It's all about the freedom

Buzzword

Open Source is today's hot topic. Even more, Open Source will be tomorrow's driving technology.

But still today many misconceptions surrounding it continue to exist.

Open Source, Free, Low Quality

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Open Source means the hard working people who wrote the software provide the source code (the internals of the application) for you as a user to inspect, and in most cases for their peers to review.

Where proprietary solutions can hide incompetent programmers, and quick hacks in order to meet project deadlines, open source programmers do not have this luxury.

Featureless

In the open-source arena, there are literally tens to hundreds of applications and solutions for every single problem. Every one of these products has a unique feature set.

Choosing the right open source product is not looking for the one having the most exhaustive list of functions, but finding the product that proves to be te most efficient for you.

Unusable

Usability is an important aspect of the user experience. The "universal" look and feel of applications helps users to feel at home in their native desktop environment.

It is however important to remember that the philosophy of open-source solutions is to break free from proprietary solutions. It would thus not make sense to completely mimic commercial desktop environments.

Given a sufficient introduction and some basic guidance, most users are perfectly able to feel at home in a different desktop solution.

Once the user is able to see accept the basic desktop differences, usability is no longer a problem.