3 ms·

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 mo

by 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.
- flogic 17y ago
  Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.
  - ciupicri 17y ago
    Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine. At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't really support styles, or if it supports them they're too complicated to use. Nobody knew who to use them, so we did the formatting by hand.
    - halo 17y ago
      Word has had full proper support for styles for a couple of decades - its implementation isn't very difficult to use, it's just that most users tend not to know about them because they haven't been taught as they aren't worthwhile unless you're writing a long document.
- omouse 17y ago
  Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial. Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.
  - halo 17y ago
    I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free". I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous. That said, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even my misuse of wording is accurate.
    - omouse 17y ago
      I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous. It would be called noncommercial open source software or noncommercial free software. The point is to separate the aspect of buying software from the availability of its source code and whatever freedoms are associated with that.

by cesare 17y ago

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.
flogic 17y ago
Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.
- ciupicri 17y ago
  Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine. At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't really support styles, or if it supports them they're too complicated to use. Nobody knew who to use them, so we did the formatting by hand.
  - halo 17y ago
    Word has had full proper support for styles for a couple of decades - its implementation isn't very difficult to use, it's just that most users tend not to know about them because they haven't been taught as they aren't worthwhile unless you're writing a long document.
omouse 17y ago
Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial. Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.
- halo 17y ago
  I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free". I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous. That said, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even my misuse of wording is accurate.
  - omouse 17y ago
    I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous. It would be called noncommercial open source software or noncommercial free software. The point is to separate the aspect of buying software from the availability of its source code and whatever freedoms are associated with that.