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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.
While Bill Gates may be the person that many of us love to hate, he is the icon of Microsoft, and puts a human face on an otherwise impersonal corporation. He just looks unassuming, and mild mannered... kind of a "geek next door" look.
If someone in the open source community were to step forward to become the poster boy and PR representative to counter the FUD that Gates distributes to the media, it would probably help immensely.
Of course, with a 20 in charisma, he's going to be rather hard to defeat.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
It's in the nature of the open source movement that there's no-one who can actually appoint leaders. But don't we already have de facto leaders? People like ESR, RMS, Perens, O'Reilly etc. who speak up for open source when there is some controversy? In fact, Jay Greenspan seems to acknowledge this in his article.
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Warning: Rant: The biggest problem with open source is user interface. I see plenty of programmers involved, but few UI experts, let alone serious usability testing. Until this happens, I'm sorry, but open source doesn't have a chance. Done mark me as a "traitor". I'm a big fan of the open source movement, but I'm also a programmer with 22 years in the field. The fact that most open source software is difficult for me to use is proof enough. Sorry, but that's the cold hard facts.