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."

Comments

People.. the same as any community

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It is very easy to say that FOSS communities are broken, but they depend on people, which are inherently broken.

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.

Re:In my opinion

[finiteSet]

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.

For what it is worth, in my experience I have found the Gentoo community to be nothing but helpful. Anytime I've had a problem the answer has already been provided in the forums, or users quickly (and politely) responded to my posts. And I started learning Linux with Gentoo, so I most certainly was a "n00b." Because of my experience with the Gentoo community, forums.gentoo.org is usually my first stop when I encounter any Linux-related problem. Luckily, I have long since shed my "n00b"-skin, but I am grateful to have had access to the community during that early formative stage.