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Open Source Is Not a Democracy
itwbennett writes "A recent kerfuffle within the Ubuntu community serves as a reminder of an inconvenient truth: open source is not a democracy, writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The discussion started innocuously enough, within Bug #532633 in light-themes (Ubuntu) on Launchpad, where the order of the window controls within the Light theme were requested to be re-arranged to be on the upper right side of any given window. Light, it seemed, now placed the buttons on the left side, similar to the Mac OS X interface.' The discussion turned into an argument and culminated in this exchange in which Mark Shuttleworth lays down the law:
'It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this... No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
Open source is utterly a democracy.
Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun. Those who come and join you are always there voluntarily, either because they feel like it, or you are payiong them to be there. And maybe no one feels like it. And maybe you don't feel like paying anyone. Maybe you are alone there. Maybe you didn't bother to make your tree at all. But you have that right to, at any moment. And this is utterly democratic, and it is at the heart of why open source exists. In fact, this is why it works so much better.
Shuttleworth has a very big, popular tree. He pays many participants and many others join him for free. He gets to make the decisions in his own tree, because it's his. He can't tell anyone else what to do in theirs.
Now if it's a Bill Gates product, and you do not like where those buttons got moved to, or i.e. you have a critical bug derailing years of your work, or whatever your issue may be, you will be ignored, or if you are very lucky, someone may even explicitly take a moment to personally tell you, "fuck off, peon." Your only real option is not to be so foolish as to use a Bill Gates product again in the future.
But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.
(All those who have never lived under a monarch, dictator, or cabal, please identify yourselves now with cynical comments about your democratic government.)
So I reiterate, as stories go, this is pure -1 Troll. IT World and Proffitt look like an 8 year old trying to say something "controvertial" about global warming by noting that it's snowing outside. I'm a bit sad that Taco rewarded them by sending them some traffic.
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Is doomed to fail.
It is a Thoroughbred designed by a committee, or in this case a huge community. Good for Mark. Inputs are important but final design decisions should not be subject to a vote.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
People complaining *is* a form of data. I wish Shuttleworth would acknowledge that.
Some time back, gaim had a UI redesign where they replaced protocol-specific icons with generic ones, in the decision that hiding the protocol is the right thing to do. A lot of us thought that was boneheaded, and some people forked GAIM, others wrote plugins to undo the change, and a lot of us offered harsh criticism of the developers responsible. If it were a democracy, we probably would've voted it undone. Right decision? Wrong decision? We didn't like it, but most of us decided not to walk away from it (either to the forks or further away).
Opensource provides new possibilities for governance - the ability to fork is something we don't really have in nations (splitting into bits really isn't the same), and with the exception of protocol decisions we generally can reshape our environment as we like (local patches, greasemonkey, etc). By having so much local variance possible, we no longer have our elbows so close to our neighbours and so there's less hazard for technocratic or autocratic decision styles (provided they use licenses that sustain this type of environment - some developers like Tuomo Valkonen prove to be batshit insane and play license games to compound their boneheaded technical decisions).
With licensing messes out of the way and the ability to fork, the most precious thing for us is mostly time/attention. If we want to fork a project, we're balancing our time and attention versus how much we care over the relevant issue. It's the easiest thing in the world to follow a path paved by the actual developer, while maintaining patches of any size (or starting a parallel community for a true fork) is an ongoing burden. If it's for an important enough reason, we'll do it. If that reason turns out to be not important enough to be worth the bother, all we can do is complain and hope to convince whomever is already doing that work to pave our path.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
As a geek who loves history I can't help but think about the organizational strategy of american (as in region not nationality) colonial era pirates. In general they were not democratic in their decision making, they understood the inefficiency and impracticality of that path, but they were democratic in choosing a captain. Once a captain was chosen he had command. A wise captain did exercise his authority justly though. It seems to have been a quite reasonable self organizational strategy and it may also work for open source organizations. There are some parallels: the populations are mobile and independent minded, share a meritocracy based organizational philosophy, ...
This kind of bickering is the ugly dark side of an otherwise decent philosophy. The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity, is both useful and unpleasant and will always be a locus of justifiable criticism of the FOSS community in general.
Move along. Nothing new to see here.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Your posting makes not a bit of sense. Could you qualify that? In English? Please?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I certainly agree that "because Mac does it" is not a good reason. But that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason -- you've made a straw man argument, IMO.
And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much.
But I can think of some reasons that might apply: "as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done, therefore putting elements there minimizes gratuitous movement of those elements" could easily be a factor in a reasonable decision along these lines. Or "as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense".
If you don't agree with the conclusion, prove to the design team that you're enough of a design expert that they should pay attention to you, and have the discussion with them.
Every time a user chooses what distro to use, they vote.
Don't like the way a distribution does things? Use a different one.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
You make a lot of assumptions.
"The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side,"
Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?
And no 'It's obvious' doesn't cut it. Data only.
Why do you assume if the scroll bar is on the right , then windows on the right is more efficient?
"Putting it on the left for no good reason* just makes you have to mouse farther to accomplish the same task."
First, you are simple stating 'no good reason' without any backing. Strawman.
Second, what do you base where the mouse is most likely to be at any moment?
"* And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason."
No, but why Mac does it may be a good reason.
~~~ About your sig ~~~~~
heh, I love stuff like that. While they may have a good reason for doing it that way, claiming it's green for marketing reason crack me up.
After they give you your coffee, you should pout it from your mug into a paper cup. To make a point.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much."
Job security?
I'll show you an unshipped product.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
This is where you fork. End of story. kthxbai
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The old metaphor is: if someone builds a nuclear reactor, it is left to the most qualified engineers. But if you build a bike shed everyone wants to have their opinion heard. I.e. if you want to change the way an IO scheduler or a pagefault handler works, only experienced kernel hackers will bother discussing it, but if you move around two buttons, everyone understand what you've done and wants to weigh in.
But honestly if you are an specialist in building bikesheds, you can never expect to be taken as seriously as those who build nuclear reactors. Someone just reconfigured Metacity to switch some buttons because they thought it was better that way, surely this feat proves that they are the experts here and their judgement should be deferred to.
Back when I regularly contributed to Gnome they switched the button order on dialog boxes, I actually liked the new layout but it was just personal taste, their was no objective improvement to be worth the enormous amount of bitching from the community. And in the end this will be the same, I will get used to this new layout, all that will change is a few indignant people will stop using Ubuntu and it will mainly serve to piss off anyone who borrows my computer.
In a way, the new button order makes more sense, maximise is the opposite of close and should be on the opposite side, but ultimately, it's just not all that important but it serves to attract a lot of attention and impact a lot of people's habits. Surely a software developer who has nothing better to change than this is hardly worth taking seriously.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.
This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.
Could you imagine?
Sprint item #1: Nominate alphanumeric names to assign to for-loop index in procedure named last week. Due: Monday - noon
Sprint item #2: Vote on nominated for loop index names - top 5 continue to run-off. Due: Monday 6pm
Sprint item #3: Run off vote simple majority. In event of tie, Sprint Master will cast deciding vote. Due: Tuesday noon
Sprint item #4: Marvel at the code dev efficiency and speed of the archaic waterfall model ensconced in the Mil-Spec 498. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498
Expertise != arrogance.
sig: sauer
Mac also has a different order of buttons, with the close window button on the left, just as Windows has the close button on the right. Both are at the outside of the window, a good place. This puts the Windows order of buttons on the left -- doesn't work.
Mac also doesn't have a menu right underneath the buttons to accidentlly hit.
Mac has a complete user interface thought of to work together. Taking one element from it is a risky proposition, because unless you did your homework you don't know what other elements you also need to bring over in order for the first element to work right.
I modded you informative, but couldn't help but chime in, because I'm not sure if you realize why you are sick of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is what Mandrake was in the early 2000s. It's the flavor of the day. The problem with Ubuntu is not a drop off in quality - it's a lack of improvement in quality. Ubuntu is little or no better right now than Mandrake was back in 2001. As users realize that it is not the answer to what they are seeking - a desktop system for the masses, another distro (based on Debian/Slackware/CentOS/etc.) will surface with a similar polish that Ubuntu has, and a mass migration will occur. Like Ubuntu recently and Mandrake before it, it will be hailed by many as the precursor to the "year of Linux of the Desktop". After a few years, with still no adoption of Linux by the masses, the Linux community will grow weary and the cycle will repeat itself.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.