Why proprietary sucks
It’s been a year and a bit since my personal, critical take on open source software solutions in the South African education system. Naturally, I was lambasted by the open source evangelists, and applauded by those who are vehemently opposed to Moodle – no surprise there. However, what become very apparent was that most critics of my opinion didn’t or couldn’t read my article well enough to understand what I am (still) looking for: a success story of an open source solution being used to the real benefit of learners and teachers in South Africa.
It’s been a year and a bit since my personal, critical take on open source software solutions in the South African education system. Naturally, I was lambasted by the open source evangelists, and applauded by those who are vehemently opposed to Moodle – no surprise there. However, what become very apparent was that most critics of my opinion didn’t or couldn’t read my article well enough to understand what I am (still) looking for: a success story of an open source solution being used to the real benefit of learners and teachers in South Africa.
Now of course, I am well aware of software solutions that are built on open source platforms but for all intents and purposes are sold as proprietary products. Thumbs up to them. If you’ve managed to create a useful product using open source and you sell it for profit then you deserve whatever you derive from your invention.
My critical take on open source is when South African schools are hoodwinked into ‘buying’ into open source by overly zealous IT administrators. And my reasons are clearly stated in Why open source sucks. I know of some schools that went the Linux/Ubuntu route, only to return to Windows when they realised that there was less available on the Linux than the Windows platform. A more recent trend in South Africa is schools that are dumping Windows for Apple. I’m becoming more of an Apple fan every day, but more about that later.
This piece, however, is a swipe at vendors who are pushing proprietary products. They can suck too. Big time.
I am speaking from personal experience (as with my previous article).
Instead of expanding on my own thoughts about proprietary systems, at the risk of being lambasted a second time (yes Johnny, Ferial Haffajee would NOT be impressed by my fear!), I am opening the floor to allow you to share your experiences – good or bad.
So please go ahead and add your comments below …
Teacher\'s Monthly experience
Hi Adrian,
I just read both your article named “why opensource/proprietary softwares sucks”.
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Few years ago , such titles would have either put a smile on my face or make me angry. But after many years I have learn to temperate my reactions. Then my first though was: “wow… such a opiniated and definitve title will definately trigger a lot of hits to its website… that’s clever
I don’t want to tell about good or bad experiences in one or the other kind of software… I think this is not relevant as anyone may have its own very different experience. But instead I would like to tell you about my global experience in IT.
I never really studied IT and computer sciences nor programming… actually I studied biology (at school you’re driven to make chooices… at least in france).
So when I started working in IT, I had quite basic, not to say low, level of skills. basicly I knew windows 95/98 and… that’s all. I had no idea about how things were working under the hood. The company I worked for, because they would never spend thousands of euros for training staff, was hoping me to train and learn by myself, by using software, making mistakes, fixing them and so on… that’s what I did! But at the end the knowledge I gathered was very partial, out of any context and sometimes even wrong. At this time I was *only* working on proprietary systems (no need to mention). When I started looking into opensource system (the other one there is no need to mention), I was really amazed to see how much documentation, help, howtos, tutorials, wikis you could find around the opensource products AND their related concepts (some protocols, API…).
My point here is to say that time spent learning will be rewarded… as a teacher I guess you know that. Today I am an ingeener, a good one (yeah you might think I am quite proud of myself… that’s not wrong). I really I am not sure I would have been that far using proprietary softwares… of course I would have had more time to go to the pub, or write article about how much this or that sucks
Lol! You saw right through me … was this article so transparent as to be an SEO winner?
Thanks for your comments. You make valid points on each comment.
See my answer at your previous post http://www.teachersmonthly.com/why-open-source-sucks/comment-page-1/#comment-6429 which I only read today.
Kind regards
Manie