7 ms·

Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

26 points by edw519 17y ago

makecheck 17y ago
I think this makes some good points about how projects have trouble reaching users. The fact that people try a program 4 years ago and don't check back since, is particularly true. But I'd add one other big problem for open source: "anti-marketing", in the form of aggregating trolls. I don't have to Google far to find sites that apparently just crawl SourceForge and dig up whatever crap they can automatically generate ad-ridden pages for. A lot of direct harm to projects comes from trolls: - They don't properly credit, and certainly don't link to, the page that they crawled (e.g. SourceForge). So users have no way of knowing that a more complete and authoritative source exists. - They often don't "re-crawl", so within a matter of months they're advertising something extremely old. - They usually don't have all the details quite right. So their pages seem "authentic", yet are wrong in critical places (such as, system requirements; I've seen things as stupid as non-Windows programs that "require Windows XP"). - Their robots are sloppy. For instance, I've seen them create a "what's new" page that completely misinterprets the original source release notes, resulting in a couple of nonsensical bullet points. This makes it seem like the software maintainer is retarded. - They give no direct control to project owners. Not only is there no way to update a page, but even if there were, the site has no way of knowing that the person contacting them is the true maintainer of the software. Whichever one of these trolls becomes king of Google will do the most damage.
- kaitnieks 17y ago
  These things can be fixed by automatic check for updates and preferably seamless automatic update, but the problem is that people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates. People don't like when they're asked too much questions ("Do you want to check for updates?" - Yes - "Do you want to download update?" - Yes - "Do you want to update now" - ffs just do it!) and they don't like if program does this kind of stuff silently in background. How to fix this problem?
  - smokinn 17y ago
    people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates Really? Where does that come from? Because one of the things I love most about running Ubuntu is that everything just stays up to date on its own. I'm always very wary of installing something myself and will nearly always take the apt-get route unless I really need that very latest feature. Whenever I evangelize running linux, (which is very rarely) this is one of my big selling points. When people see the update manager pop up, update a bunch of programs while I'm doing other stuff and not even ask me to reboot they're often convinced to give it a try.
    - arohner 17y ago
      There's one other benefit of Ubuntu that is worth pointing out: there's only one source of automatic updates. The auto updates on OSX and windows drive me nuts because every app has their own updater with their own UI and their own preference for whether and when and how to update.
  - derefr 17y ago
    You fix it by giving Windows and OS X package management. It's not something one app provider can do (well, maybe Apple could bundle it with iTunes...)
known 17y ago
Even today most Open source apps are developer (not user) friendly.
- zokier 17y ago
  And that's the way I like them.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  It's not a matter of friendliness. It's a question of choosing friends carefully. I have seen proprietary software so friendly it ends up catching the digital equivalent of STDs
kaitnieks 17y ago
I'll talk about the setup and configuration part. I mean this has been talked about to death but people still don't get it. And lately I'm starting to fear that maybe some people like it. This is especially visible when trying out various new programming languages. I have written exactly one .NET application in my life and I absolutely loved it that I could just downl... I mean buy the Visual Studio, install it and start coding, debugging and deploying the application. The same story with Delphi. A very different story is about Python, Haskell and all things Java related. You need to download compilator, then you need to find and download IDE separately, then you need to figure out how to make it work with the debugger, if you're lucky enough to get it working at all. It takes time and effort that doesn't benefit me. It's all reading instructions, changing paths in configuration files and setting environment variables. And the reason why this is done so is because as I mentioned some people absolutely love the idea that they can use any tools in any configuration that somehow after some effort work together. And people who like to tinker are the people who write open source. So there. Also making good product = fun, making good setup = boring.
- mullr 17y ago
  But there's a catch, isn't there? There's always a catch. At work (Big Company TM), we call it the "MS Happy Path." If you're on it, you're golden and life is good. The overall development experience is great. If you're not, well, sucks to be you. With the other choices you probably have a way out. Even if there's no scaffolding for you, you can at least implement something yourself. Granted it takes more time up front, but it pays off when your priorities vary from those of your tool vendor's. We've made lots of choices explicitly for the purpose of staying on the MS Happy Path, since we knew it would make our life easier. Not because they were the best solution to the problem.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Wow, This is the first time I've heard anyone else describe the happy-path phenomena, yet I previously talked about it any time anyone ever asked about the goodness of MS software. I'd also mention that the Happy Path is also a verbose path. I recently looked at a C# application and a C++ application that each did about the same thing. I was amazed to find the C# app had least ten times the source code. Moreover, the C# app seemed to be coded in the proper C# way and worked generally well. The main thing is that the problems that it did have (memory leaks) were utterly, irrevocably, totally, completely unsolvable... So there are trade-offs in all these things that are very "unobvious"...
mattmcknight 17y ago
I think this misses the mark, at least in the enterprise world. What the commercial companies have is huge sales teams- sales personnel that know how to convince people to by their product.
- tptacek 17y ago
  It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime. In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going through the buying motions, nobody cares. It just sits there. Nobody wants to depend on it, because nobody wrote a check for it, so it doesn't seem real.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    It's so true. In order to evaluate open source software you have to have someone competent set it up. However with a software vendor they can provide a demo and you can have different key levels of management evaluate it. I think the problem is one of expertise and motivation. A software vendor will necessarily be an expert in their own product, and they have a huge incentive to sell it. Internal IT staff are not going to be expert in some random open source package. Their expertise is going to be domain knowledge, and their interest is just to make sure things are working smoothly. In theory they would prefer better quality open source software, but in practice they need someone on the hook to blame when things go wrong just as the brass does. I think this could be changed though. If a corporation had the mindset that they wanted their IT to be a competitive advantage, recruited and paid accordingly, I think a large corporation could mop the floor using the right mix of proprietary and open source.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      I really think the problem is simpler than that; in most enterprises, I think there's literally a company neurotransmitter that doesn't get activated until someone has to cut a check. Until your project gets JBoss-big --- hell, even after that --- nothing you do is going to get open source taken seriously. I base this in part on a number of friends who have hugely successful open source deployments in their companies (BSD/pf firewalls, for instance), and who are locked in a constant struggle to keep those deployments from getting "upgraded" to "real software".
cesare 17y ago
You're talking about the average user? It's simple: because they can pirate proprietary software and they always perceive something which has a price tag as more valuable than something which is offered for free. Something which has more (perceived) value but which you can obtain for free will always win against something which is offered for free (and thus is perceived as probably worthless). Sad but true. There are some exceptions, though. A lot of people use Vlc, for instance, because it can play every single (probably pirated) video you'll throw at it. And there isn't a market for commercial video players. Something like Firefox wouldn't have reached such penetration without a lot of marketing (most people doesn't even know what a browser is, go figure). I'm constantly baffled by the number of articles about these subjects coming out every day from authors who don't understand (or completely ignore) basic human psychology.
- halo 17y ago
  I don't buy it. I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good. There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software has beat commercial software (most notably in tech areas, such as Apache, or Linux versus other Unix-likes). I think people should simply face facts: Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.
  - cesare 17y ago
    > I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I'm not saying this. I, for one, prefer Gimp and Inkscape over Photoshop and Illustrator. I have coded my own plugins for Gimp and I write my own scripts (in various languages) to output svg (using Inkscape for additional free hand editing). But I know that I'm not the average designer/sw user. Apache and Linux are for tech-savvy users. > Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software. This is obvious. What I'm saying is that, for most people, the opposite is true, because there's a psychological bias which is independent of technical value, user friendliness etc.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
natch 17y ago
I dumped Linux, although I still use it in the cloud. And rather than saying "dumped" it would be more accurate to say I decided to NOT use a PC laptop with Linux, instead getting a Mac. Why? Not for any of the reasons mentioned. One of the big things that convinced me was a little thing, the magsafe connector. I've seen laptops slammed down on the floor, and it's not pretty. Endless driver issues were another reason, but the magsafe was the clincher. That alone is worth the price difference. So sometimes the reasons are not related to software. The larger context matters, including little things in that larger context.
- pyre 17y ago
  How did MagSafe -- a hardware feature -- convince you to switch to OS X? Plenty of people run Linux on Apple hardware. Not to discount your decision, but MagSafe wasn't really the deciding factor. > Endless driver issues were another reason Really? Not to discount your problems, but if you choose your hardware wisely there aren't that many problems. That said, a lot of 'driver issues' are to blame on the manufacturer (i.e. NVIDIA sometimes has massive drive issues even on Windows; back in the 90's ATI was know for their atrocious driver support on Windows).
  - natch 17y ago
    Assigning blame (to NVIDIA, or anyone else) doesn't interest me, if it doesn't help me solve my immediate need: get shit done. Why do I not run Linux on Apple hardware, you ask? Actually I do run it on Apple hardware. I dumped it as my main OS, but I run it under VMware. As to why not wipe OS X and use only Linux, well, OS X gives me a lot of stuff I like, so I'm not about to wipe it. OS X is like a superset of Linux, in effect, at least according to my most important metric which as you may recall is getting shit done. It's like a new Swiss Army knife that has more blades, if you like analogies.

26 points by edw519 17y ago

I think this makes some good points about how projects have trouble reaching users. The fact that people try a program 4 years ago and don't check back since, is particularly true. But I'd add one other big problem for open source: "anti-marketing", in the form of aggregating trolls. I don't have to Google far to find sites that apparently just crawl SourceForge and dig up whatever crap they can automatically generate ad-ridden pages for. A lot of direct harm to projects comes from trolls: - They don't properly credit, and certainly don't link to, the page that they crawled (e.g. SourceForge). So users have no way of knowing that a more complete and authoritative source exists. - They often don't "re-crawl", so within a matter of months they're advertising something extremely old. - They usually don't have all the details quite right. So their pages seem "authentic", yet are wrong in critical places (such as, system requirements; I've seen things as stupid as non-Windows programs that "require Windows XP"). - Their robots are sloppy. For instance, I've seen them create a "what's new" page that completely misinterprets the original source release notes, resulting in a couple of nonsensical bullet points. This makes it seem like the software maintainer is retarded. - They give no direct control to project owners. Not only is there no way to update a page, but even if there were, the site has no way of knowing that the person contacting them is the true maintainer of the software. Whichever one of these trolls becomes king of Google will do the most damage.

kaitnieks 17y ago
These things can be fixed by automatic check for updates and preferably seamless automatic update, but the problem is that people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates. People don't like when they're asked too much questions ("Do you want to check for updates?" - Yes - "Do you want to download update?" - Yes - "Do you want to update now" - ffs just do it!) and they don't like if program does this kind of stuff silently in background. How to fix this problem?
- smokinn 17y ago
  people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates Really? Where does that come from? Because one of the things I love most about running Ubuntu is that everything just stays up to date on its own. I'm always very wary of installing something myself and will nearly always take the apt-get route unless I really need that very latest feature. Whenever I evangelize running linux, (which is very rarely) this is one of my big selling points. When people see the update manager pop up, update a bunch of programs while I'm doing other stuff and not even ask me to reboot they're often convinced to give it a try.
  - arohner 17y ago
    There's one other benefit of Ubuntu that is worth pointing out: there's only one source of automatic updates. The auto updates on OSX and windows drive me nuts because every app has their own updater with their own UI and their own preference for whether and when and how to update.
- derefr 17y ago
  You fix it by giving Windows and OS X package management. It's not something one app provider can do (well, maybe Apple could bundle it with iTunes...)

known 17y ago

Even today most Open source apps are developer (not user) friendly.

zokier 17y ago
And that's the way I like them.
rbanffy 17y ago
It's not a matter of friendliness. It's a question of choosing friends carefully. I have seen proprietary software so friendly it ends up catching the digital equivalent of STDs

kaitnieks 17y ago

I'll talk about the setup and configuration part. I mean this has been talked about to death but people still don't get it. And lately I'm starting to fear that maybe some people like it. This is especially visible when trying out various new programming languages. I have written exactly one .NET application in my life and I absolutely loved it that I could just downl... I mean buy the Visual Studio, install it and start coding, debugging and deploying the application. The same story with Delphi. A very different story is about Python, Haskell and all things Java related. You need to download compilator, then you need to find and download IDE separately, then you need to figure out how to make it work with the debugger, if you're lucky enough to get it working at all. It takes time and effort that doesn't benefit me. It's all reading instructions, changing paths in configuration files and setting environment variables. And the reason why this is done so is because as I mentioned some people absolutely love the idea that they can use any tools in any configuration that somehow after some effort work together. And people who like to tinker are the people who write open source. So there. Also making good product = fun, making good setup = boring.

mullr 17y ago
But there's a catch, isn't there? There's always a catch. At work (Big Company TM), we call it the "MS Happy Path." If you're on it, you're golden and life is good. The overall development experience is great. If you're not, well, sucks to be you. With the other choices you probably have a way out. Even if there's no scaffolding for you, you can at least implement something yourself. Granted it takes more time up front, but it pays off when your priorities vary from those of your tool vendor's. We've made lots of choices explicitly for the purpose of staying on the MS Happy Path, since we knew it would make our life easier. Not because they were the best solution to the problem.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Wow, This is the first time I've heard anyone else describe the happy-path phenomena, yet I previously talked about it any time anyone ever asked about the goodness of MS software. I'd also mention that the Happy Path is also a verbose path. I recently looked at a C# application and a C++ application that each did about the same thing. I was amazed to find the C# app had least ten times the source code. Moreover, the C# app seemed to be coded in the proper C# way and worked generally well. The main thing is that the problems that it did have (memory leaks) were utterly, irrevocably, totally, completely unsolvable... So there are trade-offs in all these things that are very "unobvious"...

mattmcknight 17y ago

I think this misses the mark, at least in the enterprise world. What the commercial companies have is huge sales teams- sales personnel that know how to convince people to by their product.

tptacek 17y ago
It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime. In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going through the buying motions, nobody cares. It just sits there. Nobody wants to depend on it, because nobody wrote a check for it, so it doesn't seem real.
- dasil003 17y ago
  It's so true. In order to evaluate open source software you have to have someone competent set it up. However with a software vendor they can provide a demo and you can have different key levels of management evaluate it. I think the problem is one of expertise and motivation. A software vendor will necessarily be an expert in their own product, and they have a huge incentive to sell it. Internal IT staff are not going to be expert in some random open source package. Their expertise is going to be domain knowledge, and their interest is just to make sure things are working smoothly. In theory they would prefer better quality open source software, but in practice they need someone on the hook to blame when things go wrong just as the brass does. I think this could be changed though. If a corporation had the mindset that they wanted their IT to be a competitive advantage, recruited and paid accordingly, I think a large corporation could mop the floor using the right mix of proprietary and open source.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    I really think the problem is simpler than that; in most enterprises, I think there's literally a company neurotransmitter that doesn't get activated until someone has to cut a check. Until your project gets JBoss-big --- hell, even after that --- nothing you do is going to get open source taken seriously. I base this in part on a number of friends who have hugely successful open source deployments in their companies (BSD/pf firewalls, for instance), and who are locked in a constant struggle to keep those deployments from getting "upgraded" to "real software".

cesare 17y ago

You're talking about the average user? It's simple: because they can pirate proprietary software and they always perceive something which has a price tag as more valuable than something which is offered for free. Something which has more (perceived) value but which you can obtain for free will always win against something which is offered for free (and thus is perceived as probably worthless). Sad but true. There are some exceptions, though. A lot of people use Vlc, for instance, because it can play every single (probably pirated) video you'll throw at it. And there isn't a market for commercial video players. Something like Firefox wouldn't have reached such penetration without a lot of marketing (most people doesn't even know what a browser is, go figure). I'm constantly baffled by the number of articles about these subjects coming out every day from authors who don't understand (or completely ignore) basic human psychology.

halo 17y ago
I don't buy it. I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good. There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software has beat commercial software (most notably in tech areas, such as Apache, or Linux versus other Unix-likes). I think people should simply face facts: Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.
- cesare 17y ago
  > I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I'm not saying this. I, for one, prefer Gimp and Inkscape over Photoshop and Illustrator. I have coded my own plugins for Gimp and I write my own scripts (in various languages) to output svg (using Inkscape for additional free hand editing). But I know that I'm not the average designer/sw user. Apache and Linux are for tech-savvy users. > Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software. This is obvious. What I'm saying is that, for most people, the opposite is true, because there's a psychological bias which is independent of technical value, user friendliness etc.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

natch 17y ago

I dumped Linux, although I still use it in the cloud. And rather than saying "dumped" it would be more accurate to say I decided to NOT use a PC laptop with Linux, instead getting a Mac. Why? Not for any of the reasons mentioned. One of the big things that convinced me was a little thing, the magsafe connector. I've seen laptops slammed down on the floor, and it's not pretty. Endless driver issues were another reason, but the magsafe was the clincher. That alone is worth the price difference. So sometimes the reasons are not related to software. The larger context matters, including little things in that larger context.

pyre 17y ago
How did MagSafe -- a hardware feature -- convince you to switch to OS X? Plenty of people run Linux on Apple hardware. Not to discount your decision, but MagSafe wasn't really the deciding factor. > Endless driver issues were another reason Really? Not to discount your problems, but if you choose your hardware wisely there aren't that many problems. That said, a lot of 'driver issues' are to blame on the manufacturer (i.e. NVIDIA sometimes has massive drive issues even on Windows; back in the 90's ATI was know for their atrocious driver support on Windows).
- natch 17y ago
  Assigning blame (to NVIDIA, or anyone else) doesn't interest me, if it doesn't help me solve my immediate need: get shit done. Why do I not run Linux on Apple hardware, you ask? Actually I do run it on Apple hardware. I dumped it as my main OS, but I run it under VMware. As to why not wipe OS X and use only Linux, well, OS X gives me a lot of stuff I like, so I'm not about to wipe it. OS X is like a superset of Linux, in effect, at least according to my most important metric which as you may recall is getting shit done. It's like a new Swiss Army knife that has more blades, if you like analogies.