Fanatics and their illogic
In a newsgroup thread today, I heard (rather, read) an open-source fanatic complain about some minor shortcoming in a proprietary piece of software they are forced to use at work. This went something like,Bloody Microsoft! This stupid Outlook/Word/etc. can't even do XYZ!
The implicit claim, of course, being that their favourite open-source alternative does not have absolutely any usability bugs of comparable or greater severity.
When asked explicitly whether they are serious about that claim, they'll sure as hell deny it, but still defend their favoured ideology by saying something like,If it's open-source, you can always fix it yourself!
Then I point out that very few people on this planet have the necessary skill to fix an actual bug, much less a subtler usability problem, and I get a reply somewhat akin toThen pay someone to fix it!
which is kind of really stupid, because custom development is orders of magnitude more expensive, so a complete, full-featured commercial solution is usually better value for money.
I also sometimes hear them sometimes claim ridiculous things like,Usually the people who claim The developers haven't fixed my pet bug! suddenly go really quiet when asked for the URL where they actually reported it.
Surely this demonstrates clearly that the person saying this has never seen an active bug-tracking system for any random open-source application, much less Mozilla's, which has open bugs as old as 5 years.
Of course, by the time this point in the thread is reached, I get labeled as a troll and accused of not reading.
The implicit claim, of course, being that their favourite open-source alternative does not have absolutely any usability bugs of comparable or greater severity.
When asked explicitly whether they are serious about that claim, they'll sure as hell deny it, but still defend their favoured ideology by saying something like,If it's open-source, you can always fix it yourself!
Then I point out that very few people on this planet have the necessary skill to fix an actual bug, much less a subtler usability problem, and I get a reply somewhat akin toThen pay someone to fix it!
which is kind of really stupid, because custom development is orders of magnitude more expensive, so a complete, full-featured commercial solution is usually better value for money.
I also sometimes hear them sometimes claim ridiculous things like,Usually the people who claim The developers haven't fixed my pet bug! suddenly go really quiet when asked for the URL where they actually reported it.
Surely this demonstrates clearly that the person saying this has never seen an active bug-tracking system for any random open-source application, much less Mozilla's, which has open bugs as old as 5 years.
Of course, by the time this point in the thread is reached, I get labeled as a troll and accused of not reading.