Big Budget Software vs. Open Source

There's an alternative to every piece of commercial software in existence. Don't believe me? Type in "Free Photoshop alternative", "Free 3dsMax alternative", "Free Word alternative", "Free X Software", ect. Chances are no matter what you search for, you'll find something decent. Gimp, Paint.Net, Blender, Open Office. All of those almost as good, if not as easy to use, as their commercial counterparts. Most of these are 'Open Source', meaning their source code is available to use and modify.

Now for my question to you good people. Do you ever think that Open Source software will get to the point where it fazes out commercial software? Do you ever think there will be a world where people are using Blender 7.2 to make the special effects for the next Hollywood hit? That there will be a world were something looks "Gimped" instead of "Photoshopped"?

I think that at the rate open source is going, this could happen in the next 10-15 years, probably sooner. Open source is becoming more user friendly, more powerful, and more reliable. Add to the fact that you can get it hassle free for zero dollars, as opposed to the 600-1000+ smackaroons you'd have to pay for the commercial stuff.

Anyone agree? Disagree? Have something to add?

One thing you're overlooking is how much money in commercial software is actually special order work, that is for a particular usage by a particular set of people.

But couldn't Open Source software be created or modified for their needs? Access to the source code could be used to make specialty programs fairly easily and it would be much cheaper than purchasing several thousand dollar software.

Even assuming that said code-base does exist, they still have to pay somebody to do the work to write the code for whatever they need. Paying somebody for access to the code they wish to use as a base may well be a trivial expense, and may be under better terms for them than the open-source licenses available to them. See sections 15 and 16 of the GPL for example. Some companies may feel they do need a warranty. So perhaps they negotiate for that. Thus the program being open-source didn't do much for them in that regard.

Now perhaps you might argue that with the code being open-source they can get a competition for providers, but still, you pay for good work.

edited 20th Jul '11 9:16:02 PM by blueharp

I don't think it will ever phase out professional software until all of the population is capable of using the internet to look up problems and use free forums for tech support.

After all, most people want the dedicated, on call tech support.

Fight smart, not fair.

There's also the issue that not everyone agrees with your assertion that open software is "almost as good" as the equivalent commercial software. Personally, I hate using OpenOffice, and I like the idea of open source.

One thing is that most good commercial software not only has developers, etc. working on it, but also professional user interface designers and the like. There's also the benefit of generally better support, which is a must for non-power users (i.e. most users).

In addition, as I think has been mentioned before, there's the issue of licensing. Many "free" licenses are only free if the use is noncommercial–commercial use may not be so free. And then there are security requirements and the like. I recently started a co-op position for a large national organization, and one of their workplace policies is that any software you want on your computer has to be preapproved. In many cases, this approval gets fast-tracked and you can download your software by the end of the day, but the number of approvals needed (they even have an "open source approval"!) shows the degree to which organizations need to dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s.

Short version: businesses have needs that open source software may not be able to fulfill.

Also, minor nitpick: "phase" is the word you're looking for, not "faze."

Commercial software will be forgotten once people stop using piracy to get the commercial stuff. At that point, all effort will be put into open source. Other than that, it is mostly just big budget companies and crap that actually bother to shell out money. Oh, and the occasional un-internet-baptized fool who thinks "yeah, this is totally my only option", and buys it.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

The only open source software I've ever used that was anywhere near as polished as even the scrappiest one-man Share Ware effort are the Mozilla Project's products. I used to think this was because most of the work is being done by paid ex-Netscape personnel, but then I noticed that tons of other big projects are actually written by professionals from companies like Sun, Corel, and IBM. Subsequently, my current guess is that Firefox and Thunderbird are polished for the simple reason that most of the specialized features and interface elements from the Communicator days were stripped out and wallpapered over.

Also, I have yet to see a new feature invented by an open source development team.

Eric,

I've got pretty limited experience with Open Source stuff. I've got GIMP and had Open Office for a while. Never used Photoshop so I can't compare, but GIMP's pretty good. Open Office seemed quite a bit worse than Microsoft Office. Seemed less intuitive, looked uglier (although how it looks isn't that important, it helps to look nice), was just all-around harder to get to do what I wanted to do. Now, how much of that was because I'd been using Microsoft Office for years is up for grabs, but...

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

I wont use Open Office until they have the equivalent of MS Office Smart Art. I also hate that OO's simple task like making custom colour is hidden deep in cryptically described menu.

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

I'd prefer to be using Word, but Open Office is cheap and I've grown accustomed to its evil...

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

This. Also, some companies are still using old software or hardware from as far back as the 80's to do certain things because they still work and they have no need to upgrade. I used to work for a telephone company that had some of their records on an old AS/400 that was built in the late 80's. That thing was pretty fun to work with, sometimes.

Also, FYI, the guys who worked on Open Office jumped ship when Oracle got a hold of Sun Microsystems. They now currently work on Libre Office. A couple months ago, Oracle gave Open Office to the Apache Software Foundation, so it seems that Open Office is going to stay open.

edited 21st Jul '11 12:44:04 AM by Driscoll

WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A DIALOG BOX INTERRUPT GAMEPLAY.

Like Eric DVH I found that almost all open source applications I tried were second rate clones of an original work, though some get pretty close, and Firefox is better than IE. Blender may also be an exception but its interface is really, horribly nonstandard even with the option to imitate Maya. As a cost saving measure my company installed Open Office on the computers of employees who don't need Office apps so much, and pretty much everyone feels it's buggy and has less features.

But I like open source and I think it's great because it provides competition and forces developers who've previously sat on their arses and not needed to change their products, to do so. Thanks to open source, even monopoly apps like MS Office get challenged. The greatest example of that for me was Internet Explorer which was worked on unceasingly while Netscape was challenging it, then became stale once it became the unchallenged leader, and went back to being developed and improved when Firefox came on the scene.

Will open source phase out commercial software? I don't think so. Open Source projects don't seem to have enough impetus to create new features, only copy them. Proprietary apps need the competition from open source or it'll go stale. When both are around the end-user wins.

edited 21st Jul '11 1:07:14 AM by betaalpha

Firefox is better than IE, but then IE is pretty much free too.

When you have to pay for software, it's usually better than the open source alternative (photoshop is better than Gimp, though Gimp's pretty darn good for most uses; MS Office is much better than Open Office).

I think the big difference isn't going to be open-source and free vs. closed-source and expensive, it's going to be between desktop and web-based. Google docs is a more dangerous competitor to MS Office than Open Office is, and Gmail is clearly better than Outlook. Having web-based software allows you to be profitable and avoid piracy, and also gives you more leeway for pricing schemes and business plans.

Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.

Really? I find Google Docs to be worse than Open Office in pretty much every single way.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

The small problems I have with Open Office aren't as much of a problem as it is to pay for Microsoft Office.

Well I don't think the question in the OP really makes sense. They don't solve the same problems. They sometimes solve the same problems but not always.

Your question of whether to use commercial or open source relies on several points

• Do I need someone to sue if stuff goes bad? (ie. most governments and large critical software corporations require this)
• Do I need support or warranty? (99% of people aren't techies and they shouldn't be because it is a waste of time and money versus just having dedicated support)
• Cost of integrating open source software versus producing new software from scratch (not all open source is made equal and a lot of open source is really bad code)

And so on. It's a business decision. Open source doesn't somehow make it better by being "free" because in reality, it's not free whatsoever. If you want to use it, you have to put in the time to make it work and you have to be able to maintain it and if something goes wrong, you need people on the clock to fix the issues.

As SED says, browsers are a bit of a special case, since the big ones are free. Real competition is in pay browsers like Opera. And much like operating systems (converging on POSIX,) there seems to be too much convergence under the hood, with Mozilla axing the ability to be run outside XUL and various browsers (iCab, Omniweb) throwing in the towel on engine development, all that's left are Trident, KHTML/WebKit, and Gecko, and one of them is sure to hit the floor soon.

As an aside, web browsers are subpar compared to most software in terms of robustness and polish, so the bar is substantially lower to begin with.

Eric,

edited 21st Jul '11 8:44:35 PM by EricDVH

But browsers are also the most commonly used software, at least among our demographics.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

That speaks volumes, I'm not sure what it says, but it's probably not very complimentary.

Eric,

Nitpick: Opera hasn't been for-pay for years now.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

They charge for their widget browser/OS.

Fight smart, not fair.

I doubt open sourced things will completely overtake commercial ones for quite some time since they can't have the same advertising and marketing budgets as big software companies. Stop a random person on the street and odds are good that they`ll know what word is, or photoshop, but few will be able to identify open source alternatives. So they won't use open source alternatives and will just spend some bucks on an MS Office license when the time comes.

I've found a few niches where payware will still win for the foreseeable future: video games (high-quality graphics aren't free to make), client software for streaming rented Hollywood movies like Netflix or Amazon Prime (MPAA is worried about redirecting the stream into a transcoder), and tax preparation software (because of the "someone to sue" factor).

They don't spend those bucks, they just pirate the damn thing.

edited 2nd Dec '11 3:57:53 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.