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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."
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."
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.
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
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.
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 is one of the most confused responses I know of on this subject. Not your fault, I hear it frequently. I would like to clarify some things for you. There are 2 basic types of OSS devs. Those that are employed by a company with some interest in OSS, and those that do it purely for fun. The devs in the first group don't develop for end users, they develop for their company. Somehow, through some process (in which they may be involved at some point) the Company decides what they have to work on, and when it should be done. This may have some benefit for the end user, it may not - and that is totally besides the point -- for all you know these devs are hacking away at some piece of code that will never be distributed outside of the Company anyway.
While this may be OSS development in the sense that people work on OSS code, it isn't about this topic - the "FLOSS Community" and the coders that form part of this community. Those coders tend to fall in the second camp. They tend to work for reasons other then direct cash. They do it for fun, peer recognition, whatever. For the majority of these people, "non-coding end-users" are the same bunch of clusterfucks they deal with everyday during the dayjob, and tend to not feature very prominently in the motivation chain. The things that drive them are project that are "fun" to code, "pet projects" and all that kind of stuff. They have little motivation to work on projects that are "boring", "seen as difficult" or "of no interest to the developers". This camp of OSS developers "must" do nothing, and more importantly, owe you nothing.
You then bring in some muddled argumentations about the "market" and "running out of business". Unless the OSS coder in question is pretty incompetent, and gets fired from his (quite possibly non-OSS related) dayjob, there is no "business" to be run out of. Most of these projects *are* pet projects, and they only reason you can use them for free is because the coder in question has an urge to tell the world: "Look what I can do!!"
Now its time to bring market drivers / basic economics into the picture. You, as a non-coding end-user, want an application. There are some half-way-there projects out there, but non really fit your bill. You are angry because all the selfish devs only think of their pet projects and having fun. Some entrepeneur, somewhere, will know this, and hire a bunch of devs to create a project you, and hopefully many others, will pay good money for. Only now, once renumeration has entered the picture, can you speak of a market in a meaningful way. Now you are a paying customer, and you can vote with your wallet and feet.
Unless you are a cheapskate, and don't want to pay for anything, but still want every little piece of functionality handed to you "just so". If you ain't paying the cash, either do it yourself, or STFU.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Actually lack of leadership is a problem within the FOSS. Mark Shuttleworth has done a great job with Ubuntu because he is a good businessman. Too many FOSS projects are managed by developers who don't know how to manage which means poor decisions are made. This is fine if you don't want the project to grow however if you want to become bigger and better you need to make certain choices and sometimes they are not always easy to accept. I have seen many projects (both FOSS and commercial) die because of bad decisions being made by someone who has never managed anything in their life. Just because something is free and open source doesn't mean that they cant be managed by someone with a business background. Ubuntu is a fine example of this IMHO.
Alas the pissers and moaners get most attention while the people doing the coding get pissed on.
Sad really.
evil is as evil does
Well... I don't know about you but I've seen many an open source project run by self-appointed dictators, so I don't think that's the "major" reason at all. Dictators in both worlds are plentiful and a pain. Become too painful in OSS, however, and someone will fork the project.
Which in turn may or may not be successful. The mambo/joomla mess illustrates that some forks work and you end up with two relatively strong branches. Go the other way, and a fork splits its community, diverts resources, and eventually kills off one, the other, or both.
And while no one wants a moron in a suit yelling at them, OSS developers are notorious for chery-picking the "cool" aspects of the project and ignoring others, and generally being insensitive to things like schedules and deadlines.
As to "winning", you have some strange definitions. Get an OS with more than a percentage point or two of the average desktop, and "maybe" you can start waving that flag. Utill then...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Self appointed dictators, if that's all they are, can be removed from the FOSS scene with something as simple as a name switch.
A lot of people who are given the label "self-appointed dictator" in this realm are really just people leading by doing, but leading in a direction different than those doing the labeling would prefer.
The "I'll donate some of my time to some project" developers like the "cool" features, yes, and the real leaders will take what help they can get. As they do most of the work.
Most successful FOSS projects seem to be based around a core group of people whose prime driver is their interest in fulfilling their vision of what the result should be, assisted in small ways by a large group of vaguely interested people.
This is leadership. You can tell the difference between a leader and a director with a simple comparison: If the person would eventually/theoretically get the project done even if everyone else left, they're leading, and if they wouldn't get anything done when everyone left, they're not leading.
Of course, there's no reasoning with people like that... they don't give a fuck about what you want, they're blazing trail.
As to "winning", which do you think most people care about, their desktop, or the Internet it connects to? How many people do you know these days who can't just sit down in front of any computer whatsoever, log onto whatever services they need, finish up and walk away? There are a lot of them. The services they're logging onto are the "Network is the Machine" effect Microsoft has been fearing and fighting all this time, and that network is pretty much owned by FOSS.
Linux might not be on the desktop, but the desktop is becoming more and more "That virus infested annoyance you're forced to deal with to get on the Internet", and the Internet is FOSS.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.