Ensight – Jeremy Wright

I believe that for me, finally, certain new shining gems are emerging in the Open Source community which are good enough for me as a user to use, no question.

Yes, it’s finally happened. My criticisms of Open Source Software (OSS) have just diminish considerably over the last 3 weeks. 3 weeks ago I tried out Firebird, the newest Mozilla browser. Last week, I gave Thunderbird a shot as a replacement to Outlook Express.

Both only had very minor annoyances, and both had very massive pluses. After about a week of using each, I could easily switch over without minding one bit. In fact, I may switch to Thunderbird entirely at home, we’ll see.

If this sounds… unbalanced, I apologize. I don’t switch software easily. In fact, my wife calls me a “creature of habit”. I put my deodorant on in the bedroom, for no other reason than that’s what I’ve always done. When my wife moved it on me, I couldn’t find it, and everytime I remembered I’d already wasted so much time that I decided to move it back to streamline my morning.

Sad, eh?

The point of all this? In the past, I’ve felt OSS was generally “below snuff”. With the exception of the “gems” of OSS (Apache, PHP, etc); most software was not of a quality to get the next circle of users (ie: me) to use it on a regular basis.

This has changed.

I won’t be switching to Firebird anytime soon, as I have no problems with IE (creature of habit, until something is wrong, not much changes); but one thing will change: my opinion of OSS. Granted, these 2 pieces of software are neither the only ones out there nor are they perfect, but they were enough to help me appreciate them, and OSS in general, much more than I did a month ago.

My hope is that with these sorts of victories under their belts, OSS developers can move onto truly bigger fish: groupware, IM, directory services, etc. Well done to everyone