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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.""

22 of 912 comments (clear)

  1. Sore PC by yuckymucky · · Score: 5, Funny

    He should get that "open sores" PC checked out. That doesn't sound good at all.

    1. Re:Sore PC by (H)elix1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      He should get that "open sores" PC checked out. That doesn't sound good at all.

      I hear you can get that type of problem if you don't practice safe hex...

  2. Open Sores? by Frogbert · · Score: 5, Funny

    If your PC is giving you open sores perhaps you should stop rubbing up against it so hard.

  3. Buggy Browsers by zbuffered · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:Buggy Browsers by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 5, Funny

      I submitted a patch to fix the Firefox name bug, on the basis that it's hard for someone to tell that it's the name of a browser. I suggested renaming the browser to something more marketable, such as Internet Explorer Improved or Internet Surfer or even Free Money, Click Here!.

      Got no replies. =(

    2. Re:Buggy Browsers by zbuffered · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      Synergy is your friend
    3. Re:Buggy Browsers by gnuLNX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      what?
    4. Re:Buggy Browsers by MikeFM · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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  4. Wow, what an ass by Zencyde · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:Wow, what an ass by Osty · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There really is no reason for every damn product on the market to need a custom driver though. There should be one interface for a printer, one for a camera, one for a video card, one for a joystick, one for a modem, etc. The consumer needs to demand this.

      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).

      Not only will it give us choices as to what OS and software we use with these products but it'll also make computers a lot more stable. A lot of crashes and other common problems are the result of minor incompatibilities between different drivers on the system. Standard drivers can be well tested. A mish mash of random drivers can't be tested well at all.

      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.

  5. Linux will never progress very far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  6. what a flamer by John+Frink · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code." I'm a pilot who happens to like flying as well as open source so screw him!

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  7. Re:jeeesus by Comatose51 · · Score: 5, Funny
    I deserve to be heard because I'm an idiot too so mod me up!

    All I have to say is close source is better than getting branded by a hot iron. If it was a choice between close source and being branded by a hot iron, I would take close source. At least proprietary software have progressed faster than hot iron branding. Hot iron branding have progressed little since the days of cowboys. You still apply fire to a piece of metal that gets applied to the skin. Proprietary software has definitely progressed beyond that stage.

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  8. Re:jeeesus by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  9. I don't know by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've read studies where Hot Branding compares favorably against Microsoft's latest license agreement. But maybe they were funded by Hot Branding Zealots.

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  10. He hits the nail on the head by Clockwurk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  11. Re:Full of hot air by KylePflug · · Score: 5, Funny
    Having said that, I'm commited to Firefox and had nothing but great luck running Apache (on Windows, not Linux ;-) - so OS is slicker than glossy marketing materials from M$ in many cases, but my experience with Operating Systems is to treat them like guys in suits carrying Bibles and ringing my doorbell.
    You spray your operating system with mace and call the police?!?
  12. Re:jeeesus by pchan- · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. For crying out loud by Cally · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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  14. Re:jeeesus by arkhan_jg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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?

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  15. Re:Otis Stern is just upset because by indifferent+children · · Score: 5, Funny
    Unlike you I get windows shoved down my throat at work.

    Ooh, that's a pane in the neck.

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  16. Re:Oblig. Spelling Nazi by Reverend528 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Cars produced by apple all have 2 engines, one big one kludged onto a smaller one. Apple's cars have many of the features of a linux vehicle, but you wouldn't know, because everything is hidden under a dashboard that can only be removed with excessive force. The only thing that drivers are granted access to is a steering wheel, which is located in the upper left corner of the car. Because there are no pedals, all apple vehicles drive at the same speed all the time. Apple drivers insist that the speed is "fast" because there are two engines, but many windows and linux drivers debate this.

    Despite the absurd usability problems that are created by having only one poorly-placed steering wheel, many Apple users insist that their cars are "more user-friendly". They also insist that they are "thinking differently", despite the fact that all of their cars look exactly the same.