When in conversations with people championing freedom causes using Google Blogger or Six Apart TypePad, I share that myself and many people find it upsetting that they do so using proprietary software.
The inconvenience and their frustrations with software usually leaves them too afraid to even consider switching to another publishing platform.
It is ok that it isn’t their issue. We all have a limited amount of energy, and relative to other causes open source isn’t urgent.
It is our opportunity, those that are passionate about open source, to provide a solution that is superior. We need to allow those people to see benefits that overwhelm their fears and helps them champion their own causes.
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To be fair, there are benefits of Blogger that can’t be found on wp.com blogs (the ability to manipulate the template freely is the one I hear the most). Sometimes the open source alternative just doesn’t meet the criteria the user is looking for. It should be the goal, therefore, to (at the very least) meet that criteria.
Like picking a presidential candidate. Some folks feel that the stance on the Iraq war is of utmost importance, while others couldn’t care less about that policy but will choose a candidate based on economic policies.
Alternatively, some people just get so used to doing things one way that they cannot switch over. I am great at using Word and Excel, and I can pump out documents and spreadsheets to meet project needs in short amounts of time. However, switch me over to OpenOffice and that productivity is lost because of the (sometimes not-so-)subtle changes in how things work. Therefore, I stick with MS Office so I can get stuff done.
Proprietary software, I think, is not the enemy. I am willing to pay for services and programs that help me get stuff done and get stuff done effectively. I, along with many other people, do not care how the code is written and distributed as long as the end product is actually worth the cost and effort of learning how to use the program. However, when there is an open source alternative that can deliver increased productivity/features/user experience I switch over to that. It’s why I use Wordpress along with a suite of other open source software. It’s why I have not switched to Office 2007. It’s why the company where I will be working at this summer uses the construction management software that they do. It just works better than the alternatives.
It’s a very easy trap to fall in to to say that “Because it is open source it is the better choice for suchandsuch type of program.” That should be the case, but in many instances it is not.
I agree with you on the fact that people need to see the benefits of an open source alternative, but those benefits have to outweigh those of the proprietary choice before any change can be considered.
It should be the goal of any product to exceed the criteria! Exceed the expectations. More than it be the goal, it should be the experience delivered.
The benefit you identify for Blogger is spot on. The other is the ability to include ads. So WordPress.com or another open source based service needs to meet these needs or they provide no solution at all. Though sometimes when you continue a conversation with people that identify these issues, you find that open source solutions meet and exceed the needs when you look at all of the issues those people care able.
Your story of MS Office and OpenOffice is a very real one in my own life. Thankfully, I don’t have to spend much time in either document word processing or spread sheets, but my wife Julia does. She works for the BC Provincial Government, the largest employer in Victoria, and they are a Microsoft shop for productivity tools. Fairly so, as Microsoft’s productivities tools in this setting is the best. At home, I have installed Open Office for her. She is regularly frustrated with the Open Office experience. I ask her if she can find the time to work with me to document the problems, but that I’m also OK if she purchases the Microsoft products. I won’t purchase it, but it is OK if she does, and I won’t take a copyright-infringing copy, though they are regularly offered to us.
Though the specific context of my article is “people championing freedom”. And to people that care about freedom, proprietary software is an enemy.
Daniel, I know that you have some skill and experience working on cars, but to most people the freedom to work on a car doesn’t matter to them, but a sealed car would probably be unacceptable to you?
I whole heartedly believe that sealed systems are holding back are growth in its role as fundamental part of our self-centered, greed based society.
You are correct that open source is an opportunity, not a business plan (sic business model), not a solution in itself. The opportunity is curiosity, exploration, and innovation, and in a global community this can far exceed any proprietary model.
Sure, you have to be more creative how you pay your bills and make your fortunes today, but it is your only opportunity to consistently better peoples lives and have a lasting legacy.
The fantastic development is that curiosity and exploration will triumph in our life time — if we don’t destroy the planet in the interim — because of us increasingly using technology to connect with people from all the world.
The greatest stumbling point is education, not education of what open source or free culture is, but basic education. Most of the world doesn’t have access to the education to be curious, understand the systems they are curious about, and benefit from their curiosity.
Ironically, Bill Gates, who more than any other single person in personal computing missed the opportunity to take us in this one area beyond our petty selves, today is leading in giving the world’s children the education they so desperately need.
I’d argue that in the context of hosted applications, open source doesn’t matter, terms of service do.
I can’t imagine anyone championing freedom under wordpress.com’s terms of service. Tumblr is the clearest and most open in that regard. Free speech trumps “free software” (wordpress.com is built from an open source project, but being hosted, isn’t truly open)
While I have been using open source software for quite awhile now, I have never really taken advantage of the opportunity to dig into the code. I always felt like I didn’t know enough to start and, frankly, didn’t know where to start a lot of times.
However, it looks like I will have finally have to go after that opportunity. I have a buddy in my university’s software engineering class, in which the prof has the groups do some work on an open source project. I will be taking this class next fall probably so I am looking forward to it.
adam, those are great points. Although, in the context of hosted applications open source still matters to me, terms of service are at least as important. What specifically about the WordPress.com limits or interferes with someone’s ability to pursue their causes? (I searched on http://archgfx.net/, but didn’t find a related article)
What is the greatest difference about Tumblr’s in this area?
On Tumblr, as far as I was last told, other than using the Feed, there was no way to export.
Jon, although creation (implementation) is the most important product of open source. It isn’t successful without all of the supporting contributions and articles. And in those areas from my personal experiences you have already contributed greatly!
A prof that gets students to work on open source sounds like both a very good course and a very hard course. I greatly look forward to hearing of your experience with it.
I try to leave that sort of thing to wank, but I can’t imagine that you missed this post, or thought it wasn’t relavent.
wordpress.com can’t champion and free speech and simultaneously have a means of hiding blogs they don’t agree with (or mature blogs).
Tumblr includes both a content policy _and_ a terms of use. You’ll notice that their content policy is as clear as they can make it, where wordpress.com uses vague terms like “unethical or unwanted commercial content”, and outrightly states that they will remove (or at least hide) content at their own discretion.
adam, sorry, some time ago I stopped reading Wank. That blog is too toxic of an environment for me to wade through even for the often nuggets of insight.
I also look forward to more concise WordPress Terms of Service. I will have to find time to read Tumblr’s Content Policy and ToS.
I had read your post Desaparecidos: Wordpress.com Sucks, and some of comments, but I found the defamation of the discussion tasteful. I wasn’t directly involved in those events, though I trust Matt and Mark’s accounts in that situation.
Those situations can only be messy. I do agree that it was best for “timethief” and WordPress.com’s other customers that she no longer participate in supporting on the forums.
I know you are a strong proponent of erotica blogs having the same experience as other blogs, but I disagree with you calling these “hidden from public view”. They aren’t included in the community glocal categories and tags features, but can be accessed through any search engines or linked to from any other sites. Creating an experience to serve both our larger communities of customers and “mature content” authors is a challenging and expensive challenge, that we haven’t yet undertaken.
I don’t see how this interfers with them championing their freedom causes, though in the case of mature content another service might give them a promotion platform.
do you think it is acceptable usability for a blog to have links that are marked as categories (and tags) leading to pages that expressly do not contain their own posts? what possible use could there be for such links?
i say hidden from view, because tag pages like “blogs in our monkeysphere” are dead ends, and there’s no reason for them to be. it’s a broken service.
i’m not asking for erotic blogs to have an identical experience. i’m asking for them to have one that’s at least reasonable for what a person would expect a blog to provide. i left blogspot for 2 reasons: their terms of service, and their lack of categories. wordpress.com is worse in both regards.
it’s not just erotic/mature blogs. whether or not timethief should participate in the forums is irrelevant to whether her blog should function as expected.
i did my best to keep the discussion (while it was active) on that post out of the range of defamation (much to some commenter’s dismay).
Regarding “leading to pages that expressly do not contain their own posts”, is a good point, and also relates to a person being able to identify that their blog has been marked mature. I will look into it, and find out if it is reasonable to have the categories/tags links stay local, and by able to see that you are on a mature blog, but based on intense previous discussions, some members of the team aren’t interested in solving challenges related to mature blogging at this time.
I also agree that timethief blog should have functioned as expected, but as she deleted her blog, there isn’t opportunity for me to investigate or good opportunity to understand the issues further.
@ Daniel Lackey - Very true about your issue with Open Office. It’s just not ready for the big time. But I’d go a step further and look at the impact of this refusal to sacrifice effectiveness for opensource. What happens over time is that we’re stuck with a product like MS Office, and there’s no chance for alternate products like OpenOffice to evolve and rectify their earlier mistakes. This is now happening to Firefox. IE 7 has just about killed all other browsers.
In an ideal world, all products, good and bad, would be opensource, allowing us to choose the most effective one. That’s what we should be looking at, even if it means temporarily sacrificing a little productivity until you get used to products like Open Office.
I really believe that soon OpenOffice will become at least equal to MS Office in terms of popularity. The only thing that keeps Microsoft’s product alive is that people are creatures of habit. However people are not that blind about what is happening around them.
About the sacrifice of a little productivity I disagree because time is precious and if that time costs you way more than the prise of the MS Office suite, then you have to let go of the ideal world that you want so badly. Another thing is that using OpenOffice can mean that you can’t spare the money to buy MS Office. And if you are a businessman, you cannot afford your clients to get that impression.
@Ling
I would love to be able to use Open Office full time. I would love to not have to let my sister use my Office install every time her computer gets screwed up (thanks to Geek Squad for that fiasco…). But right now you are right; OO is just not fully up to speed. It is SOOOO close too.
But I do not see how dominance of one software suite prevents the open source alternatives from becoming the more popular option. Look at Firefox. It is gaining market share pretty well, and not just amongst the “geek” class of computer users. It is the better alternative and just so happens to be open source.
So maybe it is a matter of project focus evolution. If you are intent on making a set of software to rival Office, the priorities should obviously be to be better than Office first, be open source second. If you can achieve goal number one, then surely you can achieve goal number two.
“However people are not that blind about what is happening around them.” I think that is the biggest assumption that open source advocates have that just simply isn’t true. Ask a random person on the street if they know about Open Office, or what the GPL is, or what open source is. Most folks don’t know or don’t care. Raising that knowledge out of ingorance and apathy needs to be a priority first and foremost.
Open source was the greatest discovery I’ve had in the latest years. I’ve started blogging on Blogger, but I got my own domain after about two weeks, when I realized that other people can do with their sites some things which were not accessible to me. And both domains and hosting are so cheap these days, that I think most of the people can afford to publish on their own domain, because the biggest expense, which would have been the software, is now free, thanks to open source.
Also due to open source, Firefox is now 10 years ahead competitors.
I recently started using open source software and saw that it has much better quality then I thought about it before and sometimes it’s even better then paid one’s
I found the first comment really interesting. Many users frame their experience and choice in terms of an *alternative* to MS. But in that mind set they are almost bound to be disappointed. OO may not be quite there. But so what? The reasons for using open source to those of us who use it are compelling. And we are not on any kind of crusade. We use it because it is better than all the alternatives. We are geeks. We know about this stuff. That is why we use it. IMHO the only thing keeping M$ afloat is the entrenched coroporate mindset / inertia / skill sets of staff including admins. By any rational criteria M$ would have sunk long ago. And there days are probably now numbered I would think. The only combo / platform that makes sense to me is linux terminals and Google docs.
I work within IT and I have to admit that open source has enabled me to carry out my job more professionally, with less expense, and more efficiently.
I use thunderbird for my emailing, filezilla for ftp, gimp for image manipulation, firefox for browsing and linux on my servers. - All open source, and all the best solutions to meet my requirements.
Although I love Microsoft Discussions - which normally solve any problem I have with Microsoft products, I find that the open source world is more friendly and more willing to help others when there is an issue.
I’ve also got open office installed and use it whenever I can (I rarely word process) however I’ve got to admit, if I want to do a mail merge or need to work on a database for a client, I do tend to use Excel and Access - Why? - I have no idea, maybe because it’s what I been brought up with, and know like the back of my hand. - or maybe I’m just scared of change. Either way, I really do believe that open source is the way forward, and although I don’t normally like Dell products, I have to congratulate them on being one of the first IT providers to offer Linux as a preinstall on many of it’s laptops.