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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.
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.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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?
'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
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..)
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