Is Open Source too Complex?

Jason Pillai writes to tell us ZDNet is reporting that at last month's Microsoft Worldwide Parter Conference in Boston Ryan Gavin, director of platform strategy, claimed that one of the big downsides to open source is complexity. From the article: "Gavin noted that the flexibility of open-source software in meeting specific business needs also means systems integrators and ISVs have to grapple with complexity costs. 'It's challenging for partners to build competencies to support Linux, because you never quite know what you're going to be supporting,' he added. 'Customers who run Linux could be operating in Red Hat, [Novell's] Suse, or even customized Debian environments,' he explained. 'You don't get that repeatable [development] process to build your business over time.'" More than once I have had complaints that my setup is more difficult than necessary. Is open source really that much harder, or just different than what most are used to?

Comments

All Software is complex.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Article should read:

"Gavin noted that the flexibility of proprietary software in meeting specific business needs also means systems integrators and ISVs have to grapple with complexity costs. 'It's challenging for partners to build competencies to support Windows, because you never quite know what you're going to be supporting,' he added. 'Customers who run Windows could be operating in 98, XP SP1, SP2, Vista or even customized 2003 server environments with god alone knowing what browser version they're using' he explained. 'You don't get that repeatable [development] process to build your business over time.'"

Because, lets face it - what Gavin is saying here is that proprietary software vendors find it hard to develop for linux. *shrugs* Maybe, that is not the same as saying that developing for Open Source is complex.

MS - time to face it, almost noone apart from you is making alot of money selling proprietary sofware (alone). The real cash is in services, services, services.

Re:All Software is complex.

[khakipuce]

Or put another way, a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...

And this is NEWS?

For my sins I have used a lost of operating systems over the years and they all have their pros and cons, the one thing that seems common across them is that the more scarey they look the less likely they are to break because people don't mess with the difficult ones. Most failures are caused by human error (it's just that no one admits to it) and making server OS's look familiar tempts people to fiddle.

Re:All Software is complex.

[Enderandrew]

I think you homed in on what the real message is here. And there is some truth to it.

For a large software developer, they want to reach a wide audience. That is why they develop for Windows, which has the largest user base. Even if they want to reach out to a Linux user base, there are so many different distros and ways of doing things, that you cut that audience into even smaller shares.

I'm all for freedom, but I find it silly that different distros keep configuration files in different locations, use different init scripts, use different install methods, have varying level of compliance with the LSB, are focused on either Gnome or KDE predominately, etc.

It does make it more difficult for a large company to develop for a Linux crowd in general.

Re:All Software is complex.

[IAmTheDave]

Or put another way, a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...

I don't think it's this bad - I think he has a point (that he puts his own MS positive light on) - but OSS is very often written to solve the problem a developer has, and is then supported and primarily used by developers. Setting up the software isn't something that the tech-savvy are concerned with because I think there is a very large "it works for me" chip on the shoulder of the OSS community.

That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today. I'm even dissapointed in Ubuntu in that light - they're the closest in my mind to a full desktop solution.

Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc. I think OSX has it pretty much right with software installation - drag this "file" into your Applications directory. Done.

Isn't that better than MSI or make/make install?

Re:All Software is complex.

[init100]

That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today.

Then what is a good graphical installer? The Windows XP installer? I'd prefer the Fedora Core 5 installer over the Windows XP installer every time. It is not only the graphics, but certain other issues. One prominent example is that the Windows XP installer won't ask everything before the installation and then work for half an hour. It will work for five minutes, ask a few questions, work for five minutes, ask a few questions, ad nauseum. The FC5 installer asks everything needed for the installation before it starts working.

But of course, most users never install Windows, since it comes with their computer.

Re:All Software is complex.

[waveclaw]

The F/OSS Way is just different than the Microsoft Way(tm): the reboot, reformat, reinstall dance. Most problems in both OSS and proprietary cases are misconfiguration and misuse of APIs or resources like memory, bandwidth and scheduling. It just takes a little more training to solve the real problem than to have a grunt punch the power button every 30 days.

All software is complex. It is perhaps the most complex technology developed by mankind. (Almost) everybody that has walked on a bridge knows how bridges work at some simple level. You can't say the same for a web browser or video game. Completely virtual, arbitrarily defined and so abstract it takes years of study just to understand the basics.

With all ISV's it's a select your platform game:

1. Pick your proprietary OS (Windows 2000, 2003, XP Home,XP Pro).
2. Pick your proprietary DB(MS SQL Server, SQL Server 2003, Access, Oracle).
3. Pick your proprietary UI toolkit (COM, ActiveX, .Net, Qt).
4. Pick your proprietary webserver (IIS, PWS (I'm not kidding on this one),IBM Weblogic).
5. etc...

Is this less complex than OSS? No. Just different.

OSS is very often written to solve the problem a developer has, and is then supported and primarily used by developers.

And proprietary software is written to make a quick buck. There is software you can put in your datacenter in which 70% of the code is dedicated to license enformcement: copyright checks, license servers, date bombs, vendor backdoors and product key checkers. I installed a zip library on a system in the mid 90s that was about 2k in size, but the software to enforce product key cheking was over 50k. They did wonderful Q&A on the installer to make sure nobody cheated on the product key, but screwed up the library. Had to get a patch for the library from the vendor back in the day when you had to get CDs and disketts of patches shipped.

That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today.

Please define 'good.' If you are using a graphical installer, you aren't in a large server envrionement[1]. In data centers and computer rooms, standardization is so important that jumpstarting Solaris and kickstarting RHEL is required. You define what is your platform for 100+ servers then enforce that through automted installation. No WIMP-iness here. These are text mode and command line tools: drop in a CD and let'er rip methods of standardizing your platform.

M$ gets away with using graphical installers on their desktop-OS-sitting-on-a-server becuase you get squat for software on the installation disks. There is nothing to verify when a complete bells-n-whistles install includes the base OS and Minesweeper. You have to get extra 'software X' to make Microsoft platforms usefull, so your configuration boils down to MS+software X when talking to a vendor. This is no less complex than the OSS model. For support puropses, it might be less complete with OSS since the software is all from (supported by) 1 company (the distro maker) and all on the same disk(s.)

Why do people focus on the installer anyway? With OSS you shouldn't be needing to reboot/reinstall to fix things. Working in a larger datacetners, you will focus on the disgnostics your can get out of a program to manage it. The quality of installers doesn't matter too much unless you are doing lots of turnover.

Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc.

I aggree whole heartily that OSS solutions are at least as difficult as commercial. However, the point of the FUD in the article is that OSS is a babylon of platforms, not that the installers suck. From the article:

"You don't get that repeatable [de

Absolutely. Unlike Windows where

[Flying pig]

You will only be supporting Server 2000. Or Server 2003. Or some custom locked down corporate environment. Or W2000 desktop. Or XP. Or XP SP1 (still having problems migrating to SP2.) Or SP2. With different flavors of IIS. And SQL Server 2000. Or SQL Server 2005. Or we have to use MSDE for this application because we only have SQL Server 2005 available and it won't connect to it.

Quite right. Microsoft has a huge advantage in terms of consistency and lack of complexity, provided of course that you just want to run Office on the desktop. Oh yes, which version of Office?

Open source is easier, if you know how to work it

[Eivind Eklund]

I am used to working with open source and I'm fairly used to working with proprietary software. I find it much, much harder to work with e.g. MS-SQL than either PostgreSQL or MySQL, as the resources around it is missing. MS-SQL has a ton of tutorials and screenshots and stuff for the proprietary stuff, but there's no working support community (I can't go on IRC and talk to a developer), the configuration systems are long and complex (probably because the developers do not use them to configure things and do not do support), and the use of graphical interfaces make the tutorials long and clumsy ("Now press "OK" in the dialog that had a screenshot just taking up half the page" is noticably more icky than "").

To add insult to injury, when the stuff is in trouble, I cannot go to the source code and find out what's up or fix that stupid error message that says "Cannot open file" but nothing about WHICH freakin' file.

In sum: I find open source much, much easier to support. When there's a problem, I can talk to other people that have had the same problem *and have had the resources to fix it*, unlike e.g. Microsoft support. (Microsoft support have actually called me to find out how to fix a problem in a Microsoft product - a problem that should have been trivial for them to debug if they had code access.)

Eivind.

How to deal with the 'complexity' of choice?

[Famatra]

Simple, have standards that people/distributions can *choose* to follow.
Projects such as Linux Standard
Base (and others, list / talk about them if you know of them) allows
distributions to have a common point and common environment.

I think GNU/Linux will learn from the fragmentation of Unix. Part of the
reason why Unix didn't develop a standard was that each closed version was
competing against eachother for customers. With Linux there is no to-the-death
competition since the work is shared and co-operative.

stupid FUD

[grindcorefan]

Ryan Gavin's statement about Free/Open Source Software being to complex is a complete no-brainer and doesn't even remotely reflect reality.

The truth is, complexity in computers and computer software is a tricky thing to tackle. As computer systems become more complex, complexity itself becomes a problem as integrating all the different components of high-complexity software into a working system as a whole is getting more difficult.

The perfect example is ms's own windows vista. That piece of software is so complex ms just can't get it to work properly. Delays are the logical consequence. Otoh, Free Software profits from having the source code available, not necessarily reducing complexity but making it easier to get along with it.

Summary: Complexity is a problem for software, but it doesn't matter if that software is free or non-free. Ryan Gavins statement is just what you would expect it to be, a stupid piece of FUD that might sound somewhat sophisticated to a non-guru but every proper software engineer would be rofl about.

There is no such thing as Linux

[TheRaven64]

This is one of the fundamental things that Linux advocates rarely get. From a user perspective, there are about as many differences between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE as there are between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, or Solaris and some other SysV variant. The fact that they have the same[1] kernels makes little difference.

You can run Debian with a few different kernels and, apart from differing levels of hardware support, there is no difference from a system administrators perspective. Code written for one POSIX-compliant will usually work on another if the same shared libraries are the same.

Saying you support 'Linux' is silly. It's like saying you support 'UNIX.' Saying you support RHEL makes sense. RHEL[2] is a complete operating system with a set of defined library versions, a documented filesystem layout, a minimum specified set of supported system calls, etc.

[1] Modulo a few hundred vendor-specific patches.
[2] Substitute your distro of choice here.

Re:Eh?

[MadJo]

hmm which Vista version do I want...
Yup, they really don't offer any choice, do they? And they aren't confusing their customers at all, right?

BS

[pedestrian crossing]

I'm all for freedom, but I find it silly that different distros keep configuration files in different locations, use different init scripts, use different install methods, have varying level of compliance with the LSB, are focused on either Gnome or KDE predominately, etc.

It does make it more difficult for a large company to develop for a Linux crowd in general.

Only if they want to develop proprietary software for Linux.

If they provide the source, then whoever maintains the distro is the only one who has to worry about issues that you are fretting over.

That's the whole purpose of distros.

I'm all for freedom

I would argue that you are not. Otherwise, you wouldn't be rolling out this old canard...