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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.
is that if you go into an IRC channel for any non main-stream OS (os/2, linux, mac, etc) and ask a question, you're going to get beaten up by assholes
:)
Uhhh.... I think that's just IRC, dude.
Place sig here.
The author should stop griping about the difficulties of playing DVD's, because the MPAA has not allowed linux users a free, legal way to play dvd's. DeCSS, which is what most dvd-playing software is based upon, is illegal in the US. The author loses a lot of credibility by not having his facts straight....he looks like a damn n00b.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Compromised machine info: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003 /debian-devel-announce-200311/msg00012.html || Down: gluck (people, packages.d.o); || more info at http://www.wiggy.net/debian/
While lists.debian.org is down, a little bit of digging would have given you the Google cache. Also, it says right there that packages.debian.org is down. How much clearer can it get? I agree, it'd be better if someone had explained the situation instead of flaming, but the information was right there.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I write free software for a living, and I'm getting paid. I'm writing an application for a vertical market (i.e. a market with very few customers). They pay me to provide the functionality they need, and they don't care about the license.
In the other end, the horizontal market, people are getting paid as well. The Linux kernel, Mozilla, and Open Office are primarily developed by people getting paid to do so.
And in-between these two extremes, people are getting paid as well. Samba, Apache, GCC, GDB and other popular network and development applications are primarily being developed by people getting paid to do so.
It is true that most free software applications, if you count them on sourceforge, are developed by amateurs in their spare time. But most of these applications have very few users as well.
Most of the free software most people use are developed by people getting paid to do so.
What's often forgotten is that the Kuomintang party (of which Chiang Kai-Shek was leader 1925-1975) was actually founded on democratic principles and the party was elected to power in China.
Elections were also held while Kuomintang was in power on the mainland.
It wasn't untill civil war started and they got chucked out by the communists that things degraded to a good old 1 party dictatorship on Taiwan.
(I'm ofcourse painting things a bit rosy but the democracy in China was above average measured by the political standards of 1910-1920.)
His current article is a follow-up to a previous article about Linux NOT being ready for the desktop because it didn't work with his 802.11g card and wouldn't play DVD's "out of the box".
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/38038.htm
In that article, his solution was to award "kudos" (as you noted) for fixing the "problems" he claimed that rendered Linux "dead" on the desktop.
I believe that the real solution is to only purchase products from vendors that support Linux.
As for developers focusing on other aspects, that would be nice. But I'm not about to ask someone who is giving me their labour for free to work harder for my benefit.
I will contribute financially to projects and I will purchase Linux-friendly hardware and let the vendors know that I'm using it with Linux.
There are so many ways you can contribute to projects you deem worthwhile.
#1. Help with the code.
#2. Money - always appreciated.
#3. Testing & submitting GOOD bug reports.
#4. Helping with documentation.
#5. Maintaining your own "HowTo" for your system.
etc.
#2.
Three entirely different worlds.
#1. Microsoft - 95%+ of the desktop so any vendor shipping a product also included Windows drivers.
#2. Apple - small marketshare so it compensates by restricting hardware selection. That way it can ensure that the drivers are available.
#3. Linux - small desktop marketshare but it doesn't attempt to limit the hardware choices. So YOU have to be carefull about what hardware you purchase. Some work flawlessly, some work okay, some suck bad, some don't work at all.
Now, the problems.
#1. Different vendors write drivers that MAY NOT WORK NICELY with other vendor's drivers. That's one of the reasons that you're told to "Remove the driver, re-install the driver, did that fix it?"
#2. Limited selection. What else can be said?
#3. Better than #1, but still problems with un-supported hardware drivers. The good news is you can easily identify and remove the evil drivers. The bad news is that those drivers might be for hardware that your really need.