I just read Neil Gunton's article on Open Source Myths. I've got to say that I agree with him, particularly on points 4 ("Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software") and 6 ("More choice is always better").
Every once in a while I need a really good hex editor. And let me start by saying that EMACS hexl-mode is a sad joke and the VI hex mode isn't any better.
I need a hex editor that does the following:
* Opens files in a paged manner (a gig of data doesn't fit so well in memory when you need to not shut everything down, and a half terabyte of data just doesn't fit).
* Adjust the alignment of the data so that it has nice even offsets (usually 0x8 0x10 or 0x20)
* Has a nice ASCII dump of the text on the side
* Runs under Win32 (sorry, not all of us can run under Linux at work).
And I tried a dozen different open source projects (because everyone can write a half-assed hex editor). Under Linux ghex did an ok job but really wasn't stellar. I finally gave up and downloaded a trialware HexEditor for Win32 and when it turned out to be a good product I shelled out the money for it.
Which brings me to my main criticism of free/open source software. Most of it is crap, and a lot of the stuff that isn't crap is badly in need of a polish stage.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, most of everything is crap. Most non-free software is crap and unpolished too, but you don't see most of that software. At my company we have dozens of tools to process artwork into something suitable to be used in game. If the average person picked up any of these tools they'd find the tool to be buggy, obnoxious, and generally difficult to use. However, in the very limited context of our art pipeline the tools do a very good job. But nobody here is pretending that these are stable, mature products that are suitable for the average software user.
Every time I look for a utility on freshmeat or sourceforge it seems like I have to try 5 or 6 different projects that turn out to be total crap before I can find that one project that turns out to be pretty good.
This isn't some kind of grand indictment of the Free/Open Source Software movement thing. I'm using Mozilla Firefox to post this, I edit code with EMACS, I edit config files with vim, pictures come off my camera courtesy of gphoto2, and my primary compiler is based off of gcc. There's a lot of really amazing software out there, there's just an awful lot of unpolished, unfinished, craptacular, student project-ish software that has consistently made it very difficult for me to find the good software.
Posted by matt at July 26, 2004 11:58 AMSo, what hex editor did you go with in the end?
Posted by: Magica de Hex-Editor at August 15, 2004 02:03 PMI wound up using Hex Workshop, which has all the bells and whistles I could ask for.
Posted by: Matt at August 18, 2004 02:20 PMI realize that it doesn't always make sense to comment on blog posts about a month old, but still :)
This is actually an old argument, and it's true that the way Neil puts it - "open source is *always* better" - the myth is patently, demonstrably, ridiculously false :) However, please be careful not to swing too far, because you *can* swing too far in the opposite direction: closed-source software is also not *always* better than the open-source alternatives, and this is *especially* true of small-scale projects. In fact, I've lost count of the times I've spent hours trawling shareware/freeware download sites looking for some kind of simple program, and had to try and reject about a dozen that mostly did the job, but were not quite there. Yes, it is the same with FOSS, just substitute SourceForge and FreshMeat for, say, download.com and tucows - but it is *the same*, not worse :)
Posted by: Peter Pentchev at August 31, 2004 02:15 AMOh yes. There's lots of crappy shareware, lots of crappy freeware, and lots of crappy commercial products. It's just unbelievably infuriating that after several hours of searching I couldn't find a FOSS hex editor (which I'd regard as a very basic piece of a programmer's toolkit) that did what I needed it to do.
Posted by: Matt at August 31, 2004 10:47 AM