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Open Community vs. Open Code
snydeq writes "Recent silence regarding the future of OpenSolaris under Oracle's hand has InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues questioning the relative importance of open code. 'Source code availability is a central factor in establishing trust in the open source community, as knowledge that the source is available can often allay fears about the future of a particular open source project or product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated,' Rodrigues writes. Members of the OpenSolaris community have been agitating for Oracle to clarify its plans for OpenSolaris in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, with some suggesting a fork as a way of severing ties. But, as Rodrigues points out, 'The community around an open source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a fork. In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.'"
So the short and neutral for of this article is:
A company opening the source to a given product at a given time may decide that - upon seeing not enough external developers jumping on - that it may be not worth continuing this effort. And the "community of administrators and users" complains they dont have enough programmers to fork it on their own.
How to say: Congratulations. But you know that *working* open source ecosystems also include programmers.
Let's not forget that Sun bought MySQL, which competes with Oracle's core database products.
If you choose a GPL app for your critical infrastructure, you're pretty safe. If the vendor, sponsor, developers and everybody else involved drops it you can support it yourself until you can migrate to another platform or just become the primary fork. Choosing GPL means never having to say "oops", unless you're the kind of fool that wants to take a GPL app proprietary.
A commercial closed-source app? No, you're maintaining legacy hardware that supports it until you can't get parts on Ebay any more, and then you're sunk.
A non-GPL open source app? Your mileage may vary. Consult your attorney. Consult several attorneys. Be prepared to pay those attorneys to defend you in court.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am wondering, why OpenSolaris should even continue?, its not like there is no open UNIX available for x86, you have the BSD family, and even though its not a UNIX you have GNU/Linux. If you are running on Sparc hardware it may be worth it but methinks that oracle might have been interesting in Solaris as a way of getting away from linux.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
There are many reasons why Open Source is good. The availability of developers is only one reason. Even if there seems to be a lack of competent developers ready to take over the project, simply having that potential can mean all the difference. If nothing else, the more eyes on the code, the more likely that bugs can be found and reported. At some point all closed source software will become unmaintained because technology changes, and there is only a finite set of resources. OSS, however, is always available to tinker with, even long after it seems to be worthwhile. As a comparison, think about older cars. They don't have all the bells and whistles, but still have value because they can still be worked on long after their respective companies moved on to newer models.
As a user of OSS, I prefer it even if there is a slightly better closed source alternative. Even though I very rarely look at that actual code, it's nice to know that it is there. It also says a lot about the company when they close up the code. I'm sure that others feel that way too. I don't mind if you sell your product, but I feel that once I buy it, it should be mine to take apart.
Sadly, Microsoft is a great example of how well closed source and good marketing can be. That is why I secretly want that giant to fall. I still think there is an unfortunately large number of people who don't care where their stuff comes from and what the real cost is as long as it works for the short term.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
A telling statement. If enough programmers find the program useful, but in need of improvement, then it is very likely some of them will improve it. If enough non-programmers think that way then they can pay to have it improved. If this doesn't happen then maybe the program wasn't so very important after all.
This is merely natural selection at work, and for the most part the outcome will be as it should be — unlike closed-source products, which live entirely at the whim of their creator.
It works sometimes too. I got into GIMP community via such suggestion. I sucked at code then, but I could debug things. That evolved into full developer thing over time since I got to know the code. Large projects like GIMP take commitment to know the code and to contribute. And that so-called line is not an excuse. If you want it done you need to do it yourself because, the developers don't have resources and the will to full-fill every users desire. Specially since they can be 100% conflicting at times with each other and sometimes with what developers see themselves developing, the product vision. Best way to know it fit matches the vision of those that manage the code is to ask and to to be offended when you are told "No", "Not now" or "Hell freeze over first" in some cases.
they would have turned openSolaris into an M$ killer but they need to level up a few more characters first.
Linux leveled up meanwhile. OpenSolaris is noob, it needs to grind with an established party to gain some experience.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
You mean to say that, when working for no reward, they work on the features that suit their interests rather than your interests? How shocking.
Your concept of user requests as something that developers have to ‘escape’ from betrays completely the wrong attitude. Listening to requests is one thing, but actually implementing them may require a large commitment of time and energy that you're not paying for. If you can convince someone to do the work anyway, for whatever reason, then that's great: everyone wins. If not then ‘do it yourself’ is a perfectly reasonable response.
If you want it done you need to do it yourself because, the developers don't have resources and the will to full-fill every users desire
Maybe not every users desires. But there has to be a system where people actually using the software full-time are listened to and included in the decision making even if they don't contribute a lick of code. All the features in the world are useless if it's unusable.
Look at the improvement in the Blender foundation thanks to Elephant's Dream and Project Peach. Real professionals using the product on real projects is how you get real feedback on your product. That's no different than how closed sourced products get their feedback, they invest a lot of time and money listening to the users and delivering what the users need while keeping an eye to the big picture. A bad community interaction is one of the leading indicators of misdirected development and stagnation.
Only if the developers care. They owe no one their work.
And honestly, many of them want just to write the features THEY need. Not everyone else's, no matter how "important" it is to someone else's "usability" rating - although they often are open to doing small changes for other people out of pure kindness. Either way, that won't change. If you don't like things, get some programming done. too, or hire someone.
Screw it, for $700, I'll deal with Adobe's lousy customer service rather than some OSS prima donna.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Even Linus Torvalds himself uses KDE, and encourages others to do the same.
Linus Torvalds is an idiot when it comes to user interfaces. Just look at git.
And how's that an excuse against "do it yourself"? If you live in a household, not knowing how to wash dishes does not exclude you from the duty. Now you didn't sign a contract which states that you *must* wash dishes regularly. You can hire a dish washing person, or the other household members can be nice to you and wash dishes for you. But if neither are true then complaining whenever other household members ask you to wash dishes is a douchy thing to do.
"Escape from listening to feedback and requests"? The developer has to eat, how will immediately doing what you say get him his next meal? It won't, so he has the right to do whatever he wants with your feedback, including postponing to an indefinite time in the future.
Your analogy is too confusing for me. Let's say you find some code and it doesn't do what you want.. so you ask the people who work on it to add some improvements so it works for you. They ignore your request. So you ask again. They continue to ignore you. You have a big screaming fit and complain that no-one is listening to you and that everyone is unhelpful and you hate them. I think "douche" is too nice a word.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And what makes you think that a real professional wouldn't be listened to? Trouble is real artistic professionals seldom move in the circles of developers. We have had a few and Ive learned a lot from them, but they are rare... Strangely enough, its usually the non-pros that complain and demand things loudest.
Choice of DE is a matter of taste. Personally I am KDE user too. A kernel developer does not have to do a good GUI. Git as version control is very nice once you get to know it. The UI parts are both optional and replaceable with custom tools if found inadequate. So far this has not happened.
Torvalds has switched to GNOME.
-- Linux user #369862
For $700 you could probably get some attention from most prima donnas. Try that with Adobe, if you can even get connected to someone without a heavy accent and not reading scripted information you can find on the web anyway.
I've been using FreeBSD for several months now, specifically for ZFS. The more I play with it, the more I like it. Of course, if it wasn't for the few years of running Ubuntu, I wouldn't have built up the skillset or the patience to tinker with things until they work, which is what I've had to do (not so much ZFS, but the FreeBSD side of it).
As part of the design process, Jeff Bonwick questioned pretty much every convention that went with filesystem design, threw out everything that no long applied, and instituted everything he thought was a good idea. It shows. Dealing with ZFS is different, but in a much better way. The most beautiful thing is the checksums/hashes for every block, so that you KNOW when something has corrupted, and more importantly, you should have a backup, and hopefully, some redundancy so fixing it is as simple as swapping in another drive. Why should we, in 2010, when prices per gigabyte are dirt cheap, be still dealing with silent data corruption? There is no reason for it. Everywhere I look with ZFS shows that it has been sensibly architected.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The point of this article is that it doesn't matter, because almost every single person fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms is employed by Oracle, and wouldn't be able to work on a fork. Nobody else is really contributing, so a fork would die quickly.
If not then ‘do it yourself’ is a perfectly reasonable response.
It is if you have the time, ability, and willingness to do it yourself. Otherwise it's much more efficient to go buy an existing closed source product that actually does what you want. I'm a coder with a couple of decades of experience across a variety of platforms, so I probably *could* hack on an open-source project to get it to do what I want, but rather than waste God-knows how many hours of my time and then be told to go away when I try to submit a change to the repo, I'm going to save myself a lot of grief, plop down a credit card and buy something made by a company that actually gives a damn about what I need.
"But you could pay someone to do the work for you!" $650 buys me a full copy of Photoshop. That same $650 will buy me 2-3 days of a coder's time, which isn't going to get me very far towards bringing GIMP up to the same functionality.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
but if there isnt demand for it, there will be no use if you allocate numerous paid developers to it.
Read radical news here
The point of this article is that it doesn't matter, because almost every single person fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms is employed by Oracle, and wouldn't be able to work on a fork. Nobody else is really contributing, so a fork would die quickly.
But what it overlooks is that most of the people who don't work at Oracle, but who could be fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms, seem to prefer to work on Linux or BSD instead. The problem is not that the community can't support a free OS--the problem is that with several flavors of BSD and hundreds of Linux distros, the community may be starting to reach the limit on the number of free OSes it can support.
Of course, the article is purely speculative--up until now, Sun has been supporting OpenSolaris, so it's hard to say what would actually happen if it stopped. We might suddenly discover a bunch of lurkers who are willing to step up to the plate. It might go moribund for a year or two then suddenly get revived. Or it might die completely. At this point, any guesses are just that--guesses.
There is plenty of demand for a high end photo manipulation and editing package.
While gimp is pretty good (it would certainly take a man year or two to catch up to it), its still like 10 years behind photoshop and even paintshop in most of the meaningful ways. The problem is that the demands being filled is not the same.
The developers of GIMP are fulfilling developer demand. There is no advantage to fulfilling professional or consumer demand, even though there is PLENTY of both.
"His name was James Damore."
I think you're reading rather too much into the 'do it yourself' response. Nobody is forcing you to use Open Source software, so of course you can go and buy Photoshop if it better meets your needs. However if you want specific functionality added to the GIMP then they have every right to decline to do that for you — to suggest otherwise would be absurd. They are simply telling you the harsh reality that if you want it to happen and they don't have the time and/or inclination, then you either have to make it happen some other way or live without.
You love an apple in the ass? That makes sense, it's much less painful than a penguin, not to mention a window.
Ezekiel 23:20
So did I when distros pushed the immature kde 4 out. I went back the moment things started looking saner again.
That's wisely put.
As I look at the landscape, I'm actually inclined to think that opensolaris is usefully distinct enough from *BSDs, with interesting and rich tools and infrastructure to attract developers from (esp.) the *BSD kernel development communities, if it becomes clear that a clearer cut opportunity to do this exists.
Also, it looks to me as if the internal Solaris devs actually liked having an open process, and valued being open source, and that while a lot of the reasons for keeping the development and design communication internal were competitive, they were also just intended to avoid taxing the productivity of a very productive team. I'm surprised Sun's solaris devs wouldn't have tried to make more (perhaps piecewise) efforts to engage external developers in areas where those interests wouldn't conflict, and, perhaps they still might.
Matt
The point was not that open source developers should be obligated to implement everything the end users ask for, but rather that open source doesn't work the way people have been claiming for a decade.
Well, if nobody else is really contributing, it tells you that people don't really care, in which case it doesn't matter.
I certainly don't care about Solaris. I still care a little about Java, but I believe IBM and other groups will continue to develop that under FOSS licenses.
It's not a question of numbers. If Solaris provides important functionality that other systems don't, then companies will invest in maintaining a FOSS fork. If ZFS, dtrace, and all that are all a bunch of hot air and nobody cares, then it will die.
The nice thing about FOSS is that, unlike corporate decision making, it's democratic and market-oriented.
thats an important developer culture problem. developers are creating stuff that would appeal to developers, in developer mindset. if we want open source to really take off as a culture, we need to learn how to work for the needs of the common man, without despising it or harboring elitism.
Read radical news here
The point was not that open source developers should be obligated to implement everything the end users ask for, but rather that open source doesn't work the way people have been claiming for a decade.
Claims about the way that open source works? The point of the open licenses is to allow developers that work differently, have different needs and preferences or ego trips to create their own communities or go it alone.... and that is how it works.
My perception is that if a user goes through enough participation that they are recognized by the devs on the lists their feedback will usually be taken into consideration. By the time they have that recognition they have probably assisted the community in some way and they don't have to be bitching out in the cold, but can rather get their suggestions directed to the proper parties.
Fact is, even when a community has a guiding body instead of just a Maintainer that coordinates volunteers it is still better to research the history of similar requests put forth on the lists in the past, then find the devs that might actually be interested in your idea if it hasn't already been beaten to death within that community. In this scenario there is no complaining or listening to users, there is a conversation between community members that have proven themselves as such by steady participation over time.
The fact that one of the members in the conversation can't code doesn't come into play anymore because it is assumed that they will be willing to dogfood the changes, file accurate bug reports, and probably help out on lists/forums when questions come up about details of the implementation... basically there is confidence that the person doing the requesting will remain a part of the process.
Once a 'user' has done the groundwork it will be a pretty simple equation of how insightful their feedback turns out to be vs the amount of resources required to implement vs how able the developers are to add more work to their schedules. Fork at any time.
This is how it works.
Who has been claiming what exactly for a decade?
If you mean users fixing problems for themselves, or developers implementing suggestions from end users, then these things can and do happen. Frequently. I've experienced it, and so have others in this discussion.
If you mean that this is guaranteed to happen, of course it isn't, but who would be foolish enough to make such a claim (or gullible enough to believe it)?
They are simply telling you the harsh reality that if you want it to happen and they don't have the time and/or inclination, then you either have to make it happen some other way or live without.
Absolutely, and I have zero problems with being told that. It's ludicrous to expect someone else to spend hours of their free time writing code just because I want a particular feature and am not willing to pay for that time. My point was just that the ability to roll your own changes is always trotted out as a big benefit of open source, but often it is of little practical value.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Well, of course it matters the degree to which these things are true. You'd also want to see what happens when you get away from the "poster boys" like Linux.
...which is to completely change direction every year or two. x86 on, x86 off, linux is crap, we're the biggest linux vendor, screw linux, solaris, opensolaris, change licenses, x86 off...
I do understand that Solaris technology is excellent, but anybody who counted on Sun maintaining consistent support for it hasn't been paying attention. So if Sun made you happy before, then Oracle should make you happy now; nothing has changed, the strategy spinner is still spinning.
Fair points, to which the answers are (a) it varies and (b) it varies. Being open source is no guarantee of quality, and if you pick at random then you will spend most of your time in the long tail of unfinished, unsupported code. The solution is simple: use the good and ignore the bad, just as you would with proprietary software. (Easier, in fact, because less is hidden and there is no monetary commitment.)
Well how many users of proprietary software have a chance to participate in the development of the software they use?
Not every user of open source software will have the opportunity/desire/ability to participate in the development of the software they use.
However, for those who do get that chance it is a pretty "big benefit".
In terms of "practical value", for some people it is very high, for others almost nothing.
In terms of the average benefit, its probably pretty hard to quantify... I suppose you could argue many ways. Personally I would think that the average benefit would be mostly a second order effect of the benefit to developers.
I'd really like hell to freeze over and the gimp to get a human usable UI.
Nah, I like it toasty here in Hell. Why can't GIMP get a good UI, 8+bpc support, CMYK etc without first altering the @#$ing weather? 8I
Netpbm changes with the times. (<3 Netpbm! ;D) So why not the GIMP?
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
In short, if you're going to hack the code, AND if you're going to lurk for upwards of a decade in order to be recognized by the community as sentient so that you can re-contribute your changes, then you will prefer today's Open Source ecosystem.
If you are on a tight budget and you are willing to bend your processes like taffy around infrastructure that hackers thought would be a good idea years ago and then forgot to cook it all the way through, or support as the code began to age, then you'll eke by on Open Source. If you lack respect for IP, you might also mix in some pirated copies of closed source software.
If you fear IP, and/or have the money to sink into software then you are generally going to buy either closed source, or enterprise licensed software. Because your money acts like a class equalizer, you don't have to bear the brunt of financing a feature that millions of people (who aren't hackers) already want. Instead, authors who want your money are actively trying to guess what you would like in order to sell to you and millions who share your (common, probably easy to divine) preferences.
More Open Source communities really need to grow a bit of sophistication and learn to reward hackers for meeting aggregate needs in order to end the cycle of circle-jerk that's asphyxiating the industry. There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" until the needs of common Desktop users are actually satisfied by a Linux distribution.
I've seen "code bounties" (normally only offered by medium to large businesses) and I've seen bug/feature trackers with voting mechanisms (where the developers pan straightforward fixes years old with more votes than all other entries combined), but I haven't yet seen these concepts combined: where users could donate money into separate code bounty pots to clarify their aggregate interest in fixing specific non-critical bugs or implementing specific features. I think that sort of approach might make a big difference. Let the patcher and the community's governing body share the bounty by some split, to encourage actually accepting patches in favor of thumb-sitting. In case the feature becomes obsolesced by changes elsewhere, perhaps an Escrowed Assurance Contract would be the way to go?
Then you don't have to personally bribe some entrenched developer by paying him $100/hr to write every line of code, test, and sublet-bribe every other impacted task leader just to see (for example) GIMP get some feature everyone already wants and every other graphics package has had since the dawn of time. Non-RGB colorspaces, perhaps? Honest, I used these in Photoshop v2.5 in 1992, and Jasc Paintshop Pro v4 in 1995. Wouldn't it be great if Linux X11 (I've tried Redhat, Debian and Ubuntu over the past decade) allowed you to specify monitor sizes without hacking text files? Parallel service bootstrapping? You know, I've always wanted a tagged filesystem. I think I could rally support for one easier than I could just raise the needed funds by hand.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
It's not ridiculous that GIMP still remains a piece of shit compared to Photoshop, no matter how much you and every other OSS apologist try to argue otherwise. Adobe does in fact incorporate features requested by users, and by and large it's a lot more stable than GIMP.
Prove me wrong.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas