[vox] Reasons you might not want to use OpenOffice

[Joseph Arruda]

On 10/25/2010 8:12 PM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> That is truly sad, and IMO, shows a lack of expereince.
>
> Ruben

Maybe on your part, but as someone who uses at various lengths the Adobe 
Suite, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Apophysis, ArtRage, Muro, ContextFree, 
Processing, Phatch, and a host of other utilities and apps as needed, I 
know that especially for creative endeavors, sticking to one app just on 
a non-aesthetic principle is -in the main- an act of masochism at best, 
and at worst a painful reminder of where some FOSS apps may be coming up 
short.

I know I am not alone in this experience.  There are still folks who 
think all graphics end up on the web, in which case, they don't have to 
care about pre-press tools (which by and large are still not fully baked 
in FOSS-ville).  There are those who need 16 bit channels (some apps do, 
some don't). The list goes on depending on the app (remember, there are 
those just as married to Corel Painter, or 3DS Max, etc as any Adobe 
product).

"A lack of experience" presumes that with enough mass-hours of effort, 
one can pound for pound replace all the other mass-hours of effort in 
getting a working toolchain running - and that the person will want to 
do that just for the sake of the sw license (if you are a coder/geek 
maybe, if you are an artist, more likely not as much).   It's like 
telling someone like Larry Wall that he should just use Python cause it 
will do everything he needs (which even if it could defeats the fact 
that he can do all he wants in Perl and allready has the front loaded 
knowledge to do so).

The thing to make FOSS apps 'sellable' is to make sure they have the 
features that their proprietary counterparts have, as well as fully 
baked innovations (or better implementations of standard features, like 
PoTrace in Inkscape, or flame fractal manipulation in Apophysis).

No, it is peoples lack of experience with art apps that presents two 
observations:

1. The inexperienced amateur is more amenable to learning (since they 
are in effect n00bs) a different tool, rather than a semi-pro or pro 
creative with an established style or method.
2. The inexperienced FOSS advocate tends to make assumptions about what 
is and is not pertinent or have utility to the target audience of an 
application; in doing so, they short-circuit their own arguments.

The broader truth is the above applies really just as broadly across all 
software as much as it does in art applications, but this happens to be 
one area near and dear to yours truly, and for which I am quite intimate 
with.

ja