Open Source Worse than Flying

george writes "In an article published on TheRegister, Otto Z. Stern makes the bold statement that "The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code." Accusing Open Source of being buggy and its devolopers of preoccupation with mudane details."I'm sitting here...wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.""

Comments

Buggy Browsers

[zbuffered]

Open-source Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out, and it's decidedly less buggy than IE.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[zbuffered]

Internet Explorer has not been improved since the release of Windows XP (with the exception of lame popup blocking and minor security improvements as a part of XP SP2). FireFox undergoes active improvement and supports features (transparent PNGs) that IE does not. I did not make the larger OSS vs Closed Source argument, just that FF is much better today than IE is. And even more so with the release of 1.5.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[gnuLNX]

uh...dude have you used both browsers in the last year?

No seriously you are totally righ both browsers were developed by highly skilled engineers... No one is dsputing that. However one group of engineers (for whatever reason...boss said so perhaps) has not been competitive in the last 2.5 years...go download Firefox, you can see for your self.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[MikeFM]

My first explanation would probably sound rather rude and that wouldn't really prove anything other than getting into a name calling fight. So to a more useful argument..

I am a big free software advocate. I am a professional programmer that invests much of my time and money sponsoring free software development. A single person could never create, or pay for, every single piece of software they might need to use in this day and age. By working with others we can share what software we can create, and pay for, so that we all benefit. THAT is the entire basis to the concept of free software. There is no rule that you can't also sell software. Obviously many free software supporters do sell the software to great profit.

What you can't do is continue to sell crap. Crap can be defined as software that doesn't work, can't be made to work, and can't be returned. THAT is exactly what the commercial software industry is. You buy a program and half the time it doesn't work well enough to acomplish the things the box claimed it could do. So.. return it and try something else.. oops that's right. They won't take software returns. You can't see the source code so you can't fix it. You're just fucked.

Please make free software and sell it. Make a profit. Hire more programmers. Sell more software. Make more profit. We, the free software community, want you to do this because it makes more software available to us. It makes better software available to us. We'll even help you add features and fix bugs at no cost to you. Maybe you won't be able to sell a poorly supported crappy product with no documentation for $300 but you will be able to sell a good product with good support and documentation for a reasonable price. Sounds like a lot more work for the buck until you consider that the customer will help improve, document, and support your product.

I REALLY say this to hardware companies. Make your product with good, open source, drivers (or well documented specifications) and I'll buy your products. The drivers don't even need to be for my OS of choice (Linux). If they're open source I'll port them myself if needed. I'll pick your product over cheaper products if you do this because I won't need to worry about the product not having drivers or having drivers that suck or no longer work in the future. (I've had to many bits of perfectly good hardware stop working in Windows because the company didn't release drivers for the new version of Windows.) Money is not a problem. I spend a LOT of money on electronics and software. I just want to know your product will work when I need it to and to me that means having the information to write or fix drivers.

Wow, what an ass

[Zencyde]

Isn't it the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer to provide drivers? Perhaps I am just crazy...but aren't generic drivers a godsend in themselves?

Linux will never progress very far

[Anonymous Coward]

When the ones developing it are the ones using it all the time. The closer to things you are, the easier it is to lose track of how bad they suck (there's a reason the first thing apple removed from their unix was X11).

Re:jeeesus

[JanneM]

The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all. And it works too - as I write, they're probably high-fiving themselves as they see the hit counters spin from the slashdotting.

He hits the nail on the head

[Clockwurk]

Whats the use of pointless eye-candy (like compositing and transparent xterms) when the underlying windowing system (X) is more broken than a New Orleans levee. The big problems in Linux won't ever be addressed because you can't get enough people to agree on a common vision and work to achieve it (well that and the hostility towards commercial developers).

Linux is a lot like windows, each new version is a little bit better, but it is chained to doing many of the important (and broken) things the same as every version before it. Linux won't ever be great when it gets developed a lot like a katamari, layers of hacks that get thicker and thicker as time goes on.

Only Apple (and Steve Jobs) has the guts to throw out all the old garbage (X windows, the many start up daemons, unix copy/paste, gtk) and replace it with fresh new ideas (quartz, launchd, xcode).

Re:jeeesus

[pchan-]

You have it wrong. The Reg is a very Open Source friendly publication. They often post about the evils of Microsoft and others. This is just their way of balancing out. Instead of posting an anti-open source article every so often, they just post one huge flaming pile of crap to get it all to balance out in the end. It's like when you help a dozen old ladies across the street, you get to murder one bum and your karma breaks even.

For crying out loud

[Cally]

What wrong with you people?! don't you know irony or satire when you see it? Oh, ... wait. No 'Private Eye' in the land of free speech... Just think of it as IT journalism by Monty Python. I'm really looking forward to seeing the "FotW" and what the Register cha;ps have to say about this mass sense-of-humour failure. Let's just say that I think they might just be ever-so-slightly slightly taking the piss out of the Slashbots...

You know, I think this inability to distinguish irony from sincerity explains a lot about the success of Dubya in hoodwinking Americans into voting for him. He'd've got nowhere in Europe, because he's obviously a clown - obvious to anyone equipped with a sense of humour or of irony, anyway.

Re:jeeesus

[arkhan_jg]

"Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest."

I think you've missed that The Register is a british publication. This article is sarcastic satire, nothing more. It might raise page views, but it's not meant as a troll to be take seriously.

I laughed when I read the article. I laughed even louder when I saw how many slashdotters have taken it seriously and leapt to linux's defence, and I say that as a user of linux for 7 years. I mean, come on -

"Meanwhile, I'm sitting here typing away on a 128-processor Unix SMP armed with an ultrasonic file system and jet-fueled partitioning system, wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate" - how could anyone NOT see this is a joke?