At the rate I am going, I expect it will take a couple more years for me to learn enough to figure out how to use this open software stuff, and by that time a lot of it, like OO, will probably be ported to OS X and I won't need to know it. So what is the benefit of open software to me and other rank-and-file computer users, left-wing or not?
==========
I think much more's being made of what might be called the issue of complexity than is accurate although I freely admit my deep familiarity might prevent me from seeing the glitches that drive users to drink.
The late (and in many quarters lamented) Red Hat 9.0 and more recent Red Hat Workstation are very easy to install and use on a standard PC. Similarly, SUSE Linux's installation and use are fairly straightforward too.
Both builds come with a full suite of productivity apps (such as Open Office) that meet most users' needs. Cross-platform compatibilities (i.e. between the Linux and Win32 worlds) of objects such as formatted word processing docs or spreadsheets are rarely a problem at this stage.
In fact, I go back and forth all the time. At home, for client reasons, I maintain a Windows Server 2003 active directory in which my SUSE, Knoppix (another Linux distro) and WinXP machines participate at the shared file and network peripheral level with few problems. Of course, when there are problems the network and software engineering background does come into play but at the basic, day-to-day user level it's not at all needed.
So, no math degrees or time investment at MIT or Berkeley are required to use the most popular open source products.
Much of what I'm reading in this thread regarding difficulty-of-use seem to be descriptions of the sorts of problems users had several years ago.
On the other hand, there's more than one flavor of Open Source on the counter, and all are not equally easy on the digestion...
FreeBSD, the OS that Chuck G. and Ravi have been talking about and the heart of the thread I guess, is, in my opinion, not a tool I'd recommend to my friends who simply want to conduct general biz such as typing letters, checking email and trolling the web for images and/or films of pr0nsters doing pr0nster things. There is indeed a more serious synaptic overhead involved (as Chuck's JDK experience illustrates) which OSX, a kissing cousin of FreeBSD, addresses nicely by providing a lovely wrapper.
.d.