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I have sort of an underlying philosophical theory that open-source projects that start out as attempts to clone a popular commercial package will ultimately fai

I have sort of an underlying philosophical theory that open-source projects that start out as attempts to clone a popular commercial package will ultimately fail. The reasoning goes like this: even if you achieve a good clone, the commercial project will move along and you will not be able to keep up. Your desire to catch a user-base that is resistant to change will actually encourage you to not keep up, as at first this looks like a kind of success, but then a few years down the road you will realize that you are terrible behind. As an example, look at LibreOffice. It is widely marketed by OSS enthusiasts as "just like Office" and "just as good as Office," but it struggled to meet feature parity while remaining stable early on. Then, MS transitioned Office to the Ribbon UI. This was absolutely hated by a fairly large group of users, and it became a marketing point, at least in my circles, for LibreOffice that it had not made such a transition. This pulled in more users and looked like a success story. Years later, though, Office users have adapted to the Ribbon UI and discovered its advantages, and when you compare Office to LibreOffice, LibreOffice seems hopelessly out of date. I think KDE is another example of this phenomenon as it was commonly seen as the best way to transition from Windows. But as a project it seriously struggled to retain interest after Microsoft continued to evolve their desktop environment in big ways, and now that I think they've successfully divorced themselves from any "clone of Windows" objectives they're still not really able to make up for the lost steam. For just a last example, I would point to The GIMP, which has successfully navigated the transition from "a kind of clone of Photoshop" to "a kind of clone of a very old version of Photoshop."

lakechfoma 9y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with all of that except GIMP. The UI in GIMP is horrendous and the only reason it's successful IMO is because the gap it fills is that of an expensive and confusing product that is niche to a lot of people who need some of the functionality but don't use it for their job. I use it quite often (and loathe the interface) but I'll never pay for photoshop because I don't need the pro tool and after 10+ years of GIMP I don't want to shake up.
- progman 9y ago
  To me it's exactly the opposite. I am glad that KDE remained to be a usable desktop, and did not follow the Win 8 GUI disaster. I also appreciate that LibreOffice sticks to the classical menu system and doesn't overload the desktop window with a multiple of icons where most of them are barely used.
progman 9y ago
Regarding catching up you are right. It is always difficult, if not impossible to catch up with proprietary systems. I always wondered why the OSS community followed that way for so long instead of focusing on things which the user really needs and wants. Both Gnome and KDE for instance made the big mistake to ditch their very successful previous versions in favor of something many users didn't like. Fortunately, and that's a big point for Linux, the user decides the further direction. KDE has become very usable again, and Gnome is on the way. In the Windows and Mac ecosystems the users have no choice. Regarding Limux, I followed the Limux project pretty closely. I think this project failed only for political reasons. This conjecture is supported by the fact that most reports about Limux in Germany published only opinions of technically clueless political leaders while the opinions of the actual users were barely mentioned, if mentioned at all. The point is, Limux had to fail by any means since MS could never afford a Limux success. If Limux would have been successful (and it actually looked promising) it would have been an example to follow for the whole world -- just for reason of license costs and source control.

lakechfoma 9y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with all of that except GIMP. The UI in GIMP is horrendous and the only reason it's successful IMO is because the gap it fills is that of an expensive and confusing product that is niche to a lot of people who need some of the functionality but don't use it for their job. I use it quite often (and loathe the interface) but I'll never pay for photoshop because I don't need the pro tool and after 10+ years of GIMP I don't want to shake up.

progman 9y ago
To me it's exactly the opposite. I am glad that KDE remained to be a usable desktop, and did not follow the Win 8 GUI disaster. I also appreciate that LibreOffice sticks to the classical menu system and doesn't overload the desktop window with a multiple of icons where most of them are barely used.

progman 9y ago

Regarding catching up you are right. It is always difficult, if not impossible to catch up with proprietary systems. I always wondered why the OSS community followed that way for so long instead of focusing on things which the user really needs and wants. Both Gnome and KDE for instance made the big mistake to ditch their very successful previous versions in favor of something many users didn't like. Fortunately, and that's a big point for Linux, the user decides the further direction. KDE has become very usable again, and Gnome is on the way. In the Windows and Mac ecosystems the users have no choice. Regarding Limux, I followed the Limux project pretty closely. I think this project failed only for political reasons. This conjecture is supported by the fact that most reports about Limux in Germany published only opinions of technically clueless political leaders while the opinions of the actual users were barely mentioned, if mentioned at all. The point is, Limux had to fail by any means since MS could never afford a Limux success. If Limux would have been successful (and it actually looked promising) it would have been an example to follow for the whole world -- just for reason of license costs and source control.