I originally sent this to a specific company, but I think it applies more broadly, so here’s a generic version:
Last week, I purchased a new laptop from your company. I plan to use Linux on this system. Although Ubuntu installs and runs successfully, there are several issues with the display, sound system, and other features (I haven’t even got to the web cam yet). These issues limit my ability to enjoy the new system.
As a highly technical user, I am confident that I will overcome these issues. However I should not have to. There is a lot of support for your older hardware in the community, but not for newer systems. This implies that as a company, you offer little to no support to the community and they have to figure things out by trial and error. (more…)
Several years ago Corel’s then-CEO Michael Cowpland made quite a stir with his offhand attitude to software piracy. Paraphrasing, the slant of what he said was that he’d rather have people use unauthorized copies of his product than those of a competitor. [I have been unable to find a reference for this.] (more…)
IBM’s open source Eclipse platform is an incredibly powerful development tool. Despite the fact that it’s a bit of a resource hog, the productivity gains I get from it are well worth it. Thanks to its open source license, there are an increasing number of excellent tools that let me work with anything from PHP to PovRay.
IBM does a pretty good job of soliciting input from the development community, and in many cases they respond well. But not today. (more…)
I’ve been running a nifty little package called “phpGroupWare” for a few years now with great success. It’s got just about everything you would want in a groupware package: contact management, shared calendars, document storage and retrieval, e-mail, and much more.
This is a project that experienced an all too common event in open source: a fork. Some years ago, there was an argument on the future direction of the project. As I vaguely recall, it had something to do with licensing. I wasn’t around for the fireworks, but this tends to be a deeply philosophical issue and one of the most common reasons for OSS forks. (more…)
A year or so ago, I needed a tool to generate thumbnails of Web pages. I found a lot of inadequate tools and a server based solution with limited flexibility (thumbshots.org). So I decided to throw together Thumb-Page to do the job, and then I decided to release it as open source.
Since then, it’s been a surprisingly popular application. I figured maybe a few hundred people would be interested in it… instead it’s clocking in at about 400 per month. Now compared to a “hot” shareware application that can pull in 400,000 downloads per month, that’s not so hot, but it’s still pretty good. (more…)
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