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?