[plug] GIMP/Pshop

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 23:20, Chris Caston wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 22:56, Denis Brown wrote:
> >   I find "Open Source" a much better
> > phrase than "free" since (my people at least) have the mindset that if
> > it's free, it cannot be worth anything.
> > 
> 
> Yes I had a customer that somehow managed to botch his Office XP install
> so that it would ask him for his product key (and reject it) every time
> he tried to start word.

Word? Go insane? Never...

One of my users recently typed in some French passages. The app cleverly
went "that's French! Want a French dictionary?" - to which the user
clicked the default ("OK"). All was well ... except that the app didn't
want to use the English spelling check anymore. It actually took a
machine reinstall and the deletion of the user's domain profile to clear
up the issue.

Ick.

> At the time I couldn't resolve nor find details on resolving the issue
> myself so I gave him OO.o writer and told him that it was from a free
> word processing suite that is completely compatible with Microsoft word.

AFAIK it isn't completely compatible, nor has it claimed to be. It
claims to be _mostly_ compatible, sufficiently so that most users will
not care. 

<rant>
( I know, I'm doing a lot of that today - I'm tired and I'm bashing my
head against some really annoying Mac problems. )

IMHO realism about apps right from the start is the best way not to piss
off users. I'm getting really sick and tired of people presenting
${RANDOM_OSS_APP} as utterly perfect or "replaces
${BLAH_COMMERCIAL_APP}", when it is usually less than 100% compatible,
has some known serious issues/limitations, etc.

In particular, seeing people going around telling otherwise uninformed
users that the GIMP will replace Photoshop w/o even knowing what that
user needs drives me _nuts_. Surely "the GIMP may be helpful, and it
will do some or maybe all of what you need" is better. If it's fully up
to the user's needs, the user is surprised and delighted - and if it's
not, they don't feel like this OSS stuff isn't all it's cracked up to
be.

I honestly think a lot of Free/OSS apps are "hyped" too much, and suffer
from it when people try them out and find out that no, it actually
doesn't do what they need, has UI/stability issues, poor documentation,
etc. Realism from the start - on the theory that if you admit issues are
there, you can more usefully work to eliminate them - strikes me as a
better approach.

</rant>

> He got really narky and went through all his word documents trying to
> pick any slight difference in the way his documents came up.

I do the same thing myself ;-) but I'm doing it to find and (soon)
report incompatibilities to help OO.o improve. We get a lot of nasty
word docs here from people who think Word is a DTP app. We also get a
fair few 4000+ page trial transcripts with hundreds of sections, fancy
headers/footers, magic page numbering, etc. The differences are
interesting.

For example, OO.o's handling of sections is much better (and much less
confusing), but I still find it doesn't get the layout right on
documents with lots of absolutely positioned frames and graphics.
Solution: submit the documents causing a problem, plus a JPEG/PDF of the
"correct" render in Word, so it can be improved.

> I used the word 'free' instead of open source because I feel the need to
> hide my zealotry while working with users of proprietary software lest
> there be any conflict of interest.

Heh; I find the opposite, myself. Most users I run into seem to perceive
"Free" in either of two ways: "Oh, you mean  what that RMS crackpot is
always on about" or "umm... is that like those free programs you get on
the Internet that put spyware on your computer?".

Open Source, OTOH, tends to get either "*blink* *blink*" or "Like that
Linux program?" - which is rather easier to handle with a short
explanation.

Craig Ringer