[vox] Reasons for caution when promoting FLOSS

Brian Lavender brian at brie.com
Fri Jan 1 09:17:02 PST 2010


Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)

So, it seems that I see a lot of this.  "See, OpenOffice (OO) does all you
need. You don't need MS Word, WordPerfect, or whatever." But in the end,
OpenOffice can be a real pain. My recent experience with OpenOffice and
using its bibliography feature has been a real pain. The cost is that
I invested time into learning OpenOffice because I believed it could do
what I needed it to do. In the end, I am burdened with a tool that does
a poor job for the task.

I believe we should keep this in mind when promoting FLOSS.

brian
--
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture


More information about the vox mailing list