Free software, free headaches

I am not surprised by this saga and I accept that Open Office doesn't have to be compatible with anything else and must be taken at its own merits.

I use Open Office exclusively now and have not even bothered to install my MS Office during my last update. As I mostly do small word processing jobs I can live with the bugs and quirks and all my docs have been ODT for about two years. But if I was a commercial user I would go nuts. Just a sample,

1. The screen rendering of all fonts is awful. As an old typeset programmer I am offended by the hintless rasterization and sheer ugliness of it all.

2. Using some large point size (greater than 72pt) fonts for posters and the like, results in garbage being printed. I was forced to use Wordpad on at least two occasions to get a job out and it printed the same data perfectly.

3. Getting up-to-date dictionaries, or heaven forbid, Thesauri for some regions, like Australia, is a saga in itself. Many are available, few work properly.

4. Bugs! Settings disappear, things happen without reason, everything goes slow for a while etc. etc. Not frequent enough to be a show-stopper but annoying at times.

5. You need a PhD in comp science to do the equations. A GUI (I mean a proper one) would be nice but I won't hold my breath. Lucky that MathType works well with OO.

5. The charts are an amateurish joke!

6. etc. etc. etc.

I like the package and I appreciate the effort which has gone into it. I can afford the commercial version but like the idea of OS apps doing something useful besides maintaining each other. But this package wouldn't last a week in the real world. You know, where people pay real money for product. And I have had similar experiences with lots of other OSS, e.g. GIMP, IrfanView, Scilab and others. They are decent at what they do, and getting better all the time, but the commercial versions blow them away.

(Aside: Is there any chance whatsoever that Scilab V5 will once again, in my lifetime, have a working Scitab debugger. You know, the one that was broken when upgrading from V4 and has been blithely ignored ever since. As the French say, “Ce n’est pas terrible. Only a sissy need ze debugger for to developing ze complex scientific software avec graphics and real-time input. Pouf!”)