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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.""
Who exactly is Otto Z. Stern? What is his background, credentials, past software development involvement, and so on?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Is someone just trying to provoke Slashdotters into an absolute frenzy lately? I've been seeing a flamebait, as-offensive-as-possible anti-F/OSS story every couple of days, and not the same one over and over again.
I'm all for showing both sides of the fence, but damn, choose people closer to the center instead of moonbat extremists.
Wow. I kinda think that this post proves the previous guy's point exactly. Specifically, where you say that you can configure KDE to basically look like OSX. If you think that a KDE theme is all you need to get the user experience of OSX you're just being silly. If it's "good enough" for you, then you are exactly the person too close to things to see how bad they suck. Further backing up the original guys post is the fact that you are modded so high. I am not sure there is an easy way to cure what appears to be an epidemic of "bad taste" among *nix users. I don't think there is a pill or anything :)
There already are such standards: printer = postscript, camera = FAT (filesystem for flash memory), video card = VESA, joystick = USB HID, modem = Hayes, etc. The problem is that these either cost way too much (postscript printers, real hardware modems) to be viable in the current consumer market (different from the business market, which is why you should have no problem using multi-thousand dollar "enterprise" printers but can't use your $50 inkjet), or they don't let you use the advanced functionality of the device (video card, joystick). In the first case, consumers aren't going to go back to paying $500 for a printer or $100 for a modem when they can get a $50 printer and $10 modem that work with the 90%+ majority OS. In the second case, while you may get your hardware working, you're going to bitch that you can't use higher resolutions at proper refresh rates or take advantage of all of that hardware acceleration in your $200 video card, or that you can only use two of the ten buttons on your joystick. There's simply no way to design a standard driver that will allow designers to continue to advance their product and still remain competitive (even "standards" like OpenGL allow for extensions, because if it didn't it would've been dead years ago).
We'd also be stuck in the early 90s, technology-wise, because nobody could or would advance the state of the art. Standards are all well and good, but you have to be able to extend them for them to remain viable. Look at HTML for example -- the deliberate snubbing of standards by Microsoft and Netscape forced the standard to move forward. Yes, it resulted in crap like <blink> and <marquee>, and it caused a lot of compatibility pain (do you use iframes or layers? IE events or Netscape events?), but if that hadn't happened we'd still be stuck in the days of HTML 3.x, using tables for layout and not having anything close to CSS (or worse, we'd have Netscape's javascript-based style sheet language instead).
Standards are defined by committee, which the absolute worst way to innovate.
it seems to me that he is mostly upset because software he does not have to pay for is not being developed in exactly the way he would prefer. i for one do not expect people to whom i am not contributing money or help to give a damn what i personally want from the software they are developing. but i prefer to not have to pay $300 for software developed by people who exhibit the same ammount of apathy towards myself as those who give their product away for free.
I love OSS. At least half the applications on my computer are OSS, I'm writing this from FireFox, in the background I have Eclipse and OpenOffice open too. But I still have some issues with OSS.
It's not the quality of what OSS projects produce, it's the difficulty of getting involved. It's like a rite of passage. You can't just open up a compiler, read the source, and start typing code. Getting started is a complicated process. There are numerous OSS projects I'd love to get involved in, but actually setting up my computer to have a functional environment is frequently more work than I can stomach. In comparison, designing and writing code is far easier than configuring my system to prepare to join an OSS project. Some people have said that it's no more difficult than understanding the system at a commercial project, but I disagree. Any commercial projects I've been involved in usually have their computers already configured so you can just start working, no break in stride.
For the most part, the thought of how much work it's going to be to get started keeps me from even taking the first step to get involved. I spent many hours just trying to configure my system to get involved with the Mozilla project, and didn't even get to the point I could review the code because of build problems. And of course real life intervenes so the amount of time I can spend at once trying to configure my system is limited.
Maybe this is a necessary hazing ritual, but in my opinion, the day that software developers don't also need to be System Configuration Experts, the progress of OSS will skyrocket. If there were simply an executable file that you run and it setup a complete environment where you can just start typing code and contribute, OSS would progress at light speed because much less capable developers could still contribute with small bug fixes, or even clarifying comments, adding comments, or just restructuring code modules.
Some people might think that's a bad idea because complete idiots could try to participate, but there's numerous ways around that like ranking/priority systems attached to code reviews (i.e. Positively ranked developers would have their code reviews take precedence over unknown developers, and trolls who not only didn't produce anything valuable, but even wasted reviewers time with complete nonsense pseudo code could have rankings knocked down so they wouldn't even be visible to review)
They've lost touch with the fact that people don't care about any of that anymore.
Yes, most people never cared about "any of that", now or ever. But, luckily for all of us, some people happily lose touch, and make interesting things.
If people are screaming at you, and you don't like what they are saying, you should probably hang out with some different people. Or at least walk away.