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Comment by halo | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it.

I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good.

There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software has beat commercial software (most notably in tech areas, such as Apache, or Linux versus other Unix-likes).

I think people should simply face facts: Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.

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> I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents.

I'm not saying this.

I, for one, prefer Gimp and Inkscape over Photoshop and Illustrator. I have coded my own plugins for Gimp and I write my own scripts (in various languages) to output svg (using Inkscape for additional free hand editing).

But I know that I'm not the average designer/sw user.

Apache and Linux are for tech-savvy users.

> Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.

This is obvious. What I'm saying is that, for most people, the opposite is true, because there's a psychological bias which is independent of technical value, user friendliness etc.

Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.

Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine.

At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't really support styles, or if it supports them they're too complicated to use. Nobody knew who to use them, so we did the formatting by hand.

Word has had full proper support for styles for a couple of decades - its implementation isn't very difficult to use, it's just that most users tend not to know about them because they haven't been taught as they aren't worthwhile unless you're writing a long document.

Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial.

Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.

I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free".

I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

That said, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even my misuse of wording is accurate.

I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

It would be called noncommercial open source software or noncommercial free software.

The point is to separate the aspect of buying software from the availability of its source code and whatever freedoms are associated with that.

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