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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.
showering, maybe?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
They're not being paid.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
is entirely wrong.
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.
We slashdot each other's sites!
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
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.
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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
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.
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..)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
I for one am planning on taking my own life in shame. I fear that
You appear to be writing a suicide note. Would you like to:
- Search MSN.com for psychiatric help in your area?
- Use a suicide note template?
- Browse quotes by Emily Dickenson?
- Find great deals on sleeping pills and handguns?
Gaaah! No! It's too horrible! We must never give up! Never surrender! Viva la Revolucion! Viva la Tux!You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
>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.
1. Too many companies "scratch the same itch."
.Net. HP-UX vs AIX. For every interesting commercial technology, there are two bitterly feuding camps that spend as much time taking potshots at each other as in improving their own products.
We hear that commercial software companies come up with new ideas because they "wanted to make some money." In other words, there was some need they had for a new application, and they "scratched" it by coming up with a tool. The problem is, it's not uncommon to end up with two or three (or more!) different packages doing the same thing. For a specific example, look at what's happened with the relational databases, where there are now several competing packages that have to be supported by each distribution.
2. Commercial software companies love a good feud.
Oracle vs Microsoft. Java vs
3. Commercial software companies often scratch the wrong itch.
The problem with commercial development is that the developers often aren't the consumers of their products, and thus don't feel the pain of their mistakes. The other problem with commercial software development is that they often don't fix problems or develop new features that aren't going to make them money.
4. In the commercial software community, you're either "with us or against us"
Attempts to point out flaws or places where there's room for improvement in an application usually lead directly to legal action. Attempts to contact the company directly lead to either unqulaified indivduals, fees, or, again, legal action. Direct comment from the companies if laded with fear, uncertainty, and doubt: "The GPL is a cancer." "Linux is stealing my IP." "Hey! No benchmarking."
5. The commercial software community has a huge chip on its shoulder...called Microsoft
Although Linux is also a popular a target lately too, the merest mention of MS is like a bull having a red cape waved before his eyes. All reason and sense of decorum flies out the window. And while I'm first in line to throw rotten tomatoes at Bill Gates, it's harmful to the community. The reality is that Microsoft owns the lion's share of the non-server OS market. If the first thing you tell all these people who own Windows is that they are idiots, you're not starting out on very good ground to convert them.
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.