How did you start hating opensource?
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@fbmac said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e It hasn't produced a quality video editing program, while closed source has produced several. We just finished talking about that. So there must be something wrong with it.
I never proposed that OSS would work better for all the things
The problem is, many of the people driving the OSS movement - RMS in particular - do say that, so the idea does need to be addressed in discussing it, even if only by distancing oneself from it (as you have done).
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I use Word at work and LibreOffice at home and I'm satisfied with both. I also don't tend to do anything fancy with either.
Or in summary, "I'm not qualified to compare the two programs, but I'm mouth-farting words into this thread anyway".
I see it as:
My needs are pretty basic so both apps are acceptable. Neither are bad and neither are awesome. In that case, might as well use the free one. Somebody who cares about using more or most of the features in these apps may care. I don't. As a user, there is no single measurement I should use to judge software beyond "does it work for me".
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I don't care about free, I care about good.
Most of the time paid stuff will get you higher quality. But I like my OS open, and I don't have loads of money.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@anotherusername said in How did you start hating opensource?:
That argument is basically analogous to "privately owned corporations are obviously shit incapable of accomplishing anything worthwhile... just look, they've never successfully gone to the moon".
Fine; but then don't tell me open source is a better development methodology, if it can't even produce a genre of application I use several times a week.
I didn't. I wouldn't call it "better" or "worse" on the basis of quality. As I said in my post a few
pagesarbitrary-sized flicks of the scroll wheel back, closed source produces some ugly shit too.The part that's "better", in my opinion, is the part where open source stuff is often free. But closed source also produces some free stuff, and I really don't care how it was produced, so long as it's useful, and not horribly broken.
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@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I see it as:
My needs are pretty basic so both apps are acceptable.Right; but that doesn't contribute ANYTHING to the discussion so it's just clutter. The question isn't, "does a person with simple needs find both programs acceptable?" The question is "is Word better than OpenOffice?" And frankly you'd have to be insane to answer "no" to that question.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I don't care about free, I care about good.
Unless my employer's paying for it, I care about both.
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@blakeyrat The question is about hating OSS. Openoffice is miles worse than word, yes, but it being available is a good thing.
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@fbmac Why is having the inferior product available a good thing? So people can be exposed to it and think, "wow, software developers must really hate me, this thing is awful."
(Not a great argument for OpenOffice, perhaps, but imagine it for GIMP.)
How does that advance society? By making people hate their unfriendly autistic computers? How does that advance our industry? By giving people the impression that none of us really gives a shit about how easily our products can be used?
But the real beef I have is: I'm told a dozen times a day either explicitly or implicitly that open source is the superior development model. Microsoft's moving their dev tool stuff to open source because it's supposedly so superior. Idiots recommending software will always recommend the open source product first, because open source is so superior. When selecting a forum we picked an open source one because Alex thought it was so superior.
If the open source development model is so superior, why the fuck can't they get their shit together long enough to produce anything as good as Word?
Which isn't to say all open source software is awful. The .net framework is good for example. (Because it was made open source after a bunch of front-ended design work made it good.) Chrome's pretty good. (Because it's 99% funded by a company with a vested interest in people using and liking it.) Ditto Firefox. (Ditto the reason.)
Why are those products good? Because they're open source? No. For reasons entirely orthogonal to them being open source.
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@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
either way, I'd rather spend 10 minutes figuring out how to make the program do what I want than spend 10 minutes dicking around with the mouse clicking options in submenus and random-ass dialogs.
Clicking options is how you figure out how to make a GUI do what you want, or at least a decent part of the process.
By contrast, working out how to make a CLI do what you want involves... um... going on a forum and telling the people who use it that it's shit because it can't do what you want?
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@Jaloopa said in How did you start hating opensource?:
By contrast, working out how to make a CLI do what you want involves... um... going on a forum and telling the people who use it that it's shit because it can't do what you want?
Typically it involves trying
/?,-?,--?,-help,--help, and Google, in approximately that order, until something produces helpful results.
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@blakeyrat Office is expensive. Most south-americans would be using MS Write if they weren't able to pirate office. Who do you hate more, we openoffice users or the office pirates? Because I haven't seem a brazillian buy a legitimate copy of Office for home, ever. (business are different, though).
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I see it as:
My needs are pretty basic so both apps are acceptable.Right; but that doesn't contribute ANYTHING to the discussion so it's just clutter. The question isn't, "does a person with simple needs find both programs acceptable?" The question is "is Word better than OpenOffice?" And frankly you'd have to be insane to answer "no" to that question.
From the perspective of my needs, the fact that Word is generally better than Open Office because it has more features or a better interface for certain features is irrelevant. That being said, if they were both free, I'd probably use Word at home.
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@anotherusername said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Typically it involves trying /?, -?, --?, -help, --help, and Google, in approximately that order, until something produces helpful results
Most results will be in a form that assumes you already know all about it and just need a little hint. That's my experience of man pages anyway.
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@fbmac What stops a Brazilian company from writing a quality word processor at reduced cost due to reduced labor costs?
I'm sorry your country was caught napping during the computer revolution. (Like most countries except the US and possibly Japan and maybe the UK). But that's hardly an argument for or against open source.
That's just saying virtually all quality software comes from the US because we were developing our computer industry while the rest of the world was ignoring the technology entirely.
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@blakeyrat We had "Carta Certa", but it didn't survive competing with word, much like all other word processors around. And why do you think it would be any cheaper than Word if it survived?
But people that haven't money and want to avoid piracy already have a solution here, it's called openoffice (or libreoffice, or even google docs).
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@fbmac What stops a Brazilian company from writing a quality word processor at reduced cost due to reduced labor costs?
At this point, assuming they wanted to sell their app, there's a huge amount of investment needed to make the product better enough (not just better) than Open Office and close enough to Office (to make piracy less appealing) to make themselves a customer base.
It gets worse when you realize that the market for Office is stagnant. Sure, it still makes Microsoft a lot of money, but it's not really a growth product.
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@Jaloopa said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Clicking options is how you figure out how to make a GUI do what you want, or at least a decent part of the process.
Right, except if I want to do something repeatedly, I need to click around even if I know exactly what I want to do. With a CLI, once I know the command it's one step to do it again.
I'm not saying that Maya or whatever should be made with a CLI, just that it's really annoying having to do repeated tasks with a GUI that wasn't designed for repetition.
Hell, there's a reason why professional tools like AutoCAD have command line interfaces embedded in their application for inputting commands. Because for people who know what they're doing, it's faster and easier to use.
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@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@dkf said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@Kian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
OTOH, that's hardly the whole of the open source space. Not everyone is a communist jerkwad.Which brings us to a side issue regarding the FSF, GNU, and many other big players in the OSS game: most of them are politically Libertarian. Not Randian Objectivists1, naturally, but several do identify with Heinlein's version of Objectivism, and most - including RMS, ESR, and Mitch Kapor - see themselves as dedicated supporters of capitalism and opponents of government interference. Watching them justify their positions on closed source relative to this can be both amusing and annoying.
Can we all agree that RMS is awful ("hurr durr pens are less expensive than the packaging to keep people from stealing them so they should be free"1) and move on with life? He's really easy to beat on so it naturally comes up in threads like these but the horse died long ago.
For that matter, Ron Paul, and his son Rand who is named after Ayn Rand, aren't either, as they both also claim to be Christians. Watching them trying to weasel out of that kind of cognitive dissonance is interesting, too, but hey, the whole concept of popular sovereignty contradicts Abrahamist views of morality and law, anyway, so they aren't alone in that boat.
- Randall Paul was not named after Ayn Rand.
- I've never heard either Ron or Randall claim to be Christian Objectivists, but there is such a thing as "Christian Libertarianism" which is not subject to the same self-contractions.
- You're right about popular sovereignty, which is why there's an alternative known as "rule of law".
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@blakeyrat I don't know why Brazilians are not making better office suites that can compete with MS Office, but it's probably not a country thing since US companies are not doing it either.
Seriously, can you name any alternatives other than (Libre/Open)Office and Google Docs without having to google it?
And similarly, what commercial desktop OSes are competing with Windows? None?
Windows and Office are worth billions and they have no viable competitors. Some part of the free market must be broken because that just doesn't make sense.
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@Mathijs-Segers said in How did you start hating opensource?:
why not reinvent the wheel It's always a good solution!
I just wish I could find that clip from episode 44 of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo where Pana says, "I'm still cooler than you, I have a WHEEL on my head!"
I guess the quote will have to do.
@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If your GUI is better or quicker because of hotkeys, I'd argue those hotkeys are a GUI equivalent of a CLI. If that's your primary source of being better, then I'd say it really isn't better. I'm not saying hotkeys are bad. I'm simply pointing out that hotkeys aren't really that different than having to memorize CLI commands. There's a set of basics for copy, cut, paste, open, save, and print that are reasonable and pretty universal these days. But once your app starts throwing various chords in (like Ctrl-shift-N), I fail to see how that's any different than remembering or looking up CLI commands. At least for simple stuff.
>vs some UI that has a button, with text that includes the hotkey? Yeah, you're too stupid to live.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Right; which is not an application. It's just boring useless shit that's pointless unless an actually application is wrapped around it.
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Which isn't to say all open source software is awful. The .net framework is good for example.
So the .NET framework which is good open source software is boring useless shit that's pointless. Got it
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@Magus said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If your GUI is better or quicker because of hotkeys, I'd argue those hotkeys are a GUI equivalent of a CLI. If that's your primary source of being better, then I'd say it really isn't better. I'm not saying hotkeys are bad. I'm simply pointing out that hotkeys aren't really that different than having to memorize CLI commands. There's a set of basics for copy, cut, paste, open, save, and print that are reasonable and pretty universal these days. But once your app starts throwing various chords in (like Ctrl-shift-N), I fail to see how that's any different than remembering or looking up CLI commands. At least for simple stuff.
>vs some UI that has a button, with text that includes the hotkey? Yeah, you're too stupid to live.
Fair enough about button and other similar hotkeys that are right in front of you (with Alt+letter combos). Generally I was talking about the kind that are CTRL+C, CTRL+SHIFT+whatever, etc.
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@pydsigner said in How did you start hating opensource?:
- Randall Paul was not named after Ayn Rand.
Apparently, I was misinformed, as it is often claimed to be so - I don't know if that's something his opponents say, or just a common bit of confusion. Thank you for the correction.
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@ChrisH This exactly how I feel. I have nothing against open source software, I have a lot of problems with the FSF and their like.
- A lot of project spend half of their web page evangelising the fucking license. Not telling me what it does exactly, what the features are, no screenshots etc.
- There is always some fucking moron telling me about "Software Freedoms". Go away I don't care unless I am including it my own software.
- Richard Stallman and his rhetoric is mental.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@anotherusername said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Pretty much every video editing program that isn't expensive is a usability nightmare. I don't know why. It's a niche, and it's hard to do well, apparently.
But open source is SO MUCH BETTER THAN PROPRIETARY SOFTWAREZZZ why haven't they conquered that hurdle after all they are SO MUCH BETTER at writing the softwares!
Seriously, do you guys need reasons to dislike open source? Just read your own posts. Read every post. Here's one:
Node.JS broke their debug build so it crashes if there's long file names, Ben L's talking about that one right now.
How about Node.JS hard-codes security certificates instead of reading them from the OS like it's supposed to? heterodox is talking about that in the same thread as Ben L.
That's two reasons to dislike open source right there. I'm sure if I went through any randomly-selected 48 hours of posts on this forum I'd find a dozen more.
You guys do NOTHING but talk about all these shitty flaws and bugs in open source software. Every open source product I've used is a bug-filled mess. We're POSTING THIS on a open source forum which is a bug filled mess.
"Why do you hate open source?"
"GEE WHAT A MYSTERY! CALL SCOOBY-DOO!"
We're in the process of upgrading our windows 8 boxes to Windows 10 where I work. Microsoft by default enables the option to share updates. This kills CPU (almost 100%, cannot use). We fixed it, sure, but if my mom upgraded on her own she wouldn't be able to fix it by herself. So she'd have the following workflow: Windows update -> Windows broke.
CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE IS FUCKING NIGHTMARE I HATE CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE LETS EXTERMINATE ALL CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE CODERS THEY DON'T TAKE PRIDE IN THEIR WORK!
@blakeyrat, you're not stupid. Why do you act as if you were? :/
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
my question is whether or not open-source software is generally more shit than other software
Run Word and OpenOffice side-by-side and you tell me.
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
my question is whether or not open-source software is generally more shit than other software
Run Word and OpenOffice side-by-side and you tell me.
Run IE and Chrome side by side and tell me.
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@mikehurley said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
To dick around writing CLI bullshit, or to produce quality software?
The main goal should be quality, whether it's CLI or GUI. True, many apps could really use a quality GUI and only have a CLI. That doesn't mean all CLI's are crap. Given the complicated tasks FFMPEG can do, I'd say its CLI is actually fairly high quality. Also, sometimes simple operations are better with a CLI. I can type "mkdir new-subdir" quicker than messing around in Explorer. Keyboard shortcuts don't count. I generally consider them GUI CLI's. Especially apps that love their keyboard chords (I'm looking at you Jetbrains software).
Also, GUI takes more resources to write. If you're doing a project for free by yourself or in a very small team, this really fucking matters because resources are scarce. This doesn't say anything about the quality of the developers. Of course you can still judge the software as shitty, if GUI is so important to you, but you shouldn't judge the devs.
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I'm not opposed to open source. But I don't like the GPL
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@slapout1 The GPL wasn't designed to be useful to closed-source software developers, so it's expected that most of us don't like when we find a library released on it.
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@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@fbmac said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e It hasn't produced a quality video editing program, while closed source has produced several. We just finished talking about that. So there must be something wrong with it.
I never proposed that OSS would work better for all the things
The problem is, many of the people driving the OSS movement - RMS in particular - do say that, so the idea does need to be addressed in discussing it, even if only by distancing oneself from it (as you have done).
Unfortunately more often than not this is the discussion. Look, @blakeyrat has come and started shouting and that's all this thread is about now. Not if OSS can be good or if it's important or whatever, no. It's about the fact that NodeBB devs broke something. Like CSS devs don't do that.
Really, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK?!?!?!?!?!??!?11111111
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@kt_ @blakeyrat must have a really good story of when some OSS developer stole his lunch or something, and he isn't willing to share with us
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
you're not stupid. Why do you act as if you were?
You think maintaining that level of self-loathing is easy?
I think you underappreciate the level of sheer hard dedicated work he's putting in on this project.
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@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
With a CLI, once I know the command it's one step to do it again.
You have photographic memory?
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@fbmac Why is having the inferior product available a good thing? So people can be exposed to it and think, "wow, software developers must really hate me, this thing is awful."
(Not a great argument for OpenOffice, perhaps, but imagine it for GIMP.)How does that advance society? By making people hate their unfriendly autistic computers? How does that advance our industry? By giving people the impression that none of us really gives a shit about how easily our products can be used?
how about: so people that can't afford Word can edit their documents for free? How about: because people who don't need to write macros can calculate their vacation cost for free?
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
But the real beef I have is: I'm told a dozen times a day either explicitly or implicitly that open source is the superior development model. Microsoft's moving their dev tool stuff to open source because it's supposedly so superior.
OK, we get it, STOP WHINING.
If the open source development model is so superior, why the fuck can't they get their shit together long enough to produce anything as good as Word?
You're confusing closed source software with corporation- or money-backed software development. And that's fucking stupid of you. Microsoft won't become the next Linux just because they opened their codes. Grow up!
Why are those products good? Because they're open source? No. For reasons entirely orthogonal to them being open source.
Hey, you get it! So why do you keep spouting this bullshit all the time? However it is an interesting question: will making source code open source better? For the reasons pertaining to it being open source, like the fact that people can easier spot bugs or submit simple bug fixes, find out what it is that the framework does without running a decompiler etc.
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@anonymous234 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Seriously, can you name any alternatives other than (Libre/Open)Office and Google Docs without having to google it?
Word Perfect. Scrivener for novel writing. Tableau is not exactly what you asked, but it's basically a replacement for Excel and Access. PageMaker, if you count that as a word processor. Apple's... what was it called... oh Pages.
In short, yes. Yes I can.
@anonymous234 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
And similarly, what commercial desktop OSes are competing with Windows? None?
OS X.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
you're not stupid. Why do you act as if you were?
You think maintaining that level of self-loathing is easy?
I think you underappreciate the level of sheer hard dedicated work he's putting in on this project.
And he's doing it all for free so it must be shitty.
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Run IE and Chrome side by side and tell me.
AFAICT they're exactly equivalent.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@slapout1 The GPL wasn't designed to be useful to closed-source software developers, so it's expected that most of us don't like when we find a library released on it.
The problem is, it's not particularly useful to open-source developers either. The GPL isn't really a license so much as a political statement, a proclamation to the world that you believe that proprietary software is inherently immoral and you are doing all you can to throw the full weight of the law behind keeping anyone from using your precious code for any purpose that's not "free enough"... including some open-source licenses!
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@blakeyrat Chrome isn't opensource anyway. Firefox would be a better example.
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Also, GUI takes more resources to write.
Yes, it's generally more difficult to do things properly than to half-ass them.
@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If you're doing a project for free by yourself or in a very small team, this really fucking matters because resources are scarce
Well if the goal is to create quality software, then recruit some more people to advance your goal.
If the goal is to release half-broken useless shit, then congratulations, keep using your small team of idiots.
@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
This doesn't say anything about the quality of the developers.
If the developers identify a weakness in their product, but don't take any steps to improve on it, it damn sure reflects on them.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
With a CLI, once I know the command it's one step to do it again.
You have photographic memory?
I know you have dyslexia, but there are people who don't have problems with remembering CLI commands. Although there's probably not many that can get around without a cheat sheet, at least from time to time.
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Hey, you get it! So why do you keep spouting this bullshit all the time?
I've never argued that open source software is good, you're smoking the good ganja man.
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I know you have dyslexia, but there are people who don't have problems with remembering CLI commands.
Pretty much everybody, for example.
You know what people don't (generally) have trouble remembering? Where they put down their keys. That's because your brain uses this thing called "spatial memory" to keep track of where physical objects are located, and it's really fucking powerful (in the vast majority of people) compared to rote memory.
A good GUI makes use of spatial memory, and that's its superpower.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
You know what people don't (generally) have trouble remembering? Where they put down their keys.
[Insert stock sitcom "where are my glasses?" joke here]
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The GPL isn't really a license so much as a political statement
GPL is a license. It's called the "GNU General Public License". Linux developers, for example, say they like the GPL because it forces people to contribute back to then. Instead of simply giving for free, this is their price.
The political philosophy of RMS and the FSF is another thing. They can't compete with closed-source software on funding, and that is a problem. But having the sources and the freedoms is a good thing.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
GPL is a license. It's called the "GNU General Public License". Linux developers, for example, say they like the GPL because it forces people to contribute back to then. Instead of simply giving for free, this is their price.
So does the MPL, and it does so without being viral about it.
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@kt_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Really, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK?!?!?!?!?!??!?11111111
I think part of it is bikeshedding.
Now, before anyone jumps on me for this, we need to understand that term better. Most people (including myself), on hearing the term, are given a definition along the lines of 'wasting a lot of time on trivialities', and having a term for that is useful, I guess. However, it isn't what Parkinson's Rule of Triviality (which is where the term comes from) means, but instead describes a common outcome of bikeshedding, and in a way is itself an example of bikeshedding in the strict sense (or at least a lie-to-children, which is another common result of bikeshedding).
Originally, the term referred to the act of redirecting a debate or conversation to a topic one is more comfortable with, in order to avoid revealing one's ignorance or uncertainty on a less familiar topic. Actually, even that's not quite right, because he was talking less about individuals and more about the discussion process as a whole, but it still is relevant even for a single individual.
In modern parlance, bikeshedding is a management anti-pattern, one usually caused by a combination of lack of domain knowledge, a desire to contribute even when unfamiliar with the subject matter, and a conflict between ego and self-doubt. Parkinson's original example was of a city council debating three topics, the construction of a nuclear power plant, the construction a bikeshed for the staff at City Hall, and the budget for coffee and other refreshments for the City Hall staff's break room. While the power plant is obviously the topic needing the most discussion, it instead gets the least, because the city planners have only a vague idea of the issues at hand; while the familiar but completely unimportant topic of 'what color should the bike shed be?' gets most of the debate time, because anyone who isn't blind (or color-blind) can have a meaningful opinion on that.
My point is that @blakeyrat, like everyone else, prefers to stay in his comfort zone, which in this case is his anti-GPL stance, rather than talking about things he doesn't know, such as software he's never used.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
But having the sources and the freedoms is a good thing.
Because?
It doesn't produce better software. So what good is it?
