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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.'"
There are a lot that are contributing that don't get enough credit.
To those people I say thank you.
Now back to work code monkeys!
> 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.
For those not in the know like me. He is/was a researcher at bell labs and worked on all things related to the activity of developing software.
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.
... that the general quality of EVERYTHING is on a downward spiral. Relentless commoditisation is forcing everyone to work on lower margins and wider tolerances.
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 statement only seems partly true for those who are really, really big and have a kind of monopoly (you know who I mean). For smaller, niche software, they have to make it good and even better for each version or the customers will demand something better by buying something else. So a company who neglects their customers needs will go broke and disappear, giving those companies who listen to their customers a higher market share. And even the biggest software companies are seeing that their market share drops when they do something bad, because even the biggest monopolies face competition from things like Linux.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.
It can even be taken as far as evolutionary delivery, which requires that the software be released into the market, and the feedback from that used to decide what will be in the next release. The time scales of this are much shorter than say, Apple releasing Panther and then Tiger, so not to be mixed up with major product releases.
I only wonder whether the success of Linux as a household brand is compromised by the fact that non-proprietory software does not follow IID and hence doesn't actually deliver what is the customer wants, but in fact what the developers think the customer wants. I know that Microsoft are very much for beta testing on thousands of individuals which is a step closer to this, but from the serious delays in Longhorn, it's also true that maybe they have missed the point as well.
There's no doubt the functionality is there in Linux as the guy mentions but I'm not so sure that the customer really fits into Linux like is required when moving beyond the waterfall model...
I'm not sure where he's drawing this "death spiral" conclusion from because I'm not seeing it.
Now, vendor lockin, DRM abuses, etc. etc. THAT I am seeing and OSS may be our saviour there.
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.
Closed source is in many cases better. If you are required to use the best software available to generate profit then obviously you will pay the price for private software if that is the best alternative for your needs. I personally prefer the Gimp over Photoshop, but after seeing what features the professional graphics artist use in their day to day work I fully understand that firms specialize in that field are willing to pay the extra money for the Adobe series of products. Gimp is still a joke in the eyes of the very professional users.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
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
Uh ... you mean proprietary software such as ....
Apple's iLife suite? Horseshit. How about Apple's suite of professional video apps? Garbage. Hmm, Adobe's suite is also junk (along with the rancid piles of dung they'll be inheriting from Macromedia). ProTools? AutoCad? How about all of those proprietary games? All of them stinking and rotting piles of excrement. I'm sure I could go on and on but there's no question that proprietary software is uniformly crap.
Now, by contrast, we can place our hopes on OSS, all of which is completely bug-free, extremely easy to install, and documented by poorly paid but well intentioned doctoral students in English. OSS is our savior and gace. God Bless OSS.
Was having a conversation with an "I only do Windows" manager who was trying to be agreeable with me (knowing I'm an "I don't do Windows" contractor). He said he thought Microsoft would be helping to boost Linux growth by their recent push to enforce licensing.
As much as I appreciated his sentiments, I had to respectfully disagree. I illustrated my perspective by pointing out how we had both spent the last six hours cleaning off spyware from the reception desk PC of one of his client's. (He needed my knowledge of Knoppix to pull important documents off the workstation, just in case.)
To summarize, I said, "People will put up with incredible amounts of discomfort and expense, rather than learn something new." I think Microsoft has figured this out, long ago. I'll add that it doesn't help that most business software (e.g. Quicken, QuickBooks, Point, etc.) is built for Windows and that that fact will probably never change.
Linux in the embedded world will grow. Linux in the server world will grow. Linux for the business desktops won't. Not for a long while -- if ever. After watching my friend scrape spyware dung off the Windows' registry, for hours, oh, how I wish it were not true.
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.
When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
The underlying problem is that there is a short-term (and perhaps long-term) commercial advantage to shipping buggy, poor quality software "today" rather than higher quality software "tomorrow".
OSS has no advantage to shipping software before it's ready-- This can sometimes backfire, because if the OSS developers stop making updates/bugfixes, either other people pick it up, or the project is stalled. A commercial company would still need to do at least major bug fixes if they want to keep customers coming back for version 2.0.
Also, some projects just don't work well with the OSS model. Games, for instance-- some of them are more like movies, and needs $$$ to back them.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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.
Yup, that's software quality alright. I mean, look at windows for workgroups 3.11, and compare it with crap like XP or 2000 - we've lost so much stability, and performance, these modern OSes are just rubbish compared with the old ones. Don't get me started on how bad OSX is!
Another bit of software that's been getting worse is Photoshop. I mean, have you ever tried using version 1? You can do _so much_ more than you can with the current version. They just keep removing features with each new release, and the software gets worse!
It's the same with databases. It used to be that everything used fixed length fields, and really restrictive character sets. That meant that people like Mr Rénauld-Smythe could rely on always being refered to as Mr Renauldsmyth by their gas company. Nowadays, that kind of attention to detail and users is completely absent.
And it's not just in ways like this that software quality is going down-hill. Customer services is going to the dogs! I remember when, if I wanted an update to my software, I could write a letter, then wait for a week to get some floppy disks with a patch on. Nowadays I have to connect to some huge wide area high speed network and download the patches myself! Just because the software companies want to save the cost of postage! Well I ask you.
In every way, from speed, features, stability and customer service, software is getting worse and worse. I was so glad when Open Source came along and changed it! No sooner had Microsoft scrapped the excellent Windows 3.1 environment, and replaced it with the dreadfull Win95 one, but Linux came along with - X11 and twm! I thought quality and useability like that was dead!
And that's not all. I remember when configuring a PC let you insert your own IRQ numbers and decide what drivers were loaded into what RAM segments - and then, DUH, Microsft figured they should do all that for us - as if we weren't clever enough to resolve hardware addressing issues ourselves! Imagine my delight when I found Linux. I spent _many_ happy hours manually configuring my drivers, I can tell you! That's the kind of quality I wanted.
From the simplicity and ease of LaTeX, to the high performance and slick modernity of X11, there's nothing that OSS hasn't done better than their so-called rivals. It's true that some things are getting worse - ReiserFS instead of Ext2? I don't think so! But the for most important things, like printer configuration, and having a fully skinable CD player applet with it's own LISP based configuration language - well, Open Source is way out in front.
P.S. I was disappointed to see that Opera is making such poor software - that's why I'm sticking to Netscape 2.1
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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'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.