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Examining Some Open Source Myths
Neil Gunton writes "I wrote an article distilling some thoughts on Open Source myths. Perhaps unusually, these are not myths propogated by the anti-OSS crowd, but rather dogma that is more frequently spouted by OSS proponents. It is not intended as an anti-OSS argument, but really more as observations and reactions to specific things people say without really thinking about it, such as 'You shouldn't complain about it if you don't want to put effort into providing a fix', 'OSS lets you get under the hood to fix problems', 'All software should be free', 'Scratching the personal itch', etc."
To fix it, you need to be able to give a clear description of the problem to the developers. "It doesn't work" is not a clear description; "It doesn't correctly read 192-bit-per-pixel multilayer tiff files, because it loses the last 8 bits of each channel" is.
Hmm, to me IE feels far _less_ integrated than Konqueror does.
sure, you can type file addresses in IE, and web addresses in explorer - but the web addresses in explorer will pop open a new iexplore.exe instance (which is different to explorer.exe).
Personally, I have no problem with a central browsing application for web and file and any other type of information. But as usual, Windows doesn't actually pull it off.
Microsoft seem to be completely unable to provide consistent integrated UIs.
Take their "Web Folders" for instance - that's the biggest piece of crap kludge I've ever seen. 90% of the time it forgets that it's WebDAV and reverts to http, and stops working. Not to mention needing your username and password every time you go into a different folder.
Another case of bad integration is the "Compressed Folder" (zip file) support.
It tries to pretend that it's navigating a zip file just like any other folder - BUT, right click on something, and half the options you'd usually have are simply not there. For no user identifiable reason.
KDE and Gnome have integration and abstraction and UI consistency done far better than Windows - KDE the most. I don't think Windows will ever catch up, because Microsoft simply don't seem to understand abstraction.
Advanced users are users too!
If you look at some of the more serious projects today, you will find that, although the software is released free of encumberances, most of the developers were paid to do the work (e.g. Netscape, Apache, Linux).
Processes are patentable but not copyrightable. The expression of a process is copyrightable but not patentable. The idea of getting from point A to point B in the development of a product for which the process is developed is often not copyrightable or patentable either one (although sometimes point B itself is patentable).
In short, the idea having value is in no way related to copyright. Copyright is about the expression of the idea having merit.
Why is it that every successful Open Source project, that is also targeted to the End-User market (and not the server/developer market) is backed directly by a company with money to spare?
...)
;-)
This isn't quite true; there are a number of significant open-source projects that have no corporate backing.
One very successful such effort that I've been involved in can be found by googling for "ABC music notation". Only musicians would find this useful, but it's a good counter-example here. All the prime movers are musicians who happen to be programmers. There are a few commercial music packages that can now input (and sometimes output) ABC notation. But this doesn't include monetary support. There are a number of excellent end-user open-source tools for this notation, and none of them has any corporate support that I am aware of. There are also some closed-source "shareware" tools, and they all seem to have come from one person using their own resources.
This isn't surprising. Commercial music interests tend to be rather narrow, catering to only Western Pop or Western Classical styles. They aim for complex, click-and-point GUI packages that try to do everything for a very narrow range of music. They usually run on only one platform, usually Windows. The ABC gang consists of a motley collection of musician-programmers that are involved in musical styles that you've probably never heard of. And they've developed software that runs on all the common computer platforms with more compatibility than you'd ever expect from a gaggle of musicians. (Talk about herding cats
I expect that others involved with the 80,000+ SourceForge projects will chime in with more open-source end-user projects that don't have corporate support.
Of course, such support is usually welcome. It's just not always forthcoming, until after a package develops a user population and looks like it might have marketing possibilities.
(The ABC crowd is generally wary of corporate attention. As musicians, they have good historical grounds for this. Some here might have read about the growing use of copyright to limit musical innovation.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
While it is certainly true that the GPL provide a fairly effectively means to prevent prices from getting unrealistic, it does not prevent you from selling software.
The GPL does not explicitly prohibit you from selling software. But it does effectively prohibit you from doing so. Once you sell one copy, nothing prevents the person you sold it to from distributing it for zero cost. Not a forked version necessarily, but exactly the same package. They can pop a file on their web site about as fast as the originator can release one.
In such a situation, the price people are willing to pay will be driven down to the marginal cost of acquiring the file. That's pretty darn small for a download, even if the official website is prettier and faster. More importantly, the "marginal cost of the download" only covers the download itself, which means there is no way to recover the investment needed to create the software. (And we haven't even begun to reach step 3, profit, yet.) So while the mirror site might even manage to break even, the original creators of the software lose money.