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Re: complainers
by Radiantmatrix on Friday 28/Oct/2005, @09:39
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Excellent points, it's about time someone said it. I've been getting *really* annoyed by all the people who think ports of popular Free software are somehow hurting the use of Free OSes. The logic I've heard goes like this:
* User can get all the Free tools they want on Windows
* User figures "I have no compelling reason to switch to $FREE_OS"
It's crap. I think it goes more like this:
* User thinks $FREE_OS isn't worth it
* User finds lots of Free tools that work very well on Windows, but are ports of tools created on $FREE_OS
* User starts to think $FREE_OS might be very good, since they had all these tools a lot sooner.
I've seen that first-hand. My father-in-law is a Windows user. Frustrated with IE, he tried Firefox and loved it. As he's an astronomy buff, I pointed him at Celestia, which he enjoys immensely. Audacity helped him with his LP -> CD project. OpenOffice saved him $400 when he needed to generate documents at home for consumtion at work.
Suddenly, he realized that *every computing need he has* is being filled by OpenSource software. Why, then, was he paying for Windows? He's now in the process of converting entirely to Linux. I doubt he would have made the effort to change everything about his work habits at once: and doing things like porting KDE to Windows gives people the chance to "fall back" easily when the learning curve slows their work.
Kudos on this project, and never let anyone tell you this is harming the Free OS community: those people are clueless about how people make decisions. |
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