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

I read the article

[matt me]

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.

Re:Common sense says

[miu]

The piece seems to be claiming that good > mediocre > no > bad leader.

That's somewhat true, certain kinds of software and features just won't get done without a leader. That nifty little project doesn't need a leader, it'll get done because personal motivation is enough to get it done and it's small enough that a single person can handle the entire workload. Boring stuff won't get done no matter how grand the end result unless there is a leader to make sure it gets done, no one digs ditches for fun - even if the end result will be the panama canal.

I can pay the coder to do it.

[khasim]

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.

Re:In my opinion

[WilliamSChips]

I've gotten much more of that type of abuse from Mac users than from users of any other operating system. Except, instead of claiming the problem is a lack of RTFM like you sometimes get from Linux/BSD groups, you get people demanding that you're not actually having a problem, when you are.

Re:What's their point?

[squiggleslash]

That's exactly what I wanted to say.

I thought the article's comments about GNOME in particular were wrong. The problem with GNOME was not that it had no direction and therefore suddenly became bloated and unmanagable with feature creep. Far from it. It had a relatively popular leader who had an idea about how it should work. It gained feature creep because the "vision" of that OSS leader was to emulate a UI that itself was bloated, poorly designed, and suffering feature creep, both on the outside and the inside.

Had it had no direction, I believe it would have been more like the mix of UIs we saw in the early to mid-nineties on X11, or even throughout the late eighties on the Amiga. Someone would have put together a file manager. Another would have put an object viewer. Yet another might have worked on a print system. Each component would probably have been terrific, but the whole would have looked relatively ugly and argubly been poor in usability.

I'm surprised how "easy" it's been to fix GNOME and make it the relatively good system it is today (relatively as in recent versions, as configured by Debian and RedHat, are easily the second best mainstream GUIs, after Mac OS X.) That took the right kind of vision, and that vision, interestingly, was the result of the community noticing the project had gone badly wrong, and forcing itself to pay attention.