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Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."
Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
Yeah, anyone who's ever gotten even remotely involved in wikipedia could have seen this one coming a mile away. This is why, at work, you have "project managers", that have final say (and yet, also take the burden and responsibility of making decisions).
Push Button, Receive Bacon
IMHO, Gnu/Linux on the desktop still kinda sucks right now, but it is advancing rapidly. This makes me want to upgrade my distribution to get the latest and greatest, because it fixes features I really want (multimedia these days). We are quickly getting to a place where most the needs of average users will be well met. Then I won't mind if Debian is a little behind. It's like Windows XP being good enough that most people don't really care about upgrading to Vista. I can't wait until we are in that place, and I hope that then, the impedus to move forward so rapidly is lightened enough to relieve some of the stress on the Debian devs, allowing them more time to work through some of these issues.
Unresolvable egos have killed many a commercial project stone dead (especially when the subcontractor thinks it knows what the prime contractor wants rather than actually doing what they're told by the relevant subject metter experts).
Unfortunatly along with outstanding coding skills the OSS comunity has its share of egos, and as with an OSS project your job (usually) isn't on the line you can make your point more forceably and with less tact than in a work situation. The only problem is alot of the time both sides of a row are right - just unable to see the common ground and resolve their egos for the good of the project.
I do wonder whether some of this is down to lack of face to face in person meetings between the various parties...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Intresting post, but may I point out that Slashdot doesn't need to pander to people any more? They can post more or less anything they want and they'll find it very difficult to drive the fanbase off. Slashdot is just a really large forum to most people, we come here for the latest (ahem) news/waste a bit of time and take part in the commenting. Slashdot isn't a news site in the traditional sense, it's a blog with thousands of people reading it.
Does all this matter in all honesty? To most people probably not. We're a bunch of nerds discussing things from America's movement into a police state like society to the latest gimmick software. Both cannot be "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" in all cases.
As for addressing the article it's self. OSS does have 3 sides and we have to remember this. As long as we keep everyones goal in sight (good free software with the freedom to do whatever we like to it) then our paths may cross at times but we'll work together for the greater good. My biggest worry for OSS is when it gets too big and it's flooded by people who think they can make money out of it instead of the love of good software as we have now.
I like muppets.
What's wrong with a little tension? It's all about how you handle the tension.
It really seems to me that Ubuntu really is more of a community than a just a distro. Packages appear to be carefully selected based on what the community is asking for, and the effect of the community forums for support make it a great distro for the newbie (be nice to the newbie! when properly nurtured, they can grow into gurus!).
I think that if Debian total fell apart for any reason, Ubuntu would continue to move forward. If the community found another distro to serve as a base, I think they would just use that base.
It's all about community, the people. Without that, software really doesn't matter much.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Right, when will that be? Aside from Office & AutoCAD there are still a LOT of half-assed custom installers full of boiler-plate text that no-one has bothered to customize. (Look for "Your Company Name here" in the "summary" info on a random Windows installer some time. Nullsoft installer really isn't helping matters, and so it Microsoft's lack of good tools for making clean MSIs. Well, and the fact that the MSI format does not make any intuitive sense, it's more or less a binary SQL dump of a bizzare data model for describing parts of a program's installed state, peice by explicit peice. WiX helps, but it still exposes you to the SQL-style silliness, like having to explicitly list every file with it's attributes at least twice in a verbose XML syntax (Once to define it, once to include it in a component that can be installed).
.deb's and there's no comparison, .debs are a LOT less work, are a lot easier to understand what's going on, and actual has a useful way to define prerequisites. That, and even though MSI is only supported on NT-based system Wix requires defining 8.3 format filenames.
I agree Windows would suck a LOT less to maintain if MSI were used, but even Microsoft seems to be moving away from it (not that they ever went whole-hog for it), with the Vista installer. They arn't installing their components from their own managable and patchable package format, the description of the new Vista installer seem to be that it takes a snapshot that somebody at MS duct-taped into working (hopefully) then burned to CD.
Not even Microsoft distributes things as MSIs or MSPs though, they distribute "I 0wnz0r your system!?1111!!111" EXEs. At least MS doesn't gimp their MSIs to refure to install without the setup.exe wrapper, like some companies do.
I've made a few MSIs as well as
I hate Windows because I have to make it do useful thing.