If you picked an average computer user at random (read: not people on HN) and had them try out Linux, Gimp, and OpenOffice, I don't think they'd agree with you that they're as high-quality as their commercial alternatives.
Try giving an average user Photoshop. See how they weep. These thought experiments are really hard to apply to software on complex domains.
OpenOffice is indeed a terrible example.
The OS vendor can change the kernel being used, and those average users won't notice it all.
The only quality is being a free beer OS, that the OEM vendors can leech at will without bothering one second up-streaming their changes.
And when the community started to be too vocal about it, efforts to use MIT/BSD licensed alternatives were set in motion.
In a couple of years those router OSes, smart televisions, Android phones won't be using the Linux kernel any longer.
MIT/BSD licensed stuff is still free software.
I advise you to read about Zephyr OS, FreeRTOS, Azure RTOS, Fuchsia, NuttX,....
A closed-source OS in this space has no real chance, as it has to be adapted by hardware makers. Microsoft may be able to provide the backing for wider ThreadX adoption, but don't hold your breath.
I don't see how the fact that BSD allows proprietary forks implies it is not high-quality software.
Again, where is the source code to Playstation OS 4 or clang bitcode changes for watchOS?
Got to love FOSS.
Or cost... or abundance of existing tooling for... or a ton more factors that are all considered. And quality itself is multidimensional. Something might be good for engineering flexibility but terrible for exposure to end users, or vice versa. And engineers can work around shortcomings much better than end users can.
OSes aren't like Javascript frameworks. There are only so many viable choices for a given domain. It's like if someone chose T-Mobile over AT&T and Verizon and you automatically concluded it's because of quality.
I do not understand the argument. Linux won. It won because it — for a variety of reasons — fits certain domains well.
I think that’s mostly due to them being different from the thing they are used to, not because they’re inferior.
I’d be more interested in what people going in the other direction (e.g. from LibreOffice to MS Office) would say.
Well you would be wrong. I have LibreOffice 7.1.4.2 in front of me right now and it still can't correctly render stuff I had from 2014. The text boxes and stuff all end up in massively wrong positions, like they always have. (And they render fine in Word, like they always have.)
Similarly, first Excel spreadsheet I try to open in it gives this error: Warning loading {document}: The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded.
I could waste my time with other examples but it would be that: wasting my time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for them. Maybe someday there will finally come a free office program that can function like MS Office did a decade ago. I'm looking forward to seeing it before I die. But in the meantime, there's just no way we can honestly tell people LibreOffice is as high-quality as MS Office, regardless of how much we want that to be the case. It's just a lie we keep telling ourselves.
> (in some aspects)
...you just made my point for me.
That's not exactly a fair assessment exercise. I'm not sure what format is the original excel file, but xlsb is a proprietary format.
My experience with Writer is wonderful. Have not had any issues and I know many people who use it daily with no issues.
Try to balance a picture and a couple of paragraphs in M$ Word in a long document and then come back to me on how that "high-quality" software handles it.
> there's just no way we can honestly tell people it's as high-quality as MS Office
Apparently, like many others in this entire thread, you've totally missed the point. I wasn't saying it's "as" high quality as M$ word (although I disagree with the usage of the word high quality here) but just that it is high quality by itself. This is known as an irrelevant conclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion
The entire discussion has been regarding this verbatim quote from the top comment: "open source projects will always provide a lower quality than commercial ones". If you replied regarding some other premise, then you're the one missing the point and changing the topic, not me.
> That's not exactly a fair assessment exercise
It sure is fair to me. Just saying this doesn't make it true. And a reality check is warranted here: "it's not fair" is not going to be a satisfactory response to any user you're trying to win over.
> I'm not sure what format is the original excel file, but xlsb is a proprietary format.
No, it's an open format [1], and LibreOffice supports opening it... with poor quality. And again: even if it was, you're not going to win over or satisfy any users with an "it's a proprietary format so we don't support that many columns" excuse. They expect their office programs to dance around their documents, not the other way around.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_forma...