I am starting to hate open source

In My Humble Opinion
61

But, so what? Just because you’re not entitled to those things doesn’t mean can’t dislike the product for lacking them. If someone gives me a car for free but it’s an ugly color, has a bunch of problems and I can’t figure out how to work half of the ‘features’ it comes with, I can still hate it and telling me ‘but it was free’ doesn’t change that.

Regarding all the comments about GIMP, I think we need to keep this in mind:

Yes, GIMP is harder to use than photoshop (at least the last desktop version of Photoshop I used), but there’s a fairly steep learning curve to both of them. At least WRT wrapping your head around working with layers. If you’ve never worked with PhotoShop and don’t have a working knowledge of how that type of image editing works, it’s going to be really difficult. At least when I moved over from photoshop to gimp, it was mostly about figuring out how to do what I already knew how to do just with a different UI. OTOH, my experience with Illustrator is probably less than an hour. That made learning InkScape considerably more difficult as I had to learn how to work with vector graphics at the same time.

62

With open source you are not a customer, you haven’t paid someone to give you a good and/or service.

Its important to remember this. Open source does not entitle you to anything (except for rights to use the source code). You haven’t paid for anything here. If you do not like the open source project/maintainers, or it doesn’t fit your use case… okay. No one is forcing you to use it.

Go use something that fits your needs, or go help in the development of the project, or fork it and develop a project to suit your own needs, or (even better) pay someone to make/develop something that does. That’s what FOSS entitles you to do. It gives you the legal right to fix it yourself.

Now you are always free to hate anything for any reason. Sunight? It’s too damn bright! I hate the sun. But people can also say “fix it yourself, or pay for a better product pal”

63

That said. If you ACTUALLY paid someone for an open source product… you are 100% a customer and deserve product satisfaction (imho). I am 100% in support for consumer’s rights.

The open source definition specifically demands that you are allowed to pay for open source products and people have the right to sell open source products.

The legal requirements are that the source code is to be always available to all, and that the rights are also available to all to modify/extend.

64

That’s not the right analogy. A better one is someone posted a free car on Craigslist, you took the car and didn’t like it, then you complained about Craigslist.

As @orcenio said, open-source is not a product, it’s a resource that you can choose to use or ignore.

There’s also a strong current of negativity bias in this thread: “I had a bad experience with one or more open-source projects, so I hate open-source”. It ignores all of the good experiences. Not to mention the meer existence of open-source applies pressure to commercial software to be better. Windows Server is better because Linux is an option.

Over the years I’ve struggled to build various open-source projects and vented extreme frustration, but I don’t blame the concept.

65

I have tried that. I asked several of the most prominent LLMs to produce a Shunn format version. Just as an experiment: (no way am I going to actually submit an MS formatted by an LLM: something like a .docx is all too easy to watermark.)

And each one produces something fairly close to a correct Shunn format - but not quite.

And as before with other experiments, you point out the deficiencies, the LLM says, oh, yes, sorry I missed that. And confidently produces another one… which is wrong again in different ways. Round and round we go.

Interestingly, if you upload the output of one to a different one and ask it to analyse how it’s not quite right, you get differing critiques. Odd, since Shunn’s own website provides clear examples.

As I said before, I guess I will just have to learn libreoffice in detail and do it by hand.

66

Is Google Docs an option? You can import the official shunn manuscript template into Google Docs, cut and paste your plaintext in, then fix-up anything left.

You can do the same with libre office. It depends on if you already know Google Docs.

67

I also find it interesting to note that the SDMB is run using Discourse which is, itself, open source under the GPL-2 licence.

68

It is maybe one of the tragedies of history that the AT&T vs IBM (etc) rivalry kept Unix code locked up in lawsuits for so long.

Imagine if, instead of the limping IBM PC, we might have had systems using a better CPU (68000 family, for example) running a real operating system rather than a glorified program loader like DOS…

69

Did you try an agentic harness already? (They let the LLMs add a self-verification loop, with tests, renders and validators, and self-iterate until they get it correct.)

It wasn’t clear from your posts what exactly you were doing with the LLMs, but if you were using just the bare chatbots (like “Claude” instead of “Claude Code”, for example, or ChatGPT instead of Codex), a harness can help a lot for this specific use case. Your choice of harness (and the instructions you give it) can matter more than your choice of model or provider for something like this.

A bare chatbot usually can’t see and check its own output. A harness can render the finished .docx, write tests and scripts to validate that the output matches the spec, and use a vision model to do a visual pass. Most importantly, it can do all of that autonomously, in one long cycle of iterative test-driven development, and then report back to you after a few minutes (or hours), and only after it’s reasonably confident about its results — because the deterministic tests against your on-disk render verified it in code, not just because it’s pulling more nonsense out of its training. A harness still isn’t a perfect system, but for the purposes of software development, it is a big improvement over the bare chatbots.

Anyway, whether you WANT to keep at it is entirely up to you. Let me know if you want a free 1-week guest pass to Claude Code (along with a sample prompt). I’m happy to chat if you want to discuss it more, or send me a sample, but otherwise, just use one of the non-AI tools?

I mean, of course you’re free to do that if you want. You just don’t necessarily need to. I guarantee you this problem has been looked at and tackled by many people already… their existing work could be a good starting place, rather than trying to do this from scratch?

There are existing open-source Shunn exporters made for this specific use case already, including the Obsidian exporters mentioned back in post #22.

Did you ever try those? Do they not work…? Do they not fit the bill for some reason? (Or do you maybe just not want to use Obsidian?)

There’s also an existing Pandoc template for Shunn outputs: GitHub - prosegrinder/pandoc-templates: An opinionated set of Pandoc templates and scripts for converting markdown to DOCX manuscripts that adhere to William Shunn's Proper Manuscript Format guidelines using Pandoc. · GitHub

Or a simple standalone Python script if you prefer: md2shunn

Any of those should get you close to the goalpost, if not 100% of the way there. They should make the final LibreOffice cleanup easier, if nothing else? Worth a shot.

Of course… if you were really just venting about how difficult some FOSS software can be, well then… I entirely agree, and apologize for the word vomit of unsolicited advice :slight_smile:

70

This is pretty much my reaction to this thread. My Ubuntu laptop is working fine. Honestly, it looks and feels a lot like a pre-cluttered version of Windows. Even the icons for the main things i want to do look similar to the windows icons. I’ve been shocked to the degree it “just worked”

71

As for other open source stuff I’ve used…

  • I, also, gave up on GIMP. But that was a really long time ago.
  • I use Audacity regularly.
  • I use libreoffice sometimes. Often, i need to be truly compatible with MS office, so i own a copy. (Actually, a few copies, as i run it on several machines.) Other times, i want to share, any i use Google docs.
  • I use signal. It’s really easy. If you can use any other text app, you can download it and use it.

I’m pretty sure i use other open source stuff.