OSNews: Is Free Software Always a Good Thing?

“Now, this is not a review of Windows Server 2003 or even an
attempt to discuss it. However, installing and using has clarified
some feelings, in my mind, about the success and shortcomings of
open source software. As a grateful user of download editions of
Linux, desktop environments like KDE and Gnome, and applications
like gaim, OpenOffice.org, and Mozilla Firebird, I rely heavily
upon free software for my day to day work. I use Apache http Server
and script with PHP and write some Perl. I am no stranger to the
quality of individual open source products, and I owe a debt of
gratitude to developers around the world.

“That said, booting up into Windows for the first time in a long
time was surprisingly joyful. The graphics and feel of the system
were tight and coordinated, the look and feel was sleek. Despite
the fact that it’s supposed to be a server OS (which is a whole
separate issue), it felt like a single, integrated system.
Installing Office 2003 for the very first time was simple
enough–as expected, clicking the setup.exe file installed the
necessary components and I knew exactly where to find them, having
installed a previous version before. Despite the fact that this was
supposed to be a ‘trial run,’ I had my server configured as a web
server, a file server, a print server, and my primary desktop
machine within an hour or so.

“This is what got me thinking–‘Choice is good.’ Some debate the
marketability of choice–it confuses new users, it makes learning
much more complex, it makes each computer different enough so that
you must, to some extent, relearn what you can and can’t do on each
box. But one downfall of the amount choice is that it makes Linux,
in this particular case, feel disjointed. Some programs feel meshed
and others feel semi-developed. Some programs are themeable, while
others maintain a single look. A public with extreme expectations
refuses to accept distributions that strip out too much choice, and
therefore, we end up with some sort of OS pudding, with each bite
tasting just a little different than the rest. To top it off, when
a commercial company, like Red Hat, takes a shot at solving this
problem, the community backlash can best be described as
merciless…”

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