1.  Marketing.  If no one's heard of your product, they won't use it.  And if they've only heard of your product when it's mentioned in passing by some open-source pontificator, then they're not going to be inclined to dump their so-so tool that works kinda-well.  Sad but true.

2.  Design.  Most OSS products go for feature-richness, and end up designed in a way that completely satisfies the project lead, and irritates everyone else who uses it.  I'll give an example:  When I'm using Word to write a tech document, I use the classic infinite-scroll, pagebreaks-denoted-by-dashes view, which allows me to see as much information on the screen as possible.  I, or the tech-pubs person I hand off to, will worry about layout once I get my story straight and fill out all of my bullet points.  OpenOffice doesn't allow me to edit in this mode.  Why?  What is the advantage to me of seeing two inches of white space and gray void between the bottom of the previous page and the top of the next when I'm writing?  I'm sure people who care mostly about layout are thankful for this, but I am not.

Another example is Konqueror.  Who's bright idea was it to spend thousands upon thousands of development hours to put the worst feature of the Windows '95 File Explorer into KDE?  I never ever want ed to browse the web from within my file browser, and I am mystified that development is still going into this thing.  Konquorer highlights a second problem of OSS design, which is that the big projects tend to play it safe and just copy what Microsoft or Apple did, rather than sit down and do some soul-searching on what kind of interface is really best for the product.

3.  Response to User Feedback.  When OSS programmers do get paid, they are usually paid by their employers/clients to make sure product X has feature Y so that it works with the client's saleable product Z.  If someone has a problem with the product that the developers don't find interesting, they will either ignore the issue, or release an inane explanation of how the issue is not relevant because a clunky workaround exists that will make the user hate the product even more.   For a good example of this, see the documentation for...well, pretty much everything other than the core man pages.

(is 3fingerspointback)

So, I'm a bit biased as I started an open source strategy company six years ago. Our clients have basically been all the large tech companies and a lot of very large end users (including 3 national governments), plus around 30 open source-based startups. One of our notable clients is the Free Standards Group, which just took over the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to become the Linux Foundation. I've also been an OSS user and developer for around 20 years or so.

Here's my short list of why open source is still lagging, at least in the business world:

1) Excel - Amazingly, most corporations run on it, and the formulas/macros are very hard to translate to other software. Never mind the re-training issue. This is the very definition of a legacy application....

2) Quicken - What can I say, there really is no substitute for a small business. It's not until you get to stuff like Oracle Financials and SAP that you start to see serious Linux-based accounting... Yes, there are a few niche players and some hosted-stuff, but Quicken is the standard in most places.

3) Outlook - Most people I know live and die by Outlook. Open source desktop calendaring software just sucks for collaborative use, particularly on Windows. Plus, every smart phone can sync to it... Yes, there are some web-based things that are pretty good, but it doesn't help people on planes.

Beside those critical applications, there are also a million other pieces of Windows only software that people rely on every day that are either hard to find for open source platforms or non-existent. And if you are a small to mid-sized business, you don't have a lot of tech resources to find and setup all the OSS that you might need to run your business. If you are an enterprise, the cost of re-training your workforce and refactoring all your policies will exceed cost savings by a large order of magnitude. Never mind business-critical backend applications like RIM's Blackberry Enterprise Server or SAP. Plus, it's hard to get many standard issue laptops to work well (and completely) with Linux.

All that said, OSS is making substantial inroads in companies, but not on the desktop. It's mostly in web-delivered applications such as SugarCRM or dotProject, as well as datacenter stuff. However, in this space, Google, not MSFT, is the biggest threat to OSS apps, as their advertising-subsidized model is cannibalizing open source, web-delivered applications, particularly webmail and calendaring.

Optaros, an Open Source-centric systems integrator based in Boston, has published a good list of applications that businesses should look at for replacing existing commercial apps.

As far as home users go, we actually did a study for a client in 2005 of open source desktop application popularity by geographic region. Not surprisingly, the most popular open source applications by far are peer-to-peer and multimedia applications. And the numbers are astounding, with downloads in the hundreds of millions. And don't forget that most of the Mac OS, as well as pieces of Windows, come from open source.

Personally, I used to carry around a small laptop running Linux. When I bought a new laptop, I switched back to Windows because I could never really get everything working right under Linux and every update broken an endless stream of stuff. Now, I have a laptop that works, although most of the software I run on it is open source. Before you ask, I ran Gentoo and I've been using Linux for 12 years, so it's not like I 'didn't know what I was doing'. Quite the contrary, because I did, I switched.

As a side note, we're actually hosting our second Open Source and business conference in March. We held one last year and the idea is to examine the future of open source in commercial environments.

Oh, and here's my list of OSS apps, just to add to the list:

Dev-PHP - Web application IDE
WAMPserver - Web application platform
VLC - Media player
Putty - Secure remote access via SSH
WinSCP - Secure remote file transfer
Gallery - Web-based image gallery
GeekLog - Blog software
Joomla - Web content management
NetOffice - Web-based client management
RSSOwl - RSS reader
Azureus - BitTorrent client
PeerGuardian - P2P firewall
Blender - 3D design tool
PSI - IM Client
FedoraDS - LDAP server
DimDim - WebEx clone
WebHuddle - WebEx clone
Asterisk - PBX server
GAIM - IM client
CygwinX - XWindows for Windows
Audacity - Audio editor
Jashaka - Video editor
DB Designer - ERD for databases

There's probably a million more apps I use on a daily basis, but I really don't keep track...

Chris.

My theories for why OSS is not more widely adopted:

•  Piracy is more widespread than you think.  Consequently, the price advantage Linux has over Windows is not what you think.
  
•  Advertising and marketing are more important than you think.  People don't know this stuff is out there and easy to use.
  
•  Interoperability is more important than you think.  Everyone is going to be e-mailing you Word documents, and you gotta read those, right?  (Tip:  You can install Microsoft Office in Linux, using Wine).
  
•  Human capital is more important than you think.  It's a lot easier to find IT support staff who know Windows than those who know desktop Linux.  Same thing with hiring secretaries.
  
•  Brand identity is more important than you think.  This is why people are willing to pay thousands more for an Acura that has fewer features than a tricked-out Honda.  The Linux brand, for me at least, carries the image of a Dennis Kucinich-supporting impoverished college student who writes term papers in Emacs.  (And I like Linux).
  

I use & like Firefox.  But the reason my work computer is still a Windows box is because of file format conversion & printing problems.  My clients send me things in PowerPoint, Visio, and MSWord.  While I can open these files in OpenOffice (except for Visio, for which there is Dia), the formatting gets screwed up 90% of the time.  And I can't afford to spend a bunch of time each revision making sure the formatting is still correct.  I do use Outlook as well, and hate it.  The only advantage is that it syncs with my Treo, using GoodLink.  

Thalia

Yeah, I've had me some OSS. I wouldn't call it a kink, but I like it from time to time.

But seriously...  like, apparently, everyone else here, I use Firefox. At work, on my PC, I use it all the time because I really dislike IE. At home, on my Mac, I use Safari more often. Reason being, honestly, that it looks better. I know that's shallow, but it's true. Since I mostly just surf, it's not a big deal. I use Firefox fairly often though, even on the Mac. It has great plug-ins and does things Safari doesn't do. Some examples: download YouTube videos, chat in Gmail, and block javascripts from sites (that's mostly for when I'm on the PC). Perhaps Safari and IE cover those bases too, but I found it easier to do on Firefox.

I've never used Open Office, but I'm tempted. There's certainly alot I don't like about MSOffice, or at least the 100 year old version I'm running now. My wife is a writer by trade, so she's pretty much sticking to Word unless she feels 100% comfortable she can trade documents with her editors without their being any issues, any at all.

I do use Adium (an IM client), Cyberduck (FTP), PureFTPd Manager (an FTP server), Audacity, Paparazzi, Colloquy (for chat), Taco (an html editor. I love that program) and some others, though I've downloaded scores of OSS programs I never actually use. All the programs named above work great (ok, Audacity crashes sometimes) and for many of them I'd be happy to pay (some take donations, so that's cool).

Which brings me to another point -- at least for Mac, there are tons of great programs at very affordable prices. When I went looking for an RSS aggregator, I decided to pay for NetNewsWire, because it was the best of the programs I'd tried and easily worth the money. It's become the most-used program on my computer lately. I almost bought Scrivener too, but decided I don't really need it, although I think it's a wonderful program (all it needs to make it perfect, imo, is some light word-processing power, like spellcheck). I think alot of people are also not aware of these inexpensive programs, and would use them if they knew, but all you ever hear about is the already established major player.

Of course, this last point is less true if you spend time among the blogging community, especially the sectors populated by lots of developers and other techie types. In response to the comment about OSS programs being aimed at developers, I think that is somewhat true, but is not always a detriment. It's great for people who are just barely tech-savvy, like myself. I didn't know much about FTP but managed to get a server set up on my computer using PureFTPd Manager anyway. And now I know more about how FTP works. No, it wasn't exactly "plug-n-play" simple, but it wasn't what I'd term "aimed at developers." Ditto a bunch of the other programs listed above. And many of them have been very helpful with questions, either directly or through the faqs and boards they almost always have on their sites.

There are also, kind of in the same vein as OSS programs, some great free sites that I think are worth mentioning. Backpack (www.backpackit.com) is the best organizational tool I've used in a long time. And it's perfectly free.

p.s. - sorry for the lack of links. I'm at work.

Now with caps!

All you need to know about open source is best understood by comparing OSS to Apple's software vs. Windows.

Windows is the default (for various legacy business reasons).

Apple has carved out an enduser niche by making their software work the way the user intuitively expects it to.

OSS developers make their software work by doing things they want to do. Few end user wants the same values as a  high level oss coder -- someone who is extremely comfortable with the command line and generally disdains a gui interfance. Marketing? A foreign concept. Usability design? Mere mumbo-jumbo.

OSS had its shot and failed. Its like brazil..perpetually the software of the future. Anything that is built for mass adoption is unlikely to be produced from the OSS community. (Firefox is the counter example that proves the rule.)

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

What's holding OSS back?  First a foremost is name recognition.  Let's take Firefox as an example of the most well known of the OSS alternatives listed above.  Dollars to donuts, your average computer user could not tell you what it is.  And I bet a large portion of the people who do know what Firefox is, don't use it for some reason or another (more on that in a moment).  I would guess that it's even worse for programs like Open Office and The Gimp.

The second thing standing in the way of OSS adoption is your average user's inability or lack-of-desire to learn something new.  IE comes with Windows, I know how to use IE, therefore why try something new and unfamiliar?  With something as easy to use as a web-browser, trying to convert users to something as big and complex as Open Office or The Gimp faces even tougher challenges.  Also, the availability of pirated versions of MS Office and Photoshop compound the problem.

Don't take this the wrong way, though.  I love OSS.  I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim (a nice chat client that supports most chat protocols, including Messenger, Yahoo, AOL, Jabber, etc) on my Windows partition.  While, most of my time (read: when not playing games) is spent in a Linux environment: OpenSUSE 10.2 on my main computer and Damn Small Linux on my ancient 400mhz Celeron laptop.  I also tell everyone I can about OSS alternatives.  But the thing is I have to tell everyone about it.  Rarely do I run into someone who already knows that Open Office is a viable, free alternative to MS Office for the home computer (whether or not Open Office is ready to replace MS Office in the business environment, though, is another thread in and of itself).

Quite a few of the posters here talk about using firefox, so I took a look at our stats page to see what the breakdown is.

The site is accessed 60% of the time by "Mozilla 5.0" agents, which almost always means Firefox and Safari.  22% of the time it's Internet Explorer, and the rest is almost all bot clients, with the exception of what appears to be exactly one Opera user (.4%).

(is 3fingerspointback)

With Windows, there are some great and helpful sites out there, like pc mechanic and this one for sensitive souls. Now, I'm aware that within these sights, there are linux subset advice threads, but the majority of users are Windows Vets (and all-too-familiar with the problems inherent).

The Ubuntu forums just flat-out aren't very helpful. Which sucks, and inhibits the spread of the Open Source meme. Gee, those people are kind of jerks, guess I'll stick with shit people are empathetic about, 'eh?

Every little thing I've got going on my Ubuntu box requires me to search & frequently (7 times out of 10, say) ask for assistance, from a wireless card to USB drivers.

I make a lot of flyers & ads with Adobe. I would gladly use OSS for this work, if the equivalent existed. I haven't seen it, unlike just about everything else. Clues, anyone? Open Office doesn't count, by the way.

----- The earth may fail, but we will quiver

After my gripe upthread, it seems fitting that I should detail the OSS that I'm actually using.  Stuff with a star is stuff I'd recommend to anyone.

At Work:
*Firefox for wasting time
gVim for text editing
Tera Term to talk over serial ports
putty to talk over the network
*Filezilla as an FTP client
My employer's IDE tool, which is based off of Eclipse.
Cygwin, which is distributed as part of a commercial tool we use.

At home:
*Firefox for surfing the web
Thunderbird for email.  No star, because it's a little slow for an email client.
*Azureus bittorrent client.  Bulky but hey, gotta represent my Eclipse buds.
*OpenOffice.org for document and spreadsheets
MoneyManagerEx to get my life in order (still beta, no star yet)
gVim for text editing
*Inkscape to make the TnT logo
*GIMP for image manipulation
*VLC media player when QuickTime and DivX player doesn't work (I like DivX player better than VLC because I find it more intuitive, and it seems to have better performance than WMP when my computer is busy)

(is 3fingerspointback)

In case anyone didn't know, treesandthings.com is run on opensource software - linux, apache, mysql, perl and scoop...  

Anyone here use Songbird? Seems like it's a pretty cool combination music player/web browser. I've debated grabbing it, but for whatever reason just never got around to it. There's a tutorial on how to use it here.
Thoughts?

Somewhere in my soul, there's always Rock -n- Roll... Joe Strummer