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When Equivalents Aren't

The other week I received an e-mail in response to my piece "Windows 7. vs Linux," from a fellow who'd tried to run Ubuntu 8.10 and ran into rocky territory. The whole thing brought up some tough questions about whether talking about open source "equivalents" to existing programs may be misleading.

The reader, Robert T., ran into several frustrations in a row, each one of which alone might well have been a deal-killer for other people. He does not bill himself as a novice -- he used OS/2 back in the '90s, according to his letter, and in his purview the same mistakes are being made with any Linux designed for the broad swath of users.

One of the major issues he had: the existing programs he has on Windows and depends on regularly (e.g., Quicken) aren't available for Linux. I know for a fact that open source equivalents for a program like Quicken do exist. GnuCash comes to mind -- but GnuCash isn't Quicken, and that's the deal-killer for a lot of people.

These objections, both from Robert and other people, bring up a question: Is it legitimate to reject a FOSS program as a replacement for a commercial/proprietary app, simply on the grounds that it's not the original (even if the vast majority of its key functionality is duplicated)?

This question applies to a gigantic number of programs, not just Quicken and GnuCash. GIMP vs. Photoshop, or Office vs. OpenOffice, are two of the most common culprits. I know a fair number of people who have ditched Office for OpenOffice without blinking -- but just as many who stuck with the original because a) they didn't have to retrain themselves to do anything and b) it was the original. And I didn't blame them: in many cases, they couldn't afford to waste the time, or lose functionality that might have seemed trivial to other people.

Here's the way I see it. If someone says no to FOSS because it's not the original, that's not a failure on their part. It's also not a failure on the part of the FOSS application. It doesn't mean the program is no good -- it just means it's not going to make that particular user happy. It also doesn't mean that person's snub should be ignored: there may well be something valuable to be learned from that negative feedback.

I've said before that Linux and FOSS do not need to overthrow or dethrone Windows and commercial software to be successful. That hasn't changed. But it's also become clear, now that Linux and FOSS are no longer server-closet-only items, that they do need to take cues from what Windows, etc., do right. The point is not to ape them move-for-move or, again, steal their thunder, but learn how they do things right (when they do do things right) and follow that example. If everyone else makes cars with four wheels, you don't make one with five wheels "just to be different," or to provide "choices" that amount to nothing.

This means being willing to admit that what seems like the most logical approach to build a particular program -- from the POV of a programmer -- may be the wholly wrong one. This means putting the regular user first without condescending to him or making experts feel like they're getting short shrift. This means making things discoverable. (Why, for instance, is the "Check for updates" function in Ubuntu's install of Firefox grayed out? Why not enable it and instead just have it redirect the user to the Update Manager, or something along those lines?)

The point, again, is not to become the new boss (which would just be the same as the old boss). The point is to not act as if FOSS is developed in a context that does not also include commercial software, whether anyone thinks of it as competition or not. The danger here isn't limited market share, but something even worse: compulsive irrelevance.

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