news:4ada314d@news.povray.org...
>  Another advantage is that OSS is often developed by several independent
> parties which are not driving their own personal gain with the project,
> something that is the rule with proprietary commercial software. OSS is
> user-oriented, doing what benefits the users the most.

All of this works in two situations: when said users happen to be developers 
themselves and the OSS project is basically targeted to other developers 
(i.e. developers creating developer tools), and when the OSS project has 
solid corporate backing (e.g. Mozilla being funded by search royalties 
through Google) that provides money for quality assessment, usability 
testing, documentation and such. The best known and real world tested OSS 
projects are often in both categories, actually.
In other situations, the OSS model of development does not shine so 
brightly, when it shines at all. That's IMHO, but I just tried to find OSS 
replacements for several costly proprietary software and the results were 
not convincing, to say the least (see also Andrew's post). Yeah, if you're 
an academic or a geek with lots of free time the replacements are nice and 
sort of fun, but when you're a pro looking for tools that you can actually 
use, less so.

I understand that many IT folks love OSS, but that's because the OSS model 
caters for this particular niche and does indeed provide great tools for 
them (and toys: if you're a IT person dabbling with graphics, the GIMP is 
good enough and you get to play with the code ; if you're a graphics pro, 
no, not really, thanks, you'd rather pay the Adobe tax ; if you're neither, 
some cheap proprietary entry-level photo editor with an interface that's 
actually usable will do). Those of us who are not working (full time) in IT 
see the problem differently.

G.

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