Why free software is bad

[glauxosdever]

Hi,


Some of you remember me supporting free software out there. But finally I got to the fact that proprietary software is better for all people.

Economics

Free software programmers are paid much less than proprietary software programmers. Therefore, when we use free software, both programmers writing free software and programmers writing proprietary software will eventually starve; in the former case because they don't have adequate salaries; in the latter case because they lose their jobs because of free software.

Features

Free software is generally of worse quality than proprietary software. Free software can't handle common file formats correctly. For example many free multimedia players will fatally fail when you try to open a file of well-known format because of some missing codecs. Instead, proprietary software will always handle common formats; at worst they will not be able to handle formats used by less than 1% of people.

Also, every normal person uses .doc or .docx files for text documents. LibreOffice/OpenOffice can't handle them 100% correctly. On the other side, .odt files are used by obsessive people only, thus Microsoft Word is justified for not wanting to support them.

Compatibility

Free software is not always compatible with other free software, even from the same project. Characteristically, I wanted to build a GCC toolchain with support for my OS. So I grabbed the newest GCC source tarball. In some point, it involved rebuilding the configure script. Not surprisingly, the configure script wouldn't rebuild with Autoconf 2.69, it needed exactly Autoconf 2.64, which is older than the one I had.

Maintenance

Free software is maintained by a small number of programmers of questionable education. This way free software is much more prone to bugs and lack of features. Proprietary software is maintained by properly educated programmers, which always try to make the software better, because otherwise they will lose the income from sales.

Security

Free software as in freedom means that everyone has the right to view, edit and republish the code. Viewing the code allows malicious hackers to find flaws and exploit them. Editing and republishing the code means that these hackers can ask infected users to pay to get their own fixes. These fixes are usually of questionable quality too.

There are also several instances of free software publishers that have advertisements waiting to trick users into clicking them. Additionally, they usually provide installers that will install adware and spyware without the user's consent. I will not get into enumerating these malicious websites, though.

Conclusion

I hope I have opened your eyes, before you read the date.


Regards,
glauxosdever

[Rusky]

wat

[glauxosdever]

Hi,


Have you seen the date?

Maybe it's not the best joke, but I didn't come up with anything better.


Regards,
glauxosdever

[ggodw000]

this is an interesting argument and i agree with many of them. for me free software is as free is free lunch. also there is a saying in the country i have grown up:
the one who does cheap product buys that product seven times.

and in my experience, it is not related to just software, buying a free or cheap stuff often comes with even higher costs when you account for frustration, time lost, and quality and so eventually ended up costing just more.

last of all, i agree, most open source code i downloaded from the internet has rarely compile on the first try, so i usually give up because it is not clear how long will it take to make it compiling.

now it is not to say closed-source is free of trouble, i think it largely depends on how dedicated the developer for the source to produce high-quality software.

in the past, linux has garnered lot of hope but it fell out of favor because it is unintuitives and for me, way too many distro each having its own set of commands/configurations options. i especially hate how many distros have different package management and networking configuration options. Even the major release wipes out set of available commands and completely changes and they call it "innovation" or "better". Windows is better in that aspect for providing backward compatibility for many commands that has still been used decades ago, but it also got its set of problems too.

and i am too lazy and re-iterate what has been said here so just put the link:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/understand ... ake-money/

[Kevin]

I hope I have opened your eyes, before you read the date.

31 Mar 2016 23:46. You were a few minutes too early even for Central Europe.

[glauxosdever]

Hi,

I hope I have opened your eyes, before you read the date.

31 Mar 2016 23:46. You were a few minutes too early even for Central Europe.

This was to be expected. I couldn't post it later; I needed to sleep, and morning there was school. I found only a little of time in a break to post a quick reply (see above).

Nonetheless I live in Greece, so it was April 1st already.


Regards,
glauxosdever

[b.zaar]

I hope I have opened your eyes, before you read the date.

31 Mar 2016 23:46. You were a few minutes too early even for Central Europe. ;)

Made it in time for Oz.

I almost bit too... How would I work without free software, frameworks and libraries?

[onlyonemac]

Economics

Free software programmers are paid much less than proprietary software programmers. Therefore, when we use free software, both programmers writing free software and programmers writing proprietary software will eventually starve; in the former case because they don't have adequate salaries; in the latter case because they lose their jobs because of free software.

That is only an issue for as long as proprietary software remains dominant. As soon as free software becomes more popular, programmers for it will be in greater demand and will likely get paid more.

Features

Free software is generally of worse quality than proprietary software. Free software can't handle common file formats correctly. For example many free multimedia players will fatally fail when you try to open a file of well-known format because of some missing codecs. Instead, proprietary software will always handle common formats; at worst they will not be able to handle formats used by less than 1% of people.

Also, every normal person uses .doc or .docx files for text documents. LibreOffice/OpenOffice can't handle them 100% correctly. On the other side, .odt files are used by obsessive people only, thus Microsoft Word is justified for not wanting to support them.

Again this is a matter of market dominance. The only reason why free software fails with some common file formats is because there is little or no openly-available documentation for those file formats and any support relies on, at least partially, reverse-engineering them. When open formats are used, free software often does a much better job than a lot of proprietary software. (In my experience, free software has also been able to recover corrupted proprietary-format files that the original program refuses to open and apart from Microsoft Office documents I haven't had any issues with file compatibility.)

Compatibility

Free software is not always compatible with other free software, even from the same project. Characteristically, I wanted to build a GCC toolchain with support for my OS. So I grabbed the newest GCC source tarball. In some point, it involved rebuilding the configure script. Not surprisingly, the configure script wouldn't rebuild with Autoconf 2.69, it needed exactly Autoconf 2.64, which is older than the one I had.

Free software can be a fast-moving industry at times and it's hard for all of the developers to keep up with the many incompatible changes between releases of other projects. Usually in a project's documentation it is specified exactly which versions of other software are required (in the case of a specific version requirement like what you described). Most Linux package managers also make it easy to specify exactly which version of a package is required, sometimes even allowing the installation of multiple versions alongside each other.

Maintenance

Free software is maintained by a small number of programmers of questionable education. This way free software is much more prone to bugs and lack of features. Proprietary software is maintained by properly educated programmers, which always try to make the software better, because otherwise they will lose the income from sales.

In reality, a lot of good/big free software projects are maintained by large groups of programmers who are highly-qualified to do what they're doing. I'll admit that for every big successful project there are plenty of small projects managed by a few guys who dropped out of college, but these are of questionable quality (at best) and tend to fall by the wayside - I usually just ignore those and focus on the good stuff. Proprietary developers, on the other hand, are often driven by their employers not to write the best code but to write the most code, to add the most features to brag about in the promotion for the next release of a product, and to bring the company (and themselves) the most money - this doesn't lead to secure and bug-free code but to programmers cutting corners in these areas so that they can meet the company's targets for the number of liens of code added to a product.

Security

Free software as in freedom means that everyone has the right to view, edit and republish the code. Viewing the code allows malicious hackers to find flaws and exploit them. Editing and republishing the code means that these hackers can ask infected users to pay to get their own fixes. These fixes are usually of questionable quality too.

There are also several instances of free software publishers that have advertisements waiting to trick users into clicking them. Additionally, they usually provide installers that will install adware and spyware without the user's consent. I will not get into enumerating these malicious websites, though.

While having access to the source code allows hackers to more easily find flaws, this also gives developers a much greater incentive to improve the security of their code. Furthermore, open source code is subject to a lot of feedback from users, developers, and penetration testers ("ethical/white-hat hackers" often working on a voluntary basis) which finds far more security issues than whatever in-house checks a proprietary software company does. I have never heard of an instance in the wild of hackers infecting users and then charging them to get patched code, but if this did happen it would be illegal not only for the hackers to infect users but also for them to be selling edited code as most open source licences prohibit sale of code derived from an open source project. The only sites where users are tricked into clicking on adverts are SourceForge and Softtonic, and both (especially the former that focusses exclusively on open source products) have faced considerable controversy for it.

Conclusion

I hope I have opened your eyes, before you read the date.

Actually no, I am disappointed that a former supporter of open source software has fallen for the FUD that commercial software companies are so desperately trying to ingrain into consumer's minds, in an age where so many people are starting to see through these marketing tactics. To fall for the classic myths of "developed by garage programmers", "full of security holes", and "incompatibility with other software" (all paraphrased quotes from an open source software myth-debunking article that I read a few years ago) after supporting free and open source software for so long is... appalling. I strongly discourage you from posting this publicly, but I would appreciate it if you could email me the link to whatever article it was that changed your mind because frankly I can't see how it's possible for you to make such a swing in viewpoint so suddenly.

[iansjack]

15 days too late.

[~]

Of course it isn't bad.

Everyone uses a minimum of software freedom, for example to expose important APIs, file formats, standards and programming languages.

The most important detail here is that all that we need to make things better is more documentation, something even your mother or your grandmother could understand easily. With this I mean even to the point where videos are produced about screenshots of the exact environments, tools and replicable procedures, from start to end, to compile and install an open source program or library. Videos and text that you can follow step by step without failing because they have been tested to be more useable and stable than they currently are (where only the main developers really know what to do if several things fail confusely).

Internally, propietary companies behave just like open source communities. They don't hold any explanation or collaboration back. But since open source projets are in the wild, it's here in the open that we need much more collaboration.

[Rusky]

15 d---

[Schol-R-LEA]

Give it up, Rusky. If you've ever read anything on Literally Unbelievable or the 'Inboxer Rebellion' section on Snopes you'd realize that these things have a way of taking a life of their own.

[onlyonemac]

15 days too late.

???

[BASICFreak]

15 days too late.

???

April 1, 2016...

(Actually a few hours early here, but it's an April Fools Joke)

Does you screen reader not get the date/time of post?

[onlyonemac]

15 days too late.

???

April 1, 2016...

(Actually a few hours early here, but it's an April Fools Joke)

Oh

Does you screen reader not get the date/time of post?

It does, but only if I explicitly ask for it, which I don't usually because it usually doesn't matter that much.