Wow..just...wow
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| techiem2 May 01, 2008 12:21 PM EDT |
Several of those sound like a description of proprietary software more than foss... Talk about clueless... |
| bigg May 01, 2008 12:51 PM EDT |
Clueless, yes. However, the academic world is very kind to FOSS in general. This guy is just bitter because he couldn't sell his proprietary software when his intended customers could download a better program for free. Academic freedom does not protect lies, he can be challenged in class, and complaints can be filed with his boss. |
| montezuma May 01, 2008 1:49 PM EDT |
I wonder what the college is? Doesn't sound very reputable. Assuming some shred of respectability as an institution the best approach would be to send his head of Department a formal complaint letter stating that an academic has an obligation to present a balanced view of an area where there are many divergent viewpoints. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 01, 2008 1:52 PM EDT |
Oy ... most of that is BS. One thing I am dealing with is that I now have to use Photoshop. There's just no other app -- FOSS or proprietary -- I know of that deals with type in images in the sophisticated way that Photoshop does. For working on images themselves, you don't need Photoshop, but for doing "Photoshoppy" things with type, I can't see any way around it. It's just a challenge for the FOSS community to come up with something better. I hope it happens. |
| softwarejanitor May 01, 2008 1:58 PM EDT |
> While I was in class, a professor tried to hammer Ubuntu and Open Source with comments that I have added
> below. Anyone want to help me with some ammo to put a foot in his proprietary mouth?
>
> The disadvantages of open source are:
>
> * Restricted choice - In virtually every area of software there are dozens if not hundreds choices for different
> commercial packages, but rarely are there more than one or two, if any, open source options. This really hasn't been true for a long time in most areas. There are very few business software niches that there aren't at least a couple of alternatives in the open source world and in some niches the number of choices in open source is almost dizzying. In fact, many anti-open source people often argue the exact OPPOSITE of this -- that there are too many choices in open source compared to closed source. > * Poor integration with Microsoft - Open source products tend to be created by people who do not want to work > with other platforms like dot net, so as a result their products are poorly integrated with Microsoft products > such as Windows, do not use Microsoft features well, and fail to take maximum advantage of the Windows > environment. There is a kernel of truth to this, but in a way its a gross distortion of the truth. The reality is that while there are a lot of people in the open source community who don't like Microsoft and choose to go another direction, there are also lots of open source authors who have gone to huge lengths to build bridges of compatibility to Microsoft's proprietary products. In most cases Microsoft has not only NOT been receptive to this, they've often actively worked against interoperability and been openly hostile to people trying to build compatibility with their platforms and products. Take for example Open Office which has gone to great lengths to try to be able to read and write Microsoft's proprietary document formats, Samba which has spent years reverse engineering Window's network protocols and the Mono project which has built a mostly .NET compatible framework. Many of these developers have made great strides despite Microsoft's lack of cooperation, lack of standards and lack of documentation. In many cases they've done it despite repeated threats by Microsoft of legal action. If Microsoft truly wanted interoperability and compatibility, they could follow industry standards where they exist (instead of building their own proprietary incompatible standards or using "embrace and extend" standards to break them), release specs for their proprietary protocols and formats that everyone could freely use or even, heaven forbid... actually work from their side to build interoperability and compatibility. They've started to talk the talk on some of these things recently, but only time will tell if they are really willing to walk the walk. > * Poor vertical integration - Open source products tend to be written by people who buy into the "software tools" > idea of UNIX whereby one puts together an ultimate application by stringing together smaller applications like > pearls on a string. So the argument here is that building re-usable code objects and utilities is a bad thing, and that massive monolithic designs are better? That concept is so 1970s. It also is mainly only true of command line utilities. If you are talking GUI applications, there are big monolithic applications available for *nix. But unlike the Windows world you've easily got the options of going either way. To do that for Windows you basically have to install something like Cygwin which is ports of *nix software... but then you might as well just use *nix to begin with. > * Poor interactive capabilities – there aren’t any or few open source packages with an interactive user interface > as good as "average good" interactive packages in Windows. Packages like Adobe PhotoShop, Visual Studio, > Microsoft Word and others have GUIs of extraordinary breadth and depth, all accomplished with care and > attention to hundreds of thousands of details of the user interaction. There are similar packages to the three examples given. Whether they are "as good as" or not is a matter of opinion. Also there is nothing stopping the proprietary vendors of the example products from releasing commercial versions of those packages for an open source platform, and it is also possible to run those commercial packages under emulation such as Wine. > * Difficult to use - Open source packages tend to be written by engineers for other engineers and for many of > them it is accepted that ordinary function will involve creation of configuration files, writing scripts, or actually > editing the source code and recompiling. There is once again a kernel of truth here... but only a tiny one. While this is true of many open source packages, there are also plenty for which this is not true and most users of desktop aimed distros like Ubuntu can point-n-click there way through just about anything they might need to do. The downside to proprietary software is that editing source code and recompiling is usually completely impossible, even if the user is capable of doing so. > * Higher cost of installation - Commercial vendors are forced by intense competition to configure their products > for easy installation. Open source tends to have much higher installation costs because a much greater > degree of expertise usually is required for installation. This is a whole lot less true than it used to be. And if average users had to actually install Windows rather than buying hardware with it pre-loaded, a lot of people wouldn't agree. Installing Ubuntu and adding and updating packages through its package system is in my opinion usually easier than similar operations in Windows. > * Higher cost of operation - Open source products tend to require a much higher degree of technical expertise > to operate and maintain, so they end up costing more. I don't believe this to be true. I've worked in many commercial environments where even clerical people have mastered even command line use of *nix with little or no training costs. Also the savings in not having to pay huge licensing fees, huge upgrade costs, huge maintenance contracts can really add up for some software. There are also other issues such as open source's typical higher reliability, less issues with malware (viruses, etc) and its more efficient use of hardware which means less frequent upgrades are necessary. Also open source platforms tend to be cheaper to support because it requires fewer servers to do similar work loads and a *nix administrator can usually maintain a lot more systems than a similarly skilled Windows admin. > * Higher cost of technical support - Open source costs more to support because the software is typically > self-supporting. Actually that usually makes open source LESS expensive to support. Plus for most major open source packages commercial support is available if you really want to pay for it. And there are people who specialize in supporting open source and they are usually better and less expensive than paying for vendor support -- unlike the proprietary world there is COMPETITION in open source support. > * Lack of capabilities / features - Open software packages tend to have far fewer features and capabilities than > commercial equivalents. This is not really true in general. In some areas open source offers more and better capabilities than commercial software. In most cases it is similar. And in a lot of cases both commercial and open source offer a lot of features that end up being "bloat" because few users actually use them. More features isn't always better. One of the advantages of open source platforms is that it is usually easier to remove things that aren't needed than it is on commercial platforms. > * Poor customer response - A well-run commercial software company will immediately turn around customer > requests for enhancements. With open source, if you don't do it yourself you are at the mercy of a disjoint > community of developers. Actually, there must be surprisingly few "well run" commercial software companies then, because many of us who've been working in the industry for a long time can tell you that not very many companies respond quickly to enhancement requests unless "immediately" means in the next major release which might be a year or two away. Microsoft for example still hasn't delivered in Vista on features they promised for Windows 95. > * Lack of innovation / codification of obsolete architectures - The glacially slow pace of development within > open source movements and the design by committee, consensus process tends to assure that obsolete > architectures get implemented within open source. Wow... Just because something is "new" doesn't always mean its better. And despite Microsoft's claim that Windows is "newer" than *nix, what they don't tell you is they've got their own legacy baggage and architectural ugliness that is caused by it. And Microsoft has largely bought or copied most of their "innovations". If anything most of the innovations in software design have happened in the academic and open source communities over the past 20 years or so. > * Exposure to Intellectual Property theft issues - If you buy an open source product you have no assurance > whatsoever that you are not buying intellectual property that has been stolen from its rightful owners, or has > been created illegally by people who are violating a nondisclosure contract. Given the number of times that Microsoft and other commercial vendors have been sued for violations of copyrights or patents, you've got absolutely no assurance there either. If anything, it is more likely that any such violations in open source will be discovered and rectified more quickly than closed source. > * Greater exposure to security problems - If your adversary knows your source code and your mechanism they > have a big leg up on compromising your system. While to a naive person this might appear to be true, it also means that wide exposure of source code means that bugs are found and fixed more quickly. The experience of the industry has been that open source products generally have a much better overall security record by any meaningful measure than closed source does. > * No warranty - If you use open source you are on your own. There is no single company backing the product. There is almost never any warranty on commercial software either. Every Microsoft EULA I've seen specifically disclaims any legal liability. I can't think of a single person or company that has ever successfully sued a commercial software vendor for damages caused by a defective product, which says something. Given that this argument is pretty much just silly. And again, not being dependent on a SINGLE company for support can be an advantage, because even if the original developer is no longer around with open source at least you can find someone else who can help you. I've seen too many cases with orphaned commercial software of people being just plain out of luck. > * Fraudulent status as 'open' source - If one actually looks at where some of the 'free' open source was > developed, one finds that it is not really open source but is the result of an enormous investment of funds, > quite often by a poorly-managed public agency. The GIS example would be GRASS, which was developed > at immense cost by the Army Corps of Engineers. There is nothing "fraudulent" about that. Why should the tax payers have to pay to use software that was developed with taxpayer money? In my opinion it is more fraudulent when a private company steals software developed with taxpayer money and then closes the software and sells it for a profit. An example of that would be Microsoft buying Mosaic from Spyglass, closing it and using it to develop IE. Microsoft has used other open source/free software in their commercial products before, such as BSD derived code in the Windows IP stack. Its not necessarily illegal if the license allows it, but it is intellectually dishonest to be critical of government agencies releasing free/open source software if you are praising closed source vendors who take advantage of it. The bottom line is if software is legitimately released under an open source license then it really is open source. Open source doesn't have to mean that the developers didn't get paid or that no investment of dollars was made into the development. Many formerly commercial software packages have been released as open source, for example most of Open Office and the roots of the Mozilla/Firefox browser family. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 01, 2008 2:04 PM EDT |
I grant you, I should probably try Photoshop with WINE ... if only I owned Photoshop. I use it at work, and for regular photo editing, I prefer MtPaint, the GIMP, Krita ... unfortunately I have ONE LITTLE THING I do that requires IE, and I'll probably have to install WINE in Ubuntu again (I don't have it in my current install). But I need IE less this year than I did last year, so that's a good thing. |
| herzeleid May 01, 2008 2:36 PM EDT |
> For working on images themselves, you don't need Photoshop, but for doing "Photoshoppy" things with type, I can't see any way around it. For things like that, there are macs... |
| pat May 01, 2008 4:03 PM EDT |
I guess this particular professor has let his PhD go to his head, sad when that happens. Unless his name and university is posted I wouldn't bother wasting my time to try and rebut this unless it actually leads to some public embarrassment. |
| bigg May 01, 2008 4:58 PM EDT |
> this particular professor has let his PhD go to his head He let something go to his head, but I don't think it had much to do with a PhD. |
| pat May 01, 2008 5:45 PM EDT |
@bigg And it is piled higher and deeper... |
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