Why Open Source Doesn't Interoperate

bergie writes "There is an interesting article on Advogato on why it is so difficult for Open Source projects to interoperate or support common standards. Often cultural differences between projects, egoes, and many other issues stand in the way. The article outlines some practical ways for improving the situation, based on experiences from OSCOM efforts to get support WebDAV, SlideML and other standards into Open Source CMSs. Examples of successful interop projects include freedesktop.org, the cooperative effort between GNOME and KDE."

Comments

Various comments

[srichter]

I have been involved a little bit with the OSCOM efforts and I am impressed again and again on how they all work together. The board members of this organization are leaders from various OS Web Application servers, all having different interests and yet they can work together.

I only know Paul Everitt (one of the authors) personally, who is co-founder and used to be the CEO of Digital Creations (today Zope Corp.) - therefore one of the inventors of Zope (www.zope.org). He started the Twingle project a while ago, trying to generalize the Zope effort to create a content management Mozilla-GUI for Zope 3 to all Open Source CMS solutions.

As the article states this effort is quiet ambitious, but it also shows the power OS can have. When Paul and I started working on the original code, we used heavily XML-RPC (it is just the easiest to use for getting anything done), but Paul has since pushed towards HTTP standards, such as WebDAV. While this is much harder (i.e. I am writing a WebDAV library in JS for Mozilla) than the original approach, it allows a lot of integration possibilities later. For example, in the future we imagine that we will be able to drag and drop objects between Bitflux and Zope and vice versa for example. Also, a unified GUI will allow Content Designers to gain a skill that is much less platform-specific (in the meaning of App Server and Operating System), which makes this skill much more marketable.

BTW, OSCOM 3 will be held at Harvard University on May 15, 2003 if I remember right. So everyone interested in Web-related technologies living in Boston should drop by and check it out.

And proprietary software interoperates better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone point me to the article that explains why proprietary, Imprisoned Source Software (ISS) does not interoperate well? Oh yeah, it's because of profit motives, monopolies, cultural differences, egoes, and "many other issues".

Re:OpenSource creates de-facto standards

[Rich]

Actually, there's a pretty good specification document for VNC. I was able to write a working implementation of the protocol (for keystone) that was not derived from the ORL sources. The documentation can be found here:
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/protocol .html

Re:Because free software is not planned

[truthsearch]

From an interview with Rob Short, the vice-president of Windows Core Technology, regarding Microsoft® Windows(TM) Server 2003:

Why is there no command line only version?

We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter... It's a very tangled subsystem.

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As I also explain at MS Versus, Bill Gates has testified in federal court that Microsoft® can't modularize their operating system or document all of its APIs because it's written by groups of developers haphazardly binding software together without any clear overall design.
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What the heck?

[foxtrot]

Open Source doesn't conform to standards?

DNS?

Sendmail?

These aren't standards compliant?

And now you're going to tell me WINS and Exchange ARE?!

Perhaps the problem is not that "open source software doesn't conform to standards." Perhaps the problem is that "modern software considers itself too good for standards," which is entirely a different problem and isn't open-source specific.

-JDF

Re:Because free software is not planned

[kasperd]

Even Linus is against the creation of standard interfaces internal to the Linux kernel.

First of all it is important to keep in mind, that there are two different kinds of interfaces:

1. Internal interfaces between parts of the kernel and kernel modules.
2. External interfaces used by user mode applications.

The later are aiming against complience with UNIX and POSIX standards. It is only the internal interfaces that can be changed without notice. But notice that as long as the interfaces are changed thorugh the entire kernel users are not affected. It does mean you cannot mix code from different kernel versions, but end users are not supposed to do that.

Of course the changing interfaces are a problem for anybody who wants to develop closed source driver modules. But Linus and other kernel developers does not like closed source modules, the modules impose a problem on anybody who wants to debug kernel problems. So Linus certainly doesn't want to stop kernel development in some areas just to help developers of such closed source modules.

Interfaces are not changed without a reason. Some developers of closed source modules might think interfaces are changed to annoy them, but of course that is not the case. However they do have to understand, that support from the Linux community cannot be expected before they open their own source. Hardware vendors must understand, that writing a closed source module does not make their hardware supported by Linux, a open source driver is needed before full support is existent.

Think of it as evolution in action

[HiThere]

When standards exist, Open Source projects are frequently better about following them then closed source projects. But not necessarily. If the developers consider that the standard is really broken, then they'll ignore either it or parts of it. The only difference from closed source projects is that they won't break the standard in order to keep you from working with something else.

When standards don't exist, nobody complies with them. If something is patented, then it obviously can't be standard in any meaningful sense, unless the patent is freely useable for all standards conforming uses. Some "standards" bodies don't seem to understand this.

And when personalities come into conflict, all conformance can go by the wayside.

If I look over this list, the Open Source software generally comes out at least as good at standard conformance as the proprietary software. If for not other reason, because if it's easy to put standard conformance into a project, it's reasonably easy to retrofit it in. And features tend to not get removed (though they can be turned into compile-time optional features).

Over cycles of iteration, Open Source software either becomes standard conforming, establishes a standard, or becomes irrelevant. (I.e., evolution in action.)

E.g., would you rather try to read MSWord documents with OpenOffice, or to read OpenOffice documents with MSWord? MSWord has a positive benefit to MS with breaking adherence to the file format used by the previous version. It causes people to buy the new one. OpenOffice has no such benefit to the producer, and this is a benefit to the user.