Remember that post ages ago about Aptana Studio/Eclipse doing a DoS on my User folder?



  • @Aptana Studio's bugtracker said:

    Aptana Studio has wrong "My Documents" path

    Change By: XXX XXX (24/Sep/12 7:43 AM)

    Fix Version/s: 2012 Sprint 21

    Fix Version/s: Aptana Studio 3.3.0

    Fix Version/s: 2012 Sprint 20



  •  I can't tell if it's fixed, going to be fixed or wontfixed.



  • Its "always pushed to the next sprint" for like 18 months now.



  •  Priority 0.



  • It looks like the source code is on GitHub. Fix it yourself.



  • @mott555 said:

    It looks like the source code is on GitHub. Fix it yourself.

      Nice troll.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @mott555 said:

    It looks like the source code is on GitHub. Fix it yourself.

      Nice troll.

    OSS. Perhaps it doesn't bring us the best software in the world, but it does give us fuel for a flame war.

    Qraplah!



  • Fuck bugfixes, let's add more (buggy) features instead so we can end up as buggy and useless and irrelevant as desktop Linux!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Actually, the most likely explanation is a worldwide conspiracy by open source developers to encourage blakeyrants by not fixing his bugs.

    I'm not interested enough to dig too far into what sort of things they are fixing. But I can totally see why they're not terribly hot to fix something that most users probably never notice. The release notes do show more bugs fixed than improvements or new features for a few sprints back.

    I imagine it really comes down to the fact that the DoS effect has one known instance, and most people who get their stuff in the wrong directory either move it or just don't care, combined with something that's not a trivial fix (i.e., JNI in order to deal with the calls to Win32).



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @mott555 said:

    It looks like the source code is on GitHub. Fix it yourself.

      Nice troll.

    You weren't supposed to say that. Now you've defused a potential blakeyrant. You owe us all for lost entertainment.

    @The_Assimilator said:
    Fuck bugfixes, let's add more (buggy)
    features instead so we can end up as buggy and useless and irrelevant as
    desktop Linux!

    Let me get my vi updated to the most recent version and we'll get started.




  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is this image supposed to be telling us something?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is this image supposed to be telling us something?

    Of course it is - can't you read? It's, like, totally obvious!!!!eleventy-one!11



  • @PJH said:

    Of course it is - can't you read? It's, like, totally obvious!!!!eleventy-one!11

    I am bemused by how long this critical bug is going unfixed. I want to unsubscribe to it, but... I have to see how it ends!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @PJH said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @blakeyrat said:

    Is this image supposed to be telling us something?

    Of course it is - can't you read? It's, like, totally obvious!!!!eleventy-one!11

    I googled the actual ticket, and it's amusing. I love the "wrong" tag. Also, 13 story points is fascinating*. I must assume they use dice to randomly estimate story points. Or story points are minutes. Or possibly lines of code.

    The most recent update says that they're planning on fixing it in version 3.5, which is due in August 2013. Of course, previously they planned to fix it in 3.4.1, but that didn't happen. They've kept the priority at High (downgraded from Blakey's original Critical), so either they're not serious about prioritization, or they have a lot of really critical stuff to fix.

    * Story points are supposed to be an abstract measure of effort required for the ticket. When I've used them, they've been on a logarithmic scale. I've never estimated anything at more than 4 (which to me meant at least a month of solid work), and that got broken down into smaller tasks.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @mott555 said:

    It looks like the source code is on GitHub. Fix it yourself.

      Nice troll.

    Semi-serious, actually: What are the chances of a fix/improvement done by some random dude being put into production (for lack of a better term) on a large OSS project?

    I really only follow two (DD-WRT and PS3 Media Server), and on both, it seems the only permanent changes to the code are done by the elite few. Everyone else is looked upon with contempt. Like some sort of geek aristocracy.



  • @Nexzus said:

    What are the chances of a fix/improvement done by some random dude being put into production (for lack of a better term) on a large OSS project?
     

    Pretty much zero.

    The idea that opensourcing your software will cause it to be crowdsourced and increase its quality is a myth. You'll have a small group who are the developers, and everything will be the same as with closed source— except that there is transparency as to what the code does. That's all.



  • Another reason I want to keep this thread going is so people who are all like, "you always complain about open source software but never participate!", I can link them to this and go, "hey look, it turns out I do participate and it never does any good so I gave up on it."

    Out of the dozen or so bugs I've put in to various open source projects, I've had *one* fixed. *one*. It was a Mozilla bug. And they sent me a t-shirt. So I'm good with Mozilla.



  • @Nexzus said:

    Semi-serious, actually: What are the chances of a fix/improvement done by some random dude being put into production (for lack of a better term) on a large OSS project?

    I'd say it depends a lot on the project core developers. I've had Git patches of mine go into prod without problems. Granted, it took a few weeks, though.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I googled the actual ticket, and it's amusing. I love the "wrong" tag. Also, 13 story points is fascinating*. I must assume they use dice to randomly estimate story points. Or story points are minutes. Or possibly lines of code.

    * Story points are supposed to be an abstract measure of effort required for the ticket. When I've used them, they've been on a logarithmic scale. I've never estimated anything at more than 4 (which to me meant at least a month of solid work), and that got broken down into smaller tasks.

    They're probably using the Fibonacci sequence; that's how we estimated stories at my last job. 13 meant "full team working on this task and only this task for one sprint."



  • @ArrivingRaptor said:

    @boomzilla said:

    I googled the actual ticket, and it's amusing. I love the "wrong" tag. Also, 13 story points is fascinating*. I must assume they use dice to randomly estimate story points. Or story points are minutes. Or possibly lines of code.

    * Story points are supposed to be an abstract measure of effort required for the ticket. When I've used them, they've been on a logarithmic scale. I've never estimated anything at more than 4 (which to me meant at least a month of solid work), and that got broken down into smaller tasks.

    They're probably using the Fibonacci sequence; that's how we estimated stories at my last job. 13 meant "full team working on this task and only this task for one sprint."

    I've seen that before, too. It's really asinine. Instead of coming up with a linear scale (or at least one based on something like powers of two) it's decided we'll use a scale where the values are arbitrary. Not to mention, the Fibonacci sequence has the number "1" twice, so according to the bullshit rules of the project shouldn't it represent two values?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I've seen that before, too. It's really asinine. Instead of coming up with a linear scale (or at least one based on something like powers of two) it's decided we'll use a scale where the values are arbitrary.

    No argument there. The way it was explained to me, the goal was to eliminate ambiguity over whether something should be a 9 or a 10. But then we just get into arguments over whether something should be 8 or 13. Or (even more obnoxiously petty) 1 or 2.

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Not to mention, the Fibonacci sequence has the number "1" twice, so according to the bullshit rules of the project shouldn't it represent two values?

    If you want to be an ass to your boss, then sure.



  • @ArrivingRaptor said:

    No argument there. The way it was explained to me, the goal was to eliminate ambiguity over whether something should be a 9 or a 10. But then we just get into arguments over whether something should be 8 or 13.

    Exactly. What's more, you'd have 8s that took more time than most 13s. And if you got halfway into the task and were like "Oh no, this is going to take longer than I thought", trying to change the value was a joke. Oh, and the joy of seeing things like "Moderately Tricky Bug Fix" get an 8 while "Rewriting Entire System From Ground Up" gets a 13.

    What I do now is just try to estimate the number of hours it's going to take (with an obvious reduction in precision as that number increases.) Then as I'm working on it, if I need to adjust that number up and down, it's pretty easy. At the end I can look over things and see how close my estimate was. I'd say I then get better at estimating, but that's a lie--I'm probably as good at estimating time as I ever will be. I've been doing this shit long enough that I know how long it takes, so if I go over time it's because I ran into some difficult situation that my standard amount of padding didn't account for. And obviously I can't get any better at incorporating those into my estimates because how am I going to know I'll run into such a situation until I have?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    What I do now is just try to estimate the number of hours it's going to take (with an obvious reduction in precision as that number increases.)

    We use 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8. I pretty much go from less than 10 minutes (e.g., a typo), less than a day, less than a week, less than two weeks, more than two weeks, respectively. At that resolution, it's rare that my initial estimate is wrong.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I'm approximately as good at estimating time as I ever will be (maybe).
     

    13TFY.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Another reason I want to keep this thread going is so people who are all like, "you always complain about open source software but never participate!", I can link them to this and go, "hey look, it turns out I do participate and it never does any good so I gave up on it."
    You're, yet again, imposing your interpretation on the English language. "Participating" in an OSS project involves proposing code changes (or at least substantial hints[1] as to what those code changes should be) that fix the problem, not - as you seem to imply/infer/believe - merely saying "this is broken, fix it for me, pretty please."



    @blakeyrat said:
    Out of the dozen or so bugs I've put in to various open source projects[...]
    Again - that isn't "participating." That's filing a bug report. And from the way you file your bug reports (from your attitude on here and, I presume the link below is yours, the report listed) this would appear to the developers as 'this user is being obnoxious. Again.'



    You are not 'participating' in this problem with OSS. You are merely a user whining about something.



    [1] "You should be using X rather than doing Y" is not participating. It's whining.



  • @PJH said:

    Again - that isn't "participating." That's filing a bug report.

    I'd probably agree that filing a bug report isn't much in the way of participation--if I file a bug report with Microsoft, most people wouldn't say I participated in the development of Windows. Then again, maybe they would, but it's a semantic argument, which is the most tedious and pointless kind of argument.

    The point is, he filed a bug report and it didn't get fixed. I think it's fair to use that as evidence supporting the case of "the FOSS model generally results in sub-standard quality software."

    @PJH said:

    And from the way you file your bug reports (from your attitude on here and, I presume the link below is yours, the report listed) this would appear to the developers as 'this user is being obnoxious. Again.'

    Irrelevant. I deal with obnoxious users all the time. However, when they uncover a real, serious bug, I fix it. Obnoxious or not, he clearly provided enough information to ascertain that there is a serious bug.

    What bothers me about this is the attitude of "FOSS should be held to a significantly lower standard because it is free" (a corollary of "Linux is only free if your time is worthless"). Sure, I can fix it myself, but why should I have to? If you give me an open source car and I have to rebuild the engine once a month, that's a significant cost. The fact that the car was free quickly becomes irrelevant when compared to its low quality and the time I lose having to fix it myself. Hell, if I'm going to go down that path, I can just build my own car from scratch. Then at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I did it all myself instead of losing my weekends fixing somebody else's broken car.

    So telling people they can fix FOSS bugs themselves is an option, sure, but I consider it an admission that most FOSS is a failure by any real metric. How many hours do I have to spend fixing bugs before it becomes more economical to just buy a working product? For a $500 piece of software that's, like, 3 hours. And that's my own personal time. If we're talking about company time, that figure is something like $1000 /hr. It is much more economical for my employer for me to spend $1000 on a working piece of software that has actual support rather than starting down the path of using a "free" alternative that I know will chew up at least 1 hour just trying to get the damn thing to work.

    And then if I uncover a bug and I'm told if I want to see it fixed I should do a git clone and get to steppin'? Yeah, sorry, that's an enormous waste of my employer's resources. The opportunity cost for lost revenue becomes extraordinary. If FOSS cannot compete under such conditions, then it has failed.



  • @PJH said:

    Again - that isn't "participating." That's filing a bug report. And from the way you file your bug reports (from your attitude on here and, I presume the link below is yours, the report listed) this would appear to the developers as 'this user is being obnoxious. Again.'

    I've had this conversation a million times:

    Them: You can't criticize it, it's open source, you can participate and make it better
    Me: Well I don't have the month to spend learning their codebase, building relationships to get "check in" permissions, etc. So how am I supposed to participate?
    Them: Just putting in a bug report is great! Isn't open source grand!

    So if putting in a bug report isn't participating, then where does that leave me? I want the bug fixed, but I don't want to spend months of my time learning bullshit I'll never need again to fix a bug that one of the regular contributors (if he bothered to read the bug database, which he invariably does not) could fix in 5 minutes. (BTW, this is supposed to be an "efficient" development process?)

    @PJH said:

    You are not 'participating' in this problem with OSS. You are merely a user whining about something.

    If they don't want users to participate by putting in bug reports, then they shouldn't ask users to. But OH WAIT THEY DO.



  • @PJH said:

    And from the way you file your bug reports (from your attitude on here and, I presume the link below is yours, the report listed) this would appear to the developers as 'this user is being obnoxious. Again.'
     

    Disagree there. I've read a couple of bug reports Blakey posted and I found them to be pretty accurate with repro steps - anyone comparing his persona on here with the bug reports could come to the conclusion they're different people, or at least he'd calmed down tremenduously before reporting his bugs.

    (his comments/responses almost show a revert to type, however)

    @PJH said:

    "Participating" in an OSS project involves proposing code changes (or at least substantial hints[1] as to what those code changes should be) that fix the problem, not - as you seem to imply/infer/believe - merely saying "this is broken, fix it for me, pretty please."

    Perhaps he should have used the term "contributed" then - either way it's participating at some low level. Granted, I don't expect to see Blakey's name scrolling up on the easter egg credit, but he didn't just crow about the bug to everywhere except the one place it'd be the most effective: the bug tracker.

    I guess you've contributed greatly to some OSS stuff and the thought that Blakey's "Participation" pales in significance to the effort invested by others. But the fact remains he still took the effort to report it.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    If you give me an open source car and I have to rebuild the engine once a month, that's a significant cost.

    And imagine what happens when it breaks down in Central Rapeville! #MaybeTakingAnalogyTooFar

    The real issue to me is that the projects involved *ask* me to participate by putting in bug reports. So I do. Then I get ignored, or the buck gets passed, or the bug is read but never fixed. So why do they ask for feedback they don't want and won't do anything with? Fuck them.

    For the record, I've never filed a bug report to a project who didn't ask me to on their lovely webpage.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said:

    building relationships to get "check in" permissions, etc. So how am I supposed to participate?

    It doesn't really work this way in the era of DCVS. More commonly, you clone the repository, work on your own fork until it is stable, and then put in a pull request, where the core team is given a chance to look over what you've done and decide if it passes muster to swim back upstream.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    It doesn't really work this way in the era of DCVS. More commonly, you clone the repository, work on your own fork until it is stable, and then put in a pull request, where the core team is given a chance to look over what you've done and decide if it passes muster to swim back upstream.

    Ok, but I'm still not going to spend a month of effort to learn their codebase. So thanks for pointing out a minor inaccuracy that changes nothing.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    If you give me an open source car and I have to rebuild the engine once a month, that's a significant cost.

    And imagine what happens when it breaks down in Central Rapeville!

    You're right, I forgot to mention the Unity Desktop..


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    The real issue to me is that the projects involved ask me to participate by putting in bug reports. So I do. Then I get ignored, or the buck gets passed, or the bug is read but never fixed. So why do they ask for feedback they don't want and won't do anything with? Fuck them.

    A big issue is prioritization. I have no idea what resources this particular project has, or what else they've been working on. Since most people don't have the sort of setup that blakey has, and they are at least able to get it to install, it seems like they must have decided it was a really low priority, relative to everything else. It's just more evidence that blakeyrat is in his own world. Blakey is just convinced that anyone who doesn't share his exact priorities must hate him or be a complete idiot. It's an obvious narcissistic mistake that anyone who knows blakeyrat around here would expect him to make.

    I know that I've reported a couple of bugs in various KDE Projects, and they've been fixed. But then, other people also found the issues and voted for them as well. Others have languished for much longer.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    It doesn't really work this way in the era of DCVS. More commonly, you clone the repository, work on your own fork until it is stable, and then put in a pull request, where the core team is given a chance to look over what you've done and decide if it passes muster to swim back upstream.

    Ok, but I'm still not going to spend a month of effort to learn their codebase. So thanks for pointing out a minor inaccuracy that changes nothing.

    It doesn't even have to be a month. For most software, a few hours of my time is enough to destroy the value proposition of "free as in beer" software.

    "But more eyes on the source help locate bugs more quickly!" Anecdotal evidence would suggest otherwise. Almost all FOSS I've used in the last 4-5 years has been a lot buggier than commercial alternatives. And as far as more eyes finding bugs more quickly, there's also the counterpoint of more variations in source code (due to forks, distribution methods, etc.) making it harder to track down bugs effectively. Remember the clusterfuck a few years back when it was discovered some dumbass Debian maintainer had introduced a critical bug in the openssl package that made "random" keys completely guessable? And that this bug had been out in production for a very long time? In that case access to the source code just made it easier for idiots to break something they had no business fiddling with.

    "But free software means you can do whatever you want with it!" Economics, motherfucker, do you speak it? TANSTAAFL. Yes, I can expend my labor making modifications to source code to get something to do what I want. I could also just expend my labor writing my own implementation from scratch. Or expend my labor doing some other work in exchange for currency and use that currency to pay a company to develop something for me. The idea that spending 40 hours modifying software to do what I want is better than spending 10 hours working for someone else and then using that money to buy actual, working software is pure, ideological-driven bullshit. It's an inefficient waste of resources and a classic example of violating the specialization of labor.

    And the idea that a loosely-coupled, global group of anti-social nerds--who measure their dick length by the amount of obscure technical trivia they've memorized and who are only in it to puff up their ridiculously fragile egos (as evidenced by how often FOSS is forked over some arcane, moronic disagreement, and as evidenced by how often FOSStards feel the need to engage in very public, very embarassing histrionics when anyone questions whether their model is actually producing superior results)--are going to provide better support and create a better product than well-adjusted individuals who pay their mortgages by creating and supporting their own product, well that's just crazy talk.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    For most software, a few hours of my time is enough to destroy the value proposition of "free as in beer" software.

    Just to recap:

    • Pay $2000 for software and it has bugs - doesn't change the amount spent on the software
    • Pay $0 for software and it has bugs - OH GOD NOW I NEED TO WORK AROUND BUGS IN SOFTWARE THIS NEVER HAPPENS WITH PAID SOFTWARE


  • @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    For most software, a few hours of my time is enough to destroy the value proposition of "free as in beer" software.

    Just to recap:

    • Pay $2000 for software and it has bugs - doesn't change the amount spent on the software
    • Pay $0 for software and it has bugs - OH GOD NOW I NEED TO WORK AROUND BUGS IN SOFTWARE THIS NEVER HAPPENS WITH PAID SOFTWARE

    All software has bugs, it's the degree of those bugs and the costs associated with dealing with them that matter. Of course it varies depending on the product (there are plenty of buggy, shitty and expensive pieces of commercial software) but for many things FOSS is a much poorer overall value. "Being able to fix bugs yourself" does not compensate for a product being shitty and buggy, no more than "being able to treat yourself" makes crabs any more fun. Especially if there was a crab-free alternative that just required you to take a shower and pay for dinner.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    All software has bugs, it's the degree of those bugs and the costs associated with dealing with them that matter. Of course it varies depending on the product (there are plenty of buggy, shitty and expensive pieces of commercial software) but for many things FOSS is a much poorer overall value. "Being able to fix bugs yourself" does not compensate for a product being shitty and buggy, no more than "being able to treat yourself" makes crabs any more fun. Especially if there was a crab-free alternative that just required you to take a shower and pay for dinner.

    Open source does not a bad product make.

    It also doesn't make the product good. What I'm saying is that open source has nothing to do with the quality of a product.

    It's just nicer for people like me who like to know how things work and then post things on a forum about technology being used incorrectly.



  • @Ben L. said:

    Open source does not a bad product make.

    It also doesn't make the product good. What I'm saying is that open source has nothing to do with the quality of a product.

    I never said that FOSS makes things bad, just that, on the whole, FOSS tends to be much lower quality. For example, gcc is a good compiler. But FOSS desktop apps? Firefox is okay, I guess, although I've grown quite jaded with it the last few years. Pidgin doesn't completely suck. I can't really think of any others that are in the same league as their commercial counterparts.

    My conclusion would be that even though the FOSS model can produce good results, it rarely does. So as a model develop high-quality software, I'd say it's a failure.

    @Ben L. said:

    It's just nicer for people like me who like to know how things work and then post things on a forum about technology being used incorrectly.

    In some cases FOSS does make for a good learning resource. Like, if you want to understand low-level compiler or kernel work, gcc and Linux are good examples of that. Other products fare less well--although you can learn about programming a desktop environment from GNOME, should you? It's a bit like the blind leading the blind. And do you really need to know how to build a desktop environment, or do you really just care about making applications that run on it? There are plenty of examples of working with Windows APIs out there. If you want to make kick-ass desktop applications, I'd suggest that over trying to learn how to work against the mess that is the Linux desktop. Especially if you want more than 3 people to actually use your application.

    My experience is that a piece of software is not made worse simply by virtue of the source being available, but that adopting the FOSS model of development (including the ego-driven agendas; the hostile, "RTFM" attitudes towards support; the reflexive reaction to any criticism) does produce inferior results. And that shouldn't be too surprising. When an organization has a financial incentive, I think they will tend to be more responsive towards their users. When an organization's only incentives are rooted in the egos of the creators, in their statuses within a community (or, God forbid, their own curiosity, which can be a fun reason to hack but certainly isn't a means of reliably producing and refining a product) then I think customer satisfaction takes a backseat. Especially when the "customer" didn't pay anything so the attitude is "they're just whiners who don't appreciate all we've done for them", it produces a sort of backlash against the users. And it's not that the FOSS developers are bad people, but just that the framework they are working in seems destined to produce in them attitudes both smug and put-upon.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I never said that FOSS makes things bad, just that, on the whole, FOSS tends to be much lower quality. For example, gcc is a good compiler. But FOSS desktop apps? Firefox is okay, I guess, although I've grown quite jaded with it the last few years. Pidgin doesn't completely suck. I can't really think of any others that are in the same league as their commercial counterparts.

    Eclipse, 7-Zip, Truecrypt, VLC player, NSIS, MySQL, Inform 7, OpenOffice, GIMP?

    (Those last two perhaps not quite as polished as MS Office or Adobe Photoshop respectively, but certainly "in the same league" as.)



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    When an organization has a financial incentive, I think they will tend to be more responsive towards their users.

    Yeah, how's that working for EA?



  • @DaveK said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I never said that FOSS makes things bad, just that, on the whole, FOSS tends to be much lower quality. For example, gcc is a good compiler. But FOSS desktop apps? Firefox is okay, I guess, although I've grown quite jaded with it the last few years. Pidgin doesn't completely suck. I can't really think of any others that are in the same league as their commercial counterparts.

    Eclipse, 7-Zip, Truecrypt, VLC player, NSIS, MySQL, Inform 7, OpenOffice, GIMP?

    (Those last two perhaps not quite as polished as MS Office or Adobe Photoshop respectively, but certainly "in the same league" as.)

    Apache httpd, Python, Blender, Azureus, Thunderbird, Squid, Audacity, Eraser, ...

     



  • @DaveK said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I never said that FOSS makes things bad, just that, on the whole, FOSS tends to be much lower quality. For example, gcc is a good compiler. But FOSS desktop apps? Firefox is okay, I guess, although I've grown quite jaded with it the last few years. Pidgin doesn't completely suck. I can't really think of any others that are in the same league as their commercial counterparts.

    Eclipse, 7-Zip, Truecrypt, VLC player, NSIS, MySQL, Inform 7, OpenOffice, GIMP?

    (Those last two perhaps not quite as polished as MS Office or Adobe Photoshop respectively, but certainly "in the same league" as.)

    Are you out of your fucking mind? You go to put together a list of FOSS that doesn't suck and you include Eclipse, OpenOffice and GIMP?

    MySQL's okay, but it's definitely rough around the edges. You'd have trouble convincing a lot of people it's in the "same league".

    7-Zip is fine. FOSS has churned out some good compression utilities over the years so, um, success?



  • @DaveK said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    When an organization has a financial incentive, I think they will tend to be more responsive towards their users.

    Yeah, how's that working for EA?

    So, um, EA sucking at customer support is proof that FOSS works?

    Oh, hey, but Tux Racer!



  • @DaveK said:

    @DaveK said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I never said that FOSS makes things bad, just that, on the whole, FOSS tends to be much lower quality. For example, gcc is a good compiler. But FOSS desktop apps? Firefox is okay, I guess, although I've grown quite jaded with it the last few years. Pidgin doesn't completely suck. I can't really think of any others that are in the same league as their commercial counterparts.

    Eclipse, 7-Zip, Truecrypt, VLC player, NSIS, MySQL, Inform 7, OpenOffice, GIMP?

    (Those last two perhaps not quite as polished as MS Office or Adobe Photoshop respectively, but certainly "in the same league" as.)

    Apache httpd, Python, Blender, Azureus, Thunderbird, Squid, Audacity, Eraser, ...

     

    Apache's venerable, but even compared to other FOSS HTTP daemons it's bloated, slow, buggy and with a poor track record of security.

    Your point seems to be "Hey, I can list about a dozen FOSS apps that don't scrape the bottom of the fucking barrel, so that must be proof, right?"

    I notice that most of your examples are mostly extremely tiny non-apps, the kind of crap that's usually freeware anyway. "That FOSS sure makes a hell of an xfce clock widget! It even has an option to use the Klingon calendar!" (And squid? 2001 called, etc..)

    Thunderbird is at least a real application, but last time I did heavy IMAP development (which admittedly, was a few years ago) Thunderbird had, by far, the worst IMAP implementation. It would freeze up and take down the whole computer when presented even a moderately large mailbox. And it implemented several aspects of the RFC incorrectly (although, the RFC is a goddamn mess so I can't really blame Mozilla for that). By far, the best IMAP client I tested was Outlook (and before you shoot back with the mindless accusations that I've come to expect from FOSS apologists whenever anyone suggests the model is producing sub-sub-par results--I wasn't testing against Exchange, all of the daemons were FOSS. Then again, maybe Outlook really was a piece of shit and it was just all of the FOSS IMAP daemons that sucked..) In fact, I was shocked by that result because I was a bit of a FOSStard then and didn't understand how M$ could come out on top, but it was one experience that formed the basis of a later Road to Damascus moment where I realized the general shittiness of the software I was using on a daily basis was indefensible.

    And fucking Python? Now we're including programming languages in our List of Applications Proving FOSS Doesn't Completey Suck? Jesus Fucking Christ, man, why don't you just include nouveau and wpa_supplicant? Hey, I hear libev4 has an API that is pants-shittingly good!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @DaveK said:

    Yeah, how's that working for EA?
    They're an outlier.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    All software has bugs, it's the degree of those bugs and the costs associated with dealing with them that matter. Of course it varies depending on the product (there are plenty of buggy, shitty and expensive pieces of commercial software) but for many things FOSS is a much poorer overall value. "Being able to fix bugs yourself" does not compensate for a product being shitty and buggy, no more than "being able to treat yourself" makes crabs any more fun. Especially if there was a crab-free alternative that just required you to take a shower and pay for dinner.

    One thing I really like about a modern linux distro is the depth of the package manager. For me, I often come across some task (maybe once or twice a month) that I've never needed to do before. It's a fairly simple thing, but I don't have anything installed that will do it. Most of the time, I can search my repository and find something that will work. It's possible that there is some proprietary solution that is way better, but I'd definitely have to spend more time searching for it, possibly pay for it, and likely end up wondering if it wasn't some kind of a trojan.

    The best proprietary software is truly great. But it's relatively rare, just like great FOSS. Of course, you never see the proprietary software that was abandoned before it matured. It's generally easier to evaluate FOSS than proprietary to see if it's even fit for your purpose, since you don't have to worry about limited feature trial versions or nagware.

    In short, if you know of a proprietary product that will be a good match for your requirement, and you're not aware of an at least equal FOSS alternative, then I'd agree with you. Otherwise, it's less clear.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Are you out of your fucking mind? You go to put together a list of FOSS that doesn't suck and you include Eclipse, OpenOffice and GIMP?

    This is such a tedious game. Here, put up some of your list of world class non-FOSS, and we'll make fun of your choices.



  • Closed source that I use at work a lot: foobar2000, Photoshop, VS, SQL Studio, Editplus

     

    Of course this is good software because I only use good software, until it is revealed to be bad or inferior to something else.



  • @DaveK said:

    Eclipse,

    Crap.

    @DaveK said:

    7-Zip,

    Terrible UI.

    @DaveK said:

    VLC player

    Try to figure out how to use the Convert feature on your first try without fucking it up. Awful UI.

    @DaveK said:

    MySQL,

    You're joking, right?

    @DaveK said:

    OpenOffice,

    A solid 15 years behind-the-times, and not just because of the Ribbon-- it was 15 years behind before the Ribbon too. Glacial development pace. Extreme unbelievable bloatedness.

    @DaveK said:

    GIMP?

    Awful. A good example of how software should not be written in every goddamned single way. Even the name of the goddamned thing is unacceptable in polite society.


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