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.

Comments

Much to learn.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Open Source movement.

Think back to when Chiang Kai-Shek took over China: before that no one worked, everyone was poor, morale was nonexistent. Under the benevolent dictator, a term used to describe Linus Torvalds, Kai-Shek ensured that everyone worked, and everyone had a purpose.

Within a few short years China was a world power.

With an identical structure, the Open Source leaders ensure a good pool of talent. Millions of identical workers producing code. There's no way the current method of the Cigar-smoking boss standing on the backs of the coders can continue. Chiang Kai-Shek died in 1975 but his methods and teachings continue to this day in China.

Open Source could learn a lot from him.


c39052b261506f846895cac6e0724290

Re:Much to learn.

[Ubergrendle]

Wasn't he overthrown after about 20 years by Chairman Mao? Bad analogy for Open Source if you're optimistic for a future for the movement...

Re:Much to learn.

[cmacb]

"There's nothing wrong with socialism and communism either, as long as you speak "in theory." While you can find something wrong with anything if you look with a critical eye, I don't think OSS is at all close to perfect or optimal:

RMS pounces on anyone who does not both kiss his ass (his demand is that his contribution be acknowledged, see the GNU/Linux vs Linux/GNU vs Linux arguments) *and* sponsor his own personal choice method for open source (ie, use the license he prefers)."

I think the rebuttal article did a fairly good job of countering the 5 issues, but an argument already having been made has never stopped me before...

I get particularly tired of people's need to compare open source with some sort of political movement, ANY of them. RMS may have socialist views personally, but there are many capitalists in the open source movement as well. There are also large numbers of Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians, meat eaters, vegetarians, doctors and Christian Scientists.

Open source probably would not exist in a tightly control economy. The government would eventually choose an "official" operating system and demand that everyone use it or have their computers confiscated.

And finally I like to remind people that open source existed before it had a name. Computers used in universities and research environments for as long as there has been computing were largely programmed and tinkered with by people at those institutions. Even IBM computers where I went to school had modified operating systems. Source code was readily available from IBM and there were publications used for exchanging those modifications as well as the likelihood that some of them would show up in future versions of the OS. Until Microsoft came along in fact operating systems were secondary to the hardware that they supported. While IBM wasn't thrilled if you ran a non-IBM OS on their equipment they would much rather have that happen than to have you run non-IBM hardware.

Given all of that, it is really not the Open Source movement that is odd, it is in fact Microsoft that is worthy of study for it produces almost no physical products and has continued to charge premium prices for software that has long ago left the R&D stage. I don't think that historians will marvel at the emergence of Open Source in our time, I think they will marvel that a single company was able to so effectively suppress that which comes fairly naturally to people: the desire to explore and understand for such a long period of time. I think that period is nearing its end however. For those who grew up in the "Microsoft age" its ending must surely seem odd.

I just submitted feedback on this...

[pb]

Uh-oh... did linuxworld need to increase its ad impressions?

Seriously, you can't expect to start a reasonable discussion by spouting as many half-assed examples as you can think of, and then not backing any of it up with either facts or history. Although some of your points have a grain of truth in them here and there, your blind assertions do not help your case.

First, let us assume that many developers do "scratch the same itch"... why do they do it? Well, generally it's because there's something about the other solutions that are already out there that doesn't meet their needs. Sometimes it's a licensing issue, sometimes two projects spring up at the same time.

Starting with "sound systems"... the two main ones we have now are OSS and alsa. Originally OSS had two different versions--free and non-free. The free version included in the kernel had iffy support for some cards, and comparatively few people purchased or used the non-free version. Then alsa was born (originally just for better Gravis Ultrasound support!), and it will be replacing OSS in the kernel. What's this? Consolidation of sound systems? Uh-oh... Well, perhaps you meant to say sound daemons or media players or something... let's move on to another example.

BSD vs. Linux, here's a great one. Why didn't Linus Torvalds just use BSD instead? Well, he couldn't at the time, due to licensing issues. He started writing Linux both to learn about the 386 and because he couldn't afford to buy a workstation from Sun. And by the time the *BSDs were unencumbered, Linux was already a viable Unix system on its own, and certainly more functional than Minix ever was. Oh well, I guess he wasn't writing code just to scratch the same itch... let's move on.

Gnome vs. KDE. This one boiled down to--you guessed it--a licensing issue! In this case, it was the licensing of Qt, the toolkit used in KDE, that was the issue. Some of this has since been resolved, but there are licensing issues surrounding Qt even today. That's because Qt was written by TrollTech and is sold as a commercial product, whereas GTK was written for The GIMP, "to scratch an itch". Interestingly enough, The GIMP doesn't have a lot of competition--maybe that's because of its quality, its licensing, and its extensible nature. :)

Debian vs. Red Hat. Yet again, two different products with two different ideologies, one of which is backed by commercial interests, yadda yadda yadda. Interestingly enough, Red Hat's successor, Fedora, is using Debian's package manager now. So maybe they aren't such bitter rivals as you may have thought?

As for the rest of your generalizations, I resent being painted with such a broad brush. Sure, there are zealots in the open source community; they're present in any and every community. If those are the only people you talk to, then you might get some odd impressions of how that community works. For example, most of the people in the US are Christian, but the few people who come up to you on the street and shout about Christianity are inevitably zealots, crazy people who can't be reasoned with. Does this imply that most of the US consists of crazy zealots who can't be reasoned with? No, it doesn't, the sample size is simply too small.

Similarly, I won't just read this one article and conclude that the people at Linux World are totally clueless about the Open Source Community and its history, that they're all too lazy to do research, and enjoy making grossly inaccurate generalizations instead. That would be unfair of me. Nevertheless, I hope this article is just an isolated incident, and not the start of a disturbing trend. I recognize that this is an opinion piece, but that's no excuse for FUD, or sloppiness.

Read the article - he has some points

[Dark Paladin]

I don't claim to be any kind of guru of, well, anything, but I've been working with GNU/Linux for a good 5 years now, setting up servers (Samba, Apache, etc).

About 18 months ago, I got a Powerbook, and while I still like Linux on the server end, man oh man, do I like OS X - for exactly the reasons that Mr. Turner brings up.

Simply put: it works.

I plug in a device - and it works. No compiling, no fiddling with conf files - works. I put in a game, and without once having to find Mesa drivers for X Windows and figure out why I can get video in Quake III but no sound - wait, not I get sound but no video, let me try another sound card and figure out of the chipset is the right kind - AGGGHHH!

The greatest strength of Open Source is its ability to evolve and grow and fill in gaps. It's truly software evolution - species of software fill in evolutionary needs, and the ones that work best (or are the luckiest in support/notice) get to grow.

The problem with Open Source, as Mr. Turner observes, is in some ways that same community. How many truly clear, concise, "idiot proof" manuals are written when we need to understand why some piece of Open Source (OS) software isn't acting the way you want? A cry for help will often be answered - all too often by "RTFM", though there are times when a more useful answer is given.

Probably the best thing that can happen for OS is the continued interest by businesses who want things for thier clients - like easier to use desktop operating systems (like OS X), or better office suites that can be used by secretaries (like Open Office) or administrative tools that can help configure the multitude of options easily and quickly (like what I hope Novell will do with their Suse merger).

I think that there will always be the dynamic Mr. Turner talks about - which isn't always a bad thing, but I hope the dialectic of Open Source and Business Needs helps to create a better hybrid software animal more suited to survive the wilds of the computer world.

Just my opinion, of course - I might be wrong.

Hmm...

[mccalli]

'Open source developers often scratch the same itch'

So, err, remind me - how many closed-source word processors can I go out and by? How many web design packages? How many commercial IDEs? How many instance messenging networks can I join? Wouldn't they be scratching the same itch too?

...and 'Open Source developers love a good feud.'

'They', whoever the amorphous they actually are, probably do. So do the closed source lot as well. The particular feuds they have tend to be called 'lawsuits', and they leave even the most bitter open source feud looking like a kindergarten spat.

Cheers,
Ian

A very funny example

[ciaran_o_riordan]

just because 'I want it a different color'.

You'll probably like this:
A shed, any color will do

It summarises the observations of a FreeBSD hacker, on feature disputes. Also from the FreeBSD pages, is pretty ontopic:
How many FreeBSD developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
(these articles made me consider giving FreeBSD a try, but I haven't gotten around to it yet..)

He has the wrong idea of what OS aims for

[Scarblac]

This whole article is just coming from the wrong direction. It assumes that the final goal of OS is to make usable software, that has features for everyone, to have an OS that can run all the binary drivers out there, to unseat Windows!...

What OS actually is for is, precisely, scratching an itch. Fixing what the developer wants to see fixed. Providing the features the developer wants. Having fun making something that a hundred other people made already. Many Linux developers (for example) couldn't care less about Windows, or converting Windows users to Linux.

And yes, they like bitching about Microsoft. Because it's so easy to do, I guess.

These things are only "things that are wrong with open source" if you have the idea that OS is trying to be something that it's not.

Some points yes, some points dumb.

[Oriumpor]

The "many itches, many scratchers" is a silly analogy. This is the case in not only OSS but also in for sale products. FOR INSTANCE, Musicmatch, Itunes, Winamp, Windows Media player. Enough said.

What is truly missing from the overall product creation standpoint is a universal bounty system. If someone were to create a universal bounty system for the application of new software ideas (that benefited the donor, and also gave incentive to the developers) there would be a drastic change in OSS development. Now all of a sudden your target audience is no longer yourself, but an ethereal goal list and a real cash dollar amount to buy some more raman and coffee.

Yeah sure, these things are "supposed" to be in existence already (sans the bounty) but I don't know how many projects I've seen on freshmeat with an empty .plan or a paltry .todo

So I'm no professional developer, if I knew there was a series of progressively increasing bounties available for me to freely distribute my ideas to the ether I would be more inclined to spend time doing so seriously. Not all of us are driven by the solution at the end of the problem tunnel, some of us have monetary requirements to fulfil.

Allow me to add a big one to the list....

[gosand]

One flaw of the Open Source community is that it responds to trolls like this article.

Maybe it is because it is a "community" and nobody rules it, maybe it is because it is passionate about what it does and feels the need to defend it when attacked. There are some things that might need some improving, but the Open Source Community has done quite well the way it has been operating since it started. It will improve when it needs to improve, that is how it works.