Uellue's Blog

Declaration of independence

Yesterday I realized that we do not depend on Closed Source software any more, at least not on personal computers. Almost everything can be achieved with Open Source tools. They have reached such a high level and professional attitude that they are not cheap replacements of Closed Source software, but provide innovative and independent solutions which are often better than Closed Source alternatives.

What astonishes me a bit is that lots of Open Source projects are actually commercial software (for example MySQL), and more and more companies see the benefits of releasing their software's sources to the public. For me it seems as if this has become a big trend in the last years. Good for everybody, basically!

This came to my mind when I had to set up ActivePerl on WinXP for my sister in order to run a little script. I had to change some bits—why the heck does Windows use CRLF instead of LF like everyone else? Notepad cannot handle files with LF line endings, so I needed a text editor. The Wikipedia article "List of text editors" offered a whole bunch of Open Source editors, I chose Notepad++ because I already had heard something about it ;-). I realized that any of these Open Source editors by far outperforms the default text editor of Windows XP.

Then I started to think: Which Closed Source software do I use and is any Closed Source software without alternatives?

Well, I pretty much like VMware, but lately VirtualBox was made Open Source which seems to provide pretty much the same functionality. Other solutions such as XEN are able to virtualize most x86 operating systems on CPUs with Intel's VT and AMD's Pacifica, and others are developing quickly. The prices for virtualisation technologies are plunging, VMware and other vendors give away some of their products for free, probably because they want to get a bigger share of the quickly growing virtualisation market.

The Acrobat Reader is for me just the best PDF reader under Linux, with kpdf there's already an alternative for ordinary PDFs, but without gimmicks like embedded 3D models.

OS X is just the best operating system for my iBook, it would also run under Linux, with a few drawbacks concerning usability. I am not talking about Windows XP here, the only reason why it's installed on some machines here is because sometimes you want to use Word or Access, test Web pages with IE 7 and (sometimes) use strange hardware. In fact, every time I touch Windows I realize again how much it sucks with respect to usability. News about releases of truly innovative products from Microsoft were rare in the last years, the IE 7, for example, just tries to catch up with browsers such as Opera, Safari, Firefox, Konqueror, ... Any of them could replace IE 7 for me and the latter two are Open Source.

Well, Skype is just a neat tool for free video telephony, but for example Ekiga can do the same. Maybe not as easy as Skype, but instead free like free spech, not only free like free beer.

The nVidia Closed Source driver for 3D video cards is truly without alternative if you want to have accelerated 3D, two monitors and TV out on your nVidia card, but only because nVidia won't supply the hardware specs, not because there would be no one to write the driver.

The only really unmatched product for me is Mathematica. I didn't find an Open Souce project that provides symbolic and numerical calculus and data handling like Mathematica.

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. How is it for you? Are there any software products unmatched by an Open Source solution? Many people say that there's for example no alternative for them to Adobe Photoshop.