...I am hearing the same crap over and over. Too many of y'all are thinking that without a perfect infrastructure (like you have at home, or in your office, as I do) and without perfect, up to the minute hardware, or even legacy hardware that ain't too legacy -- without, in short, being First Worlders -- Third Worlders will never have, or never need, or never use, or never care about the Internet. Have none of you naysayers ever heard of making do? Most people poorer than the average Slashdotter are perfectly readywillingandable to use old shitty hardware running old shitty software on old shitty telephone connections --- because they know that the informational and communicative potential of the Internet is worth dealing with inconveniences. What's more, it's really weird and unsettling to see that the richest, best-connected and most Internet-savvy microslice of humanity, at this stage of the Internet's development, continues to see the Internet as a tool suitable only for (and desirable only to)... [wait for it]... themselves. This is, folks, what they used to think about radio and television... something the Third and Fourth Worlds have been using and actively, successfully exploiting (even when they have to, again, MAKE DO) for many decades now. Sigh.... they're just as good as we are, guys...
Raymond touts the stability of Linux as proof of the OpenSource concept, but that's a bit misleading. The core of Linux was written by one person - Linus Torvalds. Moreover, there is a small group who shepherds the contributions to the kernel to keep it stable and clean. In other words, there's a priesthood at the top of the bazaar. If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed out the bad ideas. The bazaar has cops. The chaos is contained.
ESR certainly does NOT fail to mention this, as tC&tB readers will remember. As a matter of fact, he makes a very clear point that someone who throws a too-incomplete project into the bazaar will not raise any developer interest to speak of. I am getting the feeling that Lewis has heard of tC&tB as ESR's paean to the OSS movement. But I don't think he's actually read it.
When you get a company the size of Apple or Microsoft, you have thousands of developers who do peer review of code. You have the referees who determine what goes in to a product and what doesn't... but they have one thing that the OpenSource method doesn't: they have markets to answer to. [...]See, when commercial developers create a product, they start by trying to solve a problem that customers need solved. The focus is always on the customer. What do they need? What do they want (which isn't always the same thing:)?[...]
Again: he hasn't read ESR's paper. If he had he would know that the OSS core 'market' is developers, both as developers, but also as users. What's more, plain ol' users are more and more being taken into account, AbiWord being an oft-cited but worthy example (hey, it saved my bacon once).
While Raymond cites Doom as an example of a product which revived itself by going OpenSource, he conveniently forgets that Doom was a very successful commercial product for a long time - both as shareware and commercialware.
No he didn't forget that. He spent like a 'graph and a half explaining that DOOM 'revived' itself as OSS after losing its... [wait for it..] long-lived commercial success!
Ironically, when commercial developers release applications which are clearly not 100%, we accuse them of forcing the customer to be beta testers, but in a sense, OpenSource assumes you're not only going to be a tester; you're going to be a programmer and fix the bug!
No. Both commercial and OSS projects, to some extent, use users as beta testers. OSS projects allow those users who are also programmers to contribute to the integrity and quality of the product.
As for comparing bug counts - at least Microsoft has a bug count. If Raymond had bothered to check the number, he'd have found that a rather large proportion of the 63,000 bugs are cosmetic - and none were considered 'showstoppers'. We don't even have a way to determine the real bug count for Linux since there's no central repository for this sort of information.
Perhaps not. There's no central Linux, tough concept for this Macker to wrap his head around. But there are distributions. Debian has a bug log, RedHat has one, I imagine the others do too
Well, that's all I care to find. YMMV. God, I hate stupid people.
Some people, like Richard Stallman, have always tried to keep a bit of this spirit alive - admittedly, it must be like fighting uphill in an avalanche. But it wasn't until Linux that the OpenSource movement really kicked in.
So he doesn't even know that RMS doesn't think of himself as part of the 'Open source' movement...nor, apparently, that 'OpenSource' is a really cheesy-looking buzzword.
Eric Raymond's comments at MacHack were wonderfully telling in several ways. He criticised Mac programmers for being too focussed on user interface and criticised MacOS for intertwining the UI with system functionality, making it harder for new programmers to get on board writing MacOS apps.[....]Ironically, it's the focus on UI, perhaps taken to obsession, which gives MacOS its edge over... well, it has to be said this way - over all other OSes. Windows comes close, but misses simply because Windows developers really do not have that obsession to make the UI perfect. Linux and the various X-Window interfaces rarely even come close. The obsession with sticking to a standard behaviour means that MacOS users experience a consistency of behaviour that no other OS can offer (although again, Windows is getting closer - Linux is not even close).
Well, ESR is obviously right that Mackers can't tell the difference between the UI and the OS functionality because here (and elsewhere) Lewis himself keeps conflating UI and OS. The 'inconsistencies' between (not necessarily within various WMs have nothing at all to do with the underlying OS!
Have you forgotten that Linux does have a (generally) unified kernel; is becoming steadily more user-friendly and 'abstractable' as opposed to 'abstracted', thus retaining flexibility of appeal to hackers and nonhackers alike; and is, along with many of its major apps, free or very nearly free?
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...I am hearing the same crap over and over. Too many of y'all are thinking that without a perfect infrastructure (like you have at home, or in your office, as I do) and without perfect, up to the minute hardware, or even legacy hardware that ain't too legacy -- without, in short, being First Worlders -- Third Worlders will never have, or never need, or never use, or never care about the Internet. Have none of you naysayers ever heard of making do? Most people poorer than the average Slashdotter are perfectly readywillingandable to use old shitty hardware running old shitty software on old shitty telephone connections --- because they know that the informational and communicative potential of the Internet is worth dealing with inconveniences. What's more, it's really weird and unsettling to see that the richest, best-connected and most Internet-savvy microslice of humanity, at this stage of the Internet's development, continues to see the Internet as a tool suitable only for (and desirable only to)... [wait for it]... themselves. This is, folks, what they used to think about radio and television ... something the Third and Fourth Worlds have been using and actively, successfully exploiting (even when they have to, again, MAKE DO) for many decades now. Sigh.... they're just as good as we are, guys...
Whoops, submitted too early.
Raymond touts the stability of Linux as proof of the OpenSource concept, but that's a bit misleading. The core of Linux was written by one person - Linus Torvalds. Moreover, there is a small group who shepherds the contributions to the kernel to keep it stable and clean. In other words, there's a priesthood at the top of the bazaar. If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed out the bad ideas. The bazaar has cops. The chaos is contained.
ESR certainly does NOT fail to mention this, as tC&tB readers will remember. As a matter of fact, he makes a very clear point that someone who throws a too-incomplete project into the bazaar will not raise any developer interest to speak of. I am getting the feeling that Lewis has heard of tC&tB as ESR's paean to the OSS movement. But I don't think he's actually read it.
When you get a company the size of Apple or Microsoft, you have thousands of developers who do peer review of code. You have the referees who determine what goes in to a product and what doesn't... but they have one thing that the OpenSource method doesn't: they have markets to answer to. [...]See, when commercial developers create a product, they start by trying to solve a problem that customers need solved. The focus is always on the customer. What do they need? What do they want (which isn't always the same thing :)?[...]
Again: he hasn't read ESR's paper. If he had he would know that the OSS core 'market' is developers, both as developers, but also as users. What's more, plain ol' users are more and more being taken into account, AbiWord being an oft-cited but worthy example (hey, it saved my bacon once).
While Raymond cites Doom as an example of a product which revived itself by going OpenSource, he conveniently forgets that Doom was a very successful commercial product for a long time - both as shareware and commercialware.
No he didn't forget that. He spent like a 'graph and a half explaining that DOOM 'revived' itself as OSS after losing its... [wait for it..] long-lived commercial success!Ironically, when commercial developers release applications which are clearly not 100%, we accuse them of forcing the customer to be beta testers, but in a sense, OpenSource assumes you're not only going to be a tester; you're going to be a programmer and fix the bug!
No. Both commercial and OSS projects, to some extent, use users as beta testers. OSS projects allow those users who are also programmers to contribute to the integrity and quality of the product.
As for comparing bug counts - at least Microsoft has a bug count. If Raymond had bothered to check the number, he'd have found that a rather large proportion of the 63,000 bugs are cosmetic - and none were considered 'showstoppers'. We don't even have a way to determine the real bug count for Linux since there's no central repository for this sort of information.
Perhaps not. There's no central Linux, tough concept for this Macker to wrap his head around. But there are distributions. Debian has a bug log, RedHat has one, I imagine the others do too
Well, that's all I care to find. YMMV. God, I hate stupid people.
...or the mistakes...
Some people, like Richard Stallman, have always tried to keep a bit of this spirit alive - admittedly, it must be like fighting uphill in an avalanche. But it wasn't until Linux that the OpenSource movement really kicked in.
So he doesn't even know that RMS doesn't think of himself as part of the 'Open source' movement...nor, apparently, that 'OpenSource' is a really cheesy-looking buzzword.
Eric Raymond's comments at MacHack were wonderfully telling in several ways. He criticised Mac programmers for being too focussed on user interface and criticised MacOS for intertwining the UI with system functionality, making it harder for new programmers to get on board writing MacOS apps.[....]Ironically, it's the focus on UI, perhaps taken to obsession, which gives MacOS its edge over... well, it has to be said this way - over all other OSes. Windows comes close, but misses simply because Windows developers really do not have that obsession to make the UI perfect. Linux and the various X-Window interfaces rarely even come close. The obsession with sticking to a standard behaviour means that MacOS users experience a consistency of behaviour that no other OS can offer (although again, Windows is getting closer - Linux is not even close).
Well, ESR is obviously right that Mackers can't tell the difference between the UI and the OS functionality because here (and elsewhere) Lewis himself keeps conflating UI and OS. The 'inconsistencies' between (not necessarily within various WMs have nothing at all to do with the underlying OS!
Have you forgotten that Linux does have a (generally) unified kernel; is becoming steadily more user-friendly and 'abstractable' as opposed to 'abstracted', thus retaining flexibility of appeal to hackers and nonhackers alike; and is, along with many of its major apps, free or very nearly free?