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Open Source Needs Leadership?
alessio writes: "At Webmonkey there is an article from Jay Greenspan which reports from Open Source Conference 2001, and I cannot agree with 99% of what he says. However, there is a point worth of discussion: do the Open Source/Free Software movement need a 'leadership' to better fight back new stuff from Redmond? His answer is yes, my would be no, but maybe it's not obvious."
Ahh... "organizations" (e.g. Microsoft, IBM, etc) derive from the word "organize". Despite how much you may hate Microsoft and Adobe, they have something that is really fundamental to growth, organization.
I have found in my own "big business" experience that not everything that goes on at the big business level is "right" or "the best way of doing things" but things still get done. What any business needs is a management chain that understands the best ways AND does them. Some companies have this, some don't, and some fall in the middle.
The problem with OSS has been stated, waring distros, KDE vs GNOME, 10+ window managers, 10+ distros, 10+ console text editors, 3 browsers, etc etc etc... the list can go on forever. If OSS was made into an organizational unit, these things would be minimized (or maybe 2-3 organizational units). For instance, why do we need 10 text editors? We don't... we have "preferences" but I think newbies "prefer" pico because it's easy to use (okay dont argue that XYZ is easier than pico, it's not the point).
In an organizational unit, a group of people would sit down and evaluate (to the best of their abilities) how one solution outperforms another solution. They'd run performance tests, user tests, and more importantly how easy it is to maintain a particular set of code. Once they've added everything together, they'd choose a single text editor, linux distro, etc etc.
Where, right now, let's say there are 10 text editors, each has a group of 3 people working on it. If we were to evaluate and eliminate the worthless projects (as an organization would do) we can better pool our resources together so we can have 2 maybe 3 text editors, each with 10 to 15 people working on them. Doing this increasing the time and manpower each project has and increases the power, flexibility, and usefulness of the application.
Someone mentioned the *BSD distros, there being too many of them, well there are only really 3 major ones, but then the comment was made about Theo. I don't really know Theo and I haven't spoken to him, but I don't think many of you have either. Theo had disputes with people, which he felt were strong enough to leave a particular project and start OpenBSD. This has been done all over the Linux community as well on multiple projects, so to say Theo is the only one who "can't get along" is rediculous.
Right now, every Linux project is like a bunch of a warring factions. This is a form of anarchy, and it has proven through history that anarchies do not do well in the bigger scheme of things.
The linux community, as a whole, needs some kind of organization.. and I don't mean letting Linus and Cox run the show. We need people who are business-oriented and not technical to run the organization. This way decisions can be made to better utilize the resources of the Linux community.
Besides, what is peoples obsessions with writing dull essays and "papers" about the topic du jour. Write some bloody code, instead of feeding the techie webs insatiable appetite for content, usually (as in this case) the same six or seven ideas endlessly rehashed.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Looking over the last 7 years of Windows development,, the .Net runtime to me is a fruition of all the OCX/Active X/OLE initiatives: a way for all Windows programming languages to share code easily. C#, VB, C++, Delphi, Perl, Python: all can create code that can be used in other languages, easily. This is a huge advantage to MS and to programmers - everyone leveraging everyone else's code
.NET Microsoft is going to be eating Open Source's lunch? OSS is wasting time re-writing, while MS builds a pluggable component architecture, letting programmers everywhere leverage each other's work, no matter what the language.
The problem i see with open source, especially Linux, is that no person thought of bringing the same to that world. No one has created their own CLR that everyone can add into, sharing code much more easily and helping each other more: which would be a truly open source ideal.
Instead, in ONLY 1 shocking example, there still isn't even a unified ODBC standard in Linux - totally unbelievable. Perl, Python, Lisp, on and on, each have to create their own interfaces to databases - tens of thousands of lines of code re-written over and over again to do the SAME thing.
Do you see, just from this 1 example, that with
I think that is why the writer was complaining there is no leadership in OSS. Why didn't someone think of this before for the OSS world? Why are you still programming in the dark ages, like in the ODBC example? And Mono isn't the answer, as Ximian won't be around long enough to make it happen, and it isn't innovative at all, it is just a copycat.
alex
Like all good terroristic threats to society, Open Source development is (dis)organized into cells. That way, Mr. Bill, or the government of repressistan (currently == G8) can't hire/jail/purge/kill all the developers.
I thought one of the big points of O.S. development was that people worked (or hired someone to) on what was important to them. Seems like an efficent way to allocate effort to me.
Now, I agree that most O.S. software could use some help in the usability and interface departments. And, some day, I may get off my ass and do something about it. Or not.
Annonymous Coward -- "/. - the biggest am I troll or not site on that internet dojigger"