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

But I thought...

[oberondarksoul]

Judging on the usual reactions of most /. trolls, open source is clearly infallible and shall never die. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anything from attempting to convert Windows users to making clones of original apps. Move along.

bias

[linuxislandsucks]

remember folks LinuxWorld.com accepts ads from Microsoft..and other closed Unixes

Re:My Take on Things-

[Apreche]

If you really want to use *nix try gentoo. Seriously, I am not some zealot. I'm an average dual booting guy who just needs to have some sort of nix to do my cs homework with. The gentoo forums are the friendliest open source people ever, and they answer just about any questions within a day. Not only that, but gentoo has super awesome documentation. It's not the easiest, it just requires a great deal of time and patience as opposed to knowledge which debian requires. Just give it 1 shot and if you're not satisfied it's not like you lost money or anything.

Your points are entirely distinct

[Ars-Fartsica]

No one is disputing that Apple has great idiot-appeal for people who want something that "just works" - that has never been open source's forte. The flipside to this uber-controlled market is that you get to pay $120 for each point release for the OS, and you get to pay a significant premium for hardware. You also get limited access to source (limited to Darwin) which ultimately puts you in the same "hostage" situation many Microsoft users are in with respect to security.

Other problems to address

[BanjoBob]

Some other issues that are limiting the ability of Linux to become popular with the masses are:
1. The names of the programs are not user friendly. Where Microsoft calls a media player a Media Player or a photo editor Paint, Linux uses names that have no meaning to the common user. Names such as Gimp, Pia, Ogg123, etc. have no indication of what they really do as an application.
2. Package installation can be a huge problem. How often do you try and install a package just to find out that you have incompatibilities all over the place. Libraries and required package version problems and other such things can make installation of simple things a total nightmare.

Re:My Take on Things-

[SpaceJunkie]

I agree with this. My most pleasant Linux experience so far has been gentoo. Although - the fact that it is CLI will scare off Joe Sixpack - or even mildly techy users. I know there are projects underway to make a GUI - mostly for things like etc-update (which can be a bit nasty). Adding a small(OPTIONAL!) gui front end to emerge,etcat and those essential tools could pull many more users.

Once agains hats off - I have not had to play wack-a-mole rpm style for a long time now.
Gentoo forums really are the friendliest linux forums. They are on par with Lugnet.

Wrong with them?

[bgeer]

They need to get laid, obviously; ever tried telling a girl at a party that you're a GNOME developer and don't even get paid for it?

Seriously though, all of this feuding and itch scratching sort of business happens in every developer group, it's just that outsiders don't hear about it because they don't have a kt.zork.net/{longhorn,oracle,whatever} to air their dirty laundry to the public.

P.S. LinuxWorld: I love the "POINT-COUNTERPOINT SPECIAL" title, maybe for the next article you can use the troll^H^H^H^Hitle "WHY SCO WILL WIN" and follow it with 15 Myth-Fact bullet points. Genius!

Mod article down!!!

[t0ny]

Boy, if that guy posted any of that article on Slashdot, he would have been modded down so far he would be breathing charcoal.

Good thing he wrote it as an article, tho. Thats the only way anyone around here actually reads anything contrary to the zealot dogma.

I am prepared to be modded down for telling the truth.

Re:Mod article down!!!

[t0ny]

Doh!! Ya, I guess that could be a wrinkle in his plan. Oh well, nothing ever changes around here. When people have nothing intelligent to say, they like to say it on Slashdot.