When you buy proprietary software, you get suffering
Posted by Tom Moertel Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:45:00 GMT
After reading about the ordeal a paying customer went through attempting to get Adobe to fix a simple mistake, I was reminded of why I lost my faith in proprietary software. After a bad experience reinstalling Win2k, it dawned upon me that software vendors could waste my time, make me jump through hoops, and sell me barely functional crap, and all I could do, as a paying customer with a valid license, was take it.
This poor guy, for example, ordered a Mac OS X version of Flash CS3 and got sent a Windows version by mistake. Not his fault. But he’s the guy who ended up wasting weeks fighting Adobe’s ineffective customer support trying to get what he paid for in the first place.
This guy is a paying customer. He paid for that treatment.
Look, folks, the world of open source isn’t perfect, but it’s better than that. Since dumping Windows for Linux, here’s how much time I’ve wasted on stupid vendor hoop-jumping: None. Nada. Zero.
In the world of open source, you never have to worry about getting stuck with the wrong version of software. That’s because you are always free to download the right version. No need to ask for vendor approval, fax in your “Letter of Destruction”, or wait for an activation code. You just type in “yum install whatever”, the software installs, and you go back to work. That’s it.
Until I switched to the open-source lifestyle, I never realized how much time (and blood and sweat) I had wasted on the side effects of proprietary software. If you’re still in the proprietary world, take a moment to consider how much time you have wasted and how much time you will waste in the next few years on stupid vendor crap. Maybe it’s time to stop jumping through hoops. Maybe it’s worth your while to give open source a shot.
Go ahead, grab a Fedora Live CD and test drive it for a few days. What have you got to lose but a world of hurt?
readers
What an absolutely useless post. A lot of your posts have been very good, but this one is complete and utter crap.
Wheee, here are a couple of examples of people who had a bad time with a vendor! Why do you focus on software? How many people have been inconvenienced in restaurants or retail stores? The conclusion you draw from their experiences has nothing to do with what actually occurred. You would have done better to at least rant against large companies.
And you propose, as a solution to this misidentified problem: use free software! This will make it all better. If you get a service from an evil wicked software company you may have to pay and then get the run around. Free software routinely gives people the run around for free! [1]
It’s certainly better to step back about 15 years in technology [2] just so we can say goodbye to proprietary software. Seriously, step it up or get off planet Haskell. I go to that site to read intelligent posting, not this kind of display of utter non-thought.
[1] http://actionnooz.com/news/?p=2870
[2] Look at the kind of games you can play on windows vs. Linux. It’s no comparison at all.
Programmer, thanks for your comments.
To be clear, I’m not drawing the conclusion that proprietary software is bad from two anecdotal examples. I’m drawing that conclusion from having lived for most of my life in the proprietary-software world and then having switched to open-source software about five years ago. I have measured what life is like in both worlds, and the open-source world is better – a lot better.
I’m using the two examples of vendor-imposed suffering to suggest to people who haven’t considered open source seriously that maybe they’re paying a large cost that they haven’t figured into their “TCO” calculations. In short, that when they buy proprietary software, they get software + suffering.
Open source software, in contrast, does not come with that extra, vendor-imposed suffering. (It does, however, come with the normal amount of software-imposed suffering – bugs and their ilk – that are present in both proprietary and open-source software.) Thus by going open source where possible, you can eliminate a lot of needless suffering, which for many people will more than compensate for the switching cost.
Yes, some people have bad experiences with segments of the open-source community. But most people don’t. Most people find the community supportive.
Because there is no practical free-as-in-freedom alternative to restaurants or retail: both consume physical goods and neither can be freely replicated.
Cheers,
Tom
Awesome post!
I switched to Linux in 1999 and stayed Microsoft free for nine years, while being profitably self-employed.
The only reason I stopped was because self-employed and working from home gets lonely after that many years!
Getting back into the exclusively Microsoft world after that many years of open source is a horrifying experience.
One of my job tasks had a two day delay because no one could find our licensed copy of Photoshop CS. I finally gave up on Photoshop and spent fifteen minutes installing the GIMP and fixing the problem.
Along similar lines, Visual Studio really gets in our company’s way in certain situations, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Luckily I have emacs installed to work around such problems.
I’ve also discovered that cygwin is a necessary tool for SharePoint development, for many reasons.
I still only use Linux at home, more games and legal decryption of DVDs is not a sufficient appeal for me to own a copy of Windows.
Thanks for the post!
Well, thanks for the measured response to my aggressively toned message. I apologize (for whatever that’s worth from an anonymous coward :)
But I still say the things you are describing apply to big companies, not software companies in general.
At least not completely. In your response you bring up the good point that “anit-pirating” mechanisms are a problem. The ironic thing about these mechanisms is they cause more trouble for legitimate customers then to people who steal the software. In that case I completely agree; I really hate dealing with these ridiculous codes. Especially Adobe which makes you, in the case of a student copy at least, send in proof of your student status before they send you a key (took us 2 weeks to get the first key, which was for the wrong product!).
But your other complaints are about services you probably getting as part of your purchase that isn’t available in any form for many open source projects.
You can’t compare working with some crappy help desk to get your software working to searching online forums (for open source). You could just forgo the help desk and check forums for the product. The help desk is an extra, and for the open source products that even have this option, I bet they also make you jump through hoops.
Of course you can just modify the source yourself in the worst case, but this is hardly viable for the vast majority of computer users.
I had not considered the side effects of proprietary software in this light. Thank you for putting together this article.
While I mostly agree with what you say, I think that this applies mostly to big companies. I’m a happy user of both FOSS and proprietary software, and I think that some indie developers, and some small shops do a great job, and I’m happy to pay for their software.
I try to avoid big names such as Adobe and Microsoft, though, but I am a happy (paying) user of Panic’s Transmit (FTP for Mac), Pixelmator, Delicious Library, Twitterriffic, TextMate, OmniGraffle and WriteRoom. I think that all these are awesome apps, given the price and the quality you get for your money. And I am also a happy user of Linux, GIMP, OpenOffice, Apache, Ruby on Rails, and many libs on Github or Google Code.
I think that the market of software has changed; to pay more than 100 bucks in off-the-shelf software is not worth anymore, and many FOSS projects have reached an unparalleled level of quality lately.
The important thing, in my opinion, is to be pragmatic. Just my 2 cents!
I’m a big Linux user too and agree with most of what you are saying, but I don’t think it is entirely fair to say that you won’t lose time using open-source software. There are still some areas like drivers where the open-source versions aren’t nearly as good as the proprietary versions. Getting my webcam or my printer or the trackpad (or whatever it’s called) on my laptop to work was not a trivial task, and had there been proprietary versions I likely would not have spent as much time messing around getting things to work.
The plus side of this is that at some point the open-source version does work depending on how much time you’re willing to invest, where if the proprietary stuff doesn’t work then you’re pretty screwed.
AMEN! Too much of my professional career has been on hold waiting to fix a tertiary aspect (licensing or authorization, etc..) of something for which I (over) paid…
And too much of my employers only understand ‘throw money at the problem’ as the only business strategy… grrr.
The proper term is GNU/Linux and it isn’t “open source” that saves you from vendors, it’s Free Software.
This is not a small useless detail, it is quite important. Software licensed under the BSD or MIT license can be incorporated into proprietary products. So you could buy a product that contains code that was open-sourced but is now in a closed-source proprietary product.
Free Software Definition: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
@Rudolf Olah:
While I understand the difference between mere “open source” and Free Software (most of my code is licensed under the GPL), I don’t think the distinction is relevant here. If a BSD-licensed body of code, to use your example, was incorporated into a proprietary software product, that product is still proprietary and subject to being sold with a full measure of vendor-bundled suffering: thus I won’t be buying it.
So when it comes to choosing software, any open-source license is sufficient to prevent vendors from holding you hostage. (When writing software, however, I agree that licensing under the GPL provides greater assurances of lasting freedom to the community, and that’s why I choose the GPL for my code.)
Cheers,
Tom
Ok, let me try
yum Dreamweaver CS3
mmmmm. What went wrong here?
Hey Alex,
It’s > yum install dreamweaver
you also have to login as root first.
There is an investment of time and effort involved in breaking out of the proprietary world, but in my own case, I had been mostly involved in development and had been in other situations free to use open source software if needed.
Then I took a job with a company where one of the main IT dudes was more a Microsoft type zealot and generally mistook his ability to write big checks for proprietary software for some awesome power on his part. He would bring big packages in house which would not necessarily work with each other, and since they were proprietary, congratulations, there’s a limit to how much you could modify them to suit your needs.
Add to this the way the Windows culture infantilizes people and generally teaches them to be helpless (in other words, admins never automate anything they can click-click-click their way through umpteen zillion times) and you have a recipe for disaster.
A small group of a couple clever people who know their way around the open source world beats an Army of Wintards any day. Open Source FTW.
To Alex, actually you could do:
This will give you a very valuable free alternative to DreamWeaver.
Tony: Thanks for a shining example of why FOSS isn’t “suffering free”.
“Since dumping Windows for Linux, here’s how much time I’ve wasted on stupid vendor hoop-jumping: None. Nada. Zero.”
Apples and oranges. Obviously, by switching to a no-vendor environment, anyone can stop jumping through vendor hoops. But that completely ignores the time you’ve wasted on other stuff that happens more often in pure-FOSS environments- You apt-get a cute little mario clone and the sound in your X manager stops working, or your laptop touchpad doesn’t autoscroll anymore, or you have no idea how to do thing “foo” in your environment, so you have to find a forum where they’ll answer the question, because there’s no official customer support team (since those are usually paid for by the vendor).
Just because you’ve eliminated vendor-related headaches, doesn’t mean you’ve cut down on the headaches. You’ve swapped them. From that point forward, it’s just subjective which is better. I prefer vendor-related support paths to unofficial online help forums, because I generally have much better experience than the fringe case you described, and nobody in a paid support position has ever wasted my time explaining that I’m a newb (redundant- if I knew what I was doing I wouldn’t have to ask the question) or telling me to RTFM (I’ve checked, it’s never in the manual).
In general, though, I tend to roll a combination of proprietary/OSS software. I’m big on “best tool for the job”, regardless of the attached license: Paint.NET, textpad, firefox, 7zip, digsby, etc.
GPL isn’t “free”, it’s viral. As for BSD, when some proprietary sw vendor uses BSD licensed code (say, Apple) you still have all of this code under the BSD license. The possibility of usage of code for any kind of project, that’s what I call freedom.
@jartur: +1. One mistake the online community has made is letting GNU spread this idea that their license is “free as in freedom”. It’s actually more restrictive then a Microsoft license.
Surely you must be kidding me! The hoops vary, but I’ve never had a technical support request where I understood the problem go through a vendor where I didn’t spend at least some time working my way through first-line technical support. Sometimes I can do it in five or ten minutes, but often I’m called on to check and change irrelevant settings, reboot my machine, re-install things, and so forth.
(Actually, this is not quite true. At one company I worked for, Cisco Enterprise tech. support was fantastic; I could make a phone call and instantly have a tech. who knew more than me on the line. On the other hand, this was a company-specific support contract for our senior network administrators that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year….)
As far as the purchasing side goes, yeah, when there’s a free alternative available that does the job (which is surprisingly common these days), it does make you realize how much time you often spend dealing with vendors on issues related simply to trying to give them money for software.
cjs@cynic.net
Not necessarily. You forgot to mention the one big weakness that Linux has that Windows doesn’t: relative lack of gaming support. Now, I’m willing to bet that the reason why you didn’t mention that is because you don’t play too many games on your computer, but for a decent chunk of users, being able to play games such as Crysis is important for picking an OS. Other than games, however, I generally agree with you on the use of Linux and other free software for almost everything else.
@Tom: Yes, perfectly true; lived that nightmare for years (with Adobe and even Apple).
Corporations are a pox on software.
For end users (rather than system administrators) they don’t particularly care whether code is open source, free or proprietary. All they care is it works. There’s no reason to assume proprietary works worse than open source, or open source works better than proprietary, just because of bad customer support. It’s not even a fair comparison: free software would come with no customer support (other than forums and man and wiki and there’s problems with those as much as a telephone) so you’re comparing “bad” customer support with absolutely no customer support. Cost is a valid issue, but has to be balanced with the cost of hiring in-house instead of relying on vendors (in short a business decision). And of course, cost is irrelevant to end users who have their Windows prebundled or can get education discounts from their kids or friend’s colleges.
In the end advocating a mix of proprietary and open source software is the best approach, not a “ditch all proprietary” answer based on personal ancedotes.
Speculation: I suspect in an open source dreamworld where the market share was dominated by open source software enforced through legislation or some other mechanism, programming careers wouldn’t be half as lucrative. So beware what you wish for.