You're good at these
To hijack your thread at the first opportunity, I've come to generally dislike the commercial software world for the way it is. FOSS is a completely different way of living, whether or not the products are the same or better/worse, it's just so much nicer the very process.
To give you an example, last week I wanted to get started with mono, so I found out the mono documentation is very incomplete and generally really sucky. But mono is just an implementation of .NET across a wide set of platforms, so I started looking for some .NET documentation. I gotta tell you finding docs in FOSS land is a lot easier than navigating microsoft.com. When I finally found it, there's only the online version available. Turns out they will let you download the docs in something called ".NET SDK", which is basically docs bundled with the doc viewer and some minor development tools. So I download it and it's a bloody executable. On Windoze I installed it, works fine. But I want to use the docs on my system. They're in some kind of mangled "windows help file" format, remember those? The .chm's? There is even a viewer for them in linux. But it's not those, it's some new incredibly improved windows help format which looks and feels exactly the same as the old one.
Now, it's hardly MS' fault that I can't open those files on my system, it's not like they anticipated years ago, before mono even was created, that someone would want to open their help files in linux. But the format being proprietary, noone knows how it works. You'd have to reverse engineer it to use it. Which someone has. There is an app for coverting the new help files to old style help files or indeed to a range of other formats. The app was written by some Russian dude and is shareware, which means it won't let you use it on big document until you register. So now I have to find a crack for this incredibly stupid app which should never have had a reason to exist in the first place.
It's that kind of bs that comes out of proprietary software firms, everything is closed off and unaccessible. In linux if you want to change the logo on boot, you open up the source, pray to your God of choice and dive in. On Windows you have to get an application called Window Blinds or whatever that will let you do this, which again is reverse engineered because noone has the fecking source. It's the spread of information that is so damn restricted, there's no sharing. So many FOSS projects have been born out of the existence of some project which never got anywhere but still developed the technology to accomplish some specific thing, which just turns out to be useful in a completely different project.
Users don't see this, for them it's a question of free beer vs paid, but for those interested in software and technology, it's bloody awful.
Apple is less bad than Windows, but it's still commercial and neesd to look after its interests, which means you can't open it up and make it interoperate with other stuff beyond what Apple do themselves to that end (in my impression quite a lot).
[/rant]
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