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Will Open Source Ever Become Mainstream?
Prabhu Ramachandran asks: "I am a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and as part of a course project I am trying to gather comments on the following question: Will the Open Source and Free Software communities develop software that will find widespread adoption amongst the mainstream, or is such software, by its nature, suitable only for sophisticated users?
As part of my literature survey I found an academic perspective that seemed to indicate that open source projects do not reach the mainstream because the developers tend to listen only to their smartest customers. There also seems to be a lack of detailed documentation and an easy-to-use interface which normally attract the not-so-sophisticated users. I would like to hear the thoughts of Open Source developers and others on this issue. If you would like to view my references or the comments posted on a website hosted for this purpose, please visit my website." There have already been some interesting comments posted on his website. What is your take on this issue?
You're forgetting great applications like CDEx and LAME. Both of which are open source, and used by many many people. Most average users don't care where software came from as long as it works.
No, they will not become mainstream. They would, were it not for the fact that the law and the corporate media distributers and such are restricting many of the popular uses of an operating system and software. DRM and security protocols will continue to make matters worse. It would be like buying a toaster that you're not allowed to make toast with or that Wonder Bread designs their bread to go soggy in. It would make a good paperweight!
power geeks will write things for people like themselves. It only makes sense to invest your time into things that will either benefit you, or interest you.
When the mainstream writes thier own software (read, yea right) then they will write to the masses.
Maybe I'm closed minded, but I'm not holding my breath.
How many open source success stories are there, where the open-source solution is so clearly superior that it's used by everyone? Uh, zero.
Well, everyone is probably an exaggeration in some cases, but not in others. Are there any closed-source, proprietary DNS servers, for example? But a sendmail/pop3d/imapd combination is competitive with some proprietary mail solutions (if you aren't into workflow/groupware it's usable in place of Exchange/Lotus etc).
Basically, it all depends how you define mainstream. GCC and xemacs and make and perl are all used by "mainstream" Unix software developers for example. But there's a long way to go before StarOffice is used by mainstream secretaries, or Moray replaces Maya anywhere.
I believe it will be the companies which package the software and pretty-up the UI and features who will deliver it to the consumers (think IBM, RedHat, The Kompany, etc).
I think it's unrealistic to think that everyday computer users will become more computer savvy (why should they?). So don't expect to see grandma checking out freshmeat.net any time soon. But now that Walmart is selling Linux preinstalled on lost cost computers the doors for exposing non-technical people to open source are open.
The use of published, universally accessible standards are exactly what makes open technology flourish over proprietary systems. Think VHS vs. Betamax. Think Internet vs. Novell. Think 8086 vs. Macintosh. Free and open standards always beat proprietary technology.
"Will the Open Source and Free Software communities develop software that will find widespread adoption amongst the mainstream, or is such software, by its nature, suitable only for sophisticated users?"
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
You would be surprised by how many military web servers are running IIS. There are a lot of underqualified administrators out there and the military is no exception.
As fas as open source applications that are good enough to compete with proprietary software, Gnucleus is probably the best Gnutella client for the end user--easiest to install and upgrade, best documentation, best UI, best user experience in general. It's not used by everyone, but it's clearly good enough to compete with proprietary software.
So what is preventing this from happening? Microsoft
- Microsoft has a monopoly in operating systems.
- Microsoft does not bundle any open source software with its OS (although it has plundered open source, returning nothing when the OSS license allows (BSD))
- Microsoft prevents large computer manufacturers from selling PCs with other OSes. (The "Microsoft Tax")
All that users get is a Windows computer with no source. Many users are content with this.Widespread open source adoption will depend on the efforts of distributors, such as RedHat, and the downfall of Microsoft as a monopoly. Open Source software will not stand on its own merits (although I believe that it could).
Before I drone on about why open source software is the way it is; open source is mainstream just no one knows it.
How many people surf the web without querying a DNS server running Bind? How many send email and have that email get touched by a sendmail server or some other open source application? How many people visit web sites running Apache with PHP and MySQL or Postgresql?
People are using open source software every day and have no idea they are.
I hope open source software doesn't start pandering to the lowest common denominator with regards to the intelligence of it's users. That is the beauty of open source software, it's for people that want to do cool shit rather than do something easily. It's a question of power over ease of use. What is easier to use Notepad or Emacs? Notepad is much less sophisticated and much easier to use. Emacs is extremely powerful but requires a tremendous amount of affort from the user to learn all of it's features (and I still don't know half of it). Now granted Notepad wasn't designed to replace emacs, but I think my point is still valid.
What many people fail to recognize is that because open source is not Microsoft, it doesn't need to gauge it's success in the same way. A commercial software company has to sell a certain amount of software in order to have money to pay all of it's people, support the users and create a new version. Open source has none of these limitations. Open source software is successful when people use it and benefit from it. My open source project gets about 600 downloads a month, is it successful? I think so.
Everyone is always looking for some measuring stick to gauge the success of Open Source as if millions of people using it aren't enough. People talk about success meaning that your grandmother can use it. The open source community is selfserving; we make software that we want, not software your grandmother wants. We make software that is not that user-friendly but kicks ass if you take the time to learn it.
LoRider
A real problem with Linux is that no is in charge.
It's still stunning to me that a major distro can ship with key applications that won't cut-and paste (and what's the binding now? Control-C? Shift-Control-C? Alt-C? Alt-Shift-C?)
And provide important tools that misbehave or even crash in nearly trivial ways. Here's my short list:
(And how about that libgcc.so helper library? I remember the day that showed up when we tried to ship an executable from one machine to another.
Stupid, stupid us.)
There are plenty enough things to dislike about Microsoft systems, but at least someone is in charge and knows not to ship things that are obviously broken, or treat the user's time and effort as being totally insignificant.
I will continue to use Linux, but it's pretty clear that the same economic factors that sunk Windows/NT under many layers of complification are at work in Linux, only the end result is going to be much worse.
I mean look at Windows. What is Open Directory? But a rip off of LDAP. Exchange a rip off of OpenMail. Why do you think Samba works so well? SMB was ripped off from DEC(I believe).
Frankly, did M$ create anything on the workstation/server side that wasn't first created on UNIX or Open Source.
Its first created for UNIX and then ported over to M$ and sold as their original work.
I think so. It's surpassed Mac and Novell in the server share (I think I saw somewhere it was marching toward the 25% mark?). There are many articles here on how this country or that are moving away from proprietary and toward free or open source. Many other stories about how MS is starting to feel the heat. But the other day when I went into a school building I got into a conversation with a secretary there. She told me how her son had put Linux (mandrake) on for her at home and she really liked it. When it starts to trickle in like that, you know its starting to take hold.
I would be GLAD to give several hundred dollars to any company that can make a consistent, user-friendly, non-MS OS for my x86 hardware (all of it, not just some). Is this possible? Apple - where are you?
One of the reasons Apple's OS works so well is that it's integrated with its hardware, designed to work with it not just on top of it. Apple is in the consistency biz, which is why they wouldn't be interested in selling a copy of OS X for the ugly monster that is PC hardware, unless of course it was their own x86-based design, with the advantages of current Mac hardware.
Why not take that several hundred dollars and just save it- and use it to buy a Mac when your PCs outlive their usefulness in a year or two.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Of course the only bad part about bringing her over is that she gives me a hard time when I slip and call it lihnux instead of lienux. I've always called it lienux (you know like before that recording), but I figured I'd go with the mainstream at work and call it lihnux so nobody gets confused. But it just sounds less manly, so to her I'm being a wussy when I say lihnux, and ... well it is pretty funny... and nobody wants to look like a wussy to his wife, eh?
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
who only got her first computer this year uses my Mandrake/KDE box right alongside her own Mac without any problems. In fact she prefers it because of the wide range of software freely available for her to use and she's asked me to build her one.
It's got all the pretty icons, buttons, clicky things the Mac does. They work just as well. They're just as "intuitive" to her and the Linux box actually crashes a bit less often than her Mac.
It lacks a bit of "fit and finish." Geeks seem to always leave off at the "rubbing out the finish endlessly" stage, but KDE has made particular strides along that line recently and don't look to be slowing down.
Open Source software is already perfectly acceptable to "Joe User." There's nothing "geekier" about Kword than there is about MS Word.
This is not the same thing as being accepted however. Although the press still seems to take cracks at the "geekiness" of OSS those cracks are almost always a couple years out of date and tends to harp on the CLI even though that's a none issue ( and the same press praises Apple for putting the command line back. Go figure). They effect the perceptions of said "Joe User" though.
Given time though I'll bet you anything that in the future the idea of a propriatary OS or WP will seem just plain doofey to the average Joe. Times change and perceptions change and OSS just keeps getting better and better without ever "forcing" expensive and pointless updates. Schools are starting to use it and as Apple proved getting it into the schools creates a user base. That's why Bill will send Steve to "Joe Blow Elementary School," or even go himself.
You never saw Jack Welch going there because they used Phillips lightbulbs instead of GE.
Here's a test you can do if you're so inclined. Take two Windows boxen and a KDE box and load up Word/Kword/OOWord in one of each. Take an average Joe and set them down to play with each. After he's played around for an hour or so ask him which one he wants, this one for $400 or one of the other two for free? Bet you the only functional difference he sees between the three is the price.
Ok, what's the catch with my mom? *I* installed the Linux. Not her.
But then she didn't install her Mac OS either.
KFG
There also seems to be a lack of detailed documentation
That's it for me in a nutshell. Forget the "mainstream" -- the lack of good documentation renders a lot of otherwise nice software useless in the IT workplace.
Look at it this way: if you pay an admin $60/hr., every hour he or she spends struggling with your fragmentary docs or (much) worse, reading the source to figure out what's going on, reduces the cost-competitiveness of your software versus a commercial product by $60. In a big project, multiply that by the multiple admins and developers who have to struggle with it, and it's not long before your free-as-in-speech software is much more expensive than the free-in-no-way commercial alternative.
Forget the broader social issues, forget the long term. Management does not think that way, and they have compelling incentives not to. And most of all, forget the dollar cost of the software. Cost of software is almost always trivial compared to the cost of the labor required to maintain it, even with expensive packages like Oracle and (may god pity you if you have to deal with it) Interwoven. The real question from a "straight" business perspective is: how long will it take us to have Package X up and running smoothly? From a business perspective, that's the whole issue.
The idea that businessmen can be persuaded on a large scale to make decisions on something other than relatively short term ROI calculations is a fantasy. That's what federal regulation is for. If you want to move product -- and that includes free software -- you must understand your customers' needs and satisfy them better than the competition. Free software, by and large, does not do this.
"Intuitive" GUIs only become a major issue when you're talking about non-technical users -- not that it wouldn't be nice for plenty of server apps. When it comes to ordinary end-users, you can probably skip the docs because they won't read them. The GUI becomes absolutely critical then. Again, stop thinking about whether the end user can figure out the interface, or whether it's documented -- ask yourself, "Is my free package as easy to use as the competition's non-free package?" If your answer is no, go fix your interface problem.
Finally -- and slightly off-topic -- the notion that point-and-drool idiot-proof interfaces will cripple a program is nonsense. Sure, some things don't translate to GUIs well, but a lot of stuff will, and you can still provide a CLI/config file interface to the advanced users.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Of course it will. Just look at OS X. That seems pretty mainstream to me.
Eventually, we'll have a nice solid base of open-source applications, and companies will just find it easier to base an application on an existing open-source project than start a new one from scratch. They'll be able to make money by taking a hard-core, geek-only, but fundamentally powerful and useful program, and turning it into a grandma-friendly desktop app. For Linux, a lot of distros are basically doing just that (Red Hat, Mandrake, Xandros, blah, blah, blah)
Companies that try to start from scratch will have to work twice as hard to make the same product. They'll make more, of course, because they won't have to GPL their stuff, but I think probably the extra pay won't justify the extra work.
Yes. Since it is the smart ones who also make things easy to use and write documentation. Therefore, as long as the project includes people that are aware of making the software user friendly, it can become mainstream. Linux is heading toward that direction. Computers used to be mainstream only in government, then by hobbiests, then businesses, and now finally consumers. This is similar to Linux, except it never began with the government. It is only a matter of time.
Question everything.
While there is no "one" reason why open source isn't the software of choice for Joe SixPack, I'd have to say that the lack of a marketing budget is a bigger one than people might think.
I recently gave a training seminar with a group of about 50 people who had very little computer experience. For licensing reasons, and because these people were to be sent overseas to teach computers to others, we decided to go with OpenOffice.org as the office suite to teach to people. (We also gave them a CD with that and some other free software with them that they could give to people overseas.)
The end result? Several were surprised at how easy it was, and amazed that such a thing was free. It has some quirks still, but overall it is a pretty good replacement for Microsoft Office. But the key was that *no one knew about it* before the training. Geeks seek this stuff out, but the average user doesn't know about the alternatives until they are told about them.
In the end, magazines and popular computer information sources are where these programs have the potential to get a wider user base, but they tend to be funded by commercial software vendors. To heavily promote OpenOffice.org may be to alienate Microsoft, and it's big advertising dollars. Word is slowly spreading, and I think over the next few years, you will see increasing awareness and adoption of open source, but right now it doesn't have the marketing muscle behind it to cause a rapid increase in adoption.
Everyone is missing the single biggest and most obvious reason that Open Source projects don't generally reach the masses. There is no marketing!!! The masses don't buy what's best. And they don't even manage to buy what they need most of the time. They buy whatever the flashy ads tell them to buy. They buy whatever the retail tie-in's dump right in front of their face when they walk in the store. They buy whatever the commissioned salesperson tells them they need to buy. And that's why Open Source solutions don't hit the big time. Nobody is spending millions (or billions in the case of some large commercial software vendors) to put Open Source solutions in front of the masses. Ever seen an ad for RedHat on network TV? Didn't think so. Do I even need to ask if you saw an XP ad during it's launch? Didn't think so.
I am a senior indie contractor working for NASA. I just saved 5% of my project budget for this year by using Open Source vs. Micro$oft. Since the division of NASA I do work for is roughly 1/2 PC, 1/2 Mac (OS X), Open Source (well, ok, + Java) was the *only* feasible solution.
So is 5% significant enough? It was for my company -- which runs as a shoestring outfit, and which NASA has repeatedly awarded (and rewarded) for giving good value for the buck.
Open Source has been saving my various employers (AOL, Siemens, Motorola, NASA) big bucks since the early nineties (back then we got a contract to do AIX + Sun work for Motorola, and lacking the funds to buy AIX & Sun boxen, we used Slackware 2.2 (yay Slack) for development, and recompiled (flawlessly) for AIX + Sun.
Obviously, I owe much of my entire 17 year career in software to Open Source and plan to dedicate the rest of it to bringing Open Source to NASA. Bottom line: every dollar NASA spends on proprietary software is IMHO mostly wasted, whereas every dollar NASA spends on me working with Open Source projects benefits NASA, me, and Open Source. Is it an uphill battle? Yes! Many of the Young Turks I work with (believe it or not!) are MS-only and do not use Open Source. But Open Source has benefitted my career so much, I owe it to Open Source to repay the favor.
FYI: Open Source packages used in the current project: Red Hat, Cygwin, Perl, PHP, Apache, Tomcat, OpenSSH, vi (yay vi), and all those other GNU/Linux utils.
What I'm seeing now is that more and more offices are converting to Linux for servers especially for file sharing, printing and emails. What's really surprising though is that interest is also picking up on OpenOffice. We're getting more and more calls daily from companies looking for OpenOffice training for their staff.
I guess that covers business mainstream. As for consumer mainstream, it's not quite there yet. RH8 is coming close, but I'm still having problems with a lot of consumer devices. People don't usually buy on features not by OS. They ask for things like, "I want a colour printer to print my photos, that I take with my digital camera". Then they expect a simple installation disk and almost plug and play setup with nice "easy" instructions.
So until you rush out and buy a digital camera, and it has linux intructions in the box, you're not likely to see it adopted for the consumer mainstream just yet.
Well I wouldn't use postnuke or any of the phpnuke derivatives either. Rather poor security track record. Sure postnuke is a bit better, but not by much. Just go look.
Some people asked me for advice on phpnuke a couple of years ago, I took a look at the phpnuke source code and recommended they pick something else (I also emailed the author about a security problem encountered during my look and didn't get a very encouraging response).
If they haven't changed the core design and architecture then I'd continue to recommend avoiding phpnuke and its derivatives. They haven't seemed to changed it. The response from the author gave me the impression that he's more or less given up on fixing things.
They went for ezpublish in the end. Code looked pretty clean - even if something is broken, _other_ people can fix it. Just a few bugs to do with the common PHPism of stupidly mixing input filters with output filters - get backslashes in front of quotes everywhere.
Open source doesn't mean it's better. Sure you get to look inside and see if it's bad or not. However most people don't seem to look in the first place, or even care.
Example: you still have tons of people using the ISC open source products - bind, sendmail, dhcp. You won't even need to look just from the track record alone. Wonder if ISC really stands for It's Still Crap, or Insecure Software Company?