I run Ubuntu Linux on my machine at work. If I need to create a spreadsheet or word document, I either need to use OpenOffice.org or remote desktop into a Windows machine. Both options are not appealing.
In many cases, open source projects are better than their commercial equivalent. But not always. There are examples in which the result is pointless. OpenOffice.org is the perfect example. Other than being free, it is a useless piece of software. It does absolutely nothing better than Microsoft Office. The advantage is it can run on many platforms and it doesn’t cost any money. But the UI is just as convoluted and inane as Microsoft Office. I swear it practically duplicates Office bugs. No attempt is made to make a better software package. The preference system is more difficult. Document editing is very similar to Word but not quite the same. Chart data can’t be edited without creating a new chart. Since no attempt has been made to come up with their own approach, being a 90% copy makes it a failure.
Evolution is another example. It may be the only software application that is actually worse than Outlook. It is a cheap copy. The vaunted Evolution Exchange Connector is incredibly unreliable. I’ve given up doing anything other than browsing mail read-only. I get quota errors when I haven’t exceeded a quota. Sent mail disappears never to be delivered. I hang on the inbox scrolling through messages.
Why? Are there that many people out there that demand totally free software over any sense of usability? If the clones actually worked, it might make some sense. However, my experience is that both programs run poorly. I have a standard Ubuntu install. I use the ubuntu tested versions of OO and Evolution. Both apps lock up, crash, and are unresponsive. It doesn’t take long to feel like I’m back in Windows with that kind of behavior.
“Edit the source and fix it” right? Well, that’s fine if we are talking about a few bugs. But OO and Evolution are so fundamentally broken, they should be abandoned and never looked upon again. Look at Firefox and Thunderbird as examples. Both perform functions similar to commercial software, yet have their own way. Firefox has dramatically improved the browsing experience. New UI ideas are direct results of Firefox. Thunderbird isn’t as polished but is very different than Outlook. Both work with standards. Both at least attempt to create a UI that isn’t dictated by Microsoft’s previous applications.
In the commercial software space, look at something like Apple’s iWork. It is document editing and presentations rebuilt from the ground up. Pages feels nothing like Word. Keynote is much more streamlined than PowerPoint. Yet both produce compatible files and solve the same needs. Why can’t software like OpenOffice.org take this kind of approach instead?
There are examples where open source isn’t a clone of something else. Firefox and Eclipse are good examples. Gnome is starting to go that way. But too many projects are nothing more than clones. OO, Evolution, and KDE all feel like rejected Microsoft alphas. Open source has no commercial restrictions, no focus groups, no marketing garbage. It should be about solving problems as efficiently as possible. Open source server software is like that. Linux is like that. I wish more of the desktop applications were like that.
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