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Central » OpenSource vs. Commercial
If you don't know what I do, some of this might be a little confusing, and you might take me out of context, and fueling the fire (or being fueled by the current fire) of the Open Source vs. Commercial software battle. While I might be, I mean no harm to either OpenSource communities, or the commercial software vendors/developers.
But I work with Softgrid. Currently owned by Microsoft, as part of their Desktop Optimization Package, it basically takes a piece of software, the files, the registry entries, and all the things it installs, and bundles it together in one happy package to be sent to a client computer on demand. Not too shabby.
But certain pieces of software make my head hurt to no end. I even made a List 'o Hate for them. I have noticed a major difference between commercial applications and their open source counterparts, recently.
Last Friday, I began sequencing a number of open source applications, believing I would only be able to get a couple done in a day. Boy, I was wrong. I got six (6) open source applications sequenced and working in under four (4) hours. Yesterday, the 14th, I did five (5) in three (3) hours time. Today, this morning, I did nine (9) in just over four (4) hours.
Now, given, many of these are simple applications. They lack the complexity and support that the commercial applications have. Many of these rely on the user community to have support, and that can be problematic at times.
However, when you compare these numbers (number of applications against hours required to produce a working sequence) against that of a commercial application, I'm half tempted to start telling our clients (faculty, staff, and students) that I will not sequence something that is not open source.
What is it about programming that makes these commercial applications so ... bulky? Complex? Conveluted? Painful? No matter the term I use, I do not believe I can convey the actual feeling I have for some of these commercial applications.
When will these major corporations see they are hurting the administrators that have to support their software? Some of these pieces of software have grown and grown and grown over years of development, patching over the patch. At least some groups (like the Mozilla Organization) have started from scratch again and again, to get the cleanest possible product (Firefox. 'Nuff said). I would like to see Microsoft take a step back, look at Office, and decide to do it all over again from nothing. Reverse engineer by picture only. No code, no quick-starts. And let everyone else see what they're doing, and give actual bug reports rather than doing it all internal.
Too much to ask? Meh, I can hope, right?