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I hate open source.
Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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Gideon Weems
Member #3,925
October 2003

Sometimes I feel like we're not having a shared conversation, but a bunch of separate personal conversations with ourselves...

I have been sensing this on the intranet lately. It's interesting that you would sense it here. Perhaps my expectations of meat-to-meat interaction are too high.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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I've had even MORE "game breaking" bugs from Kdenlive.

Version 18.x.x.

You would THINK that with a professional website and a version number of 18 in the major series, would be some sort of stable project for the most common things.

Nope.

Keyframes in zoom-position (essential) get corrupted every time you save and reload.

Speed up/down clips break every time you save/load.

Note: Every time it CRASHES means you have to reload! So good luck doing everything in a single binge.

I've wasted at least a dozen hours diagnosing and fixing errors for a TEN MINUTE project.

And I'm using the "recommended" "stable" version. The bleeding edge git one also crashes like crazy.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Keyframes in zoom-position (essential) get corrupted every time you save and reload.

Have you attempted to report the issue to the developers or reach support channels? This does seem like a pretty blatant issue. You'd expect either the project is unstable and they'd recommend you not use it unless you're helping to develop it, or maybe you've come across some edge case bug with particular formats and/or dependency versions that requires somebody to report it before they'll know it exists. You definitely cannot assume that because something is free and is presented well that it's popular and stable. Maybe they have a pro Web developer, and the product dev team is newbie. Or maybe the project was once stable and popular, but has since fallen to a better open source option (like OpenShot), and lost the lead developers that made it work in the first place. Open source plays by different rules than proprietary software. Even if it was popular and worked well at one time, it could be hobbling along and basically abandoned at this point. I'm sure anybody trying Allegro 5.0 out felt the same (but I think 5.2+ is stable af). ;)

I've wasted at least a dozen hours diagnosing and fixing errors for a TEN MINUTE project.

That's just poor time management. ;)

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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bamccaig said:

That's just poor time management. ;)

I'm including the time I spent on forums searching, and posting, trying to isolate the problem and find workarounds, installing different versions (newer minor version, bleeding edge, all of which apparently CANNOT be installed concurrently and will corrupt the old versions because there's only one registry folder) the time I spent making a YouTube clip, uploading it, and sending it to the devs for a bug report. Which, btw, requires a separate login registration and is not really suitable for non-developers at all.

Basically, once you've put 40+ hours into a project, you don't want to literally throw it out and start over so you keep trying to fix it. Especially with open source software because I care about it. But if someone thinks I'm going to start looking through millions of lines of code that I have no experience with to fix a bug, they're crazy! ;)

I have the crazy feeling you should try some different software...

REALLY?!?!?!?!?! ;) ;) ;)

My next project will be using a different software package. Now I'm just trying to finish this crap and get it out the door.

This is what I get for supporting open source. >:( I did initial tests of the software before and it seemed fine but I never got into the nitty gritty of frame-per-frame adjusted effects and motion. And again, it doesn't show up till you start saving/loading so you can do tons of work before you come back and go "wait, what?"

I'm just gonna suck it up and try Adobe Premiere most likely. Although, Adobe is such a piece of !@$!@ that it doesn't support MKV format natively. ... even though MKV is just holding an MP4 video stream. ... and they support stupid formats like MPE and WMV. But hey, "professionals" don't use it yet (because they're dumb), so why support a modern, open-source format that has the incredibly useful feature of being progressively encoded so that if the device runs out of space / power-goes-out (a "streamable" format), the entire video is still playable and not corrupted? WHY SUPPORT THAT? I can't imagine a use case for such a format!

But you know what Adobe Premiere can do? EDIT A FREAKING VIDEO. Otherwise millions of users wouldn't be buying it. So I guess I'll be converting my terabytes of MKV files... to MP4. Luckily, since it's literally the same codec, I can do it with FFMPEG without doing any actual re-encoding (and therefor quality loss).

[edit]

BTW, YouTube is basically the Devil when it comes to quality. 1080p looks like butt sauce once hosted compared to my original sources. I do all this work to get it crisp and YT just mushes it out to nothingness. Like my eyes aged 15 years overnight. I might try upscaling to 1440p or 4K if just to allow people to run a higher bitrate on YT.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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You are way too sensitive for someone who frequents the internet. :/

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---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Basically, once you've put 40+ hours into a project, you don't want to literally throw it out and start over so you keep trying to fix it. Especially with open source software because I care about it.

This is what I get for supporting open source. >:(

I hate open source.

Could have fooled me. :-/

We all need to rant sometimes, but compared to the alternative, I'd rather free software that affords me the freedom to do everything I could ever dream of doing with it even if it barely works; instead of proprietary software that I can't afford that forbids me from doing the things I want to do. >:( It can be frustrating when something looks promising and doesn't solve the problem, but it's a lot less frustrating when you didn't pay anything for it (and didn't have to break any laws in doing so).

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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You know I'm kidding, right?

I was just venting my frustration. Pretty sure I even mentioned that. I wouldn't have even Google'd for Kdenlive if I didn't love open source.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I would certainly conclude that from all these years on the boards, but I don't think it has been made clear (particularly for newbies or outsiders). It seems every time you say that you support open source in this thread you contradict it by saying that you hate it and it's a waste of time. :D And that might end up ultimately harming open source if it steers people away. And I don't think that was your intention.

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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I love open source but if it doesn't have a professional quality or at least a standard of not crashing all the time then what's it worth?

If I have to spend all my time fixing my tools then I lose time programming my applications.

and then there's s*** like QT that works great till you have to buy a f****** license.

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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I love open source. I found many good quality open source apps. Also found many paid apps that crash. But open source tends to be safer in the end.

I haven't found many open source projects I disliked. If one app doesn't work well, I keep searching for one that does.

If you need something bad enough, it may be time to pay for it.

---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I love open source but if it doesn't have a professional quality or at least a standard of not crashing all the time then what's it worth?

You're holding it to an unfair standard. You're basically saying, "ALL open source has to be perfect so it's like a few really well maintained proprietary products that I use."

"Well, what about the proprietary software you've used that is shit?"

"That doesn't count [somehow]."

::) ::) ::)

There is plenty of free software/open source that is "professional quality". It does a damn good job of competing with billion dollar corporations, and often times destroys them. For example, the Internet is pretty much built on free software.

There is plenty of proprietary software that is shit. We've all experienced it. You're effectively arguing with blinders on. You're living in a fantasy world if you think proprietary software is generally good quality. The majority of it is complete shit. It doesn't do what you really want to do, it often fails to do relatively simple things effectively (even when there's a billion dollar corporation behind it), and it's full of security vulnerabilities that allow clever crackers to just break your computer from afar.

Sure, free software is full of bugs too, but they're open about them, and anybody is free to study the code, discover them, and fix them. Whereas proprietary software is limited to however many developers the company can afford to pay to maintain it. It's only profitable to fix vulnerabilities that are critical or are well enough publicized to cause public relations turmoil so they won't even necessarily fix vulnerabilities that they know about. Guess who wins in the real world most of the time?

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Yeah, I'm (OMG.) with Edgar. I think you over-read into it. I think we're all actually on the same page here. It's that strange psychological concept where you assume your words are in good faith (because the are), but assume the worst possible connotation/implication in someone else's words. (And, honestly, with the way the media/politics works these days, it probably bleeds in from that and makes us suspicious of normal every day conversations.)

But back to the point, I think we're all basically of the cloth: "Open source rules, but it's frustrating when an OS project fails to meet our basic usability or bug-squashing expectations."

There's actually a lot of flavors or classifications of open source projects. Groups of clusters. (ala:)

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You've got tiny 1 or 3 liner bash scripts someone posts online with zero comments or support.

You've got tons of small-to-medium projects with a single developer.

Plenty of projects that were worked on (and well-developed) but and then burned out and are no longer supported by anyone.

And yes, open-source does give you the option of picking up where someone left off. That DOES happen in some places like Dosbox. (There are many forks with random patches) But very... very... very few of those actually happen. Most projects just die and stay dead.

Another way to die is the main authors either leave, or become too busy to be full-time/active, so anyone left with the project is too scared to touch large portions of the code (like when I was doing shader development on Dolphin at the time--which has subsequently gotten much better).

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Most projects just die and stay dead.

Usually for good reason though. Either there just isn't enough interest in maintaining it, or the technical debt is too great to pay off, or there's already something better out there to work with/on instead. Or perhaps just nobody with the needed skills/motivation/need wants to work on it.

If there's enough interest in a project then it should never die. There will either be enough volunteers to keep it going, or enough financial backing to afford a development team. If the project is dying it likely means it isn't needed, or at least didn't do a good enough job to fill the need. For example, with kdenlive, in your short-lived experience it has several critical flaws. It's difficult for a project like that to get support from the community. It isn't enough mature enough to satisfy basic requirements. Most people wouldn't even invest as much time as you did in it.

Ultimately, software is in a way like a living organism. It must adapt to its environment or it will die. Quite literally meaning typically software will break as its ecosystem changes, and unless it is continuously maintained to keep up it will eventually rot and die. Of course, the more robust it gets over time the more resilient it gets to changes in its ecosystem, but occasionally the ecosystem changes so much that everything breaks and the software either becomes half functional, useless, or gets patched to work again. The more complicated the software the more likely it is to break, and the more changes are needed to adapt it to its new surroundings. Some software needs to be constantly maintained to keep up with the changing ecosystem(s). Other software just needs the occasional weekend hacks to get working again.

My main and only point was that quality is more important than quantity.

And you could have just said that, and it would have been understood and agreed with. Instead, you implied that open source software is worthless because not only is it unpolished, but it doesn't even run. Which is just misleading. There are tiny, outlier projects like that in both open and closed source, but they're certainly not the standard. Why say what you said if you don't believe it to be the case? And if it's not the case then what you said is completely irrelevant to the conversation. I fail to understand how I'm misread what you wrote. I can't imagine how you could expect somebody to interpret what you said originally (unprofessional, crashing all the time) to be what you said afterward (quality is more important than quantity).

And I think it goes without saying. Who would possibly argue the reverse? It's nonsense. Ultimately, if your goal is to support open source (which I gather it is) then you should be careful how you criticize it because there are a lot of adversaries to open source and they don't need any help. There's nothing wrong with saying a project is shit. Lots of projects are shit. Just don't generalize it to the entire catalogue/movement.

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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Peter Hull
Member #1,136
March 2001

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Same for OSS - some good projects are abandoned before their time?

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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The difference is that most proprietary software has already passed most basic quality checks otherwise they couldn't charge for it (or at least continue to charge for it). :/

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:) :D :D ;D ;D ;D ;D ::)

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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inkscape vs adobe illustrator

gimp vs adobe photoshop

blender vs maya

I use the former but there's no doubt the latter are better, more polished, easer-to-use products.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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I don't have the money to spend on these other products.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

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