click things which require a single click-why? total UI confusion. Oops pressed something and the app went full screen- which key (maybe mouse!) should I use to exit fullscreen, try a dozen keys nothing happens immediately so just press the power button!. What percentage of Windows users even know about Drag and Drop which arguably works much better under Windows than under other Free Software ?

I write all of this because I have spent THOUSANDS of hours helping people with their problems with Windows. Each and every time I try to help someone I end up in teaching a class in BASIC COMPUTER SKILLS 101 which should have been learnt through sheer osmosis if the UI was not such a utter nightmare of inconsistency, anti-transparency, black-magic mumbo jumbo.

These same people who I help with windows problems occassionaly visit me- when they do and they want to use a computer I let them use my laptop running Ubuntu strangely enough they never seem to have any questions....

There is lots and lots of software for Windows which I wish I could use under Linux, somethings under Windows are amazingly trouble free and simple, but I refuse to use a system which only can succeed in the market by dumbing down its users into total ignorance and which treats its users as the dumbest thing since sliced bread.

Shame on your Microsoft.

By this guy's logic, everyone would be exploring their computer to the full extent, IF ONLY they were using a free OS.

That's like saying that everyone would be their own mechanic, IF ONLY they drove a hot-rod, or everyone would avoid eating at restaurants and only cook for themselves, IF ONLY they owned more cookbooks. Are we really to believe that if everyone just converted to Linux, somehow the masses would be better computer-educated and would never again need their nerdy relatives to help them? In your utopian dreams.

The fact is, the vast majority of people DON'T HAVE THE TIME, much less the desire to make the time to delve into the depths of their computer. And they have EVEN LESS INCENTIVE to make the time to try out a new operating system, at which point they have to make EVEN MORE time to "test out every possible alternative app in each category until they find the one they like best" (paraphrased).

The fact that most users use Windows and proprietary software, and the fact that they do not explore their system, is hardly cause and effect. Rather, the cause and effect is happening on the part of the minority of users who DO have the time/motivation to delve into their systems, as they are the ones who are more likely to give Linux and free software applications a spin.

I know plenty of people who are computer enthusiasts and know their way in and out of every nook and cranny of Windows like the back of their hand. This kind of exploratory behavior has very little to do with whether you use Linux or Windows. Either you're motivated or you're not, that's the deciding factor.

Bringing Linux to the masses may indeed encourage people over the long term (read: the next generation of children) to look at code and contribute to software projects. It may also (hopefully) contribute to a world devoid of proprietary file formats that require a tax every other year to view. It may even lead to a world where all software, even the most powerful, is available to everyone cost-free. But will it encourage every single user to know their computer inside and out? Doubtful.

If you love open source, then stop fixing closed source programs.
Even for your friends, or your family.

They can understand really well that since you don't use their OS or their programs, you won't be