Best Tool for the Job

I have recently become quite interested in open source software. As a matter of fact, I have made it to a point where I prefer, for example, Linux (in my case, Fedora,) over Microsoft's Windows. Given two functionaly equivalent pieces of software, one open source and the other closed, the clear choice is the open source option. Having said that, I will choose the best tool for the job regardless of whether or not it is open source.

One example of my choosing the best tool for the job is my choice to use Opera as my web browser. I like opera because it is a lightweight browser with a rich feature set. It has an integrated feed reader, mail client, chat client, as well as many other useful features.

More recently, I switched to using Sun's Java virtual machine as an alternative to the using the fully open source version that came bundled with Fedora. I am guessing that the open-source virtual machine has some unknown incompatibility with my hardware; Eclipse, my java-based development environment, had many stability problems until I switched virtual machines. I had been blaming the extremely poor performance on Eclipse and the fact that it was written in Java when, in fact, the problem was a faulty implementation the virtual machine. (This problem actually gave me a large amount of grief; my Google searches turned up no one else with the same problem, which is quite unusual for any computer-related problem.)

Another proprietary program that I decided to use instead of the open-source alternative is NX, a remote desktop solution that works on both Linux and Windows. I initialy tried the open-source version of it, but that gave much grief.

There are also a great many open source tools that happen to be the best tool for their respective jobs. Examples of these include Linux itself; Eclipse, my IDE; Pidgin, my instant message application; as well as a great host of other open source software solutions.

One tool that happens to be the best for its job is µTorrent. This is the absolute best Bit Torrent client available. Unfortunately, it is only available on Windows. This has been my stated reason for still having Windows Vista on my Alienware notebook. I have read that µTorrent can be run on Linux through WINE, but have had neither the time, nor the modivation to try it to this point.

Linus Torvalds, the mastermind behind Linux, also happens to hold this viewpoint. At one time, it came back to bite him. He had been using a proprietary solution for keeping track of the Linux kernel source code, but the company decided to not renew the free license that had been granted. Linus's solution to this problem was to write a new best tool for the job: git. Git is now the fastest, and arguably, the best tool for keeping track of source code. Linus was fortunate enough in being a genius that he could simply write the best tool for the job when the old one was no longer available to him.

(At this point, I'm just rambling as I'm very tired; I'll clean this up later.)