Slashdot Mirror
Industry-Based ToDo Alliance Wants To Guide FOSS Development
jralls (537436) writes The New York Times broke a story [Monday] (paywalled if you look at more than 10 stories a month) about ToDo, "an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS, "including ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively." The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.
It's not a complete myth, they still exist but, IMHO, they mostly focus on developing the new, exciting, risky and often hopeless ideas.
I'm perfectly happy with corporations focussing on stability, testing, documentation and all the other stuff that goes into actually finishing a project.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Looks more like "We want to figure out how best to coordinate and share that portion of the work that the people whom we pay to develop software for us, do on free software." (Though they're not using that dangerous word "free", of course.)
"Free" or "open source" doesn't mean no one is getting paid to develop it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Isn't this what just happened with the steaming pile of shit called systemd?
That, and frankly, the FOSS community needs to make a choice - if they want the year of Linux on the desktop to stop being a joke and start being a reality there has to be a move towards this sort of professionality that gives corporations the confidence they need to roll it out onto the desktop - they need to know it will be supported for x number of years, they need to know there will be frequent updates to keep it competitive and so on.
There are a non-negligible number of participants in the FOSS community that want both global domination for their software, but just want to continue to developing in a laissez faire attitude - avoiding the responsibilities of creating something genuinely competitive and reliable enough to become dominant such as decent planning, professional efforts on documentation, design and UX stuff whilst also complaining that it doesn't get the attention they want.
IMO there are two choices developers have when working on FOSS projects:
1) Do it for fun and don't give a shit who or how many people use it, don't care how they use it, when they use it, just develop it because you like developing and because it's a good opportunity to showcase your skills and keep them sharp.
2) Care about how people use it, how successful it is, how widespread it is, but accept that there is a cost to this - the cost being that you have to expend effort doing the non-fun parts of software development like offering support, quashing bugs in a pre-agreed timeframe, providing documentation and so on and so forth.
Those who want the success and want to crush proprietary software without wanting to put in the effort of doing the boring stuff that makes proprietary software so successful in so many cases are living in fantasy land. Personally I have respect for people whatever decision they make above, what I don't have respect for are those who want to achieve the political agenda of 2) but simultaneously demand the lack of responsibilities of 1) - that's not realistic.
If your objective is publicity, frequent releases are good. If you're writing useable software, frequent releases are bad.
Well, and who decides if a fork is good or bad? I thought the ability to fork has always been held as a strength of FOSS, as long as they release the code back to the public according to the licensing terms. X.org forked from XFree86, and it was considered a good thing. What about LibreOffice forking from OpenOffice? Webkit itself was a fork of KHTML, IIRC.
It often seems like the attitude of the FOSS community is something like, "You think you can do a better job on this project? Fork it and let's see what you got!" And then some company does it, and everyone whines and complains that they should be working within the community.
The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.
This part of TFS is superfulous to the news item and actually degrades from the piece.
It steers the discussion away from the actual news and towards the submitter's pet peeves (notice how he made sure to mention Google by name).
jralls should really save his opinions for the comment section, or if not, the editors should've forced him to.
Now the entire comment section for this article will essentially be a huge subthread for that guy's inflamatory comments.
Yeah yeah, I know this is par for the course for /. and that's the part that really sucks.