The same old anti-oss story
November 19th, 2003 by HenAn editorial at osnews.com: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5180 suggests that open source documentation is in a terrible state and highly inferior to commercial documentation.
This is complete nonsense.
SuSE vs OS X vs Windows XP. The only one to provide any documentation worth a damn was SuSE. I recently installed OpenBSD based on a No Starch Press book, it was great. If I look for a Windows XP book, they seem to nearly all be ‘Blah blah for dummies’ books.
The same argument is given for support, and yet I’m still looking forward to the day commercial support gives me a feel-good moment. I always spend the time wondering why we’re paying someone to give us newsgroup like service.
Best language books? The O’Reilly Perl series.
How many commercial products have mail list archives I can look at? Some of the more open ones do, but the classic corporate ones are nice and hidden. The more private the support, the worst the archive.
Blogs are another good advantage for open source. Commercial products have nice ‘do-not-blog’ management that doesn’t allow people involved in a product to discuss it outside of marketing. Open source products are truthful.
Lastly there’s the classic open source support advantage. You talk to the developers, and not a tiered first to fourth support system, or some third party company [ie Dell] who are not the company who created the product you are using [Windows XP].
This applies to documentation too. Developers are a lot closer to the documentation and they’re not based vaguely on the requirements which might not be fully realised in the product.
November 21st, 2003 at 8:39 am
I agree that the “poor docs, poor support” rap against OSS is comletely bogus. I have referred more people to the tomcat docs, for example, for understanding how classloading, jndi resources, servlet contexts, etc. work (in any J2EE web container) than any other place (including docs for commercial containers). Of course, just like the commercial docs, some OSS docs are *much* better than others.
The really big deal, however, is support. I have often thought about doing an empirical study comparing “mean time to problem resolution” for open source vs. commercial products. For an active, large-community product like, e.g., struts or tomcat, questions are often fully and correctly answered in minutes when posted to the user list. For commercial products, days or weeks are not uncommon.
Has anyone every done this kind of research?