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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.
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.
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.
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.
First link: author is vague and incorrect; OpenSolaris supports most common onboard SATA controllers. I have personally run it on nVidia MCP55 and above, Intel ICH7 and above, AMD SB600 and above, and OpenSolaris usually support all these very common chipsets/onboard SATA controllers.
Second link: the author is using unsupported dev builds of OpenSolaris.
Third link: the post is 2 years old and evidence suggests unreliable hardware.
Fourth link: the author complains about FreeBSD, not OpenSolaris.
Fifth link: the author concluded corruption was caused by unreliable hardware.
Search for "$NAME_OF_TECHNOLOGY unreliable" and google will always return thousands of results.
Personally I have a rather pleasant experience with ZFS. I have been using it for 3+ years at work and at home on 5-6 machines with about 50 drives total. It has been rock solid so far. And it has saved my life a couple times when drives died.