Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 24, 2004 03:47 PM
The author here seems to paint OSS with a pretty broad brush. Calling it all, or even a larger percentage "high quality" is a gross exageration.
Sure, there are some really high quality OSS apps, such as Apache, Postfix, or even Linux itself (for the most part), but these apps tend to fall into infrastructure roles, rather than application roles. Infrastructure MUST be high quality, or it dies under the load.
In the application realm, things aren't doing quite so well. Open Office is a decent app, but it's largely on a par with MS Word 2.0 (including slowness and bugginess), rather than any current big name word processor. On top of that, Open Office was largely written by a third party commercial developer, sold to Sun, then "open sourced" as a pretty much complete product (though there has been much improvement since then).
Mozilla is probably one of the exceptions, although it's taken a LONG time for it to become high quality, it's starting to pay off.
Gimp is another exception, but it too lacks a great deal of necessary features, especially for the printing industry. It's well made, it's just not luxurious.
The state of the linux application (not infrastructure) market is on a par with the DOS/Windows market in 1990. There's a lot of room to grow, but it needs to grow, and grow a lot. The tendancy for distro developers to throw every cobbled together app into the mix tends to hurt the impression of Linux as "high quality" as well.
There are some good, high quality apps in Open Source, but you can count them on a typical human's appendages without much effort.
There are a lot of mediocre quality apps, such as mplayer, or cinelerra. And these could move on to be great apps, but they need polishing, and i'm not just talking about jazzy GUI's. In order to be "high quality", they have to be rock solid stable, not require cryptic configuration or recompiling to enable features. And they need actual documentation, not a 3 year old how-to that is woefully out of date, or a cryptic readme file that assumes too much of the user.
OSS is starting to amke inroads with the technically literate, and even the less so literate but pretty smart crowd, but it's a little early to be proclaiming that OSS has won.
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A few comments
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 24, 2004 03:47 PMSure, there are some really high quality OSS apps, such as Apache, Postfix, or even Linux itself (for the most part), but these apps tend to fall into infrastructure roles, rather than application roles. Infrastructure MUST be high quality, or it dies under the load.
In the application realm, things aren't doing quite so well. Open Office is a decent app, but it's largely on a par with MS Word 2.0 (including slowness and bugginess), rather than any current big name word processor. On top of that, Open Office was largely written by a third party commercial developer, sold to Sun, then "open sourced" as a pretty much complete product (though there has been much improvement since then).
Mozilla is probably one of the exceptions, although it's taken a LONG time for it to become high quality, it's starting to pay off.
Gimp is another exception, but it too lacks a great deal of necessary features, especially for the printing industry. It's well made, it's just not luxurious.
The state of the linux application (not infrastructure) market is on a par with the DOS/Windows market in 1990. There's a lot of room to grow, but it needs to grow, and grow a lot. The tendancy for distro developers to throw every cobbled together app into the mix tends to hurt the impression of Linux as "high quality" as well.
There are some good, high quality apps in Open Source, but you can count them on a typical human's appendages without much effort.
There are a lot of mediocre quality apps, such as mplayer, or cinelerra. And these could move on to be great apps, but they need polishing, and i'm not just talking about jazzy GUI's. In order to be "high quality", they have to be rock solid stable, not require cryptic configuration or recompiling to enable features. And they need actual documentation, not a 3 year old how-to that is woefully out of date, or a cryptic readme file that assumes too much of the user.
OSS is starting to amke inroads with the technically literate, and even the less so literate but pretty smart crowd, but it's a little early to be proclaiming that OSS has won.
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