[lbo-talk] Yannis and new queer agenda show...

Matt lbo4 at beyondzero.net
Tue Jun 26 06:34:03 PDT 2012


On 6/25/2012 3:22 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yeah, but I use these things a lot and have tried all that NeoCrap and it sucks by comparison. Slow and under-featured.

[...]


> Yeah, I've heard that one before. I don't care about rewriting stuff for my own use. I want good, solid, fast, powerful software. OpenCrap doesn't qualify.

The regular FOSS debate on lbo-talk... ;-)

Productivity software in the FOSS world does suck. There is no Project Management tool as good as MS Project. And *existing* does not mean anything - a dozen exist, but none of them are useful for managing anything other than a to-do list. I've tried.

The office suites are just as bad. Serious number-crunching just doesn't work in the FOSS tools, unless you use a programmatic one (and most people don't have time to learn one). Excel's pivot tables alone make it worthwhile. One might be surprised, but even in the world of transactional ERPs, Excel still is used to run billion dollar companies.

Of course, for serious data analysis, even Excel doesn't cut it. I prefer Minitab...for which there is no friendly FOSS. R project exists, but the learning curve is pretty high...higher than the cost of Minitab.

With all that being said, productivity software is NOT where FOSS shines. FOSS runs the Internet and many academic, corporate, and government infrastructures, and it blows away the non-FOSS alternatives.

What Excel is to OpenOffice [or whatever], pales in comparison to what sendmail/dovecot is to Exchange, or Apache is to IIS, or Linux is to HPUX, or everything else is to Microsoft's server version...

Matt

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