Loose ends
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hiohoaus Oct 08, 2006 11:20 PM EDT |
Take The GIMP as an example. I use it regularly, and quite like it — but there are incompletenesses. The artwork sections are kind of dodgy; CMYK barely exists; many of the “themes” aboard (like area (“paint”) gradients) are restricted in range or manage to address only a small cross-section of the available capabilties... and so on. The GIMP is extremely powerful, but the learning curve is kind of chunky, so very few people persist to the point of learning how to do real work with it. The minority who do, produce beauty. I think that’s reflective of so much FOSS. Even OpenOffice Writer is good at editing HTML, but getting it to accept something simple like relative hyperlinks is an uphill march. It’s the little things — yes, really it is — the kinds of things which get brushed past during release time, but which are ever so important to new users, or people coming from “alien” packages (PhotoShop or MS-Word, for the above) & expecting to do well. Having learned how to use The GIMP (not perfectly, but reasonably well), going back to PhotoShop is quite painful. I think that’s a clear illustration that the problem is two-sided; that people have invested so much (financially or emotionally) in closed-source alternatives that they just beat their heads against the problems until they’re (more or less) solved. Much of that commitment is absent for FOSS programs, because they’re free. |
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