Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day 460
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
What did they expect? Lol! (Score:1, Interesting)
So, lets throw some fairly complex software at some people for a day and see how they do. Surprise! They prefer the stuff they've been using *since they know how to use it*. Just throwing a piece of software at someone doesn't mean they know how to use it. Fuck, if they managed to get that newspaper out at all, then that means the free software was so efficient and easy to use, a bunch of people who've never used it before could get the job done with it.
It seems the whole point of these stupid exercises is just for retards to justify how much they've spent on expensive proprietary crap.
Re:For a day? (Score:1, Interesting)
Your example of gimp is hilarious, as it demonstrates exactly what the newspaper concluded.
It wasn't a scientific test, but most sane people who have used both free and commercial software will agree with what they concluded. There are some FOSS programs that are up to par with (or better than) the best paid alternatives, but they are very very rare.
Re:For a day? (Score:5, Interesting)
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
Certainly some software might lacks polish, but the conclusion that if they didn't adapt in ONE day the software isn't as efficient.. that's really quite flawed uh.
EXACTLY!
My companies IT refused to install Visio on my machine (citing some limited licensing issue) so I installed Inkscape todo some vector drawing.
I very quickly picked it up and can do all sorts with it.
That was over 2 years ago. last month IT installed Visio for me since I had some other peoples drawings to edit and DAMN did it take me forever and a day todo some of the simplest stuff SIMPLY because I didn't know the equivelent or the visio way of doing some things. I know visio can do most of it (except equation drawing, sup perfect sinwave :D) because others in hte office use it daily YET I took some time because it was new to me.
Re:Could be useful as well as interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself, despite him not being a programmer at all, just an advanced hobby photographer. He spent almost a week laying out what, how and why, writing a couple of pages of structured and well-described suggestions.
Re:For a day? (Score:3, Interesting)
That depends on what they were doing.
Obviously one shouldn't expect to learn a different application through-and-through in just a day.
On the other hand.. if e.g. Google Docs did not use a bolded B button to turn text bold, like every other application going with that defacto standard, but instead went with a normally-written T - for Thick - which those in the graphics industry might instead think is to insert a text field, I could well-imagine that the learning curve would be much greater than it had to be.
As such, I'm far more interested in -exactly- what problems they faced, rather than the uninformative single-sentence conclusion, and hope that they plan on communicating these problems back to the developers, if not already done so.
Classified ad paper (Score:4, Interesting)
I set up the computers and provide technical support for a small publishing company that prints two weekly classified ad papers (place your classified ads for free, the paper is sold at gas stations and convenience stores); about 15,000 physical papers are printed weekly. Plus there is an online subscription available for people to purchase
The software is a combination of stuff that I wrote myself (the ad database, the program to create the plates for the press, etc) and Scribus, Gimp, and OpenOffice. LTSP is used to support thin client terminals for the staff that enter the ads into the database. Apache and sendmail for their web/email server.
The whole operation runs on Centos 5.
No worries about Windows viruses and everyting runs on automatic pilot as far as I'm concerned, most of the time.
Re:Learning curve (Score:1, Interesting)
I bet if they switched from their Windows software to a Mac OS software, they'd experience similar results. It's inevitable that when you jump from one style to another style, you'll experience some slowdown in the work.
Office Ribbon, anyone ? Why the hell did Microsoft think that was a good idea, without at least leaving the menus in place for transition.
Re:Could be useful as well as interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
In theory, that information would be very useful to the developers. In practice, it would have no value whatsover. The developers would do one of the following: a) ignore it b) ?? c) treat the suggestions as a personal attack and launch a flamewar. Closed source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
Re:For a day? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to hear some examples -- because again, GIMP is all I know.
It seems to me that any functionality and interoperability missing from GIMP could be addressed with Script-Fu
Re:For a day? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:clearly you have no knowledge of the industry (Score:3, Interesting)
If the rest of the world wants to pay the developers to build that software, I'm certain that many would jump at the chance. The fact is, people get something for free and then they bitch when it doesn't do everything they think it should do, because it's never been something important to the developers.
Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?
Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change (Score:3, Interesting)
Come to think of it, I wonder if this is part of the reason Canonical has dropped GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation.
Re:For a day? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the US, it's comparatively rare to see a car (except the very very cheap or the very exotic) that isn't an automatic transmission.
People who don't know how to drive a manual transmission are, for the most part, smart enough to know that they don' t know how. I don't really think we need a law, thanks.
Personally, I haven't driven a manual transmission since 1997 or so (and it was a customer's car while I worked at an auto repair place.) I could probably still do it but it wouldn't be pretty.
My current car is a VW with DSG, which is a computer controlled "manual" transmission, more or less. (No, it isn't a fluid automatic, it has gears and clutches.) I can tell it when to shift if I want but my 10-mile, 30-minute commute is very tiring if I do so.
Build own open source (Score:3, Interesting)
The license should be GPL so nobody can just take the work and get an advantage over the other. But if then every newspaper pay the developers the costs should be just a small fraction to the costs they need to pay now.
It's like with Linux, where a lot of companies are paying the developers, but the cost per company remains very small, comparing to paying for licenses or build an own operation system.
Re:More evidence GIMP needs a name change (Score:1, Interesting)
F/OSS needs a Photoshop replacement.
GIMP is not (by choice) a Photoshop clone.
It also has a (universally accepted) stoopid fooking name.
My view (as a not entirely unsympathetic F/OSS outsider) - somebody start a new PS Clone, then try and better it. This argument over the crapness (an sheer unusabilty) of the Gimp got old already, long time back, actually. It is stuff like this that drives people like me into the arms of Adobe, and, yes, I have tried "The Gimp" - briefly, thanks, bye.
That most of the Gimp evangelists on here claim never to have seen/used Photoshop, sorry, just who on earth do they consider may comprise the potential market for a halfway presentable Pro Photo Editing/Design Software replacement? Have, in the name of God, any of you considered for even a second the fact that nealy *all* of us Photoshop users who have seen the Gimp, consider it unfit for claimed purpose? Are we *all* really wrong?
Gimp had their chance, it (seemingly almost single-handedly) holds the movement back - if they don't and won't accept us Photoshop users are Photoshop users for many good reasons, and cater for us accordingly, then, fuck em, let someone less blind have their chance. Finally.
Re:I barely use it (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me link to a comment in response to a UI complaint about Photoshop [slashdot.org].
Can we drop the double standard that GIMP has to be magically intuitive?
Re:Could be useful as well as interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
At Scribus we love user suggestions. We don't do b) or c) and only rarely a). Usually we invite the person to discuss it on IRC or post an RFE on bugs.scribus.net. /Andreas