OT-open source 2005-05-05 - By Eric Winemiller
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Brian,
I think while there are some real gems in the OS community and there are
a few tools I use from there, they invariably, for me, require more time
with it (compared to commercial apps) to get it to work and are not as
feature complete or easy to use for the things I do. If it takes me 2
days to get an app up and running smoothly or it slows me down
significantly, it's just not worth my time. I'll pick the commercial
version.
I've tried Blender, didn't like it, GIMP, didn't like it, Open Office,
really slow, but works okay enough for the little I do. So my machines
are built on Carrara, Corel, and Open Office.
I am a commercial software developer so this of course is coming from a
particular viewpoint. I don't think there is enough incentive for OS to
match commercial software. I know there is a difference between free (as
in beer) and free (as in speech) software, but they most of the time go
hand in hand. When an open source developer is presented with a
decision, do I go have a beer with my buddies or fix that bug/improve
the workflow/add that feature to the project I'm working with, he has a
much less motivation than the commercial guy who can't pay his mortgage
if his product is not competitive. Building software is an expensive
(machines, compilers, research, time, etc.) endeavor and it's hard to
spend your own money on that when there is no return on the investment.
I also find that many open source projects are poorly organized or just
abandoned. I tried to help out with a key remapper on OSX a while back,
but couldn't get the project to even compile. Repeated emails to the
project leader never got a response. It was either abandon or the crew
was just rude, either case, not worth my time.
Another example, in my day job I program Java web apps. We use
websphere, built on the open source eclipse. It often can't keep up with
my typing speed on 2ghz P4 with 1gig of RAM. The intellisense is so slow
as to be nearly unusable. It often will lock up trying to scan for
errors because you haven't closed quote on the string you're currently
typing yet. No drag and drop editing. Finally it simply won't handle a
text file above a certain size without going off into the weeds. It
can't compete with a commercial web development IDE (Visual Interdev)
from 7 years ago, much less a current one like .NET.
If I was still in college, less money, but LOTS more time, my viewpoint
might be different. 99.9% of the time my commercial operating system and
commercial apps just work, on open source experiments I hit closer to
50% and it always takes more time just trying to get that 50% working.
It shouldn't have to recompile my kernel to get a rather popular
wireless card working in a major linux distribution in 2004, that's just
silly! Time to try getting OS projects to work has to compete with the
wife, kids, DCG, house, and those things are simply more important.
Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com
nicholas8681 wrote:
> I'm curious what people think of the current expanding selection of
> open source software out there.
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