Well, I tend to agree with most of waht was said. I have used pretty much everything from an old ATARI (TOS), Mac OS, OSX, PC with DOS, Sun, PC with most or all versions of Windows, Suze, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat and a couple of others. All as a non-IT trained user, so, believe me, I have been in all sorts of pains. I have used proprietary and open source software on these platforms and free as well as paying soft. There is no rule. Some proprietary software is decent and well designed from a graphical point of view, user friendly and so on. Some of it is horrible in all aspects (and even the most expensive). The exact same is true of open source, be it gratis or not. I loved Ubuntu. I use Open Office. But for instance, I think the guys who made the Impress module of it (the equivalent of MS Power Point) should be hanged. It is simply poor work and reflect badly on an otherwise very decent (if a bit heavy) product.

Luke, you have no idea how difficult capturing images can be with a proprietary system. We have altiris deployment where i work and it is a pain in the ass. Thing is, we have had it for years, we have sunk a lot of money into it and moving to an open source solution is seen as a net loss by management.
This is because if we sunk 60K for five years into it, then for some reason it’s “worth” 300K and if we move to something that is free, then we are not using a “300k asset”. The idea that if we stop spending money on a product, there is this perception that is is somehow a loss, due to what has been spent in the past.
I suppose that if we made up a line item for clonezilla that was less than the license renewal and support contracts for our current product, it would be seen as savings.
There is even resistance to giving people open office on their work computers. A teacher has asked for open office to be installed on her computer and there is this idea that now she is wasting money, since the district pays for office and she is not using it. Her husband works for Sun and she doesn’t have office at home and likes using open office better than MS office.
There are a lot of attitudes in management that need to change. I would say most IT staff and the users just want to get the job done.
Management has to defend their budget against cuts and it seems like they like to throw around numbers to use in pissing matches against other departments. “We have 1800 computers and we have a operating budget of 1.8 millions dollars a year, we can’t cut x from that!”

I can relate to this. From what I’ve seen of open source software (and I’ve seen quite a lot), oftentimes what you’ll get is an extremely powerful tool packaged with a rather dated/clunky interface; it’s almost as if it’s a last-minute addition tacked on just to allow access to various functions. Now this isn’t always the case, of course (I really love the KDE4 interface, for example). Perhaps it’s just me being biased towards visual design – I think it plays a big role in application usability.

As for your OpenOffice vs Office 2007 example, I can’t remember how many times my relatives have complained about the ribbon-style in the latter. Indeed, I think I’ve almost convinced my dad to switch (citing near-perfect compatibility with simple documents). To this day, I’m still pretty bad at navigating Word’s interface, but I’m sure Microsoft had a reason for making the design decision. I just wish there was an option to switch (say, on first use of the product).

@ Kevin Benko:
s/hardware/software/g

Concerning the discussions on the costs of retraining people on a new operating system or bit of hardware. While the end users may require some actual training in order to effectively use a new piece of hardware, I think that any “tech” should be able to just figure stuff out and teach themselves to use a new piece of software.

While I may seem a bit harsh with respect to this, a real geek should be able to just figure out the basics of GNU+Linux, for example, without having to attend any formal training. Isn’t it in implied in the definition of a geek to be so damn interested in this stuff so as to just *want* to figure it out from scratch?

At least, that’s my personal frame of reference on such things….

@ Luke Maciak:
not sarcastic. i thought it was very insightful.

@ Jenn:

Are they all booked now? I sort of got lazy and didn’t do anything regarding tickets and/or similar stuff. :P

Travis McCrea wrote:

I think that you went off on a tangent while writing, and decided to go with it, instead of going with your original thought

Shhh… Don’t tell anyone, but that’s pretty much true for every post. Sometimes I change the titles though.

Travis McCrea wrote:

Or in the corpate world… having each of your employees learning to use the new linux interface… may cut down on productivity so you may be actaully taking a loss from switching, even though everything is open source.

See, I think this is not entirely true. Let me give you two examples:

1. Transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007 vs Open Office

I’d argue that transitioning to Open Office is cheaper because it behaves much like Office 2003. So an average user can jump right in and feel more or less at home. Office 2007 on the other hand changes the whole UI completely, so it usually takes power users few weeks to adjust.

2. Elderly Secretary

Let’s say we have an elderly lady who was trained to use Firefox, Thunderbird and Microsoft Word 2003. She doesn’t actually understand the file system – she edits the files by double clicking the email attachment and then mailing it back. If a message pops up, she immediately calls the IT department. Someone has to walk to her desk in the morning and log her into windows because she just can’t figure that out. How hard is it to transplant her to linux? It she likely require no training and probably won’t even notice the change.

So it’s relative.

@ road:

LOL. I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not.

It seems a fair judgement of a good chunk of open source software, I really need to get round to learning LaTex anyone got a good starting place for that?

I think your Cheap/Easy/Powerful analysis is fantastic. I think it’s so astute it should be called “Maciak’s FOSS gambit” or something.

Great post.

Sorry that kinda sounds like I was being a douche.. I also enjoyed THIS post. I was just let down that it wasn’t covering what I was hoping it to cover. :)