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What's Wrong With the FOSS Community?
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, one of the major Free Software Magazine authors, has completed his second article on whats wrong with the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community, and what we face in this world. He touches on ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar essay briefly, and warns against cherry-picking style software development."
I'm pissed. I'm disgusted. Santa is in dire need of some improvements. When he brings all the presents, he does it in the middle of the night, so I have to wait until the morning to get them. When I do get up in the morning to see what I got, all that trashy wrapping paper is in the way, delaying my enjoyment.
Also he drinks all the milk and eats all the cookies!
Good leader > no leader >> bad leader
Nothing in this piece convinces that common sense is wrong.
There is nothing wrong with the FOSS community, however there are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people new to things such as Linux. I am not a Linux n00b as I have been using it on and off since 1996/7 however when I first gave Gentoo a try (back in 2004 i believe) all I got was abuse when I asked for help with some things. There are a small number of groups within the FOSS community who give it a bad name, however this is the same with most communities IMHO. Ubuntu are doing a lot of good not just with their decent distribution but with a positive and helpful community as well. Infact this is probably the best thing about Ubuntu.
When did the 'FOSS community' become an entity that could be analyzed as a single group so that you could point at it saying that's what's wrong with it?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I kind of dislike the Open Source fanosophy... Sorry, philosophy, but that article was a waste of bandwidth. Of course, in free/Open Source everyone does as they want. Yes, it's a Bazaar, but that's the way it's suposed to be. I do whatever i want in my freetime, but I must do whatever I'm told at work. And that is not going to change.And that has been so since the creation or the evolution from monkeys. And the world has not ended because of that.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
If you don't like it, then don't use it :)
Steve and BIll don't own it. (But Novell isn't done, so that could change)
so what's wrong with it is actually what is right with it.
we need more artists in the FOSS to design icons and stuff. Also, we need folks who are willing to hunt bugs to complement those who come up with features. Instead of doing a crossword puzzles why not fix bugs in FOSS?
That one thing is that FOSS can not be the end all and be all of software.
Not every software need will be be solved with FOSS.
There needs to be freedom to write Open and Closed source software. That is what bugs me are people that think selling a closed source package is evil. I just don't think that the FOSS model can work for every program.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Clearly, when ideological differences get in the way of even naming the community, you have a problem. Then again, having a common enemy will never be enough to guarantee harmony.
From the article: :-) ) until it matures and shines. The linux kernel is a wonderful example.
Unlike in the Cathedral, the Bazaar has no official leadership.
Isn't this what enables FOSS? Most of the FOSS don't have official leadership (other than the creator of course
I read the article, and I still couldn't tell you what it says. It talks about bazaar, and Gnome and development, but it has no content! I don't think it said *anything*. From the book: Harmless.
I challenge thee to summariser it.
This is what (/usr/bin/ots) a text summariser said (interesting to note it tents to focus on cathedral-style, bazaar-style, and gnome bashing)
A few years back, Eric S. Entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he wrote about how the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community does what it wants when it wants to. In Cathedral-style projects, your not-so-friendly neighborhood PHB (fueled by the lies from various ugly hunch-backed minions), although wrong 120% of the time, says what goes in a project. Backed by the Free Software Foundation and the FOSS community as a whole, the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat.
The GNOME project lacked true vision for those years, and feature creep and other long term development problems rushed in to fill that hole. Problem is, many projects are just like GNOME. Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same. someone with vision (corrupt or not) would control a project, driving development behind it, and have the project reach goals in specific time frames.
Another thing that's wrong with the "community" is writing an article detailing what's wrong with the community and then bashing a project like GNOME, which for all its failings does what it needs to do, is very much active and has a large user and developer following. So I guess this guy must be a "KDE fanboy"... and so it goes.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The biggest problem with the FOSS community is its tolerance for whiny fuckers who can't understand that we do this for fun and you have absolutely no right to complain about something you got for free.
How we know is more important than what we know.
> Not only did Dawes lack vision, he got in the
> way of everyone who did have vision.
That's rather well said. If you're the author of a successful open source project and you find yourself unable to keep working on it, do you have a duty to turn it over to the other developers for continued maintenance? I can't think of a reason not to, and if you don't, it'll either die or get forked, both of which aren't pleasant outcomes.
The Army reading list
One of the huge problems that OSS faces is the attitude that if a user (non-developer) wants a feature, then he should work on it himself. OSS developers only seem to want to work on "pet projects" that are "fun" to code, not projects that are "boring" or seen as "difficult" or "of no interest to the developers". OSS programmers must take the time to provide features which the market, which primarily consists of non-developers, wants.
This is basic economics: provide the market with the goods it wants, or get run out of business.
Been a Unix/Linux admin for eight years. Been running slackware on laptop as my sole OS for the past five years. I've seen a lot of changes. It's never been better. Sure it's a bazaar, but isn't that how it's supposed to be? Hey, if you don't like gnome, choose something else among the dozens of choices out there.
Perhaps the real problem is the plethora of side-liners, pundits, philosophers, and magazine authors who have nothing better to do than sit around and draw erroneous conclusions. I call these people OSS arm-chair experts. We don't need 'em. Seems the people with most to say write the least amount of code. Maybe they should learn to program and get involved rather than digging too deeply into what's wrong. Be positive.
Someday pigs will fly
Someday hell will freeze over
Someday bears will be catholic and popes will shit in the woods
Someday poeple will stop using weasel words
the foss community is a mirror of the world in general. the people in it are no different to those in any other community. i've met the most generous and helpful people, and also the most nasty. there's nothing "wrong" with the FOSS people, it's just human nature. right and wrong are just a matter of opinion.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Yes. A guy with a vision can move fast a FOSS proyect. The bazar is good, and the catedral has some nice features you can use on a FOSS proyect. So, I mostly agree TFA.
-Woof woof woof!
The major difference between FOSS and other communities are that the people in a FOSS community share far fewer specific goals than other communities. Some people want something fixed **now**. Others want it fixed **properly**, no matter how long that takes. Others just piss and moan.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Oops. There goes that "we" word again. So you are the FOSS community?
Perhaps you should have said, "I do this for fun and you have no right to complain about something I give you for free". Because there are a lot of others in this mythical community that don't have your attitude. I don't believe you speak for their projects.
Though I may not agree with some of his details, overall he's spot on in his argument. He ascertains that the FOSS community - when lacking Cathedral-like leadership - will suffer and potentially flounder. Using the example of x.11 / x.org, he correctly summarizes what is a partial issue with FOSS.
HOWEVER - I think it is very good that such a review exists. As the benevolent dictator of my staff, I encourage ideas and help move software projects forward. I can learn from the FOSS community and their mistakes.
I certainly hope that the kernel development and many other such projects (KDE) follow this type of path.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
One big problem that I see if the violence inherent in the community. Everything is a "war" or a "Battle". An "OS War", a "browser war". This article is titled "inside the mind of the enemy". Community != War. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the whole OSS movement was being led by our own current war-loving government (war on drugs, war on terrorism). How about dropping the hostility, for starters?
This article really only applies to large projects like Linux and Gnome. A large amount of FOSS is written by one person. I don't know of any statistics, but take a look at Freshmeat or at the authorship of programs that you use, and I'm pretty sure the majority will be single-author projects, or perhaps involve two or three people. This is often true of projects that list many authors - often only one or two people have worked on any program at any given time - there are a lot of authors because the project has run for a long time or consists of a number of separate pieces. Such projects are intrinsically Cathedral-style. There isn't any large group to have different visions. This isn't to say that what the author has to say isn't relevant as some large projects are very important, but a valid perspective on FOSS development has to avoid the mythology in which every project involves large numbers of people.
My experience with most of the FOSS software (I know, redundant...) is that is usually just doesn't work the way it "should". I know that is an awfully broad brush, but in my experience it is the absolute truth. I want so badly for FOSS to take over (primarily because I do hate capitalism...well, American-style capitalism and copyright laws) but, being a Sys Admin, I can go to my boss only so many times and say, "Hey, I can save you a TON of money on this cool FREE alternative to _____!", only to have it fall apart after a few months of continuous use. I am sick abd tired of being made to look like a fool by some of
this half-@ssed written software. I'm not saying that I can write better software. I am saying, however, that it should at least work as well as the (God, if you exist please forgive me for what I am about to say.) MS piece that it is probably trying to emulate.
I don't consider myself an FOSS zealot by any stretch, but I am rooting for its success.
First off a lot of complaining can be considered constructive criticism.
.. but the tire goes flat in the middle of the highway .. then what? You don't have a right to complain cause you got it free? It should meet a certain standard or you would have chosen the commercial one if the free one was crap. It would be different if you had approached me and asked me to make you a tire.
.. but there's two sides to every issue. Oh yeah btw I did appreciate the cool stuff you guys did back in the days of V.
Say I give you a free tire for your car saying "it's a good tire" and you use it
That said, I do understand the point you were making
That's all.
Yep, the boring stuff doesn't get done unless there's incentive to do.
A leader without the ability to fire someone or give them a pay raise isn't going to be able to provide much incentive.
But with FOSS, I (the end user) can email the coder and offer to pay him/her to finish a feature I'd like or do some other boring job. And that is one of the great things about FOSS. Once I pay for it, everyone benefits from it (including me).
Try doing that with closed source products. You can't even find out the names of the coders working on it, much less contract them directly.
The big problem with open source, once you get past the major projects like Linux and Apache, is that projects get 80% done and then run into trouble. The classic troubled Sourceforge project is stuck at version 0.9 for years. The fun stuff has been done, and nobody wants to do the boring work of making it usable and maintainable, fixing the hard bugs, cleaning up the messy parts, and writing readable documentation.. Which, in commercial software, is 50% to 80% of the job.
The problem is not open source, but volunteer projects. Which is where companies like RedHat come in. They take the stuff that's almost done and put paid people on doing the boring but essential work. Which pays off for them.
- Not-Invented-Here Syndrome: Reinvent and implement what already exists because it's not 100% the way you want it to be. Why collaborate when you can just create another duplicate project that will never make it past beta or even close to feature complete?
- Users, What Users?: Coding for yourself is nice, but if you want users to flock to your app, you might want to actually consider what they want. Don't bitch and moan at them when they offer suggestions, even if said suggestions don't fit your own personal vision, or even if they are downright stupid. That doesn't mean you have to implement them, but it means you have to be weigh them equally with your own ideas. Try to be inclusive and open to your userbase. "Go code it yourself" is a great way to keep OSS in the geek ghettos of the computing world.
- But It Looks Pretty: That's a snazzy looking interface you just whipped up, is it consistent? No? Does it follow standard UI principles? No? I'm sure people won't become frustrated and dismissive of your hard work. You can say that UI standards impinge on your freedom as a developer, but they make a user's life much easier, and makes people much more likely to actually use your software.
- Ask, Don't Beg: Asking companies and organizations to open code is nice and helpful, but be careful how you go about it. It can easily come across as "The OSS community could never dream of putting something like that together. Gimme!" Don't act like you *expect* the code, and that they are evil incarnate for withholding it. Don't make it seem as if the OSS community is incompetent and needs privately-developed projects turned over wholesale to get anything accomplished. Sure it helps a whole lot, but don't make it seem as though OSS is just mooching off the investment of others.
- Vendettas: If two projects can fight over something, no matter how petty, they will. Try coding, it's more productive and makes you appear like a mature, competent project that might help win over those hesitant to support OSS. Or you could just continue the pissing matches and flamefests over icons and licensing minutiae that could probably be settled if egos were set aside for a few moments. Public wars of words, endless forking....nothing gets accomplished but the stroking of egos. Well, except the whole "OSS developers come across as immature, childish amateurs" thing.
I don't think anything in it is wrong, as such, but it really doesn't say all that much. It sort of meanders through a few stories vaguely relating to the idea that "without an organizing vision, direction doesn't happen." But it seems to me that that while that's vaguely interesting, its not really a problem with the OSS community.
While, of course, the OSS community doesn't have a single vision for any piece of OSS software, quite a lot of OSS projects do and, as his story alludes, OSS projects that have a following but languish either for lack of vision or because the project owner has misguided vision—unlike closed-source projects which, while they may not tend to lack vision, are no less likely to have a misdirected vision than their open-source counterparts—can be rescued by forking.
And plenty of OSS projects do have a vision, direction, roadmap, etc. Sure, there's probably a lot of stuff that gets released under an open-source license (or straight into the public domain) because the author is essentially "done" with it and throwing it out to the community to do with what they will, but certainly open-source players like Apache, Mozilla, etc. have a vision for their main projects, and members of the community are attracted to and contribute to projects, no doubt, largely because of how they see the project's vision as compatible with their own. The "solution" McFarland offers is what it seems to me almost every major open-source project is already openly trying to do: allow the community to contribute, but institute a degree of top-down control in terms of timelines, roadmap, and assignments to make sure that the grunt-work necessary to have a polished project gets done.
I probably wouldn't call it "acting like the Cathedral", the openness of many successful projects to community process and innovation, while retaining a kind of top-down vision, is something of a synthesis: the Cathedral harnessing the energy of the Bazaar, the Bazaar borrowing the focus of the Cathedral. And you see something like it in the embrace by some commercial, formerly closed-source vendors of both open-source software and increasing community involvement. If I had to name the model, I'd call it the "Congregation" or "Assembly", a less-propietary Cathedral, a small portion of the Bazaar united by a common purpose and direction to accept, in the context of a project, some degree of authority and leadership (but not the exclusive ownership and control of the Cathedral.)
I think many F/OSS developers tend to have this attitude that they're developing software for themselves or for the F/OSS community... as opposed to developing software that is intuitive for anyone and everyone to use. And I think that's the KEY to making OSS software mainstream. Design it with OTHERS in mind. Design it to be intuitive to use right from the begining otherwise I don't see F/OSS software becoming mainstream. And I'm in no way suggesting replacing power with easy of use. The two can go hand in hand but it's not that easy.... but it's easier if you have the right frame of mind.
I'm not anti-microsoft. I'm anti-bullshit. Which means I'm anti-microsoft.
OSS doesn't suffer from the lack of leadership or other, supposed 'Cathedral' qualities. In fact, it's the superior leadership, based on merrit and ideals, that turns OSS into the nightmare of anything cathedral - such as MS.
In OSS much more than anywhere else, the best floats on top. That's why Outlook mail sucks and KMail sucks considerably less. Linux works because NOBODY doubts that Linus is the chief, Blender works because NOBODY doubts that Ton is the chief, because they both do an excellent job at what they do: leading large OSS projects.
Of course there's weedy stuff in OSS that's buggier and more twisted than Autodesk Converter and Macromedia Director together, but that sinks to the lowest bottom, and does not get pushed onto the market by monopolies and marketing budgets of galactic proportions (Windows XP anyone?).
The article is bogus and has it all backwards. I want my 5 minutes back.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"When did the 'FOSS community' become an entity that could be analyzed as a single group so that you could point at it saying that's what's wrong with it?"
Since statistics and psychology were invented.
The Bazaar is fun, but it can be exhausting after a little while. If you want to come away from it with anything worthwhile, you need to be pretty clever, or have some insider information. Otherwise, it's a lot of noise and junk and hobbyists selling kitsch. There are some great deals, but you have to know how to operate and where to look. Everyone is working for themselves; some things make sense, and some are just crazy. See the above replies to this article to see what I mean (check for lower scores).
I think when the author refers to cathedrals, it also has to do with the end result. There's management, and it's mostly separate from the chaos of a bazaar or the all-directions-at-once FOSS universe. Good management gets you a cathedral as a result. Bad management gets you a Spanish Inquisition. FOSS has accomplished a lot, but there are some real masterpieces of software in the closed-source world, the 'cathedral' world, that I haven't seen FOSS get anywhere near.
For the sake of discussion, here are the two titles that keep Windows on my HD: Native Instruments Traktor and Ableton Live--they're pro DJ programs for music production and live performance. If anyone can show me a FOSS project that really competes, please tell me about it. I've looked, but most of what I can find is more of a proof-of-concept than anything I would trust performing at a club. The projects are so specific that someone apparently needs to round people up, interview them, and pay a select few of them to write and maintain the software. The hobbyist/genius inventor thing is interesting, and I don't mean to say that I'm not really impressed with what people have managed to create on their own, but the resulting software just isn't going to work for me when I actually have to cue up a timecode record and match beats.
But then, for everyday stuff, FOSS is totally the way to go. When I do general computing--web surfing, programming, chatting, frozen bubble--open-source programmers have run circles around the 'cathedral' folks. So maybe they just need to get around to my niche market someday (I'll admit it first: I'm not smart enough to do it myself). Only problem is I can't wait that long. For now, and I'm glad there was some management good enough to make it, FOSS or not.
McFarland says FOSS and management/leadership aren't mutually exclusive. He says 'hybrids of both styles will provide better frameworks to deal with large projects'. There, that doesn't cramp your style too much, does it?
I think the article tries to have a point but fails short even if they may be right. FOSS projects do need a strong leader if they are going to do well. Projects without strong leadership go all over and tend to die or splinter. Just having any leader is not an improvement over no leader though. Neither is having any vision instead of a good vision. The vast majority of PHB projects are never completed or never go anywhre commercially. Mostly because the people in charge are bad leaders or have a bad vision. FOSS projects are evolution at work - what works continues on and what doesn't eventually dies off. Having good leadership just creates a nexus around which the project can grow and take direction. Most FOSS leaders don't know exactly where their project is going but they help to recognize the good and cut out the bad sooner rather than later. The best leaders create other leaders around themselves which makes their project into a multiheaded beast that is difficult to kill and with the ability to have multiple, but coherent, visions of what needs to happen for the project to evolve.
Gnome and KDE have mostly sucked because their vision was to copy features from Windows and Mac OS. They are growing away from that limited and faulty vision but I'd agree that their problem has been a lack of leadership with vision. I would not say PHB alternatives such as Windows and Mac OS have any better vision though. The problem with the desktop, and many desktop apps, is that people are locked into a metaphor and they are having trouble stepping outside that box. It'll take a strong leader with vision and major coding skills to break people out of their metaphor mind block. FOSS has a better chance to invent this future though because FOSS projects can afford to be wrong where as commercial projects usually can't.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In one sentence: to be successful, projects need to be managed and coordinated well. Not a very surprising conclusion.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
This article is just a description of the F/OSS world - it *is* a Bazaar, so it *is* anarchistic and that's *why* people stay interested and contribute - if they can and they want to, they do.
It's true that better leaders help projects produce things faster, but F/OSS has never been strong because of DEVELOPMENT SPEED, F/OSS has been strong because of diversity and the LACK of an authoritarian view. The community (warts and all) is precisely WHY F/OSS has succeeded.
The article author assumes that there is one direction we all want to go in and we should just get there as quick as possible. This is not how we got to where we are now, and it's not required for the future. Certain projects are chugging along with speed with a vision, others are meandering along to the sound of their own drums. These are all good. No need to panic, certainly no need to criticise the VERY WELLSPRING from which this world arose.
"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that."
--Homer Simpson
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
The problem(s) are imagined by the professional problematizers.
I've been running Linux since 1993, alongside Windows until 2001. What we have now is a stable, fast, rapidly-evolving, feature-complete operating system that's more powerful than Windows or Mac OS and more widely compatible that anything else on the planet, all at no cost. Similar things can be said about Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.
There is nothing wrong here, FOSS has been a roaring success and continues to be one every day. The proof of the pudding, etc. It's the best game going in technology right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Of course if your baseline is "Any 'successful' software will have every feature and function you will ever need while at the same time staying lean and mean and user interface clean, and it will come with indemnity and warranty and a serious guarantee all while staying completely free," then yeah, FOSS falls short I suppose, but it's still a damn sight nearer than any other software development ecosystem.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"I find your lack of vision disturbing."
FTA:
Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same.
Reminds me of the Gegls project to re-invent the internals of the Gimp. Lots of hot air^H^H^H^H design initially, goes dead for X years, then just recently Kolas starts hacking on it.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
All the author is saying is that in some cases (particularly cases where there's not strong leadership) Bazaar style development can be more of a hindrance than a boon. It's nothing personal. Matter of fact, it's true.
However, I think the author fails to note (but may have assumed we knew it) that while there are a lot of cherry-picked projects out there, we're not left with a bunch of cherries sitting around rotting uselessly - I've got a whole operating system and every kind of service I'd want to have, and it all works together.
But with FOSS, I (the end user) can email the coder and offer to pay him/her to finish a feature I'd like or do some other boring job. And that is one of the great things about FOSS. Once I pay for it, everyone benefits from it (including me).
;-)
However progress will be slow because most of us will wait for someone else to pay for the changes we want. Most people will freeload if given the opportunity, Econ 101. Since you are reading this right now, I will thank you in advance for your future gifts to the community.
It reminds me of how Canada, land of my birth, views itself and its relationship to the U.S.
It does somethings better, others worse. It will never admit what it does worse or will even defend it as a strength.
It's arrogant and sanctimonious even though it often has its heart in the right place. Other times it's naive in thinking that because it believes *its* way is right, it *must* be so.
It mocks the U.S. as backwards, even displaying a near pathological hatred for it, yet it secretly wishes it could hold the same lofty perch.
Now replace "It's/It" with "FOSS" and "U.S." with "Microsoft".
Frankly, what turns me off about the FOSS community in general is it reminds me of the science acolytes in the recent South Park episode when Cartman traveled to the future. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If Linux were king it would be Microsoft redux.
Feel free to mod me down, I have plenty of karma to burn.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
And I am in complete agreement.
... it's even BETTER than it seems on the surface.
And if I may expand a little bit upon your example
That's because a LOT of the patched software can be "backported" to your existing systems. So there's no reason to spend money maintaining your own "fork" of the entire system that you started with.
Example: If 'ls' is patched, some testing should show whether the patched version is compatible with your current system. So you can upgrade some of the parts while still maintaining the old functionality that you depend upon.
Kernel 2.6.x is current
Kernel 2.4.x is still supported
Kernel 2.2.x is still supported
Is that far enough back?
Meanwhile, those same coders can be working with the other Linux coders to smooth out any upgrade issues there are. It's not so much about never upgrading as it is about upgrading when you are ready to. When the features work for you. When the bugs that you find are fixed.
Not when the vendor feels the need for an increase in their profits for the quarter/year.
FOSS puts you in charge of your systems.
When IBM started sponsoring it.
Or, when it became large enough for statisticians to start trending behavior patterns.
FOSS is or is not better than closed source commercial code but the only way we'd ever know is to establish quantitative criteria and measure them with rigor.
Some things to quantitatively evaluate are:
Failures per release, time to release, bugs discovered, function points derived, cost-benefit, TCO, testability, verifiability, number of severity one bugs, number of severity one bugs never fixed, number of abandoned projects, time to next version, rate of customer abandonment.
There are probably 50 more I can't think of right now but the only sure way is to apply engineering and project management discipline to the criteria and comparison of those criteria. Then one must capture a candidate group of commercial and FOSS projects and track them over a multiyear period.
In other words we've been looking at the development experience instead of the results experience. How you build something is less important than what it does. Anyone who's ever seen the movie 'Apollo 13' understands this. More to the point though, development modalities reflect more the cultural aspects that the development team has almost no control over. Even in FOSS communities, they will self organize and operate according to features that have little to do with development.
We really don't know or care that much what the differences between good and mediocre closed source projects are. They are unverifiable in either case. So one cannot focus on the method. It's a black box. Instead we need to focus on the outputs and metrics that we can see.
name names
says the anonymous coward
"There are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people."
Change that to there are a LARGE number of very vocal people.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I resent this offense to Catholics. Archbishop Balmer is not some made-up Monty Python character. He is a real person who runs the Diocese of Seattle . . .
Then there is Java -- long time criticized by RMS but not trumpeted by SUN as being GPL'd. And how about Open Office/StarOffice with a strong SUN contribution?
Yes, FOSS may be an insurgency, but I see it backed/encouraged/funded by big corporate entities who have a stake in its success.
These are the big problems. We see them a lot on /.
/., MySQL zealots would resort to namecalling? And look at Ubuntu "Linux for Humans". Tried installing it on Connectix Virtual PC? Forget it. A kernel bug. Their answer is to follow a long, overly technical install process that requires you hitting an abort key with catlike reflexes. Linux for humans, my ass. The Ubutnu community response: "Don't use virtual. Wipe your existing PC."
Everytimes someone suggests something about Windows (the EULA, Vista DRM) the FOS hisses and spits that everyone should switch to Linux. When users say "but 3DSMAX" they vent and froth "Use Blender!" Photoshop? "Use GIMP you morons!"
This is not the way to win people over. Many people point this out, but some vocal members in FOS can't move beyond it. If there is another view in FOS, they're very quiet about it.
It's not unique to Linux. The Firefox developers have been incredibly arrogant when it comes to things like memory size, SaveAs filename. The so-called MySQL community refuse to accept the possibility that maybe, just maybe, MySQL is too buggy and unpredictable. I used an enterprise project written in MySQL and I found it to be beyond painful. But whenever I posted of my experience on
It's often said Microsoft "don't get it", and they don't. But FOS is equally arrogant and even more zealous.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1890
"...the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat. "
Is this the same GNOME project Linus lambasted recently, saying "This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease"? Or are you talking about something else? Or is that attitude an over-reacting backlash from the aforementioned era of feature creep? I could see that.
No project suffers from lack of vision; if there's no vision, there's no project.
"Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time"
"Not only did Dawes lack vision, he got in the way of everyone who did have vision."
How? You just got through telling us Xorg's fork solved the problem. Was there a some strange delay between the time it became apparent Dawes was stonewalling and the time Packard forked Xorg? If so, how do you propose to explain such a delay
There's actually a fairly simple way to get FOSS devs to obey your "vision": pay them. It's the same thing Cathedrals do; they just license their software differently. There's nothing in the licenses that says you can't pay for software development, to say nothing of copies. Ask Linus about it; I understand he's making a fine salary maintaining a fairly useful software project.
Really, this 'FOSS developers code at home in their underwear in their free time' mentality of some is a disease. It's really what puts the lie to the whole idea that the only way to make money with software is by withholding IP rights.
So I guess I'm not clear, then, on what you mean by "Cathedral". Based on your article, you might be talking about paying programmers. You could also be talking about withholding freedoms. But neither of these makes sense.
to think gnome sucks. Personally I don't care for big desktop environments like kde and gnome. But I have had to setup linux desktops for users at my last job, and given the choice of kde or gnome, every single person hated gnome, said it was confusing and hard to use, and chose kde. Lots of people consider gnome to be an example of a failed project, its not just kde users.
Ther is free software and there is open source software, often refered to as "open sores", and they are not at all the same thing.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
If nobody cares about a project it will die, so why is that bad? And if someone does care, they will fork it and update/maintain it, which is clearly a good thing. What is wrong with either of these outcomes?
TFA is not about users' groups. Not at all. It is about developers and development styles. People being jerks to n00bs isn't even on TFA's radar screen. Yes this is a worthy topic, and one that should be discussed. However, here and now is not the place and time to discuss it.
Yes, I realize that users must be a part of talking about developers and development styles. However, n00bs generally are not, and furthermore, discussion of jerk-n00b relations is taking an angle on FOSS community so far from TFA that the two can't even see each other without a periscope.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
There's good software and bad software. Wether its open source or closed has nothing to do with it. And you're not a very good sysadmin if you start relying on software before you've bothered testing it out, regardless of wether its open source or not.
"Users, What Users?: Coding for yourself is nice, but if you want users to flock to your app, you might want to actually consider what they want."
You know, not everyone wants users to flock to their app. Lots of open source developers are writing software for themselves, and are nice enough to let other people use it if they like. If someone is nice enough to share with you, either be thankful and respectful, or just don't bother using it.
You can't tell those of us who are simply nice enough to let you use our code that we have to be nice to demanding whiners just because some other developers of other projects want users to flock to their app.
One great thing about FOSS is that it tries to adhere to standards and have things be more or less portable. But people still use non-portable APIs (e.g. ALSA), and there are really not that many people with the knowledge and motivation to port things to Windows or Mac from Linux where most of the apps are written. I like GNOME, but saying that GTK is portable is only technically correct; you CAN port it, but it's not exactly easy or even possible in all cases. There is a Windows port, which is great, but the Mac OS X port is still not really usable (although there has been some great progress lately). I would love to see a fully ported GTK and QT for Windows and OS X, with established generic build systems; this would expose FOSS programs to a much larger user base, and allow more people to get involved in development too. These days it can be harder to set up the build system than to actually hack on the code. I have seen a few projects that have really focused on getting things to run on the Big Three platforms (Lilypond is my favorite example) and they have really healthy communities around them, partly because anyone with a computer can use the software.
The cause.
I am not a programmer, nor do I mainly concentrate on software at the concrete code level, but I believe that the glaring problem that the Open Source community has been plagued with for years is an irrevocable one. In my honest opinion, the main purpose and benefit of Open Source software was that its code, structure and framework were freely distributable to everyone so that everyone, granted the populace is skilled enough, could partake in the software's development process. However, almost all of the problems inherent to FOSS, no matter how obvious or profound, have been due to the same advantage that gets people's interests in it in the first place.
Furthermore, the grand majority of the FOSS projects that have succeeded to success at a commercial echelon have fell into the "trap" that I believe most Open Source developers attempt to stay away from: mainstream popularity. Software that falls into that world have to deal with its consequences: sketchy deals with large, impersonal corporations, obstacles to avoid the competition, and so forth. Red Hat, SuSE, and other Linux distributions that are used in mission-critical operations are textbook examples of this.
I also feel that a lot of the Open Source community is highly contradictory to a point in which any attempt to capture the interests of the standard "computer user" is pointless. "The community" is supposed to welcome any newcomers that attempt to learn and use certain software, but when the question becomes "too simple," those users are told to "RTFM." "The community" wants Open Source software to get more recognized and be on par with the levels of larger players, but when those pieces of software reach that level and have to implement competitive methods to retain that position, "the community" sneers at its commercialism.
Of course, like any business model there are the exceptions and outliers (Firefox and OpenOffice.org come to mind). But they are just that: outliers. I'm almost positive that a grand majority of people who attempt to introduce computer users of a generation that were not wholly familiar with the idea of electronic computing to Open Source platforms such as Linux and OpenOffice.org have a hard time of doing so.
This problem is nothing new, and being that the problem is within its own roots, it will probably not be a curable one. The only possibility for change lies within the core of the movement, which may or may not render the entire "spirit" of the cause meaningless.
i'll agree to read this on condition the author agrees to stop beating his wife.
xmms, there ya go, worked well right off the bat, still does
The article should be titled "What's *Right* With The FOSS Community".
Lack of vision? He cites GNOME as an example. Well if GNOME isn't good enough, we have XFCE, KDE, and what not. If GNOME evolves to become an utter failure, some other project will definitely take its place. This is a *strength* of OSS.
He cites XFree as another example. (Despite the fact that XFree was using a more "Cathedral" model than a "Bazaar" model). He even acknowledges that a successful fork (X.Org) was made. This example actually proves two things: 1. the Cathedral model doesn't work (at least in this case), 2. Failing projects will get revived through forking. That shows again the *strength* of OSS.
Contrast this to Microsoft. Despite what the anti-MS zealots are saying, Microsoft is still doing an OK job in its main products (Windows, Office, etc.). But what if one day their products gets a hundred times worse than now (think something akin to WinME), what can we (or the MS fanboys) do? We can't just take their source code and fork it, and there aren't even viable drop-in alternatives available -- a failure at Microsoft could bring down the whole ecosystem once and for all. (yes you can move to linux, but that actually proves the point -- the MS ecosystem will perish)
Don't quote me on this.
FOSS needs a shower and a shave and should, needs to dress a little nicer, and stop hanging out in the seedy parts of Waltham.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I'll tell you what's wrong with FOSS - from their [companies et al.]: not that it isn't controlled or it doesn't have a proper "leader", but that _they_ aren't controlling and leading it. That's all. They are just dying in anguish knowing that there are so freaking many developers out there that a) don't follow their rules b) are an almost untouchable competitor of their products c) they can and do show over and over again that commercial software and commercial software development can have working alternatives and that the world won't collapse from choosing them.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The bazaar model still worked when the pinnacle of software complexity were "cat" and "vi". That's it. It stopped working almost completely when complexity meant Open Office Org.
The Asperger's Syndrome kind of coder (and I'm one, so I can make fun of myself if I want to) which finds more joy in coding something cool instead of going out and flirting with a girl, also has a very narrow focus of attention and gets bored easily when he must deal with stuff either (A) outside that focus, or (B) which is basically homework instead of getting to the cool stuff. That's how we ended on the bad side of teachers in school, after all. Spending weeks understanding someone else's framework and code before you can even start on your cute "number paragraphs in Klingon" idea, is boring, and it's even more boring to understand and test all dependencies so you don't break something else.
So today in F/OSS the only ones making any progress nowadays are, sad to say, the Cathedrals.
Yes, everyone likes to use the Linux kernel and such as an example of why the Bazaar is strong, but have a look at the actual contributors some day. It's _not_ bored nerds like you and me working in their free time. Most of them are paid employees of Red Hat, IBM, etc. Linux as the work of bored nerds in their free time was a security shithole until Red Hat spent some real money doing a code and security review. And it was a joke in the enterprise arena until IBM started pumping some real money and formerly Cathedral-developped closed-source code into it. There's a reason why IBM looked like a believable target to SCO (as opposed to just a tempting target, by having deep pockets), and that's the sheer quantity of Aix code that IBM donated.
The same goes for OOo: practically all development is paid for by Sun, and it's bleeding Sun a ton of money. The same goes for Apache, which everyone uses as an example of why OSS is better than MS's software on a server: it, and most other Apache projects for that matter, is mostly IBM work. Go figure. IDE's? Both Eclipse and Netbeans are paid work by respectively IBM and Sun and a number of other corporate contributors. Compilers? You'd be surprised how much in GCC actually comes from Intel and the like. Browser? Mozilla was mostly paid work by Netscape, then AOL, and now it's mostly sponsored by Google. Etc.
So yes, as you aptly put it:
And that's why most of F/OSS nowadays is nothing more than a way for various corporate Cathedrals to pool their resources against MS. Sure, it's a good goal and I have nothing against benefitting from it. But let's stop pretending that ESR's Bazaar is anywhere _near_ relevant any more. The actual "Bazaar" projects are the thousands of unfinishet things on Source Forge that noone gives a damn about, either to help develop/debug or to use seriously or to pay the developper for features.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
OSS, your choices are:
1) It's already been fixed and released as stable, why are you still using such an outdated version?
2) It's already fixed in CVS... get that version or wait for the stable build
3) Wait for me to get around to it, I decide how urgent it is...
4) Pay me to fix it... I'm working on what I want to do and if you want me to drop everything, pay me.
5) Find something else that does the job
6) like it or lump it...
7) fix it yourself, please submit the patch
8) find someone else who'll fix it for you for free
9) Find someone else who'll fix it for you at a price
CSS, your choices are:
1) it's a feature, there may be a workaround
2) upgrade to the version that's already out and pay for it
3) wait for the next version to come out and pay for it
4) take out a support contract to get a hotfix
5) Find something else that does the job
6) like it or lump it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
We are talking about software in general.
The internet, succesful companies like Google and Apple, and increasingly servers in datacentres all around the world, are build on top of FLOSS of one kind or another.
The last stronghold of propietary software is the desktop, and that is being eroded slowly but surely. Today you can run most of your personal computing needs using FLOSS, which means the field is ready for a real challenge to the domination of the closed software in the desktop (in spite of MS's shenanigans, even frivulous patents will eventually expire).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I went to watch a match of football (soccer for most of you uncivilized ones) some time ago, there were around 10 hooligans causing big concern and police movilization.
Since they were English everybody was saying how bad English fans were in spite that several thousend of them were peacefuly enjoying the game without bothering anybody else.
What I am tying to say is tha most people remembers when they are rudely shunned and tend to forget or to be unaware of the countless times friendly people do the right thing and lend a hand.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I think that generalising across the entire FOSS Community is not entirely useful....
I also think what the author is trying to put forwards happens in micro as a natural part of the development cycle.... preparation for release... Features get frozen and all the work goes into debugging and getting out a solid release.
I think that a lot of developers are there to solve problems which they benefit directly from solving. I am one of those little developers releasing my own mini FOSS App.... I created my project because I wanted a tool that does X. While there might be Commercial tool M I may not have the money to purchase M anyways M does X Y and Z and I only really need to do X. So The benefit to me is that once I have created the tool I can do X. This is how I benefit...
Now since I have gained a lot from the FOSS Community.. I don't mind releasing my code so that other users who want to do X will be able to do so without going through the effort that I did. Also another individual with coding skills might need to be able to do X and Y. In which case my code might be a starting point... If people come to me saying your program is useless unless it does Z well let me remind you I needed a program that does X, I am using my program that does X. Unless you can convince me that adding Z to my program would make my life easier I am probably not going to spend my time coding Z...
If this means that my project sits in Sourceforge and festers like so many other projects then so be it I am still quite happily using it and it is doing what I need it to. If there are one or two other happy users for whom it makes their life better then it was probably worth making the code public.
A couple of years ago I attended a speech by a local (Argentine) OSS developer/evangelist group. One of the guys giving the speech stuck around after the event and a small group of people chatting with him formed.
I approached and listened as he talked about a project they were working on, to bring a full Linux solution for small business... this was a short while after the big economic crisis which devalued our money to a third of its previous value. With Windows licenses going through the roof, this project was more important than ever. They had already chosen a friendly distro, a software suite and were working on a CRM solution based on the leading small-business commercial CRM solution here in Argentina, which was the key component. So far, so good.
He mentioned what percentage of desired functionality they had reached, which wasn't very big... and mentioned the solution wasn't very stable yet. Then he mentioned they developed a new multi platform GUI framework for this project, which was great because it could be ported to all kinds of GUI environments (X, Win32, etc.) On and on he went about how great this was, and how they had implemented all the different widgets and how they had written modules to support different environments and were even working on a module for curses support.
By that point I realized these guys were lost... because even though they knew a good CRM solution was a key selling point, they didn't care much about programming that kind of thing. Apparently they'd rather reinvent the wheel and cook up something that probably would be worse than the many free portable windowing frameworks already available (which they actually didn't need since they wanted to create a full small business linux distro in the first place), and then waste time on the completely irrelevant curses support.
That's a problem I see with OSS, specially in small communities like here in Argentina. A lack of focus or discipline means that a lot of the valuable manpower is wasted. Leadership is important as an inspiration to pursue a path, because programmers will program what they want to program when not on a leash... so it's important that what they want to program is what needs to be programmed.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Is it gets done 80% then shipped.
The first few patches get it to 90% then maybe 95%. Then there's the new version. Released at 80%.
And so the long day wears on...
We once banned the author of this article from our IRC channel for (a) plagiarism, and (b) being a dick.
Now, let me start out by saying I'm fully behind the F/OSS movement, and use it whenever I can. I'm working for a very large company, and we're using Linux boxes primarily. For that matter, I released a F/OSS package last year (WebFaceDB, available on SourceForge). But this is the first time I've been building and supporting as a straight sysadmin, not as a developer/sysadmin, and I've got to say that there's a *lot* of amateur, in the bad sense of the word, software out there.
/usr/kereros/include, since even the --includedir doesn't do that.
Let's starts with how much I *loathe* OpenLDAP, and the literally weeks I spent getting it working, and have yet to have it work with autofs, and I'm fighting it, right now, with Samba. I tried to find a GUI editor. The one that seemed best for my situation installed from an rpm... and had *no* useful sample configuration files, and even when I managed, using google, to set up some, it gave errors.
PHP4 (we have our reasons for not going to 5 yet) is a royal pain, and a *mess*. I mean, php.ini in */lib?!, and not in */etc? Why? Why scatter files all hither and yon? Oh, and then there's where I have to hand-edit the Makefile to add
On the other hand, Webmin was a literal no-brainer, and Nagios was only a bit harder. AND it came with working minimal configuration files. Even setting up virtual hosts with Apache were not *that* big a deal.
The amateurism covers things like inadequate testing, absolute requirements of a specific library (and not allowing a *later* version of the library), and not having an easy uninstall method.
It seems to me that a lot of folks push the envelope ->on their own system-, and don't try to meet standards that might run on nearly *everyone's* system. It doesn't have to be tested on *everything*, just follow standards. And to look at commonly-accepted practice, if not best practice.
mark, with more than two dozen years of software development experience, and half a
dozen with sysadmin
Heh. At the "everyone who isn't with us, is part of some evil conspiracy against us" stage? Don't worry. I went through that stage myself. But eventually growing up kind of sneaks upon you, you know? You start realizing that there are no knights in shining armour and no super-villains cackling manically over death-ray plans. And that you're not really the one who'll save the world from MS. That pretending that the problems don't exist is actually counter-productive and doesn't actually help anyone. In fact, it only does more harm than good. And a lot of other such common-sense, really.
And in a nutshell that's my only "agenda": not really as much of an agenda, as just realizing that the whole fanboy crusade is stupid and pointless. Acknowledging the Real World (TM) instead of living in some imaginary crusader-fanboy world.
At any rate, heh, feel free to believe whatever floats your boat. If imagining me as part of some evil MS-sponsored conspiracy makes you feel any better, by all means, go ahead.
Bingo. That was my whole point actually. The only one that's anywhere _near_ a usable state is a Cathedral-type product.
And they're still a sad joke that noone would mistake for a real substitute for or challenge to MS Office. They took _ages_ to get anywhere _near_ where the Cathedral products got in a fraction of that time. Star Office in the 90's, before the Sun purchase, was less of a joke than KOffice and Gnome Office still are. That's just my point: that's what complexity does to Bazaar-style projects.
It may surprise you, but a lot of us eventually learn how to function in society in spite of AS. It's a bit like fighting blind, but you eventually learn to use logic and think in advance. Or at least, some of us do. There are, of course, also those who get stuck on acting like a retarded kid who wants a lollypop. But not everyone does.
Heh. I'll take it as a compliment if I passed well enough for a neurotypical, then.
But again, feel free to think whatever you will. If you don't believe me, so be it. I'm not going to turn this into a psychoanalysis session to convince a random person on the Internet than I'm a bit deffective.
Read some medicine books, lemming. AS is characterized by a very narrow focus of interest. Yes, an AS is pretty much tireless at doing the parts that interest him, but is also extremely quick to get bored by stuff that falls outside that focus or by stuff that looks more like routine uninteresting homework even _within_ his focus of interest. Someone could be tireless at hacking the interesting cool algorithms or optimizations in a program, but lose interest quickly when you make him polish the user interface. Or other such combinations of "I like A, but B is dumb, and A1 is too trivial to interest me".
I've never said "all", did I? There are a lot of those who are just paid to work on those project. Which was in fact my whole point.
But lot of those who do devote inordinate amounts of their own
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
is that the people directing the actual literal cathedral projects cared whether the cathedrals would still be standing in a hundred years. People who manage software projects often don't care what happens in two or three years so long as they meet their deadline. In sofware cathedrals, you may have the same pride of craft on an individual basis, but longevity is usually much less important than short term sales goals.
I was thinking about this in the context of security recently. The thing about secuirty is that there is no way to prove it -- it is only possible to disprove security. As is well known, any idiot can create a system he is personally unable to break.
Which means that for security specifically and quality in general, you need to take an aggressive stance towards your work. The problem is that if you look too hard, you're bound to find something. Project participants are rewarded for getting things done on time with no obvious defects; one way to do this is not to look that closely. Competition means you're usually getting things done by the skin of your teeth anyway.
This makes me wonder if the commercial model -- or at least the development culture that goes with it -- is incapable of creating secure software. Of course F/OSS is perfectly capable of creating insecure software. What directly matters is not the openness license, the but openness of the intellectual atmosphere.
This may be why RSA seems to do well in developing security products. They were founded by academic crypotgraphers; I wouldn't be surprised if they maintain a more academic culture than most software organizations.
The idea that bazaar == good and cathedral == bad is too simplistic. Think of an organization as a mechanism that could be engineered to be better. The reason you need cleverness in engineering is that you nearly always want two or more things that are mutually exclusive. You want your airplane to be strong to withstand the stress of flight safely, but it has to be light enough to fly efficiently. Things that you do to make your design strong tend to make it heavy; things that make it light tend to make it weak.
The same thing goes into the design of an organization. An organization needs to operate coherently, yet it needs to react quickly and flexibly to changing circumstances. The software development process is just a single example of this.
If you look at a single project and have either/or choice to make, you're probably better of in cathedral mode. If you look at an entire software market and have a single coice to make, you're probably better off in bazaar mode. But if you can, you want to avoid the either/or approach. You want an organization with cathedral structure but bazaar (but ot necessarily bizarre) values.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and don't represent society at large. You must be young.
too many fags.
FOSS is for English speakers in USA. In Europe and Canada there is only FLOSS, Free and Libre.
Most of the problems are people problems. The people who get ahead are those who dedicate the most time, and they're often not the best leaders or coders. Defensive behavior results when suggestions are made. Verdict: dys-functional.
is that even if it leads to more efficient and less buggy software, it fails to take usability into account. That is why F/OSS is facing so many problems once you get past servers and dev tools. Users don't want to deal with hundreds of slightly different versions of the same thing like we see in linux distros. If you want good usability, you need top down unified control.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Offtopic: This should have been moderated funny, not flamebait, IMHO. :-)