Microsoft's advantage over open-source

Now, I realize that open-source software has many advantages. This posting is not about them. Go Google "open source advantage" to see the multitude of postings that cover that subject. No, this posting is about Microsoft's advantage over the open source development community. Horrors!

No, not horrors... what was the other word of which I was thinking?

Oh, yeah. Boredom.

Huh?

Here is the back story. I was recently revising my resume using OpenOffice Writer. All in all, Open Office is a pretty solid office suite, especially for the price (which is free, if you didn't know.) However, I encountered some problems* when saving to Rich Text Format (.RTF). Why did I choose .RTF? So that people can open the file with a minimum of hassle. This would be preferable to sending out my resume in OpenOffice Writer's default format (.ODS), which would basically require people to have OpenOffice installed** if they wanted to read it. Reading the resume, of course, being the goal of sending it out in the first place, instead of having the recipients do something such as ignore the file. Microsoft can't really say that it is ahead in this part of the game: just ask anyone who has tried to send a Word 2007 (.DOCX) file to someone using a plain vanilla version of Word 2003.

So, I encountered a problem with formatting in my document when I tried to save the document in a form that doesn't require me to provide free technical support to the people to whom I send the document. This problem is one known to the OpenOffice user community, and I would hope it is known to the developers within that community. (Sadly, my coding skills are as of yet insufficient to grab the raw source code and fix it myself.) Apparently, this issue (which perusal of the forums will reveal has been known about for at least a year) is too boring (not sufficiently interesting) to attract the unpaid programming efforts of the open source community to effect a fix.

And therein lies my realization of an advantage Microsoft (or any other company) has over the open source development community: money. You see, money is what you give people to do things that they otherwise not be inclined to do. Things that might make them bored. So, when a problem is sufficiently boring, the (largely unpaid) open source community might never get around to fixing it. A company like Microsoft, on the other hand, can decide that the problem needs to get fixed and pay someone to do the boring work. (Actually making that decision is a whole other mess, mind you.)

The moral of the story: a boring problem led to me paying Microsoft for a copy of Office 2007.

* Specifically, problems with bullets and indentation. More specifically, said bullets and indentation not always being present after the file was saved, closed, and reopened. This is a known issue and discussions can be found in the OpenOffice Community Forum. There are workarounds, but the issue has not yet been fixed in code.

** There are plug-ins for Microsoft Office that allow this, but you never want to assume that optional third-party components are installed.