The debate about open source v. proprietary code reminds me of my own history with FreeBSD v. Windows. In the late nineties (1998) I was struggling with Win95 and all the Adobe stuff. It was a nightmare of incompatible graphic applications v. Win95 GUI and underlying memory, graphic display, file formats, and printing issues. Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark and font packages were expensive and didn't work very well together out of the box and there was no way to fix them, except look around the web for work arounds and wait for the next upgrades. By that time the major upgrade cycle had shrunk to six months at Adobe, and about two years with Microsoft and Mac. Which meant, by the time you got the applications working, the MS issued a new version of Windows that required upgraded applications. Apple was just as bad.
I got fed up and was spending too much money. My kid came over and helped me set up FreeBSD 2.2 and X-windows. It had limited and mostly useless graphic design packages. But it did have TeX which was a fabulous layout and typesetting system. Typesetting any kind of math formula was a nightmare in MSWord as I learned trying to format a science thesis with a math section for a friend. In TeX it would have been almost trivial.
Meanwhile BSD was upgrading at an even faster pace than MSWindows, but the upgrade process was pretty seamless. I would wait for a whole cycle so I followed 2.2 -> 3.3 -> 4.2 all on the same computer. In the Windows world, you have to upgrade your hardware. Not so in the FreeBSD world for a long time. I ran the same computer with upgraded drives and monitors from 1998 to 2007. Back sometime around FreeBSD 4.x stable the chief engineer moved over to Apple to work on OS X. The whole 5.x series was a mess. They were trying to adapt to multiple processors and not getting it right. The whole project was migrating away from the BSD 4.4 spec which was its foundation.
>From the user point of view the real problem with open source is keeping
up with the hardware wars in processors, memory, network hardware,
graphics cards, CD/DVD drives, printers, scanners, and the digital
photography systems. Most of the latter manufacturers are in their own
nightmare competition and proprietary battles over protected code.
The same idiocy of protected code is going on in power wheel chair digital electronic controllers. These are on a year by year upgrade cycle, and about a three year legacy drop support cycle. This is terrible for the healthcare delivery system, since these devices are critical to the disabled population. Medicare and other providers just refuse to buy the higher quality product line, so people drive around in old junkers, I had to keep going. It was a fair amount of fun to keep old stuff working when I had a warehouse full of junk to pick through. But my next boss had a completely different business model. The inventory was all new parts, and no used parts. He hated my working on old equipment to get something going because it was labor intensive and he didn't make enough on my labor. He made more on selling new parts and new equipment. So my whole job environment was degraded. The trouble was most of customer base couldn't get new and better equipment because newer equivalent equipment was by then not covered under the Medicare and private insurance providers. This meant that customers with old equipment were better off getting it fixed. I was caught in the middle.
Back to the computer world. When I built my current computer I tried to sort out what was not only the fastest and most reliable hardware, but also what was supported in open source and winsuck. Unfortunately the FreeBSD project was way behind on its device drivers. I figured oh well, let's see how much works. I got most of FreeBSD 6.2 to work but it was a months long pain in the ass. Every device was some problem child from the graphic card to the printer to the CD/DVD drive. And then there was the X-windows change over to the X-Org issue. It involved changing the directory where all the X files were stored. Never mind. It was a disaster as far as I was concerned.
I fucked up FreeBSD 6.2 some way I don't remember and gave in and bought a retail copy of XP a month before MS threatened to stop supporting it in favor of Vista. Thank god Vista was broken out of the box and the business community refused to upgrade.
And now dot, dot, dot, here I am back in what I hope is a temporary respite on Ubuntu.
CG