Hi all

The following is the excerpts from an article in linux for you magazine (published in india) , written by vaibhav kaushal

closed s/w is also good , unless we are really able to prove that open source is more powerful , which i think we are not doing .There are things made in the closed rooms that are better than their open source counterparts


ex:-

1) MS office 2007 introduces the fabolous user interface , while open office.org 3 looks quite plain. Forget the interface , Open office has yet to implement something as basic as grammar check in word processing.

2) Why isn't there any good framework for gaming / gaming development ?


3) GIMP can't compete with photoshop , it has a cluttered interfaces and no one fixes that

4) I have 3D support for windows vista in VMWare workstation , yet virtual Box is still not up to it ?

Now if you say that VMWare should open up their 3D support to the world I have 2 Questions


1) Why should they ? They developed it with a lot of hard work and they want a profit, and to be fair to those who worked hard for it, well they deserve the profit


2) Why cant we developsomething on our own ? Why do we need to ask them to open their source code ?




All I want to say is : yes it's great to be proud of the openness we have. but i think that the pride we take in openness need not be accomplished with undue criticism we make of the Apple and Microsofts of the world. we seem to forget that there is a lot that still needs to be done to raise standards within the open world . our criticism does not help us , while their work does help them.


Lets create something new and refine the way we think about openness. it is us the open source community that is lagging behind; and it's because of our mistakes. we are deluding ourselves if we think that we are doing great because there is a whole lot that still needs to be done and no one is doing it

I used Windows 7 before, and apps like Paint and WordPad had the ribbon interface. It was totally horrible and unusable.

What do you mean? Just go read about SDL, OpenGL, etc. and go write a game.

I really like GIMP, and I can't say I think the interface is cluttered. I hated it the first few times because I treated it like a traditional drawing program, but when I understood the whole "Image Manipulation" thing after reading a lot of documentation I really began to like it.

In fact, the way I began to like GIMP once I understood it, but hated it before, is what led me to try Linux again, but try to understand it this time, and I finally understood it (instead of naïvely applying my old Windows ways) and made the switch, and really liked it!

I trust open software to be secure and hassle free. Can you say that with Microsoft, Adobe or any number of DRM encumbered games?

The "Open Source Community" is not competing with anybody. We are not "lagging behind", we are just doing what we do. Some OpenSource SW is now better than the proprietary equivalents, some not. In many cases, we offer choices where none existed.

Nonsense!!---Tell that to the people who keep updating KDE, Gnome, GIMP, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. etc. etc. (And of course the kernel.....)

Linux is now a fundamentally better OS than many of the alternatives---OpenSource or otherwise.

So what are you doing?

For the purposes of clarity, it would helpful to make it clear what is the original article and what are your comments. Conventionally, you could use quotation marks ( "...."), but quote tags are clearer.

Well, undue criticism is, ab definitio, undue and therefore, must, in some sense be more than necessary. But this verbal sleight of hand hides that undue criticism can be accompanied by appropriate and due criticism, and that may be unfortunate if we accept that people draw that line in different places, which they do.

An interesting rallying call to action, if rather short on specifics, or what we should do about, say, flash. Or codecs. Or drivers for proprietary video hardware.

Its a whole lot easier to get people to agree that it would be better if it were to be something else than it is currently, than to agree that exactly this is what needs to be done, or the direction that needs to be followed. And, of course, as UnSpawn has commented, how much of your effort you are volunteering to commit to cure the problem. Or even, whether, as is the case with on Linus Torvalds (or Richard Stallman), you are suggesting that you are the kind of leader figure that the community needs to come behind in order to achieve great things.

1) You misspelled fabulous, and it's not the word to use. The right word is "horrible" or "horrendous".

Grammar check does not work properly even in M$ apps. And to be honest, if you need grammar check, I'd think you'd be better off learning proper English, that way you won't need M$ to try and fail to do it for you. In school, out teacher forbade us from using grammar check, not because it was cheating, but it sucked so bad. They were right.

2) There's SDL, probably the best such framework even made. If you need more, you can also use just OpenGL directly.

3) I like GIMP, works great, it does everything I need and for me is just as good if not better (because it is free and runs on Linux) than PS. For designing logos and clipart, etc you should use inkscape which is infinitely better than GIMP at such things.

4) Screw M$ and Window$, I would never even want to virtualize such vile garbage. 3D accel works fine with Linux host and guest.