Hello Vy-Shane,
These are strong points. Really. Hats off :)
Regards,
Cédric Poottaren
Software developer
http://jcplaboratory.org
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 2:19 AM -0700, "Vy-Shane Sin Fat" <shane_at_node.mu> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 2:27 PM, Abdallah Ramsing <yashircr_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A software being free or opensource does not mean that we can ignore the
> fact that it crashes often especially at important moments. This is one (
> and only) issue I have seen with many open source software nowadays. I was
> just writing a document on Librewriter and while adding a text on an arrow,
> the latter crashed. Fortunately I could use Recovery Option. However it did
> only recovered until the last save point.
>
Software quality is mostly orthogonal to it being open or closed source.
There are just too many other variables at play. I don't think that we can
reach a blanket conclusion purely based on open vs closed source.
> Perhaps that might be a major reason why some business folks still prefer
> using closed source software.
>
Business folks don't think in terms of "we gotta use closed source" vs "we
gotta use open source". They are concerned with "will you be able to open
this spreadsheet file that I emailed you?". It's telling that there are no
other closed source software that come close to challenging Microsoft
Office either.
> For instance for general use and software development I prefer Linux
> distros by a mile because of the speed and the ease of adding software,
> apis and libraries using the Terminal only with a few keyboard strokes.
> However for video production, the likes of Openshot and Kdenlive start
> crashing as soon as complex editing is involved (splicing a track into
> two). The graphic card driver might be the culprit but like mentioned above
> sometimes even trivial tasks seem to crash the respective software. There
> are exceptions in the community though. For example the outstanding PHP
> Laravel Framework from my perspective is one of the best built and
> maintained application out there.
>
Open source development tools tend to be good because the people who create
those tools are also the expert end users. There's nothing like dogfooding
to increase the quality of a product.
> To conclude, I personally think that is the main problem with further
> adoption of open source software particularly for the desktop world. To be
> honest I do realise that I am not helping much in that cause. The best I am
> doing right now is using those software and sending error messages and logs
> to those concerned. I might have help in the development and/or testing
> processes as well.
>
> What are your opinions on that?
>
A winning, full stack of open source end user software is a pipe dream.
Developers prefer to share code that can be reused by their peers. The code
for a complete application isn't that useful to other developers. However,
a framework that is distilled out of the application can be useful (Ruby on
Rails is an example of this). Developers aren't interested in giving their
work away for free. However, they are interested in peer recognition and in
sharing the maintenance burden on some software plumbing that they rely on.
This is why there is a huge volume of open source work out there, but
comparatively few fully built, ready to use open source applications.
Received on Thu Jul 09 2015 - 09:27:10 PST