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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope
sebFlyte writes "In a recent speech at the ACCU conference in Oxford, software design guru James Coplein said that unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down. He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'"
> unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with
> less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary
> software would keep spiralling down.
I don't think it has far "down" to go. People are too used to the rubbish they've not only been served with currently at home, school or work, but they've grown up with bad software and expect it as a part of normality. If the machine crashes in the middle of something people are trained now not to get angry at it - it's expected. If it gets infested with spyware then it's running slow and needs fixing by a tech, or reinstalling by some techier users. If their internet drops out multiple times a day, they just re-dial or wait for their DSL/cable to come up again.
People are adaptable, and can get used to anything - and quickly, if they don't know better. Many software vendors take advantage of that.
Person1: "Open Source is better and is making Proprietary software obsolete."
Person2: "Is not! Open Source has the same problems as Proprietary."
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
[this goes on for a little while]
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
[end of article]
And there you have it! The first definitive answer in the history of mankind! Or... maybe not.
The reality is that software is software, and programmers are programmers. A really good piece of software will tend to get that way through the work of experienced and talented individuals. Projects lacking those individuals will produce poor software. Doesn't matter if it's open source or not.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Apart from the areas where there is no competition, the quality of software is pretty good. Even Windows has become fairly stable since Linux showed up.
The reason Free software appeals to me is simply that I don't have to agree to hand over my first born son to use it. I'd like it if consumers would get a bit more assertive over the stringent and really quite unfair licencing terms. Then we can worry about quality.
Opensourceness itself does not mean that the software will be immediately high quality. There are lot of quality proprietary software as lot of open source projects not worth looking at them.
..there's thousands of people who seemingly cannot..or will not come to a consensus on how to design an easy to use, one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency, thereby scaring away the non-geek..and sometimes even the geeks..that would otherwize be willing to be more open to using OSS in their places of work and home lives.
Seriously, I love the OSS movement, I really really do. It embodies so much spirit of what the internet, in an idealistic world should be. Free exchange of information and ideas..building one on top of the other in a collaborative effort that spans the globe..
Yet for some reason, the geeks in charge of bringing us this can't seem to get their acts together. Until that happens, *nix will never be as widely accepted as the geeks in this world dream of.
Get your acts together, because you're on to a good thing.
The thing that I always think about when I hear this argument for OSS, that there are thousands of developers who will find and fix the problem, is that the argument applies only to a very few of the "elite" OSS projects.
Sure, there are thousands of developers working on Linux or Apache in one way or another. But, if you look at sourceforge.net, for instance, while there are 100,000 projects, how many of those have more than, say, 5 active developers? How many have even more than 1 active developer?
The potential is there for thousands of developers to participate in any given OSS project, but the fact is that for probably 99.9% of OSS projects, it's still just one guy in his basement hacking away.
OSS is better than yada yada yada. I am perfectly happy to pay for several commercial development tools because they are far superior in terms of quality, functionality and performance than anything I have seen from OSS. When the OSS offering is better I use that.
Rather ironically the lie to the OSS is always better is provided by the recent Bitkeeper kerfuffle. Linus choose Bitkeeper because for him it was the best tool for the job. The zealots moan about it but do nothing so 2 years later when politics interfere there is still no superior OSS alternative, let alone a comparable one.
Lets just focus on letting the user choose the product that suits them best and let them get on with it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The problem is, consumers are demanding more---more features, more bells, more whistles. Prettier interfaces. If your new word processor doesn't have more features in it, why would anybody take it over what they already have?
The problem is that quality is suffering due to demand for quantity. Quality just doesn't sell. How's this sound on a box: "Now, more stable than ever!" If you're writing server software or industrial process controllers, it sounds great. But it won't impress the consumer market at all. This is how the market works: Quantity of features sells. Quality of software comes in the form of patches and service packs.
This is not my sandwich.
My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good.
I have little confidence that Microsoft will create anything so great that it will completely change the face of computing. However, judging any software by an alpha release of a system that's final release is two years away is... not meaning to sound harsh, but ignorant. Longhorn will have its problems. It most likely will not be a better desktop OS than OS X. It most likely will not be a better server OS than Linux. However, Microsoft has demonstrated in the last few years that with respect to the general state of their systems, it will be better than the OS that they released before it.
The consumer always wants what they cannot have. The consumer will demand perfect software, without putting them out of the way financially, and they want it now. The attitude I get a lot is "I just spent $1500 on a laptop, why should I have to pay for software?".
I don't think the public gets an idea of just how much work goes into good software. There is a reason UNIX cost as much as it did; it was well designed from the ground up! Yet, sadly, the price-point led the market astray, and we're left with shoddy OSes now. The OS becomes the performance-benchmark, as the software only has to be as good as the OS its running on.
The consumers have only themselves to blame.
that we can't have both? Why can't there just be apps that you pay for, and apps that you get from your good friend that wrote the shit? I have a friend that's a goddamn genus, but he's not got enough time to write a program for everything. I'm assuming that everyone else is like that too. If you want some software, then look for it. Like what you find for free? get that. Don't like what's free? Go buy something. There is something to be said about a relationship that only costs one party or the other, and I think that one thing is to be said very carefully.
We all dance, we all sing.
-The Streets
That's consumer level stuff, and high quality consumer level stuff. Wave after wave of business level software that I've had to customize and support has been, out of the box, rubbish. Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.
We have a small dev team of 6, spread across numerous business projects. As a team, we all have some development experience using or creating Free software. Our managers are starting to feel the push we are making towards Free software, we really think it would make our life easier.
A roadblock however is being a pseudo-independant but wholey owned part of a larger corporation. They require us to shop around first, bringing in 3 separate vendors for software to be used in projects. Or often times even forcing coporate standards on us when those standards are irrelvant to our business, but not theirs.
Oh yeah, support contracts seem worthless too for software. So if we are customizing and supporting Proprietary software, why not make it easier for us and let us customize and support Free software?
Here's a thought. Learn what a computer CAN do, without bothering to know how. Then look for software that does it most efficiently (that is, read a review, or two, of credible sources). The result: if you concider the most general functions of a computer (such as an OS), OSS is the best that's out there.
If, at this point, you are lost, then it really doesn't matter if you use OSS or not, because you still don't know how a computer functions on the OS layer. And that puts you in a disadvantage even with an XP system. In either case, you'd be paying (or convincing) someone else to do it eventually.
Respectfully, I fail to see your point.