This is a rant against open source software.

The general opinion is that open source software is cool. It is valuable because you can recompile and rebuild the software in question, so as a community eventually this means always improved software.

Well, let's take Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client, as a perfect counter-example of this.

Someone I am willing to help migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird. Because you know Thunderbird may not be nearly as bad performing email authentication correctly or be as much tied to the Windows operating system version as Outlook is.

Guess what? Downloading and installing Thunderbird is where it shines. Really simple. Then that's where it starts to be of no use at all. When Thunderbird starts, it makes it possible to import anything, or a fraction of, what was used in the previous email client, that is, emails, address book, account parameters.

Except it does not. It keeps insisting that Outlook is not there even though it is. Installing a version of Thunderbird that matches Outlook bitness, that is 32-bit and 32-bit, does not help either. So where do we go then ?

This is my tiny real world usage of open source software. And the morale to the story is, keep using proprietary software.