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Can Open Source apps compete with commercial ones?

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iphigenie:
Very subjective - thunderbird is one of the last tools I would want to use to handle my email...   :D

tomos:
Very subjective - thunderbird is one of the last tools I would want to use to handle my email...   :D
-iphigenie (October 23, 2007, 08:51 AM)
--- End quote ---

so what do you use ?  :)

f0dder:
TheBat, here... but I've set up ThunderBird for most of the guys at the museum, where it works okay-ish. There's been a few weird things though, like ThunderBird deciding to create a new account for no good reason, and being bothersome to get it to use and re-index the old mailbox stores...

mouser:
Firefox is a great example of the best of the open source community, in my opinion.  It shows how amazing a product you can produce if you have a small core of devoted and consistent coders, who can bring a program along to the point at which it develops a strong market share and presence, enough to bring in tons of part-time coders who can contribute their own self-contained extensions. Of course almost no other open source programs ever get anywhere near the level of activity that Firefox.

And very few projects are able to raise money the way mozilla can in order to support the project.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there is very little if any *meaningful* difference to me as a user based on whether a program is open source or not.  Far more important to me is how active the developers are.  And in this, I really don't think that knowing a program is open source helps you much.  A huge majority of open source projects are abandoned.  However, when a project is open source it's often easier to get a feel for how active development is.

All things being equal, the advantages to open source are huge in my mind.  But on the other hand -- if my primary concern is active developers, I worry about open source coders not being able to devote the time they might want to on a project because of financial issues, or else not working on the unfun parts of a project because of lack of motivation.

Can open source applications compete? Absolutely.  But for me I have found that when choosing a program for a task, I do not put much weight on whether it's open source or not -- i think other issues are more important.

f0dder:
Wise words, mouser.

The only time I really value open-source (for it's openness, instead of valuing the application) is times where I'm not too fond of, say, storing data in a proprietary format. While that might not apply to word + friends because Microsoft is so huge, it does matter for smaller companies. So I choose subversion for source control (I believe this can compete with closed-source version systems), winrar for archives (while not strictly open-source, there's specs + code for archive decompression).

This also matters for in-house or custom solutions - where I don't particularly care for traditional open-source licenses in the fascist-nazi-zealot way, I do appreciate having source available, and I do think that everybody designing custom solutions ought to provide source for the client.

But this is getting slightly off-topic :)

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