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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.
How do you know that the same feuds and itch scratching don't happen at Sun or Microsoft? They certainly do, but you don't know this because your only interface to the firm is a PR rep. I like the transparency of the open source community. I want to see the debates and bickering take place in public, where maybe just maybe I can provide some input.
I obviously cannot vouch for the maturity and security level of everyone in the Open Source community, but I disagree with this conclusion. The partisanship and the sometimes irrational emotional responses are a problem (maybe the problem) with Open Source, but are not the result of "immaturity" or "insecurity." 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.
I agree that the community could advance more rapidly without all of the competing distributions, standards, etc., but that very same diversity is what gives Open Source its strength. The redundancy may slow things in some ways, but it helps guarantee that -- when the standards are winnowed down -- the strongest and best survive. Calling the members of the community "immature" and "insecure" is mere name-calling that is more likely to induce the exact emotional responses the author laments rather than the needed calm, rational debate on this important issue.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Well, one of the things that is definitely wrong, 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.
case in point, i just logged into the #debian channel on freenode, and asked why the package servers hadn't updated in several days.. at least 15 people got really nasty, ranging from "read the fucking channel topic" to some very nasty insults. Strangely enough, the channel topic had absolutely nothing to talk about the package servers, and the link in the topic was broken.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Before clicking through, you should know about a little bit of background information.
Check this Linux Today article. James Turner wrote an article about how Linux is DOA on the desktop because it was missing two drivers he needed for his laptop. He was scathing and he basically baited the readers into giving him the takedown he deserved (and possibly was expecting, if as is suspected he was just trolling for clicks).
In response, he announced that he was going to use this as justification for another clickbait article about how immature the Linux community is. The article in question is the new one which this Slashdot story is about.
So don't expect any substance here. This is as much about taunting Linux users for clicks as any piece by Rob Enderle or Jesse Berst -- it's merely that this time, we have someone who writes for a supposedly pro-Linux publication stooping to this level.
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If we view Free Software only as a convenience, we won't progress. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to develop a Free Software package, or to migrate a system to use Free Software. It makes no sense to put a lot of effort into seeking a convenience.
Idealism is a more long term motivator, and it's not unjustified when the focus of the idealism has already proved to be very practical.
This is party highlighted by the OpenSource Vs. Free Software terminology, but we are not enemies, it's just a choice of where you put the emphasis.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
As for the big complaint about the Microsoft shoulder-chip, I agree. Anti-Windows fanaticism is just unpleasant to hear. The point the author makes is valid - many users don't have any love for Windows either, but don't have the level of dedication to hating Microsoft that they are willing to spend hours, weeks or months futzing with their hardware and peripherals getting them to work in Linux, or learning new applications. Developers should redouble their efforts and their committment to making ease-of-use, hardware compatibility, short learning curves, and usable GUIs key elements of major Open Source projects.
His points on "Itch scratching" are well-taken. However, this is not ever likely to change when developers are unpaid volunteers. The simple fact of the matter is that people working for free will ALWAYS be inclined to work on stuff they're interested in. I'm not convinced this is an entirely bad thing as it tends to avoid monoculture, at least in these popular areas. For instance, I LIKE having a number of mail systems to choose from. This is a good thing.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I've been trying to like Linux (and hece the OS community) since 6.1 days and I keep running across the same old tired issues that prevent me from getting anywhere.
,patient, and understanding than the *nix folks I ran across. Hence I stick with BeOS, because when I run into issues, I know where I can turn and not get attitude and flame-fests.
There are, in no order:
(1) Documentation. I get far too many RTFM when the FM was written for software that is 3 versions old.
(2) 404s or links to other links which ultimately end up as 404s on web-based FM.
(3) Tired old sayings such as "Try another distro" (I have a stack of 20 odd distros burned onto CD, everything from the big players, down to things like ArkLinux and Icepak Linux) which obviously doesn't help in any way shape or form.
(4) The attitude of *nix users. When I was making the switch away from windows, I had two choices, *nix or BeOS. The Be community was (and continues to be this very day) more supportive, helpful
(5) The old re-inventing the wheel. You know gang, instead of slavishly coping MS, why not try being different?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Feuding and scratching the same itch is merely one form of competition. In the OSS community, you often find a war of ideas, whether that's Gnome vs KDE or Linus insisting on a plaintext /proc.
I much prefer this war of ideas to the way commercial companies operate -- the war of marketing departments. Is it any wonder OSS turns out better?
Read your own post and tell me again who's egocentric?
Your sentiment parallels that of many others, namely: "We've provided you with all these things, for free, and you complain? Peon! How dare you question us!" Sounds like you want to be God. Give 'em what you want, and if they complain, well damn them to hell.
In closing, go away and write some code. If you can't do that, then just go away.
In other words, you feel that open source should be by developers, for developers. You're entitled to that opinion, but bear in mind that it relegates the OS community to a little corner of reality, where nobody in the real world cares about what you do, and nothing that you do matters. If you want to be a useless, egotistical prick, that's your prerogative. I'm more interested in creating useful software to serve people's needs.
I didn't get flamed when I went into #debian and asked a bunch of questions. Neither did anyone else that came in while I was there, and I sat on the channel for several days.
/msg'ing the "apt" bot for news before asking your question, as (IIRC) the welcome message to the server asks you to do. Did you do this? And did the channel topic say something about the break-in, but you were unable to connect it to the servers not being updated?
t ml
Perhaps the problem has more to do with your question. The Debian server compromise has been "all over the news", which I believe is why the package servers haven't been updated. It's reasonable to assume that people in #debian might have assumed you knew about the compromise, and they might have been a bit sensitive about it.
Also, you didn't mention
Now, I happen to think that Eric Raymond is a jerk, and wrong about a great many things, but he and Rick Moen wrote an essay on how to ask questions that should be required reading for pretty much anyone, and can easily be applied to fields other than computers. My father is a mechanic, and his job and mine have amazing parallels.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.h
Our LUG has a mailing list, and I've been on it for about 6 years now. I've rarely seen anyone flamed, even for asking really basic questions. One person in particular did ask several basic questions in a row, and was eventually pointed to the above document by several list members. Sadly, he decided to be an ass about it, and some flames were exchanged, but that's the only problem I can remember.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Too many developers "scratch the same itch" is a bad thing only for applications/libraries which other software depends on. We know this! This is what standards are for :-) However, for a standard to become standard we need to test lots of options and decide which is best. On the way to standardization we might merge different features, or the standard might require features from different packages which do not exist together at the moment. Different approaches make it easier to decide which feature to keep and which feature to drop.
I personally do not mind having three plotting and five music playing and twelve font editing packages, it does not hurt anybody, and as the author himself points out, people get selfworth from other people using their package. So if we try to come up with a single solution the result will be fewer developers->fewer packages, not same developers->better packages.
ato
Let me expand what I said just a little bit. There are two classes of complaining users. The first class are just whiners, who complain about the state of things but can't provide any opinion on where things should be going. Case in point, people on the FreeType list saying "The rendering of this font sucks, you need to fix it."
There is another class of complainers who complain in useful ways, for example: "The rendering of this font sucks, all the stems for the lowercase characters are too wide. Perhaps this is a problem with the autohinter when using composite glyphs?" The complaint spells out the problem, and suggests where to look for a solution.
Some people on the list are even nicer; they provide code. These people are, of course, the most helpful in the long run, but there is no reason to treat them as more important than anyone else simply because they have the ability to program a computer.
It is attitudes like yours which are preventing more people from adopting Open Source. Maybe your goal is to maintain OS as the elitist club that it currently is, but many people (myself included) feel that it should be opened up to a wider audience. Why do we feel this way? Because we think people deserve access to free software that fits their needs. It's a philosophical issue. It's called, "Wanting to help people." And helping people does NOT equate to imposing your way of thinking on them.
I was having a problem with configuring my webserver with HTML::Mason. Problem was resolved in a few hours by one of the authors of HTML::Mason. Now a neat summary of my problems and its resolutions is available to the world in the archives.
I am trying to extend PostgreSQL so that it includes efficient Materialized Views. I posted a couple of messages, and the team basically says, "We've all got our personal projects we're working on, but we all want to see M.V. a reality. Here's some pointers and good luck." When I come back with my findings, they point out some more stuff, and the discussion starts to build. I can see having M.V. in PostgreSQL a reality if I keep advocating it.
These are just two examples of things that just are not possible with closed-source software. The HTML::Mason and PostgreSQL teams are really good examples of open source work at its finest (along with other projects too numerous to mention). But imagine getting this kind of support from Microsoft or SUN. (Well, maybe SUN is fanatical about support and encourages its users to contribute to the codebase, I wouldn't know.)
This is why Open Source Software (or Free Software, whatever you want to call it) is going to take over the world. Petty irritations exist, but they exist everywhere and are not insurmountable. Eventually, everyone will see what I see in the open source community. I can't imagine "paying" someone for software that I can't look into or modify. No matter how useful it is now, it won't be useful in a few years. Heck, it won't even be supported by anyone. But open source software is timeless and invaluable. When it becomes obselete, it is updated (case in point: sendmail)
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Journalism, thats the real truth, this is just another example of Journalism's continuous need for sensation, almost all journo's are just the worst sort of Trolls, BSD is dying, Unix is dying, Aunt Nelly cat is dying, linux ate my clock radio, I moderate the article -1 Troll.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Is that really a fair comparison? If I buy a Mac, I'm getting a closed system with a small hardware compatibility list. Since Apple knows what goes into all of them, it's no surprise they can make an OS that runs without lots of configuration twiddling. If Linux was sold on an equally small number of configurations, surely it could be made to run with equally little hand-configuring.
But because Linux is often run in the "anything goes" x86 world, hardware incompatibilities are more common. Where standards are well-defined (IDE, USB, etc.), Linux has no problems. In other cases (video cards, sound cards), Linux often lags behind the cutting edge and requires a bit of hand holding. But that's the nature of the platform rather than of the OS. Even Windows can't handle tons of different configurations without help; instead it requires seperate "drivers" for that purpose.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It seems to me that a problem with a large number of movements is that they are based first and foremost on an oppositional logic and rhetoric. Rather than simply providing a model for open debate and getting things done, the oppositional rhetoric gives us infighting and great wars about the composition of naval lint and the direction of the great social revolution.
Of course, this is just a problem in OSS, it seems to be occuring just about everywhere. People are subdividing into camps based on whatever thesis/antithesis group the rant about, and are gradually losing the ability to community with the rest of the world.
>There's absolutely no reason for there to be more than two or three distributions
Let's try and find reasons for more than 3, shall we. Hmmm:
-Debian: solid, stable, completely free, at the cost of being outdated sometimes
-Mandrake:Simple distro, ideal for newbies. Not good for linux diehards who like to fiddle with everything
-Gentoo: bleeding edge, compilation optimisations, easy to reconfigure the way you want it if you know what you're doing. Not so many guarantees on the stability.
-Redhat:commercial, certified, expensive, well-supported, reasonably up to date.
-SuSE:somewhat similar approach to Redhat. Keeps Redhat honest through this crazy thing called competition.
-SELinux - security above all else
The difference is priorities. Trying to combine their properties (free+certified? Ultra-Secure and custom compilations?) would be hard.
The real problem is that Open Source is to focused on the source.
;-)
What? You may ask...
Open Source developers put out some great software, Linux, Mozilla, Gimp, GAIM, etc. I could go on for some time.
Why are they good? Stable, reliable, secure... most will agree to those. Why is it true? Because good coding, and demand to get it right. No corporate preasure.
So what's the problem? NO END USER FOCUS.
Mozilla now is working towards an enduser focus. That's a big change.
But the majority don't. The products are great, but lets face it. As wonderful as KDE is, it's not Aqua, or even Luna. It's good, but not good enough for an end user. There's still computer jargon in the user's face, and it's not pretty like the others.
Tech support for endusers - missing
Computer jargon in their face
Lack of marketing towards end users ("What's gimp?")
These are the problems.
IMHO, each project should create a group devoted to end-user focus. That group should work on marketing, and viewing the product through an enduser perspective... not a Geek perspective. And judge if it's end user friendly.
Linux won't hit the masses as long as the user gets shown the path's to 100000k different things. They don't care... they just want it to work.
It's great that open source developers are such perfectionists. I personally love it. But what they need to do, is be able to cover it up.
Perhaps the general release pattern should include:
Developer release - more powerful, crude like today
End user release - friendly, hide the ugly.
End users don't like feeling confused. That's the key. That's what Apple Knows when it invented the iPod's interface. That's what Microsoft is slowly learning. That's what Palm knew. That's why Google is so popular.... simplistic yet powerful.
Until open source comes to agree on that ideal, it's not going to get that far.
Again, the products are amazing, and I love them... but I also want them to succeed with the non-geeks who actually have a social life
Troll!
Think back to when Chiang Kai-Shek took over China: before that no one worked, everyone was poor, morale was nonexistent.
True, but -- then again -- no one worked, everyone was poor, and morale was nonexistent _while_ Chiang Kai-Shek ruled China and _after_ he got kicked out. If China has changed, it's only been in the past few decades -- thanks largely to peace and a moderate Communist regime.
Under the benevolent dictator, a term used to describe Linus Torvalds,
Some would describe Chiang Kai-Shek as "an incompetent dictator who permitted graft and corruption among his subordinates; a fool who handed the world's largest country to Communists at the start of the cold war." I haven't heard similar descriptions of Linus Torvalds. (In fairness, Torvalds has a much easier job than Chiang Kai-Shek.)
Within a few short years China was a world power.
China has been a world power for thousands of years. It reached a low point in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Chiang Kai-Shek died in 1975 but his methods and teachings continue to this day in China.
No, they don't.
The question is, why can't the OSS community, with it's legions of developers get a single app to work smoothly and like an Apple or even a Microsoft app? They need to start doing this, and they need to start doing it on a wide scale. Make it useable first, then add more features. Not the other way arround
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
The other problem with OSS is lack of innovation. How many things does the OSS community go about attempting to clone only after someone like MS or another company introduced it? Was there a FreeMware before VMware? Was there Linux PVR applications before Tivo? etc.
The presence of copying commercial software products doesn't indicate the lack of innovation.
Earlier you mentioned that Linux is missing Tax software. So, which way do you want it? Do you want someone to create something similar to TurboTax, or create something innovative? You can't have it both ways.
Aha, you say - OSS developers should write innovative tax software! Yeah, right. If somebody created software that did everything the average taxpayer needed, everyone would immediately start comparing it to TurboTax (and the other commercial offerings). In many ways the OSS program would have no choice but to "clone" the commercial programs, because there's no other logical way to do things.
There are thousands of innovative OSS programs that are incredibly innovative, that have no parallel in the commercial world. Here are a few off the top of my head:
1. Audacity - shameless plug, this is my audio editor. It's not a rip-off of CoolEdit or Sound Forge. Of course it looks similar in some superficial ways - they're all audio editors. But Audacity has dozens of innovative, unique features, like an integrated envelope editor, automatic real-time resampling when tracks are at different sample rates, three different types of sample-level editing, etc.
2. BitTorrent - robust, P2P way to speed up everyone's download speed simultaneously. And yes, it's primarily used for legitimate downloads, imagine that.
3. GAIM - aha, you say, just another instant messanger! What's innovative here is that it's the only instant messenger to support AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, IRC, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr, and more...which is incredible if you have lots of friends you want to IM and they all use different systems.
4. Gallery - program that runs on your webserver that makes it fun and easy to upload pictures for everyone to see. Right from the web interface, you can categorize, show slideshows, etc.
I'm not even listing the thousands of innovative programs that OSS developers have come up with that are primarily of benefit to other developers.
Why not search the Sourceforge and Freshmeat top 100 lists for new programs? I think you'll discover lots of innovation.
Would it be accurate to say that most of the people being paid to develop the popular apps didn't start that way? I mean, didn't these folks start writing the apps in their spare time with no backing specifically for the apps, and then the apps got popular, so they got funding (doesn't matter how) to continue the development? If that's the case, the "amateur" programmers writing those apps on Sourceforge with few users could one day find themselves with a user base to match Apache, Samba, GCC, etc. And a regular paycheck too...
Before MS started pulling legal tricks, I just wanted my stuff to work better. Now I want them destroyed. They are armed and dangerous, and they wish us ill.
Even that's an exaggeration. I usually don't even consider MS. But when I do, I remember why I want them destroyed.
When I work on my projects, I don't consider "How would/does MS do this?" And I couldn't if I wanted to, because I won't agree to their EULA terms. But when you ask me about MS, my only resonse is some variant of "Carthago delenda est!" If you don't know why, then you've been living with your eyes closed, but it sure isn't by happenstance. It took careful work and planning on their part to drive me to this position. That may not be what they thought they were doing, but that was (one of) the effects.
Just to pick a minor example, one of their EULA terms forbids you to compare one of their products with any other product and publish the results of your comparison without prior approval of the publication by Microsoft.
Now the US govt is (supposedly) forbidden by the constitution from passing such a rule by the first amendment. But a private monopoly can enforce it via contract law. And be supported by the US govt.
Were MS not a monopoly, one could just say "Well, let the customers choose some other product.", but MS *IS* a monopoly that had repeatedly acted in illegal ways to destroy the competition.
Microsoft delenda est!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.