Open Source Products Just Are Not As Good?

Love Open Office except for one thing. There are times I can’t format a document to the liking or my printer. No matter how hard I try, what I see on the page is NOT what is printed out. Except for that one glitch, I wouldn’t even use my Word. I AM waiting though, because being open source, I am sure someone will figure out a fix sooner or later for my printer formating problems.

Hi, Matt

I must congratulate you on pointing out this miss concept of open source
programs. I cannot count the times that i have had people ask me “what
program do you use for doing X” then when i tell them, they reply with
such remarks as, “my mate says that is a really crap program and got
me to buy such and such”. I then normally ask them then how much it
cost and how often they use it and many times they say, ” i think it cost
X and i use it only about once a month or so”.

I point out to them where they can get the free program that i use and
get them to at least give it a try for awhile. I also give them some kind
of support on how to operate it. So far almost all of my recommendations
are still being used by the people that i tell about them and some of
them never go back to the ones that cost them an arm and a leg for
updating etc…

I also find that these people will also become more adventurous and
start to try other open source applications etc. I feel that mostly it is
just plain ignorance and like you say biasness that prevents some
people even trying open source…

Thanks for a great write up…

Vince

As Greg Papadopoulos rightly put it….think of open source as a recipe. You share it, create a demand and then sell books which contain the recipes….You now are talking money. Simple!
Any why would an Open Source product be better than a closed source product of the same genre…..Simply because too many people are looking at it and continuously contributing to making it better.
So guys wake up. Its Open up or Die!

First off, there’s this confusion between “free beer and free speech”. Free and Open Source Software are free as in freedom, meaning we enjoy the four software freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. Also, open source as a development model ensures quality because of the “million eyeballs” looking out for bugs. In other words, the low cost (w/c IMHO is questionable) is only a minor issue.

Lastly, in regard to the tags of this article: I’m uneasy with the “freeware” tag because Free and Open Source Software are *not* freeware, and vice versa.

Sun/Google and Adobe now gunning for Microsoft Office
Whether Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a full-fledged Microsoft Office competitor is up for debate. But StarOffice, Sun’s desktop-productivity suite, is definitely a head-to-head Office rival. And StarOffice distributed by Google? There’s no way anyone could claim that isn’t meant to be a direct shot across the Microsoft Office bow.Over…
StarOffice normally sells for $70, but the Google Pack is the first place you can get it for free, meaning Google pulled a nice string or two for users. Google didn’t use the already free OpenOffice.org, giving them a bit of an older version of the same codebase, but some value added elements and a supposedly more polished suite.
http://www.star-office.org
If you’re just looking to get StarOffice for free, this is a good way to do it, since you can de-select the other components of the Pack. If you were looking for an office suite that integrates with Google Docs (for offline editing), look elsewhere, because Google apparently didn’t think of that one. No Google Gears in this version of StarOffice? That’s a shame.

Mike: Solid feedback and great point as per usual. ;)

Vince: Thanks for the support, always appreciated.

Deepa: Good thoughts on the subject for sure. Thanks.

Silverlokk: Good point as well and because you brought up the freeware tag with honest concern, I have removed it as you are right - it should not have been there. Thanks.

vishal: Good point, did not even consider StarOffice in the mix.

I don’t know if the lack of cost alone affects the perception that open source is not as good as paid-for software.

In many cases, the open-source stuff is *not* as good as their closed source counterparts. Is Firefox as good as (or better than) MSIE7? Heck, yeah! Is GIMP, OO Write, OO Spreadsheet as good as (i.e. feature-rich, polished) Photoshop, Word and Excel? Well, no — but on the other hand, they’ll do everything that 90+% of user’s need them to do.

Many want that extra polish and capability - even though they’ll likely never use it. How many “Range Rovers” have you seen driving around, that have never been on so much as a dirt trail ;-)

Of course, if people really understood/took the time to understand the other benefits of open source (open formats, file compatibility), they might see things differently.

BooRadley: Fair enough, but let’s examine “why” most people feel that way. Again, only based on my experience, others may have other reasons.

-GIMP vs Photoshop. The biggest issue I have seen is the current GIMP layout. That has been the single biggest hurdle for the app, as I have yet to see a single feature missing myself. If there is, please list it or even better, ask for it to be added. Then again, try http://gimpshop.blogspot.com ;)

I would point on that on my Ubuntu box, GIMP is 80% faster at start-up and rendering than Photoshop for anything I am trying to do. That’s a fact perhaps making learning a new layout worth it to people like myself.

-Oo vs MS Office. Templates, definitely better on the Microsoft side of the fence. And if the user is needing more ‘additions’ to the apps themselves, as another commenter pointed out, purchase StarOffice, which has everything Oo is missing, even though they are basically one in the same.

I would be first agree that MANY OSS apps lack polish; POPFile anyone? But for the general public, as an ex-repair tech, I can tell you that Oo does indeed meet the needs of ‘general’ users 99%-100%. It’s the people who call them selves power users who appear to be wanting ’something more’. Oddly enough, the only thing I have ever found to be missing from Oo is indeed, templates. Short of that, I would love to understand real world examples of what is lacking. Thus far, nothing has been clearly presented in this area.

Hit the nail right on the head. Great article.

Your point is well taken. I use OpenOffice.org to run a small publishing company along with Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape and the lot.

But FOSS must become better. OpenOffice for example is not pnly weak with impress, but also Base is no match to MSAccess. But we need this desperately!. Writer should get a better spell checker and a grammar checker would be nice. I suppose Sun comes to the rescue there but that is the closed source part of it.

So I whole heartily agree with what you wrote but there is some in house constructive criticism we need to air but encourage the coders to continue with their good job.

I have found, in trying to get OpenOffice accepted where I work, that one of the biggest features missing is one that is not so easily added: third-party vendor support. In fact, that’s a problem for most open source technologies.

I have the privilege of working for a boss who is open-source friendly and willing to push for it. But the problem is when we go looking for a vendor for some new system, they typically integrate their products with Microsoft products exclusively. I mean, try to find a vertical software vendor who integrates with OpenOffice on the front end, or PostgreSQL on the backend. But there are plenty that will work with Excel, Access, or MS SQL server. It’s not a reflection on the quality of these apps, it’s just the voodoo of selling a product to businesses.

There are some systematic issues in the Open Source world. OS programmers sometimes tend to solve “their” problem and consider the work done, without truly asking if they are only providing a 90% solution.

A few specific examples of things that “could be better” with open source:
In Linux, use the X11 tools to set up an ethernet card for static addressing. Under RHEL5, you have to type the IP and tab to the netmask and type a netmask. Under Windows, tabbing to the Netmask field fills in a pre-calculated value based on the class. You can say that this is a little thing, that it’s not a common operation, and even note that it’s “the wrong thing” sometimes, but it shows that someone paid a little bit of attention to cognitive support beyond just the exact feature set of “accept an IP and netmask”.

As of a few months ago when I tried to use OpenOffice Calc for some for-pay calculation work, it had a limit of 64k records in the spreadsheet. The daily feeds that I was getting included somewhat more than that.

Does OpenOffice Writer do watermarked printing yet?

Basically, you have to define “better”. Cost is certainly one part of that, but feature complete, performance, and matching the features to the workload all matter as well. If you can do everything you want with Open Source tools, that’s great.

I thought of another one. The last time I tried to get OpenOffice calc to produce a scatter plot with the points individually titled, I couldn’t get that to work either.

See here for an example.
http://www.figurethis.org/challenges/c70/challenge.htm

What is really needed in FOSS is to try to emulate Firefox a little more. Firefox is way better than Explorer, no doubt of it. But OpenOffice is by no means way better than MS Office. It may be just as good, or have all the features you need, but it’s not better.

Firefox made it by having new, innovative features and better security than Explorer. For OpenOffice to “make it”, it needs some brand-spanking-new features that make it a “must-have”. I have no idea what these should be. If someone had thought of them they would be being implemented I’m sure.

I am also saying this by way of being constructive. I am a Linux user and an OpenOffice user. I have tried to get a friend to switch to OpenOffice, and later if possible Linux. They show no interest because they see no advantage. And they are using Office 97, not the latest and greatest.

So, we need some new ideas, all of us in the FOSS world.

You haven’t actually given even an example of some open source product that is as good as (or better than) its closed source competition. For anyone that has actually used a lot of programs it’s quite clear that popular open source software is generally worse than the corresponding popular closed source software. Often they’re much, much worse (e.g. video editors) or even completely non-existing (e.g. there are no “personal” firewalls for linux, at least not post-alpha). There are a few exceptions, but they are few and far in between.

> GIMP vs Photoshop. The biggest issue I have seen is the
> current GIMP layout.

Both GIMP and Photoshop suck. Really, they do. The workflow is sooo slow on both, and you end up spending your time redoing things fifty times over. The layer effects (or filters or whatever they’re called) helped Photoshop a little, but that’s the way all filters should have been from the start.

And for missing features in GIMP? C’mon! How about being able to use more than 8 bits per channel?!? That was an essential feature ten years ago and today it’s even more important. It’s completely inexcusable that GIMP still can’t do even a meager 16 bits/channel. The result is just so extremely ugly after you’ve run your image through a bunch of filters, most of which lessen the color space when nearby colors merge because of rounding to the closest 8 bit integer. CinePaint can do 16 b/c, but for the other parts it’s way, way behind even GIMP.

One of the best things about Open Source is that one can use a robust and optimised OS like Linux, and a small footprint window manager for running proprietary vertical market software on a single function desktop.

There are areas like CAD/CAM and country specific business accounting where no comparable FLOSS solution exists, yet because of their prior existence on UNIX, many of these high end solutions can be easily ported to Linux, enabling the money saved to be utilised for more powerful hardware and thus better productivity.

In another area where no FLOSS equivalent exists, the general purpose power user environment, I have found that the proprietary IDE Runtime Revolution allows non programmers to quickly develop desktop GUI solutions on Linux (or for that matter, MAC and Windows) for anything the user can think of. The built runtime binary is license free, so can be freely distributed across the enterprise.
The IDE integrates easily with the *nix shell and tools and can call and use existing applications as a bonus.

Until each Linux vertical application market share grows to 20% and attracts FLOSS startups, we can’t expect to see these types of solution to be anything but proprietary, as ongoing development costs cannot be recouped by affordable service agreements in a small user base.
(This may be an expenditure costing problem as well)

Even in the film industry where penetration is way beyond the 20% figure, proprietary solutions are extensively used because, dare I say, they are better. (So far).

Firefox’s success wasn’t due alone to it’s built in features. What put it over the top was its ability to run plugins. Therefore, the mozilla team did not have to think of every new feature out there to add to the browser. Let the community create plugins which extend the capabilities of Firefox.

What OpenOffice (and many other FOSS applications) need is this “plugin” approach. OpenOffice in itself may not be as functional as MS Office, especially for advanced tasks, but if OpenOffice had a plugin interface like Firefox and the community actively develops plugins for OpenOffice, you would see OpenOffice soon surpass MS Office. The same applies with GIMP and many others.

Mozilla has shown us that the plugin approach works. Microsoft recognized that and added the feature to IE7 and even to Vista (with their “gadgets”).

Great article. Good points all around. However, the point of the article was about closed source users being closed minded to Open Source. It may be true that Open Source App X does not have the “howl-o-matic-itchy-scratch” feature that the same closed source app has, but how often does the average person use that feature?.. Likely not at all. Should the OO devs really spend XXX% of their time chasing down some nearly never used and not really needed feature and ignore things like bug and security fixes?.. Improvements to existing features to make them more user friendly?.. I think not.

Hi,

nice article and discussion..
But what’s wrong with the statement “software cannot time travel, supporting formats from the future.” ?
For example, older Scribus versions will not open current Scribus file formats either. There isn’t even any external converter to accomplish that. Of course it’s no problem to upgrade Scribus, and Scribus can open all old file formats down to version 0.6.
Microsoft and other software companies usually support the backward path by offering to safe the document in the format of an older version. Nowadays Microsoft also offers free plugins to older versions of Word to newer Word documents.
So, there are solutions, and it might even be possible to design a fileformat which evolves and still allows to gracefully open newer docs in older versions of the software, but it stays a fact that software can not time-travel.

/Andreas

@ Marcus

Some OSS software which is best-of-breed IMHO:

Firefox and family
Linux and *BSD
Apache Webserver
GCC as a multi-platform compiler (speed and error reporting could be improved)
Ghostscript

There’s also some software which doesn’t have any closed source counterparts AFAIK:

TeX, GRASS, and probably many others

And for security related software many people including myself think that closed source automatically means degraded security (in the long run).

OTOH I agree that most OSS products are less polished than commercial products (even if the OSS products are superior in other ways). After all you need not only the manpower, but also people with strong knowledge in and devotion to usability.

/Andreas

P.S.: for Gimp & Photoshop haters: watch out for Krita :-)

http://digital-filmmaking.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-editing-options-for-linux.html

> for Gimp & Photoshop haters: watch out for Krita

Krita is just more of the same. It does support >8b/c, but it has just the same horrible workflow as gimp and ps, since none of them is nondestructive (well, except for the few effect layers (or somesuch) in PS).

I feel that there is one area where open source doesn’t seem to offer an alternative to the closed source providers… Autodesk’s AutoCAD and generally speaking the entire spectrum of special purpose CAD products for geology and engineering seem to be completely missing from the open source menu. I would be quite happy to admit that I am wrong about this if anyone knows of an equivalent to AutoCAD but after searching through every open source product directory for most of 6 months I have resigned myself to the conclusion that if I want open source CAD - I better start writing it…

It’s all very well championing open source’s successes in the most commonly used software (Web Browsers, Email clients, Word Processing, Spreadsheets etc.) but as soon as you move into more specialist areas, the open source community is suddenly nowhere to be found.

A good example of an area where open source software is severely lacking is music sequencing software, such as Cubase, Logic, Reason or even GarageBand. To my knowledge, there is absolutely nothing the open source community has even attempted to produce that comes close to any of these closed source products.

As such, if you’re a musician/composer, you’re left completely high and dry with Linux… so when I got fed up with Windows, OS X was my only viable alternative.

@Mike D

Have you tried QCAD? I’m not an expert in CAD so I can’t say how close it comes to the $6,000+ per license AutoCAD, but you should give it a go and tell us what you think.