It's harder to prevent people from redistributing open source, to collect the money from something they can copy to others without paying.
Plenty of open source is $free, but there's plenty of paid products that include the source code. Because open-source software is free speech, notfree beer. That point is worthless, or some negative value. Those are bad for everyone but the maker of the software. Proprietary data formats, however, are a completely different story. And they like having a company to call for support. Most of them would never be able to do anything with the source code, nor would they have the money to pay someone who could. They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary softwareīecause to most people, especially home users, it doesn't matter. If you're the type of person who doesn't know why they should or shouldn't be using Visual Studio, you don't need the versions that cost money. Why pirate it? It's free unless you want the high end editions.
And of course it's a much bigger issue on Windows, where you can't change the UI.ĭon't blame the user for not understanding when you throw something at them that works totally differently than every other program they've ever seen.Īnd they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course. Most GIMP defenders write it off and say "use a better window manager", but the reality is it just doesn't play well with the normal usage patterns most window managers are coded for. Many also end up trying to use at least one open source app at some point, but it in some way fails (eg GIMP has a weird window layout that is a little bit hard to get used to, and on Windows there's no built-in "force windows to stay on top" function). They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary software, and some even choose to use Vista just because it is the "latest". And they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course. I am in university, and the attitude from many first-year CS students I have spoken with is that "Linux sucks", even if they have only used PuTTY on their Winblows boxes to program their small C apps to the server with GCC. I think this is one of the more overlooked problems in trying to gain widespread adoption of open source alternatives, even if it is on Winblows. They get rid of it, go back to the commercial software (pirated), and decide to never use free and open source software again. The Windows-world is full of users who would just pirate any commercial software they need (no matter what purpose).
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