I just read a post in Digg about how certain county governments in Holland as well as the City of Amsterdam are asking for suppliers to provide open source software in their bids. In the Digg post, however, I read a variety of comments ranging from raves for OSS to rants against OSS and in favor of paid for (read "closed source") software. Clearly, the Digg community is rather unfair to Open Source as is evident from highly charged comments against OSS. OSS end-user software still has a ways to go before being able to compete in terms of slickness of interface to that from, say a Microsoft or an Adobe. That said, however, OSS provides good enough, and sometimes excellent, alternatives to commercial products. It is true that some products really do suffer from quality of interface, ease of use and lack of documentation.

I think the direction taken by Canonical, Ltd., the creators of Ubuntu Linux, are showing the way to many other OSS communities. Ubuntu's Linux has a great interface, is generally well documented, and also provides a very good user experience. Likewise, Mozilla's Firefox is another example. For the millions Microsoft has spent in developing and promoting Internet Explorer, Firefox has proven to be a more than worthy opponent, literally kicking Microsoft's rear end in the functionality department. So much so, IE7 finally had to come out with several interface elements that were mostly popularized by Firefox.