... However Usually It Does.

I just got inspired by comment of Davide San that Mathematica and MatLab are much superior to any open source or free tools. Recently more and more I get this feeling for all kinds of open source tools. It usually applies to big projects. The bigger project the more sure that it will really suck compared to paid counter part. I do not really say that the tools should be paid only because then they will be good. I personally use a lot of open source or free products and I am very happy with them. However when it comes to corporate level, it is harder and harder to accept compromises caused by open source.

Let's see for a while in different ranges of applications:

Bitmap graphics:

Gimp sucks compared to Photoshop. Gimp color management is one big hell. Try to be a photographer and do things without decent color management. Good luck...

Vector graphics:

Adobe Illustrator or even CorelDRAW are superior to anything open source. Inkscape is not bad. But it's going nowhere. Xara has been recently released as open source, but I have not seen it yet and I am not sure what stage it is. I believe Xara lost many years ago anyway.

Office:

Here OpenOffice can compete with MS Office. But it is still worse. It is good enough to do work you want. But in corporate you communicate with different people around the globe, they send you .doc files and try to get them properly formatted in OpenOffice.

Firefox is superior to IE7... but... IE7 is also free :) And anyway corporate business usually have all information optimized for IE because it comes with package.

MySQL can compete with Oracle. But it for sure is not any better.

And so on, and so on, and so on.... Many people who develop software for free just focus on their needs. We get millions and millions of same tools, just because someone wanted something special. People do not join forces to create something great. There is a shitload of programmers time and energy wasted to recreate programs that already have been done. I am also part of it and I also often write programs that exist just because it is easier for me to write something from scratch than to study other developers source... but then... my functionality does not go into their software, their functionality does not get into my software and we get two shitty software tools instead of one decent.

And... have a nice weekends folks. Seems like working weekend for me....