The Saga of Windows, Destroyer of Worlds

Nov 08, 2010 04:30

So over the past couple of weeks, I've faced a series of recurring computing disasters. And it's all thanks to Windows 7 ( Read more... )

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rpb3000 November 22 2010, 03:39:18 UTC
>as long as you don't contribute, you have no right to complain

I disagree. Perhaps when it comes to software written for a specific purpose, and then released to the public for the possibility that others can utilize it for the same purpose, then yes I can agree. But when it's released and advertised as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and specifically as good or better than the commercial alternative, then any user has the right to complain if it doesn't live up to the expectations created through the advertising. FOSS devs should not create, say, a media player, hype it up as better than any other media player out there, then recoil when people complain that it can't handle common formats (regardless of the reason behind WHY it can't).

Something being free should not ever be an excuse for it being of bad quality. It also should not attempt to compete with for-profit products and then use the "well, it was free, you get what you pay for" bullshit as a crutch when people run across problems or missing features. I'll only buy that excuse when it's advertised as what it is, nothing more, and nothing less.

As far as documentation, users kinda need that to learn the program. It's not something they can write from their asses! How would you expect someone to write (yet alone keep up-to-date), say, installation instructions for a Gentoo build, without having the instructions there in the first place? When it comes to editing, especially for clarity, I have done that pretty much every time I've ran across things that gave me the opportunity to fix them.

Also, you can't expect users to "give back" to software when doing so is going to create quite a hurdle to jump to "get in". With the major FOSS projects that have a sizable user-base, you have to work through the community as if it was a corporate ladder. You have to be around, get known, get respected, and then be ALLOWED to submit things. And if you're not a coder and therefore can't help with the actual development, good luck with that. That's not the time and energy most people are going to want to put into something, mostly because most people aren't going to have that kind of time and energy.

Is it fair? Probably not. But it is reality.

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rpb3000 November 22 2010, 05:00:08 UTC
The website for gparted is http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php. Can you please point me to the part of the website that advertizes it "as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and specifically as good or better than the commercial alternative"? Can you tell me where it claims to "attempt to compete with for-profit products"?

If I write a piece of software and release it, and others hype it up, that's not my fault, and I don't deserve the bitching. And I'm not obligated to fulfill any implied promises someone completely unrelated to the project may have given.

With the major FOSS projects that have a sizable user-base, you have to work through the community as if it was a corporate ladder. You have to be around, get known, get respected, and then be ALLOWED to submit things.

What gives you that impression?

There may be some project like that, but the vast majority of FOSS projects out there would be thrilled to get a useful improvement (in code, documentation, translation, etc) from somebody they'd never heard of before. I lurk on the development lists for several projects, and new people show up all the time with some patch, and they're often accepted. That said, the developers of a project determine what quality they require of contributions to make it in. Some projects have quite a high quality bar, and it is easier for existing developers on those projects to get patches accepted simply because they already know where the bar is.

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And my personal opinion here, but I think the FOSS model leads to better software. Maybe not as feature-complete of software -- commercial software is easier to sell if it has a long feature list, where that's not a consideration in many FOSS projects where there is no commercial incentive. But commercial software is subject to deadlines, which is a huge quality killer in my experience. Good software is something you can't rush.

And like I said, most FOSS projects are perfectly willing to accept contributions from random strangers if they're good quality. Try submitting a patch to MS or Apple or any other closed source software vendor. Oh, wait, you can't. So the number of people who can improve a given piece of commercial software is very limited.

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