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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.
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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.
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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.
The biggest issue with a lot of of the home grown Open Source Apps, is getting past the dreaded 80% complete mark.
This is the point in the program where all the interesting proof of concepts and interesting algorithms are all set. However that last 20% is a lot of the detail fine tuning that really puts all the pieces in play.
This last 20% mark when it no longer becomes fun, is where the project looses steam and sometimes dies off.
Having a company putting money towards development with management and direction and all those MBA Buzzwords basically means we push the developers to get that last 20% done.
But of course if they are pushing to get that set done, and are putting in resources to help that, it is going to be their vision of 20% not necessary yours.
I know a lot of the Open Source people have this Anti-Corporate everything mind set... However to make it in the world there needs other sources of motivation other then just feeling good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good point.
I've contributed to open source projects (mostly Drupal, in my case) for years. Virtually all of it has been while I was paid as an employee, contributing back things I developed for my employer (and with my employer's consent and encouragement). I don't send the bulk of my time working on projects just for the community. Most of my time is creating solutions for my employer's clients. But in the course of this, it is not uncommon that I create something useful to others, and then contribute it back.
Open source developers are a diverse group and I know my situation is radically different from many other people's. But it is easy to generalize, and good to keep in mind that developers and companies come at open source from different perspectives.