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Why Open Source Doesn't Interoperate

Posted by michael on from the playing-nicely-with-each-other dept.

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."

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ooooh, I know the answer! by Aliencow · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Shouldn't the answer be GNU/42 ?

  2. GNU / Linux by maharg · · Score: 0, Redundant


    Yeah - let's just hope and GNU and Linux can get their act together sometime soon
    </sarcasm>

    --

    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
  3. Re:Standards by Cereal+Box · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "No, you can't.

    Remember all that Windows software that worked on '95 but failed on NT? Good luck getting it to work on XP now."

    Yes, you can. Stop being an ass. Of course there are old programs that have compatibility problems due to some fundamental differences between the ways 9x and NT handle hardware (and the whole 16/32 bit thing), but beyond that it's pretty much certain that you can run all those old programs with no difficulties on a modern XP system. There is no question that Windows has far better backwards compatibility with its own programs than Linux does, as far as "out of the box" is concerned. Of course you can jump through hoops to get old Linux programs to work. The point is, in Windows there are basically no hoops you have to jump through to accomplish the same thing.

    "GNOME developers, for instance, *do* have a registry they can manipulate in a standard way (GConf!), a "start menu" they can manipulate via standard means, and a web browser which will render things in a standard way (gtkhtml). We have a directory layout standard and have for quite some time (yes, it's a flexible standard -- folks can, at their discretion, install apps under /opt/ or use package management systems like STOW, but that's fine; it hurts no-one, as long as the app has the minimal intelligence needed to deal with being installed under an arbitrary root and a system for locating libraries such as pkg-config)."

    These points all relate to a SINGLE desktop standard. There's also KDE and a bunch of other desktops competing for the "standard" spot. Someone needs to say "okay, this desktop is the standard Linux desktop. You don't need to use it but you can be assured that every Linux distro will at least have it." Furthermore, with your GConf example, that is a standard means of configuring only the DESKTOP, not the entire system itself (see Windows Control Panel). Sure, such a beast exists on Linux, but in many different forms -- Redhat has one, SuSE has one, etc. Someone needs to come along and say "okay, here's the 'Linux Control Panel' -- you don't have to use it, but you can be sure it will at least be there." See where this is going?