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Survey On the Future of Open Source, and Lessons From the Past
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Oram reports on the quality, security, and community driving open source adoption. 'All too often, the main force uniting competitors is the fear of another vendor and the realization that they can never beat a dominant vendor on its own turf. Open source becomes a way of changing the rules out from under the dominant player. OpenStack, for instance, took on VMware in the virtualization space and Amazon.com in the IaaS space. Android attracted phone manufacturers and telephone companies as a reaction to the iPhone.'"
I just wish there was more consistency to open source projects. For every OpenStack there are craploads of half-finished projects that are basically in a perpetual beta stage. Documentation is spotty, features are spotty. Hell, even the names of most open source stuff seems to suck. It's hard to sell management on something called GIMP as an alternative. Even Libre Office sounds like shit.
Gee, that's amazing. Who'd have thought that proprietary locked-down products would create a bad result?
It's great to see Open Source used as a tool to help foster healthy competition where it otherwise may not happen. But it's also potentially bad if the Open Source path leads to worse results for end users.
Take for example the iPhone/Android comparison made. The iPhone took control away from the mobile phone carriers in regards to the device, allowing all iPhone users to see updates all at the same time. It also put a dent in the phone crapware problem. Android has done nether, suffering problems because devices can't be all easily updated. Google today announced that they will be updating APIs through Google Play. All because their attempts to update those APIs at the OS level failed due to carrier and device manufacturers holding up, or never providing OS updates. Google is only regaining control and providing better user experience on Android by becoming more closed, at least when it comes to how they deal with carriers and device manufacturers.
PS: Yes, I know about gimp, darkroom, inkscape, etc. While I can accomplish the task with them, they lack usability, stability, and speed.
Always has. Capitalism is the most successful national economic model to date but it's far from elegant.
So when major corporations get behind open source, that's part of where they're coming from almost by definition.
The waters are muddied by the ideas of 'Open Source' vs 'GNU'. TFA talks about 'Open Source' and that shouldn't be confused with free.
.. that doesn't mean that GNU is taking over the world.
The companies aren't necessarily praising the freelance open source developers, they're praising the cost savings of developing across companies and (perhaps) with the help of GNU developers. But this isn't praising the 'My Time is Free' developer, it's praising the bazaar development model. Of course, software developed under collaboration is going to develop faster and more robustly because there's more people working on it.
It doesn't mean that the software is going to be better. That's why companies like Google are writing the software, then giving it to 'Open Source' for on-going maintenance. But this trend isn't going to continue into the future. However hopeful GNU developers are about the future of GNU, it's only there right now because there's so many hobbyist developers out of professional work who can afford the time to throw at it. Want to help companies write the software? They're not gonna say no
This is about open source, there's nothing GNU here.
Every time I say I'm switching from windows to Linux, I go crawling back and why... Linux desktop. My latest attempt with Ubuntu - ended up in a dog slow computer with a gui that hangs. The Suse attempt with KDE has really fuzzy fonts - I've played with the anti-aliasing but it still sucks to look at it. At least Ubuntu you could consider reading on it. I know try Mint... Really my favorite Linux at the moment is android.
I'm at the point of considering a Mac, but those stores with the blue army kind of scare me. :>
The survey, as most open source articles, studies, etc. ignores the elephant in the room: open source leads to loss of competitive advantage for companies. I know I likely won't ever use open source software to run any critical parts of my business, because part of my business model is having a competitive advantage through better software than my competitors.
I don't respond to AC's.
You bring up two points that are worth addressing. There's some truth to both, and there's good news on both - they are solved by using open source in a way that makes sense, not thinking it's exactly the same as proprietary software, except you get the source code. It's kind of like saying that dogs are better than cats because your cat won't play fetch. True, cat's don't play fetch, instead they play with laser pointers.
You're right, you can find lots of beta level OSS. Both free and proprietary software have betas. With proprietary software, you're not allowed to see the betas (unless it's Microsoft, in which case your new computer comes preinstalled with Windows 8 alpha.) With free software, you can choose the beta version of a mature project (Fedora), the stable version of a mature project (Red Hat), or the beta version of a new project (FuSe). They are all available. That means you'll want to look at the status of that version before making a major commitment to it. Don't install FuSe if you want a mature system, install Red Hat. It's actually cool that you CAN choose FuSe, or a development kernel, if you want some new feature that's in development and not yet rock solid stable. You do want to check though, and that's why Sourceforge shows you right up front how much activity the project has, the version numbers, user ratings, etc., so you can choose maturity vs. bleeding edge, etc.
You also mentioned documentation, which is sometimes important, and is actually entirely separate from the quality of the software. True, the programmers of OSS have less incentive to author well organized, newbie friendly documentation in the style you're accustomed to, unless you use a certain trick. There's actually MORE in-depth documentation for OSS. Every change to the software and the design decisions are normally documented three times: on the -dev mailing list, in git/svn, and in bugzilla or similar. If you have a question, you can email the list and the authors of the software will answer you, assuming you ask a Good Question (see ESR). So if you want to really understand how something ticks, you can find lot more information about how Apache works than how IIS WORKS, for example. That's not too newbie friendly, though. For comprehensive, newbie friendly guides, you need one of two magic words.
HOWTO is the first magic word. Google _____ ______ HOWTO for any OSS topic and you'll probably find the documentation you're looking for. If not, the second magic word is "book". I work on a OSS project you've probably never heard of, Moodle. Moodle isn't a high profile project, yet Barnes & Noble has EIGHTY listings of Moodle books. That's EIGHTY versions of the comprehensive documentation you're looking for. (Could be 40 different books, B&N may have duplicates listed.) I know, you're shocked. I just suggested BUYING something related to open source software. I know it may seem strange, but compare $500 for a Microsoft solution versus $22 for the book to go with the free software option. I'll take $22 over $500 all day long if I really need 150 pages of illustrated documentation.
So you're right, OSS projects don't prevent you from downloading beta quality code. And dogs don't catch mice. Consider this post as "Intro to Cats, a Guide for Dog Lovers".
The problem with GIMP is that it has a horrendous usability problem that seams to increase per release.
Yes, GIMP is a stupid name (even as an acronym) ... but a name alone doesn't make or break a product. USABILITY is the #1 factor in making a software product successful.
Hello,
GPL states if you want to make a game using even a little bit of their source code or art, you need to redistribute your project as well. Sometimes releasing your own source code makes your game easy mode to be hacked. For this reason I wouldn't want to release my code initially at release, but I'd release maybe down the road a couple years.
What I want is a licensing system where I can use someone's code/art for free, but if I make a profit, cut them a share. Right now there are systems that make you pay up front, and if you have no money to begin with, you can't do that. But if people made a licensing system that said,"Pay us 1-50% of your revenue in royalty", I'd be all over that.
God spoke to me
Absolutely. I've recently been victimized by 2.8's new Save As... which breaks 2.6 functionality and only allows you to save in GIMP's own format.
New workflow:
1. Save As...
2. Curse
3. Escape
4. Export
Any change that makes users curse your software is not a good change. But it's an epidemic. Office Ribbon, Gnome 3, Unity, FireFox, Windows 8, etc.
I'd say the #1 factor would be perception, then marketing, THEN usability. Look at the success of Microsoft, and learn from how they name their products. Word. Office. Windows. See a pattern? Simple, common words, even if they are non-descriptive of the product, like Excel for example. You don't need to use a recursive acronym in your product name to show me how clever you are. I know you're clever because you can write programs! That takes care of the perception issue.
A decent program will market itself given the nature of the Internet; you no longer need commercial advertising. So now you attack the usability factor.
In this day and age, if you want your wares to have broad appeal, the formula is really simple: Style, popularity, and substance coming in last place, generally speaking. Sad but true.
This is a good point, or at least a specific example of a problem that is a good point... It started with GNOME and Canonical, but it seems like more and more OSS devs are getting into that same mindset of "Quiet, users, the devs know what's best for you" to justify an utter lack of configurability, while simultaneously smashing usability with idiotic changes like the above.
Excel, Powerpoint, Silverlight, Outlook, Visio, Vista, Blue...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
> know I likely won't ever use open source software to run any critical parts of my business, because part of my business model
> is having a competitive advantage through better software than my competitors.
Then you're doing it wrong. Specifically, you've fallen into a black-or-white view and forgot that 90% of cases are gray.
Surely your company didn't write it's own mail client, you use something like Outlook, Evolution or Claws because there's not nearly enough competitive advantage in having your own email client for the ROI to make sense. You don't write your own word processing program for writing memos and letters. That's one extreme.
At the other extreme, you may have ONE piece of software which does that thing that sets your company apart. You might open source or outsource your payroll, but Google would never open source their search algorithm. Ebay may open source or outsource their forums, but the core of their auction system is the core of their business, so it's 100% proprietary. That's the other extreme. So the two extremes are a) commodity software where you should use something off the shelf and b) your core competency, your true competitive advantage, key business secrets, which should be well closed.
90% of what you use doesn't properly fit either extreme. That 90% in the middle is where the ROI is best by CUSTOMIZING existing software. Ebay doesn't write it's own web server, they customize Apache. To handle petabytes of data, Google customizes open source storage stacks. For MOST things, being completely dependent on a vendor for updates, support, etc. is at least a risk, so committing to of-the-shelf proprietary software instead of an open system you'll be able to customize if needed is a mistake. At the same time, building from scratch is a huge waste of money for most of the software you use. Most cases fall in the middle - use what's already available rather than writing your own, but not by becoming dependent on a third party vendor who may pull an Adobe and decide to stop selling their desktop software, instead offering it only as a cloud based monthly service (or who may go out of business entirely). Open source fills this huge middle perfectly.
Think I'm wrong? That means you think Ebay and Google are wrong. Over half of the world's largest companies, the Fortune 500, are known use open source software. Are you REALLY smarter than Ebay, Google, and all the other multi-billion dollar companies? Is that proven by the fact that you're more successful than they are?
Is that proven by the fact that you're more successful than they are?
I'm more successful than my larger, publicly owned competition, yes.
I don't respond to AC's.
> I have never comprehended why anyone would want to do RedHat's alpha testing for free.
I think "alpha" is a bit too strong, MANY people run Fedora on their desktop with no problems. I did so for several years before switching to CentOS for desktops.
Fedora is certainly cutting edge as opposed to stable.
As to "why", I've used Fedora on an important business server when I needed some brand new virtualization features and I couldn't wait 18-24 months for them to be available in Red Hat or other enterprise stable distros. That was much better supported than me compiling all my own pieces and cobbling them together with the older libraries on RHEL. About two years later, I updated the system to RHEL which finally had the "new" versions that Fedora let me run years before most competitors did.
> I just suggest people buy something running android, because all these Linuxes are bleeding edgers.
Most web servers run Linux. Essentially all supercomputers run Linux. It's stable enough to run the whole of Google reliably. It's stable enough for NSA.
Yeah the workflow has changed.
Then again, any change will break someone's workflow. [insert xkcd]
But the new one I find actually better. It's harder to accidently save to a lossy format, and when you pruposely do export to PNG or whatever, it no longer bugs you with pointless warnings telling you what you already know.
Takes some getting used to but I prefer it overall.
No, the pointless and REALLY FUCKING STUPID change that broke my workflow and is in no way ever an improvement is that now when you start pretty much any GNOME/GTK program from not the home directory, it forgets which directory you were in as soon as you try to use any file dialog box.
I was in the drectory for a reason. That is where I want to be.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Dude, you own two pet stores, with a web site that was apparently designed in Geocities. You're not only not in the same league as Google or eBay, you're not in the same solar system. When someone is 100,000,000,000 times more successful than you, the smart thing is to LEARN from them. The very dumbest thing you can do is to think you're smarter than everyone else and therefore refuse to learn.
I know you probably won't see this since you're AC, but I'd like to get more details. At our institution, we don't manually input any grades because we just use Moodle for online classes. It would be great if you could post more details about what grades you're inputting, why, and how to the Moodle forum. Any suggestions on how to make it easier?