Slashdot Mirror

I don't think this article is a troll. I think its just sadly misguided. I appreciate much of the sentiment though: for the average computer user (who is not technically inclined) the variety of choices offered by OSS is intimidating, and the perceived (or actual) poor quality (or state of completion) of much of this software is effecting efforts to bring OSS to the masses.

This is, however, not the fault of developers. OSS is doing what it was always intended to do, and doing it better than ever. Developers are encouraged to experiment, build and contribute, in whatever way they like. The fault lies in the presentation of OSS software by distributors and major hosting sites, for example RedHat and SourceForge.

RedHat comes on 4 CDs. A first-time user is given more than ample opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot with options, and to choose to use software that is "sub-standard" by general commercial standards. This makes the software look bad, and that reflects on OSS as a whole.

SourceForge and FreshMeat, in searching and browsing, do not by default filter out pre-release software. Worse (IMHO) they do not have a facility to rate software (as is common on shareware sites). That makes it difficult to chose a stable, functional and quality piece of software for a particular purpose. The filtering mechanisms (other than rating) exist, but are not newbie-proof by default.

The message here is that OSS needs to prevent a user- or market-friendly outward appearance, instead of defaulting to hard-core developer modes.

To address two particular issues in the article to which I take exception:

Why gTk? Qt is older and more complete, Wx beats Qt in maturity and comes close to matching it in functionality. Wx also supports many more platforms than gTk, making it far more suitable for cross-platform development -- something OSS needs to support if its platforms are to attact commercial attention. The Wx license is also far more friendly to commercial development than gTk (or Qt).

I am making the implicit statement that commercial == proprietary, because this is how most of the world operates, and that isn't going to change any time soon. Sure, there is software that doesn't follow this model. But not a lot of it.

Next, the idea that all editors should support the OpenOffice format. Besides the fact that many of these editors predate OpenOffice, again have the question: why? What makes the OpenOffice format superior? Is it because it is based on a sucky data encoding failure called XML? Why not use a mature and powerful DTP standard like Tex?

Years of experience has shown that the golden goal of application interoperability is just not going to happen. Innovation demands going beyond standards and what has been done before. This is the only way that software -- OSS or proprietary -- has been able to progress over time. Linux's attraction compared to traditional Unix platforms comes from its differences.

XML falls far short of its goals. See my critique for a far more detailed analysis.

The short of it is that XML contains multiple redundant ways to store data, and implicit within XML is processing of data. This makes it an encoding/format that is prone to implementation errors and security concerns. It took years for the major vendors/creators of XML parsers to achieve interoperability.

A good grammar that meets the goals of XML should have a single, clear structure and be inert (no implicit processing).

The intent of XML is good; the execution is bad. XML could be greatly simplified without losing any of its power other than human readability, which is a goal of questionable virtue as it is.

Shameless self-plug, but I have a critique of XML's failure to meet its goals on my home page. You may find it interesting.

But he's allowed those misspellings--after all, his site firmly establishes his identity as a sullen, misunderstood, genius programmer goth. Sorry, make that SUPER-genius, with a girlfriend!

Thanks, this is very interesting! I have a page where I've been messing around with some thoughts about XML and how it should have been - minXML gives me some more material to think about.

Personally I prefer having the structure represented by tags, and data only in attributes. It makes it a little easier to represent certain categories of information (IMHO).

I'm in agreement on your synopsis of XML. I have an article [my ISP] on why XML doesn't meet its stated goals and, in general, sucks. But its too long to post here.

The problems with HTTP as a transport are: 1. it is heavy; 2. it isn't stateful (as you point out); and 3. its INTENDED as a security backdoor. SOAP stemmed from work on XML-RPC, and both explicitly point out that the use of HTTP gave them an easy way to circumvent firewalls.

Heavy? Yes. There are several overhead fields on requests, and typically even more on responses (since server's don't tend to be terse just because you're asking for a web service). 20 'int's encoded as strings have an insignificant overhead compared to one or two lines of HTTP header information. And we won't even get into SOAP packets...

Compression (of which some have glibly spoken) is not an acceptable solution. Accepting or responding to a compressed SOAP message involves a series of filters or parsers: http, gzip, xml, soap, field encoding. The processing overhead is tremendous - even on an otherwise idle system with a Gb ethernet, SOAP cannot get near the performance of traditional (binary encoded) RPC mechanisms (on slower networks). Not to mention that you STILL have the HTTP header overhead, because those are not compressed.

The first question people should probably be asking is: Why not ASN.1 ? Its also standard, it has a ridiculously longer history than XML, and is in widespread use. It is a terse and efficient binary encoding. And that's its perceived downfall: somewhere, someone decided (with little technical knowhow or forethrough, I might add) that human-readable protocols were a good idea for data communication between machines.

Why are companies jumping on the bandwagon? Because either they stand to make a lot of money out of developing new technology, or the stand to make money out of selling new technology, or out of converting customer applications to use or support new technology, or they are customers who have their suppliers (and internal MSCD intelligencia) telling them how wonderful and great and cool and really important it is that they break their fully working existing systems and reimplement them with a new protocol. Just because.

At the risk of /.'ing my ISP ... take a look at a doc on my home page which goes into a whole lot more depth than my Slashdot post.

I tried to get an effort like this off the ground about 4 years ago, with little success. I'm still interesting in playing with it though.