Credit Where It's Due

I try to keep up with various open source news, since the software tends to interest me -- a quick look around the blog would tell you as much. So naturally, even though I am a KDE user, I follow Planet GNOME. And as I read it today, I had to laugh as I came across this post. Essentially, the poster is mad that a co-founder of GNOME, who is now working for Novell, has been looking over Excel, and said it was a nice piece of software. The poster now wants to know when Novell is going to stop sucking up to Microsoft.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Excel is a nice piece of software. I mean, credit where credit is due: Excel hasn't got a lock on the industry by being a poor product. The program runs fast and has a better interface than OSS equivalents (I especially like how Excel will remind me about formula syntax when I type them in). Gnumeric doesn't have all the features Excel does. Open Office comes closer, but although it nominally has some of the same features as Excel, some of them (optimization and conditional formating spring to mind) are not nearly as advanced.

Posts like the one I linked too are worrying, if for no other reason than they show a polarization that doesn't make sense in software. It becomes a war, an 'us-versus-them' mentality where anything produced by the enemy is automatically considered inferior. And by trying to learn from what they did well, you're 'sucking up' rather than improving.

I realise that this is in part due to Novell's current pariah status in the community, but at least part of that status is this idea in the community that anything coming out of Redmond is automatically inferior and damaging. This isn't a healthy attitude. The Linux community needs to start looking at proprietary software and asking why those programs are succeeding, and what we can learn from them. Fact of the matter is, Microsoft's put a lot more effort into finding out what's important for users rather than developers. It's entirely possible that all that testing has resulted in unique insights -- and good software.