Slashdot Mirror
The State of Open Source Software
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an in-depth look at the state of open source software and an overview of the best open source software of the year. 'It's easy to find hundreds of other positive signs of open source domination. If the mere existence of a tar file filled with code from the nether regions of a beeping device that's buried deep inside someone's pocket is all you need to feel warm and fuzzy about "open source," you might conclude that open source development is the most dominant form in the increasingly dominant platform of the future,' Wayner writes. 'But anyone who digs a bit deeper will find it's not so simple. Although the open source label is more and more ubiquitous, society is still a long way from Richard Stallman's vision of a world where anyone could reprogram anything at any time. Patents, copyrights, and corporate intrigue are bigger issues than ever for the community, and more and more people are finding that the words "open source" are no guarantee of the freedom to tinker and improve. Some cynics even suggest that the bright, open future is receding as Linux and other open source tools grow more dominant.' Included in the writeup are the best open source applications, best open source desktop and mobile offerings, best open source development tools, and best open source software for datacenters and the cloud."
InfoWorld promotion has been going on for a long time in slashdot, but seriously now. Milking for link juice and keywords like "best open source applications" and "best open source development tools" straight in the summary? Hooray, SEO spam.
As J. Gruber of Daring Fireball points out, Google doesn't do open source as we would expect. An internal Google memo on Android development clearly states their policy:
This is not how open source is supposed to work. Open source doesn't mean "closed until we decide to make it open". Open source doesn't mean "closed until we and our partners can profit."
Among the six links to infoworld.com are 6 + 5 + 8 + 13 + 11 + 8 = a total of 51 pages. I'll forgive people for not reading through the whole article. For me, the problem with a lot of pages isn't having to click next, next, next, as much as that I can't Ctrl+F to find a particular application or genre in the article.
It does seem to be pretty common for people to apply the term "open source" to things that aren't. For example, when Schwarzenegger was governor of California, he started a Free Digital Textbook Initiative. I went to a symposium set up by the state about this initiative. Many people at the meeting used "open source" correctly to describe their books. E.g., the book's LaTeX source code was freely available, and the book was under a CC-BY-SA license. But Pearson, a big commercial textbook publisher, sent a representative, who talked about how Pearson was doing books that were "open source." Actually their sole free offering was a consumable biology workbook that was available as a free PDF download. But they heard everyone else saying "open source," and it sounded like good pixie dust, so they started using the term.
Find free books.
Or one could read the contrast another way: "Although the 'open source' label is more and more ubiquitous, society is still a long way from a 'free software' mentality."
The new Hotness is developing closed layers on Open Source shells.
Companies save 7 years on core concept development, but then they slam you for anything that looks like a rectangle with a home button in patent court.
Google is doing the same thing - Android is "sorta open" but seriously no company has the cash to fight them for the 5 years it takes to begin to get noticed.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yeh, I remember the day I bought a new timex "datalink" watch. I had high hopes and dreams of what I could do with that watch, being I could "talk" to it with nothing more than a LED.
I bought three of the things.
I remember well the frustration I encountered when I tried to find out aboutl the protocols needed to talk to the watch. I had all sorts of microcontroller projects I wanted to use it with... at the time, all 6502 based. Microsoft was involved. That's when I began to get a real sour taste in my mind every time Microsoft was mentioned. Microsoft had gotten big, and no longer thought well of those of us trying to find other ways of using their products.
Now, please tell me why keeping the protocols under tight wraps helped Microsoft or Timex? Did they really think I was going to copy their watches? Geez, there is no way I had any intention of getting into the watch manufacturing business! I just wanted to horse around with the darned thing and have fun seeing what I could do with it. To me, that was the fun of having the watch in the first place. If I can't do anything with it, I might as well buy a Porsche as a lawn ornament.
I ended up, five years later. throwing the watches away, two still in the original packaging. Junk. The only benefit I got was a lesson to be very wary of my intentions to see potential in products when the manufacturer is going to do their legal darndest to make sure I can't horse around with it. Its like going to a restaurant and having the chef come to my table and make sure I "enjoy" the meal exactly as he deemed. A shake of salt could bring a lawsuit.
I have seen books on how to program Androids at the bookstore. That, by itself, has biased me strongly towards the purchase of an Android phone when I get ready to buy a "smart" phone. The other phones look too much like a "datalink" to me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
No offence, but before you start criticising, it would help if you understood the issue. RMS uses the words "open source" himself. I have emails from him to prove it. What is at issue is that there is a distinction between "open source" and "free software". Originally ESR started using the term "open source" as a replacement for "free software". He (probably correctly) felt that the word "free" was confusing. However, at the same time he created a definition of "open source" that was different from "free software" while insisting that they were the same. The FSF is concerned with the freedom of all subsequent users to use the software for any purpose, modify it for their needs and to redistribute their modifications. "Open source" discusses the development practice of allowing other developers to view and modify the source code. There is no implication that all subsequent users will be able to modify the code.
An equivalent term would have been fine at the time. The problem was that ESR ignored the only thing that the FSF was interested in. At the same time, he championed many useful and pragmatic practices that have value in their own right. Thus one movement became two.
It is quite reasonable to say that the practice of producing open source software is becoming more and more mainstream, but that the issues of software freedom have not taken hold to the same extent. I doubt there would be many people who would disagree with that statement or find it objectionable. Open source development practices are a definite step forward. But for those interested in software freedom, there is still a long way to go. In some ways the open source movement has taken up a lot of the technical issues that the free software movement used to deal with. Personally, I think it is more important for free software advocates to concentrate on social rather than technical issues (and, in fact, I think that is being done).
The thing with FLOSS is that you see the development process. You see the bastard kids. You see the failed ideas. You see the brainstorming-throw-shit-at-the-wall development until they reach a rev where everything works. You don't see that with closed development processes. You just see an end product and never see the "failed" bin.
The positive in that is that someone might like rev 3.2 that you threw out. And they can take that rev, fork it, and have a product that loads of other people love as well. It gives people freedom and choice that the closed systems deny you. People may hate Unity and GNOME 3.0. So someone comes along, forks GNOME 2, keeps it alive, and people are happy. And maybe by version 1.5 or 2.3, Unity gets really good. And maybe by 3.6 GNOME gets really good. KDE 4.0 was unusable. But the latest release is really great. The whole process lets people have the choice of using what they like instead of being told what to use and how to use it.
Imagine you have a customer that is part of a contract that you just won but you have to find/deliver/develop a user interface of some sort for the customer to interact with their daily needs. On the backend you have a database, some other stuff and this and that that will interact with the GUI. Do you write your own GUI using WCF? Do you use QT which is free to distribute commercially?(all you have to do is include the dll/jar/whatever). Do you write your own?
No of course not. Why would anyone want to do that? How about let's go with a piece of crap software that makes a crappy GUI, with VB code running in the background, no documentation online to speak of, only runs on windows(of course), is buggy and the only interaction the "developers" have with this tool is to drag and drop. If a problem occurs, if you need a change in the software then you have to wait on said company to deliver... not to mention that that is extra money to add said feature(s). So what happens when someone else comes onto the project? They have been coding in C#/Java/C++/whatever language forever but it takes them 4 weeks to become even somewhat productive because this tool is so confusing and openly with question was built so that people could use it without doing any programming.
You cannot blame this piece of software for what it is. If it is built so the average joe can use it without programming a single line of code then so be it. You CAN however blame the ignoramous that fell for the hook line and sinker selling pitch on why we should be using said software because using another library or writing your own code would be too "expensive". Never mind the fact that you are totally and utterly dependent on said company to deliver knowledge and answers to questions about software so you fall behind schedule, nevermind that a new "developer" wastes 4 weeks of his or her time learning their way around a GUI instead of actually spending at most a couple of days learning about the software design and nevermind that the GUI is so horribly put together that is doesn't make sense for a coder. Nevermind the fact that the license for this software cost an unknown amount.
Management doesn;t seem to care/notice/know about options that are available and is so short sighted that he would make a decision that would make a team of "developers" want to just get up and leave. People who are management/approve contracts should NEVER make those decisions if he/she has not and/or is not a developer without at least putting together a team of real developers who are going to be working on it.
Open source software would be much further along if developers were allowed to be developers instead of put behind a management sandbox.
His blog is here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/ It seems he's purposely stayed out of the limelight for 10 years, or at least his "Speaking Engagements" section of his home page says that he has stopped giving them since 2002 for personal reasons. Not wanting to speculate, but at around the same time he took a lot of flack for talking about the shares he received from the IPO of VA Linux. I think a lot of technical people can identify with having made political gaffs and I wish he'd been given some slack. But there you go, being famous has both its ups and downs. I think in the end we all lost out because his voice was valuable and he doesn't seem to raise it as much any more. Still, he appears to be quite active on a lot of projects, just not as vocal.
Thinking about it, it's an interesting question given that my response was really intended to deflect some all too common, unwarranted criticism of RMS. Like a lot of people, I don't agree with everything he says (though I could say that about anyone, really), but the guy stands up to an incredible amount of abuse and keeps marching on in the spotlight. I don't blame ESR one bit for not wanting to follow suit (if that's really what happened).