Guardian Article On OpenOffice
The following article is a thread which I have posted at the LUGRadio forums.
The Technology section of the Guardian had an article today about the OpenOffice suite, and the way it 'illustrates the limitations of open source as a way of producing software'. The article is quite interesting, but I also had a few thoughts about the article:
The writer says that there is a false assumption that 'even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can't. Most users just think: "The computer isn't doing what I want." '. I'd challenge that - to make a generalisation, people who use OpenOffice generally know more about computers than others - if you don't know much about computers, you won't generally know of OpenOffice, lest of all use it (generally). I'd expect that most users of OpenOffice would recognise a bug when they see it, and know how to report a bug (though they may not bother, admittedly). However, most users of MS Office I know wouldn't have a clue what a bug report is, although by default XP asks if you want to submit a bug report on a crash.
Secondly, the writer says programmers of software like MS Office have an extra incentive to get their coding right and rid it of bugs because if they don't, they 'lose from user dissatisfaction in a way open source software doesn't'. Fair enough, but what about the vested interest that open source coders have - the one where they want to use this software when it's made? Surely that is incentive enough, isn't it? Or are open source coders not really bothered about debugging the code they write and then want to use?
Finally (I could raise other points, but want to stick to three), he mentions 'hugely irritating bugs'. One of these is that 'spaces typed at the end of a line won't show'. Well darn it, what an oversight! Surely that is just merely a different implementation of presentation? Does it really matter? I for one prefer it that way.
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