9 ms·

It seems like this shouldn't be the case, at all. Commercial software has a more obvious reason to avoid breaking your stuff and to try and track down bugs. Bu

It seems like this shouldn't be the case, at all. Commercial software has a more obvious reason to avoid breaking your stuff and to try and track down bugs. But surprisingly, I've noticed the same thing -- that for me, Free software tends to break less often than proprietary software, that it tends to introduce fewer breaking changes to my workflows, and that when it does break, it tends to get patched more quickly and to (at worst) be easier to work around. This is highly anecdotal (and there are some exceptions). I wouldn't make a general, bold claim like the article is making about it. But noticing that general pattern with the software that I use has been one of the biggest driving forces behind me adopting more and more Free software into my core workflows as a policy. In general, if a Free alternative to a proprietary solution exists, I'll choose the Free one even if it has fewer features, because I assume that the proprietary version will eventually be more trouble than it's worth, or that it will eventually break in a way that significantly disrupts what I'm trying to do. I'd be skeptical of saying something empirical about that, I don't know that other people using other software wouldn't have different experiences than me. But I do find myself kind of nodding along with the article. A lot of the Free software I use, I use for practical reasons -- because I want to get work done, and I don't want my computer to break while I'm trying to get work done. Other people's mileage might vary.

aflag 6y ago
I think work arounds being easier doesn't really need any empirical data to back it up. By having the source code, a lot more people will be able to make sense of it and figure out how to change (or even fork) the original software. I'd say that's pretty much a corollary. On the other hand, I think free software probably tend to break backward compatibility less mainly because it moves at a slower pace (be it because it's designed by committee or just lack resources). With software as a service in special, breaking changes is sort of the industry norm. So, there's also that cultural component to it. But it's difficult to measure the rate at which free software introduces breaking changes vs proprietary software.
nwah1 6y ago
I think for something such as a unix-style CLI tool that does one thing, and one thing only, non-commercial community-driven development works great. For anything else, not so much. It is not possible to imagine a video game produced by an open community, because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus. That requires hierarchy, or solo development. Both realistically require a lot of resources and thus are overwhelmingly commercial in nature. The year of the linux desktop seems to never arrive because all of the support and integration of the various components requires constant application of labor by an army of people, if it is to be usable. Android and Ubuntu might be able to succeed, but "the community" will not. The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game. It can write a kernel, but cannot support a whole distro that "just works" for normal people. Maybe in some distant future when there is no constant churn of new features and drivers and rewrites then we can have an open community-maintained distro that actually works for a normal person. Doubt such a time will ever arrive, but if it did then and only then would OSes become boring. Web rendering engines are complex and happen to be open source nowadays, but are commercially supported and wrapped in proprietary packages. Mozilla is failing to keep up with gecko, so the last non-commercial rendering engine is dying a slow death. It was able to succeed somewhat because following standards is straightforward and thus can be considered "boring." Some have likened browser development to emulator development. But packaging it all up nicely and providing the best possible user experience? I wouldn't count on it.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus I've worked on enough commercial software to know that most large, practical products aren't designed from an auteur perspective, and that many that are, shouldn't be. My perspective on game development is different than it is for tools -- some of the most impressive OS tools I've seen (Blender, Krita) are where they are specifically because they've been designed by committee, and because it turns out that a committee of artists generally produces better art-tools than a committee of programmers and marketers. > The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game. A good 90% of the tools where reliability matters are boring, and I want them to be boring. I compare this to other tools that I use outside of a computer. I don't want a radical piano when I'm composing music, I want a finely tuned, boring solution. I don't want radical pencils, I do most of my artwork with tools that I know extremely well. When I picked up digital drawing, my approach was the same; I didn't want an auteur experience, I wanted extremely consistent drivers, and consistent software that allowed me to focus on my artwork, not the user interface. I think you're hitting on an interesting artistic point with game development, but you're misapplying that point to a field with different concerns. I use Linux because it's boring. It gets out of my way and lets me focus on creative tasks.
systemvoltage 6y ago
This is a really broad brush. Oracle DB will fail less often than a python open source utility with 10 stars on Github. It really depends on the scale of the project and how many people are contributing to it, and its momentum going forward - commercial or open-source. I've had MATLAB engineers fix a compiler bug in 2 hours while I was on the phone line with them. Sure, it costs my company $13k/year for the license but when you have a jet engine hoisted up for testing and its costing the company thousands of dollars of loss time, yep, commercial software or open-source software with solid support is a must. Proprietary software sometimes is quite good if not the best in class. There is no need to pick up pitch forks and large brushes to pain everything red. If nothing else, it shows how misguided, immature and closed-minded some of the GNU folks are. Most of the open source contributors are nice though, and I don't wish to ironically generalize everyone.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  GNU Octave appears to have some commercial support vendors listed, that probably wouldn't mind receiving $13k/year in exchange for answering the phone: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    That sounds great! Why can't both proprietary software and open source software co-exist? For startups and small companies, open source software is great. For large enterprises, the cost of the software is a vanishingly small % of the cost, and in fact they don't care as much - a lot of large enterprises are continuing to open source their own internal tools. MATLAB has over 2 dozen toolboxes, with insanely detailed documentation. We are actually very happy to have MATLAB and our engineers are trained to use it for decades. We gladly pay for it. It would be a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave even if it did everything MATLAB did. I think we are getting stuck in the weeds, the point is: We are engineers. Software is a tool to get the job done. There are many other packages that cannot compete with anything open source - ANSYS Mechanical for example.
hilbertseries 6y ago
My experiences with Ubuntu vs Windows, I did not come away thinking that free software has less bugs in it. This is not to say that Windows has no bugs in it, but I’ve never had my sound just stop working or my WiFi break after an upgrade on a Windows machine.
- monoideism 6y ago
  Perhaps not, but I've had performance issues far, far more often on Windows than on Linux (or MacOS). I mean, you typically can't even go a week without rebooting Windows, or you suffer severe degradation of performance. Also, I personally have never had my sound just stop working or my Wifi break on Ubuntu since probably 2013 or 2014.
- em500 6y ago
  Windows 10 has a pretty awful update history. Among it's greatest hits, it has caused user data loss and rendered some PCs unbootable (including one of my laptops).
  - boogies 6y ago
    IIRC MS has even had to block their own updates from their own Surface devices to prevent bricking. Contrast that GNU/Linux which a majority of desktop users probably run on hardware that wasn’t designed for it — I know I do because I’ve seen plenty of BSODs after updates which took orders of magnitude longer than installing GNU on the same hardware which ran the latter flawlessly.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    No, windows updates always had that reputation. Vista, 7, 10. All of them "bootlooped" i.e. an error occurs during update but windows does not delete the failed update from cache. Imagine being a 13 year old kid with a Vista laptop trying to install .NET Framework because he wanted to play Terraria but then his laptop becomes useless. Of course that is going to breed resentment and fueled my switch to Arch Linux. I managed to "unbrick" a Windows 10 system by disabling the windows update service and by deleting the cache folder. Windows updates are just universally bad.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Commercial software has a more obvious reason to avoid breaking your stuff and to try and track down bugs.i Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers. Also, if someone is only working on something for a paycheck they may not be as thorough as someone working to solve their own problems, or satisfying their passions. Commercial software has an advantage when it comes to documentation, and being user friendly because they're the things no one wants to do.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  This is not true though. It really depends on the company and their philosophy, whether they are publicly traded or what their executive team is like. Good companies know how to invest into their products and make them world class. In my previous job, we used a wind turbine simulation package developed by 25 engineers and it was so great - they really cared and fixed things. It was $50k/seat/annual license but we were almost like 2 different teams under the same company. "You scratch my back, I scratch yours". There are also a lot of companies that have lock-ins and generally awful attitude towards their own products. This also exists in the open source world - there is a lot of awful open source code out there.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  > Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers. Not if it's SaaS. Vendors of rented software have no economic incentive to develop new features, or even fix bugs, because they get subscription fees without needing to do any work.
  - notmyfuture 6y ago
    There is still competition to consider though. If a SaaS product has competitors that are more reliable, or more feature rich, they should win & retain more customers over time.
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      Data lock-in, due to proprietary file formats, makes switching software extremely difficult, especially for companies that interchange data with outside entities. For instance, companies that do design and/or A/V work have no real alternatives to paying Adobe monthly--regardless of how little work Adobe puts into Creative Suite--because it's an industry standard and there are no alternatives that offer friction-free interoperability.
boogies 6y ago
Free software ≠ non-commercial software That’s a false dichotomy.
jacobsenscott 6y ago
Commercial software usually has a support team working frantically behind the scenes trying to keep the wheels on, while the engineers are under presser to add more bells and whistles rather than improve the core application. Support issue caused by bugs are just a cost of doing business. Obviously you need a certain amount of reliability to keep those costs from putting you out of business, but less than you might think. Free software sinks or swims based on how it works when nobody is there to support it. So the reliable stuff rises to the top.
- chii 6y ago
  There's also a self-selection bias here. FOSS software tends to attract people who are interested in FOSS, and they tend to be knowledgeable, or is a tinkerer/DIY'er. Commercial software is often used by unwilling users. These users aren't interested in the software, and are often not well versed in IT or have an uncontrollable environment they cannot tinker with. Therefore, any failure caused by their circumstances are attributed to the failure of the commercial software. Therefore, FOSS software may seem more reliable because the people using it has more competency in using it, has more control over their environment and may even be willing to elbow-grease a DIY fix/hack.
  - jart 6y ago
    This is pretty close to the mark. As far as I can tell, after the Bell System got broken up in 1982, the government turned a lot of their IP into IEEE/FIPS/ISO/ANSI standards (e.g. X3J11, POSIX.1) and then made compliance mandatory. So businesses sprung up to provide compliant solutions, not for love of the technology but to cash in on the gravy train. Great example is the Windows POSIX subsystem where you can really tell that the intent of the folks who built it was basically just to check off a box.
  - smaudet 6y ago
    Hmm. You could say there is a self selection bias with millionaires having pricey stuff too... but that sounds like another reason it is reliable - i.e. its typically made for users who know their stuff versus made by the users who barely have an inkling...like getting your car designed by a mechanic versus getting it designed by a 5 year old who thinks big engines and tail pipes look cool... Often those in management tend to have a relatively infantile understanding of software and design, let alone the understanding of their problem domain...
justinclift 6y ago
Reliability aside, documentation for non-commercial free software often hmmm... sucks, compared to commercial software. Some of the larger free software Communities seem to have decent documentation though, so that's not a 100% rule. Not sure if that's because they might attract commercial entities who fill in the missing pieces (eg docs), or if other things are at play.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wegs 6y ago
My experience is that commercial software has teams of programmers rewarded for velocity. Velocity doesn't encourage good architectural decisions. It rewards building stuff quickly. Most commercial systems I see become rats nests very quickly. With free software, if I waste a year tweaking something to figure out how to Do Things Right, that's okay. If I'm a downright a-hole about accepting commits (Hi Linus!), that's okay too. It's different incentive structures. From my perspective, Linux circa 1995 was just fine. If anything, Linux 2020 is a modest step backwards. I'd rather have long timelines and high reliability. That's not something commercial teams can sustain. People need to keep externally signalling productivity. Ubuntu and Red Hat are a bit of a wildcard, since they take a hybrid model which seems to be dragging Linux down the path to look a lot like Windows 95, with layers of hairballs upon layers of hairballs. I'm not thrilled about that.
jart 6y ago
It depends on which Free Software. The paper doesn't really makes an apples-to-apples comparison sadly. GNU has always been the open source flagship. Comparing GNU to SGI is like comparing Google to Yahoo. It'd be more apt to compare the reliability of GNU tooling to the AT&T PSTN.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I don't think a 25 year old paper on the topic would still hold that much relevance today. I'd also suggest that the difference is why software is created could be having an influence over something like this. The fundamentals of the Unix design philosophy are "Make each program do one thing well" and "Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program". You could debate exactly how influential that has actually been over GNU design, but it's quite different from the typical approach taken with commercial software, which is not to write programs that perform a single function, but to write programs that solve an entire category of problems for the customer. When I think about the opensource "solution-oriented" products that I've used (Elastic stack and Zabbix come to mind), I don't get the impression that they're more reliable than their commercial counterparts. One of the things I've always thought about open source tooling in general, is that I expect to find a collection of highly reliable and performant utilities, and I expect it to be entirely my problem to turn them into a working system that's going to solve my problems. With commercial software, I would just expect it to just work off the shelf and consume much less of my time to maintain. That said, it is a fantastic feeling to find a bug or missing piece of functionality and to just write a pull request for it, rather than waiting for an account manager to get back to you saying "it's on the roadmap" or something else equally unhelpful.
nendroid 6y ago
Paid software is more user friendly. For non B2B sales usually useability is much more important than reliability. Also note that open source developers like all humans cannot live without getting paid. This means that most open source developers are usually also closed source developers. Some of you though are lucky enough to get paid to develop open source but that's rare to get paid to develop something that's given away for free.
jayd16 6y ago
I think this is partly just survivor bias or some such thing. Good open source software is popular because its good, while commercial software might be popular for other reasons like advertising or lock in.
higerordermap 6y ago
> that it tends to introduce fewer breaking changes to my workflows Often because they don't have otherwise jobless UX people. I find open source (gui) software surprisingly more usable than many stuff on windows, because they have predictable old school gtk / qtwidgets layouts. Less eye candy, sure. But I don't care.
rstuart4133 6y ago
My organisation pays many $k in "software support". Having been in the open source world where we get along perfectly fine with no support whatsoever, that was a surprise. I am perfectly capable of supporting software myself. It turns out things are structured in commercial land so you really can't do that. All the usual remedies available to me, like source code, self describing config files, open data formats aren't there. What help the vendor is willing to offer is locked up behind paywalls you can only get past without paying yearly support. Having run a commercial software company myself, this isn't a surprise. You have to have a continuous, reliable revenue stream to pay those continuous, ever reliable wage bills. If you are making a few large sales a year those sales don't cut it, so you engineer things so you get a regular income from software. One way to do that is to ensure customers regularly run into things that can't do themselves. A very good example of was in the time before office365 subscriptions. Microsoft arranged to get a stead income by deliberately breaking the on disk format of Office files every year, so the old copies of office could not read files produced by the new version. They would then seed the market by handing out free or very cheap copies of the new version of Office to students, so companies would start getting documents the could not open until they upgraded. Not providing features only used once in a year, or making them unreliable or difficult to use are other ways of doing the same thing. It's all very ugly, but by its nature software lives forever once you get it right, so I don't know how commercial programming teams would have survived without either subscriptions or pulling some stunt like that.

aflag 6y ago

I think work arounds being easier doesn't really need any empirical data to back it up. By having the source code, a lot more people will be able to make sense of it and figure out how to change (or even fork) the original software. I'd say that's pretty much a corollary. On the other hand, I think free software probably tend to break backward compatibility less mainly because it moves at a slower pace (be it because it's designed by committee or just lack resources). With software as a service in special, breaking changes is sort of the industry norm. So, there's also that cultural component to it. But it's difficult to measure the rate at which free software introduces breaking changes vs proprietary software.

nwah1 6y ago

I think for something such as a unix-style CLI tool that does one thing, and one thing only, non-commercial community-driven development works great. For anything else, not so much. It is not possible to imagine a video game produced by an open community, because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus. That requires hierarchy, or solo development. Both realistically require a lot of resources and thus are overwhelmingly commercial in nature. The year of the linux desktop seems to never arrive because all of the support and integration of the various components requires constant application of labor by an army of people, if it is to be usable. Android and Ubuntu might be able to succeed, but "the community" will not. The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game. It can write a kernel, but cannot support a whole distro that "just works" for normal people. Maybe in some distant future when there is no constant churn of new features and drivers and rewrites then we can have an open community-maintained distro that actually works for a normal person. Doubt such a time will ever arrive, but if it did then and only then would OSes become boring. Web rendering engines are complex and happen to be open source nowadays, but are commercially supported and wrapped in proprietary packages. Mozilla is failing to keep up with gecko, so the last non-commercial rendering engine is dying a slow death. It was able to succeed somewhat because following standards is straightforward and thus can be considered "boring." Some have likened browser development to emulator development. But packaging it all up nicely and providing the best possible user experience? I wouldn't count on it.

danShumway 6y ago
> because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus I've worked on enough commercial software to know that most large, practical products aren't designed from an auteur perspective, and that many that are, shouldn't be. My perspective on game development is different than it is for tools -- some of the most impressive OS tools I've seen (Blender, Krita) are where they are specifically because they've been designed by committee, and because it turns out that a committee of artists generally produces better art-tools than a committee of programmers and marketers. > The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game. A good 90% of the tools where reliability matters are boring, and I want them to be boring. I compare this to other tools that I use outside of a computer. I don't want a radical piano when I'm composing music, I want a finely tuned, boring solution. I don't want radical pencils, I do most of my artwork with tools that I know extremely well. When I picked up digital drawing, my approach was the same; I didn't want an auteur experience, I wanted extremely consistent drivers, and consistent software that allowed me to focus on my artwork, not the user interface. I think you're hitting on an interesting artistic point with game development, but you're misapplying that point to a field with different concerns. I use Linux because it's boring. It gets out of my way and lets me focus on creative tasks.

systemvoltage 6y ago

This is a really broad brush. Oracle DB will fail less often than a python open source utility with 10 stars on Github. It really depends on the scale of the project and how many people are contributing to it, and its momentum going forward - commercial or open-source. I've had MATLAB engineers fix a compiler bug in 2 hours while I was on the phone line with them. Sure, it costs my company $13k/year for the license but when you have a jet engine hoisted up for testing and its costing the company thousands of dollars of loss time, yep, commercial software or open-source software with solid support is a must. Proprietary software sometimes is quite good if not the best in class. There is no need to pick up pitch forks and large brushes to pain everything red. If nothing else, it shows how misguided, immature and closed-minded some of the GNU folks are. Most of the open source contributors are nice though, and I don't wish to ironically generalize everyone.

cycloptic 6y ago
GNU Octave appears to have some commercial support vendors listed, that probably wouldn't mind receiving $13k/year in exchange for answering the phone: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  That sounds great! Why can't both proprietary software and open source software co-exist? For startups and small companies, open source software is great. For large enterprises, the cost of the software is a vanishingly small % of the cost, and in fact they don't care as much - a lot of large enterprises are continuing to open source their own internal tools. MATLAB has over 2 dozen toolboxes, with insanely detailed documentation. We are actually very happy to have MATLAB and our engineers are trained to use it for decades. We gladly pay for it. It would be a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave even if it did everything MATLAB did. I think we are getting stuck in the weeds, the point is: We are engineers. Software is a tool to get the job done. There are many other packages that cannot compete with anything open source - ANSYS Mechanical for example.

hilbertseries 6y ago

My experiences with Ubuntu vs Windows, I did not come away thinking that free software has less bugs in it. This is not to say that Windows has no bugs in it, but I’ve never had my sound just stop working or my WiFi break after an upgrade on a Windows machine.

monoideism 6y ago
Perhaps not, but I've had performance issues far, far more often on Windows than on Linux (or MacOS). I mean, you typically can't even go a week without rebooting Windows, or you suffer severe degradation of performance. Also, I personally have never had my sound just stop working or my Wifi break on Ubuntu since probably 2013 or 2014.
em500 6y ago
Windows 10 has a pretty awful update history. Among it's greatest hits, it has caused user data loss and rendered some PCs unbootable (including one of my laptops).
- boogies 6y ago
  IIRC MS has even had to block their own updates from their own Surface devices to prevent bricking. Contrast that GNU/Linux which a majority of desktop users probably run on hardware that wasn’t designed for it — I know I do because I’ve seen plenty of BSODs after updates which took orders of magnitude longer than installing GNU on the same hardware which ran the latter flawlessly.
- imtringued 6y ago
  No, windows updates always had that reputation. Vista, 7, 10. All of them "bootlooped" i.e. an error occurs during update but windows does not delete the failed update from cache. Imagine being a 13 year old kid with a Vista laptop trying to install .NET Framework because he wanted to play Terraria but then his laptop becomes useless. Of course that is going to breed resentment and fueled my switch to Arch Linux. I managed to "unbrick" a Windows 10 system by disabling the windows update service and by deleting the cache folder. Windows updates are just universally bad.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

Commercial software has a more obvious reason to avoid breaking your stuff and to try and track down bugs.i Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers. Also, if someone is only working on something for a paycheck they may not be as thorough as someone working to solve their own problems, or satisfying their passions. Commercial software has an advantage when it comes to documentation, and being user friendly because they're the things no one wants to do.

systemvoltage 6y ago
This is not true though. It really depends on the company and their philosophy, whether they are publicly traded or what their executive team is like. Good companies know how to invest into their products and make them world class. In my previous job, we used a wind turbine simulation package developed by 25 engineers and it was so great - they really cared and fixed things. It was $50k/seat/annual license but we were almost like 2 different teams under the same company. "You scratch my back, I scratch yours". There are also a lot of companies that have lock-ins and generally awful attitude towards their own products. This also exists in the open source world - there is a lot of awful open source code out there.
bleepblorp 6y ago
> Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers. Not if it's SaaS. Vendors of rented software have no economic incentive to develop new features, or even fix bugs, because they get subscription fees without needing to do any work.
- notmyfuture 6y ago
  There is still competition to consider though. If a SaaS product has competitors that are more reliable, or more feature rich, they should win & retain more customers over time.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Data lock-in, due to proprietary file formats, makes switching software extremely difficult, especially for companies that interchange data with outside entities. For instance, companies that do design and/or A/V work have no real alternatives to paying Adobe monthly--regardless of how little work Adobe puts into Creative Suite--because it's an industry standard and there are no alternatives that offer friction-free interoperability.

boogies 6y ago

Free software ≠ non-commercial software That’s a false dichotomy.

jacobsenscott 6y ago

Commercial software usually has a support team working frantically behind the scenes trying to keep the wheels on, while the engineers are under presser to add more bells and whistles rather than improve the core application. Support issue caused by bugs are just a cost of doing business. Obviously you need a certain amount of reliability to keep those costs from putting you out of business, but less than you might think. Free software sinks or swims based on how it works when nobody is there to support it. So the reliable stuff rises to the top.

chii 6y ago
There's also a self-selection bias here. FOSS software tends to attract people who are interested in FOSS, and they tend to be knowledgeable, or is a tinkerer/DIY'er. Commercial software is often used by unwilling users. These users aren't interested in the software, and are often not well versed in IT or have an uncontrollable environment they cannot tinker with. Therefore, any failure caused by their circumstances are attributed to the failure of the commercial software. Therefore, FOSS software may seem more reliable because the people using it has more competency in using it, has more control over their environment and may even be willing to elbow-grease a DIY fix/hack.
- jart 6y ago
  This is pretty close to the mark. As far as I can tell, after the Bell System got broken up in 1982, the government turned a lot of their IP into IEEE/FIPS/ISO/ANSI standards (e.g. X3J11, POSIX.1) and then made compliance mandatory. So businesses sprung up to provide compliant solutions, not for love of the technology but to cash in on the gravy train. Great example is the Windows POSIX subsystem where you can really tell that the intent of the folks who built it was basically just to check off a box.
- smaudet 6y ago
  Hmm. You could say there is a self selection bias with millionaires having pricey stuff too... but that sounds like another reason it is reliable - i.e. its typically made for users who know their stuff versus made by the users who barely have an inkling...like getting your car designed by a mechanic versus getting it designed by a 5 year old who thinks big engines and tail pipes look cool... Often those in management tend to have a relatively infantile understanding of software and design, let alone the understanding of their problem domain...

justinclift 6y ago

Reliability aside, documentation for non-commercial free software often hmmm... sucks, compared to commercial software. Some of the larger free software Communities seem to have decent documentation though, so that's not a 100% rule. Not sure if that's because they might attract commercial entities who fill in the missing pieces (eg docs), or if other things are at play.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wegs 6y ago

My experience is that commercial software has teams of programmers rewarded for velocity. Velocity doesn't encourage good architectural decisions. It rewards building stuff quickly. Most commercial systems I see become rats nests very quickly. With free software, if I waste a year tweaking something to figure out how to Do Things Right, that's okay. If I'm a downright a-hole about accepting commits (Hi Linus!), that's okay too. It's different incentive structures. From my perspective, Linux circa 1995 was just fine. If anything, Linux 2020 is a modest step backwards. I'd rather have long timelines and high reliability. That's not something commercial teams can sustain. People need to keep externally signalling productivity. Ubuntu and Red Hat are a bit of a wildcard, since they take a hybrid model which seems to be dragging Linux down the path to look a lot like Windows 95, with layers of hairballs upon layers of hairballs. I'm not thrilled about that.

jart 6y ago

It depends on which Free Software. The paper doesn't really makes an apples-to-apples comparison sadly. GNU has always been the open source flagship. Comparing GNU to SGI is like comparing Google to Yahoo. It'd be more apt to compare the reliability of GNU tooling to the AT&T PSTN.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I don't think a 25 year old paper on the topic would still hold that much relevance today. I'd also suggest that the difference is why software is created could be having an influence over something like this. The fundamentals of the Unix design philosophy are "Make each program do one thing well" and "Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program". You could debate exactly how influential that has actually been over GNU design, but it's quite different from the typical approach taken with commercial software, which is not to write programs that perform a single function, but to write programs that solve an entire category of problems for the customer. When I think about the opensource "solution-oriented" products that I've used (Elastic stack and Zabbix come to mind), I don't get the impression that they're more reliable than their commercial counterparts. One of the things I've always thought about open source tooling in general, is that I expect to find a collection of highly reliable and performant utilities, and I expect it to be entirely my problem to turn them into a working system that's going to solve my problems. With commercial software, I would just expect it to just work off the shelf and consume much less of my time to maintain. That said, it is a fantastic feeling to find a bug or missing piece of functionality and to just write a pull request for it, rather than waiting for an account manager to get back to you saying "it's on the roadmap" or something else equally unhelpful.

nendroid 6y ago

Paid software is more user friendly. For non B2B sales usually useability is much more important than reliability. Also note that open source developers like all humans cannot live without getting paid. This means that most open source developers are usually also closed source developers. Some of you though are lucky enough to get paid to develop open source but that's rare to get paid to develop something that's given away for free.

jayd16 6y ago

I think this is partly just survivor bias or some such thing. Good open source software is popular because its good, while commercial software might be popular for other reasons like advertising or lock in.

higerordermap 6y ago

> that it tends to introduce fewer breaking changes to my workflows Often because they don't have otherwise jobless UX people. I find open source (gui) software surprisingly more usable than many stuff on windows, because they have predictable old school gtk / qtwidgets layouts. Less eye candy, sure. But I don't care.

rstuart4133 6y ago

My organisation pays many $k in "software support". Having been in the open source world where we get along perfectly fine with no support whatsoever, that was a surprise. I am perfectly capable of supporting software myself. It turns out things are structured in commercial land so you really can't do that. All the usual remedies available to me, like source code, self describing config files, open data formats aren't there. What help the vendor is willing to offer is locked up behind paywalls you can only get past without paying yearly support. Having run a commercial software company myself, this isn't a surprise. You have to have a continuous, reliable revenue stream to pay those continuous, ever reliable wage bills. If you are making a few large sales a year those sales don't cut it, so you engineer things so you get a regular income from software. One way to do that is to ensure customers regularly run into things that can't do themselves. A very good example of was in the time before office365 subscriptions. Microsoft arranged to get a stead income by deliberately breaking the on disk format of Office files every year, so the old copies of office could not read files produced by the new version. They would then seed the market by handing out free or very cheap copies of the new version of Office to students, so companies would start getting documents the could not open until they upgraded. Not providing features only used once in a year, or making them unreliable or difficult to use are other ways of doing the same thing. It's all very ugly, but by its nature software lives forever once you get it right, so I don't know how commercial programming teams would have survived without either subscriptions or pulling some stunt like that.