Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
..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.
A really good piece of software will tend to get that way through the work of experienced and talented individuals.
So the question devolves to one of, "Where do these experienced and talented individuals tend to end up?"
In my experience they tend to be over in the corner banging their heads against the wall.
KFG
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.