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What's Missing from Free Software?
dan.hunt asks: "Klaus Knopper was interviewed here and the interviewer, technobeast, asked: 'If you were asking the questions, what would be the 1st one you would ask?' Klaus answered in part 'What are you missing in the available Free Software, and how would you like to change that?'"
really I think this is just a function of another, larger phenomenon: with free software there is a great focus on the most common applications but not for niche applications. everyone uses a web browser, office programs, CD recording, audio extraction/encoding/playback, etc. the same is true for server systems: apache, perl, python et al, samba, SQL & friends all fill the voids in a free server system
but until recently, applications that only a few people would find useful have not been available. it's only been recently that linux has become a viable platform for audio production/editing. I think device drivers will follow soon.
it only takes one programmer to write the code and then it can be copied at a marginal cost approaching zero.
I really don't think they meant optional in the sense that the GPL software should be binary only. I think he meant optional in that each program should be packaged. Sure, many (maybe even most) programs come packaged -- for some version of some distribution. You run into lots of chances for incompatibilites that I rarely see on Windows. In fact, it's this irregularity in packaging that made me switch from Red Hat to Slackware. Slack plays much nicer with a hybrid of packages and source compiles.
No one is reaching out to the graphic design community. While they also have a tradition of copyleft, free fonts, and royalty free no cost photography, the two communities simply don't talk to each other.
(Which really isn't all that surprising since both of them tend to look down on each other as worthless parasites.)
I'm sorry, it looks good enough for programmers, but it doesn't look good. And there's a difference, especially if you want the masses to adopt it.
No Zen is good zen
Dear Santa,
We need a robust WINE implementation that permits any shrink-wrapped software bought at BestBuy to be run on any Linux box.
We need OpenOffice to fully support all the heavily-used Microsoft file formats.
We need user-interfaces that can be made to look enough like Microsoft application interfaces that retraining costs are minimized.
In short, we need to address the recurring issues that come up when you ask knowledgeable IT managers,
P.S. I need a high-quality recent-standard-conforming SVG implementation in Mozilla Firebird.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You rarely see incompatibilities on windows? Come on, you see them all the time!
One of the biggest reasons why Windows tends to fail for misterious reasons is exactly due to consistent lack of packaging. Some programs throw DLLs in the system directory. Some will write them to their own. Some will forget to increment the usage counter, and some to decrement it. Some braindead installers will overwrite files without checking the version. Others will leave with a mix where the errors of the program appear in English while the rest appears in say, Spanish.
All this results in a really horrible mess after a few months. 300MB of DLLs in the system directory that you don't know what they're for, DLLs being uninstalled because the usage counter was too low, or left lying around uselessly because it was too high. DLLs being replaced with newer but incompatible versions...
As a programmer who makes Windows apps I can say that making an installer for a large Windows programs takes quite a lot of time and experience to get it right. Meanwhile, in Gentoo I learned to make to create simple packages in a day.
All Linux package managers ensure all library versions are adequate and that no package overwrites another package's files. It might be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes to make sure everything is of the right version, but would you really prefer to have the Windows mess instead?