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Trouble With Open Source?
George Russell writes "Stephen J Marshall, writing in the BCS online magazine, provides a cogent argument detailing the ills of Open Source Software for the software industry - namely, the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership of OSS developed under the current Intellectual Property laws. Do these issues concern you?"
How many open source projects can you name that don't have a better closed source equivalent? Any number of application servers are better than jboss. PHP and every product released on it are complete junk. Every major DBMS is better than mysql, postgresql, etc. Gnome and KDE are ridiculous memory hogs compared to their Windows equivalent. IDEA is better than Eclipse. Firefox is good but only because MS has totally ignored IE over the past several years. Firefox crashes on me at least once a day and leaks memory like a mofo on both Windows and Linux. SugarCRM is a joke compared to Salesforce.com. OpenOffice lacks the collaboration and data integration features of Office. The list goes on....
The only decent open source projects have major company backing or are trivial programs (like GNU ls, sort, etc., which are better than their closed-source counterparts). Also, emacs, though it is just starting to show its age without proper refactoring support and other niceties of modern editors. Without the help of Redhat, Novell, IBM, Oracle, etc., Linux and Apache would be a mass of untested code, crashing with every other module or driver. Same with Java. Though it's open source, Sun controls the process very strongly to keep the quality of the JRE up to standards.