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What's Wrong with the Open Source Community?
An anonymous reader writes "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us says a Pogo-quoting James Turner, in trying to pinpoint "What's Wrong with the Open Source Community?" for LinuxWorld this morning. But he doesn't *just* say that it's we developers ourselves, he also has five hard-to-deny reasons, including 'Open source developers often scratch the same itch' and 'Open Source developers love a good feud.' He also suggests we often approach the whole issue of encouraging migration to Linux from Windows entirely wrongly." There's also a decent rebuttal with this story as well - worth reading.
showering, maybe?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
They're not being paid.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
is entirely wrong.
We slashdot each other's sites!
I think it is high time for the community to get over its self-delusion of being "libertarian" and realize that it is, actually, authoritarian communist. Every successful open source project is run in a top-down authoritarian structure. There is no room for dissent (just watch this post get attacked) and alternative (and profitable) business models are attacked ceaselessly and characterized as "evil". You guys are re-living the soviet revolution, only entirely within the confines of the internet. I predict that the open source movement will be just as unsuccessful. Deal with it.
They are a natural human reaction to perceived attacks on X, where X is something into which a great deal of time/work/hope has been invested.
It's not just X, either, but also emacs, KDE, Gnome...
my pet machine
These are exactly the reasons why I upgraded to Windows XP from my Debian distro. Wow! Look at these neat cerulean blue taskbars! I've never looked back.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Isn't "fat" and "overweight" redundant? Also, I think you forgot "pasty skinned". So, dump either "fat" or "overweight" and replace it with "pasty skinned" and you have yourself a winner (or loser, depending on your point of view).
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Offtopic as hell, but if it is my opinion that the sky is filled with invisible Skittle monsters that feed on Ozone and exhale oxygen, is that not wrong?
-9mm-
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
Sign of a Troll #1,203: Critizing people for obeying the law.
The great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid: People are less suspicious of you.
but Mao did shower more often.
It is quite possible for the open source community to be quite immature, yet still more mature than Ballmer, Jobs or Darl.
1. Too many companies "scratch the same itch."
.Net. HP-UX vs AIX. For every interesting commercial technology, there are two bitterly feuding camps that spend as much time taking potshots at each other as in improving their own products.
We hear that commercial software companies come up with new ideas because they "wanted to make some money." In other words, there was some need they had for a new application, and they "scratched" it by coming up with a tool. The problem is, it's not uncommon to end up with two or three (or more!) different packages doing the same thing. For a specific example, look at what's happened with the relational databases, where there are now several competing packages that have to be supported by each distribution.
2. Commercial software companies love a good feud.
Oracle vs Microsoft. Java vs
3. Commercial software companies often scratch the wrong itch.
The problem with commercial development is that the developers often aren't the consumers of their products, and thus don't feel the pain of their mistakes. The other problem with commercial software development is that they often don't fix problems or develop new features that aren't going to make them money.
4. In the commercial software community, you're either "with us or against us"
Attempts to point out flaws or places where there's room for improvement in an application usually lead directly to legal action. Attempts to contact the company directly lead to either unqulaified indivduals, fees, or, again, legal action. Direct comment from the companies if laded with fear, uncertainty, and doubt: "The GPL is a cancer." "Linux is stealing my IP." "Hey! No benchmarking."
5. The commercial software community has a huge chip on its shoulder...called Microsoft
Although Linux is also a popular a target lately too, the merest mention of MS is like a bull having a red cape waved before his eyes. All reason and sense of decorum flies out the window. And while I'm first in line to throw rotten tomatoes at Bill Gates, it's harmful to the community. The reality is that Microsoft owns the lion's share of the non-server OS market. If the first thing you tell all these people who own Windows is that they are idiots, you're not starting out on very good ground to convert them.
George W. Bush declares the United States a 'one-party nation' after coming to the conclusion that the multi-party system just wasn't allowing the nation to reach its full potential.
showering, maybe?
Yeah, here's a description of one particularly fanatical 'open-source supporter' (from PBS).
"If he was busy he didn't bathe, he didn't change clothes. We were in New York and the demo that we had crashed the evening before the announcement, and Bill worked all night with some other engineers to fix it. Well it didn't occur to him to take ten minutes for a shower after that, it just didn't occur to him that that was important, and he badly needed a shower that day."
Please step forward, Mr.Gates. But not too close.
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