Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source

http://www.datamation.com/open-source/9-things-that-are-never-admitted-about-open-source-1.html

by CrankyBear • 14 years ago

105 79 14 years ago

One more time, with feeling: Free Software != Open Source Software.

Open Source is a marketing term, coined by ESR because "Free Software" is scary to businesses, much the same way that record labels coined 'New Wave' to make Punk Rock palatable to the record buying public.

janardanyri• 14 years ago

This comment is a great example of problem #3 from the article: nitpicking at wording instead of engaging with ideas.

loup-vaillant• 14 years ago

You know, there is a reason why "nitpicking" at wording is important: it frames the debate in favour of the one who impose one's wording. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ng/words_as_hidden_inferences/

That said, "Open Source" became polluted too. I have seen comments here say "Open Source vs commercial software". Oops. Anyway, in my language, we don't have this issue: we have two very distinct words to distinguish freedom from gratis, so the issue didn't come up in the first place (at least when we avoid English).

EvanKelly• 14 years ago

While I agree with you and point #3 of the article. Semantic arguments typically interfere with discussing the fundamental issue, but since the article spent much of it's time speaking to the goals and expectations of the FOSS community, I think the distinction between FOSS and open-source is an important one, as the goals of the FOSS communtity are unique within the broad scope of open-source software.

pnathan• 14 years ago

It's both a problem and not. :-) The problem is that people tend to eat sound bytes and marketable ideas without careful regard for the nuances; long-winded technical discussion tends to invoke the "where's the tl;dr" response.

But careful examination of the semantics actually reveals (1) errors, (2) biases, and (3) contradictions. Which - as a blunt stereotype - is where hackers will excel, the technical & careful examination.

Engaging the idea directly: rms is a zealot. His goal is libre software as a grand moral good. He is a ideologue from the 1970s, with all that should connote. This will not make the modern ironic zeitgeist comfortable. I don't know why anyone should expect otherwise.

vampirechicken3• 13 years ago

One does not avoid being called out for being wrong about a thing simply by saying "calling me out for being wrong is one of the problems I'm discussing."

bad_user4• 14 years ago

> Open Source is a marketing term

No, Open Source is a properly defined contract that compatible licenses must comply with.

On Free Software, even though the GPL from a legal standpoint is one of the best crafted licenses around, especially version 3, the definition of Free Software is intentionally confusing because the decisions made on what constitutes Free Software or not is made by a committee driven by RMS's ideas about what freedom is, depending on his mood.

This is not to say that OSI doesn't make mistakes. AGPL was accepted as open-source, even if it shouldn't have been, probably because they wanted to avoid even more political battles.

Also, many companies and individuals that are working with licenses such as GPL or AGPL are doing so for dual-licensing, especially in cases where the software otherwise is useless without a proprietary option. Lets not forget that Gnome was born because of KDE's dependence on Qt, as companies couldn't build proprietary or otherwise GPL-incompatible software without buying Qt licenses (and btw, APL is incompatible with GPLv2).

And personally, I prefer Tolvards' views on what freedom is, rather than Stallman's.

maebert• 14 years ago

This article, while making many valid points, seems to focus on open source software for consumers - FOSS2C if you will. However, the last decade has shown an incredibly rise of open source solutions for developers, and I think most people here can readily name five or more open source tools without which their daily work would be absolutely unthinkable.

And in these areas, points 7, 8 and 9 (regarding lack of innovation, monocultures and lack of goals) are simply not valid, 4 (meritocracy) is not as bad as in projects that have been running for several decades (who would have thought?), and 1 and 3 simply don't matter.

wereHamster• 14 years ago

  > 8. Open Source Is Becoming a Monoculture
  >
  > [insert comparisons how one software is vastly preferred over another,
  > eg. git vs subversion]

If you'd make the comparison five years ago, half of the software would not be present. svn would rule over cvs, abiword would rule over openoffice, a konqueror would rule over mozilla etc.

It may be a monoculture today, but nothing stops people from inventing the next SCM tool, the next word processor or the next web browser. That has happened in the past, that will happen in the future.

hazz• 14 years ago

I agree. I don't necessarily see diversity as a virtue, but more the ability to adapt. When choosing a tool, people will naturally pick the most popular one, provided it suits their needs. Open source allows for everyone to get up and move if a better alternative appears. It may be a 'monoculture' of sorts, but that doesn't have the same consequence as the biological parallel. Open source can adapt.

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

Diversity is a virtue in that (much like in natural systems) it makes the community as a whole less vulnerable to any particular problem. Consider, specifically, software viruses/worms for instance - heard immunity logic should fit just as well as in the biological case; monoculture leads to more epidemics.

It is not with a cost, though - moving between different options and trying to get some measure of interoperation can be hard, which is why you get some concentrations at any given time.

theevocater• 14 years ago

This was the only one I disagreed with. Everyone said GCC was it forever, yet here we are ushering in an age of llvm/clang/etc. SVN was decidedly dethroned by git (and also mercurial). I think you can cherry-pick places where monocultures have developed but history shows that those are the places that get disrupted.

286c8cb04bda• 14 years ago

Anybody who said GCC was forever doesn't know their history very well.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_fo...

neilk• 14 years ago

Agreed. In software there are costs to using niche tools, so typically everybody tries to use the most popular choices available that fit their problem space. This is true of all software, closed or open.

FOSS is always going to be more 'monocultural' in terms of what software is used. There are fewer costs to switching, and you get enormous benefits in FOSS from using a tool that everyone else uses.

LukeShu• 14 years ago

I subscribe to several blogs by members of both Free Software and Open Source communities, and I hear about all of these things "that are never admitted" quite often.

benrhughes• 14 years ago

I think the author is being a little uncharitable to MS. While he's correct that the whole company isn't going OSS any time soon, there's a decent number of projects that are "fully" OSS (as in they take contribs) and even more where the source is available.

So they're not just making sure OSS works with their products. In a lot of situations (esp in dev tools) they are actively promoting and releasing OSS.

tommorris• 14 years ago

I don't see how any of these things are "never admitted".

I'm not quite sure what the first point is even trying to say beyond "some people don't like Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu is going down the route of profit for Canonical" (both of which aren't somehow magically incompatible with the goals of free software or are somehow being suppressed by the free software movement).

The rest are quite freely admitted and openly discussed by free software and open source people, even if some people don't necessarily agree.

On the sexism front, that's widely discussed (and, well, dismissed too, sadly).

Microsoft? Sure, the loud-and-proud anti-Mono crowd make their feelings heard. But I think most people pretty much know that Microsoft are changing their tune on open source, especially around developer facing stuff (F#, IronRuby, numerous other things like that have been open sourced; .NET developer conferences have had talks from people talking about things they like and use in competing free software projects like Postgres).

bad_user4• 14 years ago

As long as Balmer is still there, as long as they continue to threaten other projects with patents, I couldn't care less about Microsoft or their products, no matter what bones they throw out for free.

I'm not anti-Mono btw. I also like F# and .NET and I even think that Microsoft isn't even the worst company around. I also have a Windows license that I use back home. But I simply don't care.

Also, IronRuby is abandonware.

darklajid• 14 years ago

Well, but if you happen to work in a Microsoft/Windows environment it helps a lot to see these open projects.

Ignoring IronRuby: ASP.Net for example is a Big Thing (tm) that exists in a git repository (and for all I know it's developed in the open now, not in the typical 'code drop' style like Android etc.).

Do I love Microsoft? Certainly not. But I do think they changed for the better, measuring with a certain set of values and biases here..

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

Once again, $ money is the factor here:

FOSS for consumers = Stalled.

FOSS for businesses = Strong & Growing.

And why? Because of the faulty anti-money philosophy that so many open source developers have. They're afraid of making money, afraid of being rich, afraid of selling out, subconsciously loath rich people, are blindly following ideology over results, and think that they can create software in their free time while working a full time job with a baby on the way. SourceForget.net is littered with dead open source projects that died for these exact reasons. We've all seen awesome abandoned software that we were willing to pay for but the developer never charged for and left to rot when he settled down and had a kid.

Meanwhile their FOSS2Business counterparts have found ways to have a constant stream of income, have profitable parent companies, pay developers, progress the software, pay for usability studies, and provide professional consultation. They're growing their kingdom using money. While FOSS2Consumers is still mumbling "don't be like Microsoft" to themselves. It's aggravating to watch.

Stop being afraid of money. It doesn't make you a sell out. It's just hurting the whole community. That's why each year Ubuntu changes it's whole UI and color scheme and at the end of the year no one cares. It's not the UI. It's not Ubuntu. It's the end software that the average user sees and uses, it's the terminal, it's finding "sudo apt get" advice in the forums, and other user-unfriendly bullshit that's dragging down open source software.

Businesses want "free", consumers want "easy".

Locke16893• 14 years ago

Time for the real hard truths.

Almost all major open source success are the product of subsidized development, either by a commercial arm (Linux via Red Hat et al., gcc by Google et al., Java by Sun et al., etc.) or a research arm (OCaml by Inria, Haskell by MSR, etc.).

Open source by hobbyists doesn't work (at scale).

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

Could crowdfunding change that? https://bountyoss.com/

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

wait a sec, a bunch of researchers doing what they want is subsidized development? maybe in the states.

in europe a bunch of researchers doing what they want is just that. a bunch of researchers doing what they want.

and then comes a us company making money off of it.

"sorry dude, you're not a hobbyist, you don't count as free, because you have a day job, and get paid to do what you want." /facepalm

not to mention that most got developed FIRST, and then got funded after showing off their value proposition

berlinbrown3• 14 years ago

Corporations should do a better job of adopting open projects (see Google) and Open source projects should do a better job of recruiting corporations to get involved.

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

From my understanding nobody seriously involved in FOSS expects hobbyists to scale apart from on small or niche projects.

The term "open source" rather than "free software" was coined at least partly in order to make it easier for business to understand and adopt the software and incentivise them to throw paid manpower at it.

It seems to have broadly worked too, "we should adopt this solution because it is open source" is something that MBA types actually say now.

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

Depends on your view really. Consumer targeted FOSS has the disadvantage of being harder to monetise directly, you could make (for example) a for-pay Linux distribution but you will probably just get killed by the free forks. I think Corel Linux , Lindows etc of the past made this mistake.

You could monetise by adding "value add" proprietary software to free software, but then you will get to a point where you aren't really any more "open source" than OS X.

FOSS where the developer themselves is probably not the end user does tend to suck pretty bad. On the other hand stuff people have built because they were feeling a "pain point" tends to be amazing, if a little quirky.

Not every bit of software has to have mass market appeal in order to be good. An example might be something like XMonad which is something that a company like Apple or MS would be very unlikely to fund development of and part of the reason that people love it is probably that it doesn't need a business model to survive.

btilly2• 14 years ago

This article confuses "open source" and "the Linux desktop".

I consider myself an open source person. I spent a good chunk of my day today using open source tools, writing an article that I will give away for free.

And yet, I am typing this on a Mac. I don't care about gnome or KDE. Yes, I used several Linux machines today. But I have not seriously used a Linux desktop in the last 2 years, nor do I care what is going on there. (The last window manager that I liked was fvwm, but many years ago a Debian upgrade added integration with Gnome I did not want or need, and it stopped working in the way I wanted. I have not bothered caring about a window manager since.)

I am far from alone in my views. (Except for liking fvwm. Most people consider that plain weird.)

nwzpaperman• 14 years ago

where do you write?

btilly2• 14 years ago

Various places. Occasionally to http://bentilly.blogspot.com/. But in this case it is an article on A/B testing, which is a response to http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html. It will be part of a series.

The one I'm polishing now is a rigorous technique that lets you look at results as often as you like, but lets you run the test forever. If there is any bias at all, eventually you'll get an answer, and have high confidence that it is right.

The next in the series addresses the question, "I have a limited sample size I can realistically obtain for an A/B test, how should I run my test, and what kinds of guarantees will I get?" (With, of course, multiple looks allowed.)

Hopefully this will be coming to a website near you in the next day or so. :-)

jmspring• 14 years ago

Agreed, though I went with XFCE (over fvwm) until it got a bit bloated. My desktop requirement (laptop, in this case) is - unix based and just works.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I thought it was fun that this showed up in Datamation. That is a brand that has been through a lot, DASD anyone?

Seems to be mostly to draw rageviews. For each of their 'forbidden' topics I've seen a flame war or two in other venues. Perhaps they are trying to kindle those sparks.

steevdave• 14 years ago

Forgive me for not knowing but, what is DASD?

Spooky23• 14 years ago

"Direct Access Storage Device"... The fancy mainframe term for a hard disk.

Datamation was an ancient industry rag the went online in the 90's.

zobzu• 14 years ago

some - many - albeit not all - of the points are actually spot on.

I'm sure many will not want to hear or read them. There are alot of misconceptions, specially from the programmers & admins & other interested folks who started to use and figure out open source a few years ago.

I still see people using, indeed, Ubuntu, claiming its good for "Open Source" and "Freedom", and, what not. That's the distro the community has little control of (while we have full control of, say, Debian), and which ships non-free stuff and even tries it best to make _you_ buy non-free stuff (that means proprietary, mind you), and capture your data.

Also it's important to note that the article is focused on the "GNU spirit of open source", not the "BSD spirit of open source". Ie with enforced freedom.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

>the community has little control of

in what way?

> even tries it best to make _you_ buy non-free stuff

what?

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Wait, so #1 is basically "A lot of people don't like Unity, so I don't consider Ubuntu to be pushing open source forward anymore"? And why, exactly, is Canonical being criticized here for building a new (open source and GPL) shell rather than contributing to GNOME?

MBCook• 14 years ago

These points often contradict eachother. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Ubuntu is no longer pushing things forward because people don't like their new GUI. That means...

#4 is wrong because the meritocracy has decided that Unity isn't good enough and it's failing

#7 is wrong because Ubuntu is trying to innovate on the desktop with Unity

and #8 is wrong because the fact that Unity exists and Ubuntu isn't shipping GNOME.

Really, #8 is very weak. User polls may favor Debian based distributions, but I'd expect that if you went by install base RPM is winning thanks to all the RHEL servers out there. Git is more popular than SVN because it's demonstrably better for many use cases, but we also have Hg. LibreOffice is the only real office suite out there, Google Docs is not quite the same thing.

#8 then goes to point out that we do have KDE vs. GNOME, which as the face of the desktop is a BIG difference. It also points out the hot competition between Chromium and Firefox, web browsers being one of the most used apps on any computer.

Listing 5 different Debian based distros and deciding that's a monoculture seems odd on it's face.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Also regarding #8:

>Overall, the numbers fall short of a monopoly

To say that when "the numbers" in question are close to 50% is an understatement to say the least.

swdunlop2• 14 years ago

Agree entirely. I charged straight for the comments to rant about the stupidity of #8 (the monoculture argument) in the face of how Ubuntu and GNOME (prior monocultures by their criteria) are now on the wane in the face of more projects that are more responsive to their users.

belorn3• 14 years ago

1#, Ubuntu is indeed no longer the public face to open source, but then is anyone actually surprised? At best, Ubuntu can be said to have been an symptom of the success Debian was and still is in collecting and maintaining open source and free software projects. Where ubuntu left, mint picked up, and I don't see an end in polished distributions ontop of Debian.

#2, The dangers of web-services in regard to privacy and property is only starting to reach the general population. In this regard, EFF and CCC has had a larger role to play than AGPL and FLOSS.

#3, While Stallman is the leading figure in free software, people like Eben Moglen has much better speaches and do more to recruit new members to the community. I think today, Stallman is more often addressing the members inside the community in what areas are currently in need of most work, and what new threats exist for the community.

#4, A true Meritocracy does not exist anywhere. People follow leaders, even those that do not deserve it. The goal might be to become a Meritocracy (I wouldn't know), but the truth is that open and free software communities are just made out of human beings.

#5, When addressing/claiming a serious issue like Systemic Sexism, two things need to be done. First, one need to show the problem exist. We do have nice statistic on it and the author did show some poor but uncontested data (so he get a pass there). Second one need to show why the gender diversity is so large. The author do not do this. Actually, no articles about sexism in the free and open source communities addresses the question of why (or at least no one has done so with data to back it up!). This is in my view the primary single reason why the discussion about sexism in free software has gone nowhere for the last 10 years. Its not about hushing or denying the existence of the issue, but rather the lack of data that is keeping us from fixing it. The question of why is a central part of any technologist or academic thinking, and without it we would be unable to fix any computer, create any program, or solve any problem whatsoever. As a answer to the question on how do we show why there is a gender difference in open source and free software, I would start by looking at how this community differ from other similar sized communities with similar age groups. One particular group that comes to mind is gamer communities, sporting communities, and other communities that people freely perform as part of an hobby. One could also look at subgroups, such as IRC groups vs stackoverflow. If they have more, less or equal gender equality, one should ask the question why and try to build some testable theories. After that is done, and only after that is done, can one start to address the issue truly and in an effective way for the open source and free software community.

#6, Microsoft is never going to be trusted as a friend to free software. Too much bad blood, and honestly, who would want to be friend with someone who previously have gone out of their way kill you. Microsoft is also not putting down the symbolic knife, widely swinging secure boot around for everyone to see thus creating more untrust. At best, one can say that there exist bigger threats than Microsoft and thus focus should be redirected.

#7, the Desktop interface is the most visible aspect to desktop users. like with any area of design, it has had good times and bad times. It has a lot of discontentment, and is likely to see many people trying to do massive changes in a hope to get it in sync with what they perceive as current good design. Until design stop to change, the changes will likely continue without loosing any speed. I don't know if anyone tries to deny this or claim it is something not to be admitted.

#8, again I want to point towards human nature and that almost all cultures is monocultures. the top 1% of the musical bands are going to have 99% of the listeners. However, when people say that FOSS encourages diversity, the opposit camp is the devices which can't be changed, and are of questionable legality to modify (jailbreak). Those devices has one system, one store, one video player, one music player, and one company behind it. Compare to those places, FOSS indeed encourages diversity even if the majority of users are using the same software.

#9, open source and free software has indeed still a long way to go if they want to reach each communities goal that they had set aside for themselves. That said, reverse engineer is often a thankless job and without a political remodeling of the landscape (such as steam box might do but who knows), new devices is an never ending stream of new work. To make matter worse, old devices get old way to quick. Those people I know that work with this tend to burn out fast, and reach an unhealthy attitude to new people. Sadly this tend to happen way before those people would transfer knowledge and responsibility to a new group of people. So far, I have not seen any solution to this problem and can thus just hope that a major landscape change happens from outside the community.

adamors• 14 years ago

> #5 ...

The article did link this http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Br...

belorn3• 14 years ago

Showing that a problem exist has been done yes. The linked article does it, and has several anecdotal to show that yes, there is a problem. Yet, it doesn't even try to ask the question of why.

Is it the cause of low gender diversity in conferences because people do not respect female speakers? If so, have two talks, with two similar experienced speaker of each gender, but only have one written speech with slides. Afterward, confirm which speaker was liked/disliked and check if there was a statistical difference in how men and women perceived the talk. Then run the test a few times to confirm the data. If you are a conference orginizer that want to solve this problem, you should consider trying to do this. At least you should attempt reaching out to the sociology community if one consider that this work is not for technologists.

As for derogatory comments made by listeners. Data would be the first step to find out causes. Is there a equal number of complains (ie, proportional to the number of speakers of each subgroup) of racist, sexist, nationalistic, homophobic, and juvenile/elitist comments? If the answer is yes, than any solution to the problem would either have to apply to each type of derogatory comment type, or it would had to address the issue of commenters using derogatory terms in conferences thus fixing the problem at the root.

Thus First you identify and confirm a problem. Second you ask the question why. Third you create a theory that include a solution to the problem. Forth and last, you test that theory and preferable do it in a practical way. This is the process used by technologies and academics alike, and is the way to gain acceptance when bringing up problems to the community.

(as a side note) I would very much like to see statistics that prove/disprove the idea that women write better talk proposals than men, including the question why if the answer is yes.

Flimm• 14 years ago

"Where ubuntu left, mint picked up": if by this you mean in popularity, I do not see any evidence of this.

belorn3• 14 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint#Reception

One could of course argue that distrowatch data is not good enough, but until there is data that contradict distrowatch, I would use the data as a strong indication of where things are going.

Yver• 14 years ago

Weak article. Inflammatory content easily debunked. I don't recommend reading.

adjin• 14 years ago

they lost me at next page

GraemeLion4• 14 years ago

The one that strikes me as the most obvious is the RMS one. Richard Stallman goes out of his way to scream at people because "software must be free", and he points to his laptop , which has 100% free software on it. That's admirable.. but he doesn't mention that his computer is basically built by the chinese government, using near slave labor, that makes FoxConn look like Disney World.

It's just misguided and a one trick pony. He argues from a moral position, but completely tunnel visions that morality to software only.

r0s• 14 years ago

As he always has, nothing is new or remarkable here. RMS is no more or less controversial today than ever before.

GraemeLion4• 14 years ago

Its actually kinda gotten nicer. IN the past, one RMS zealot would litter your project's mailing lists with inane ramblings if you even DARED approach businesses. Then those kids got out of college and had to figure out how to solve problems, and their entire toolsets were based on solving problems with free software.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

That's a strawman argument. By arguing like that you can dismiss anyone by just saying things like "but he drives a car that pollutes the atmosphere so his unrelated argument is invalid" or "but he goes to a hairdresser that pays under the limit of minimum wage so his unrelated argument is invalid".

GraemeLion4• 14 years ago

But it's not . I agree that his computer has 100% free software, and that's a good thing. But he paid for that 100% free software by sacrificing good care of workers. And when he paints his laptop and computing as "more ethical" than others, he's the one saying he's morally superior to others. Read and listen to his speeches. He outright says he is a better person because he uses software that's 100% free.

But it's not just software that goes into a computer. And by ignoring the other ramifications in question, he's ignored a large part of morality. It'd be like me saying I'm an overall better person because my house has zero carbon footprint, while paying illegal aliens $1 a day to build it.

All that aside, we can handle that. This has been RMS's thing for decades. It's his other annoying issues that make him a liability to us now that we have bigger eyes watching linux.

quasque• 14 years ago

Regarding his fifth point, that rings very true and not just in open source, but many male-dominated fields. It's almost cliché to see a bunch of guys complaining to each other about the lack of female participants in one breath, and cracking sexist jokes to each other in the next. If I were a lady, I'd find that sort of environment unworthy of my attention too.

berlinbrown3• 14 years ago

My comment:

Nobody will claim that Apple creates ugly, hard to use hardware and software. Design, art and beauty of hardware and software is a primary focus at Apple. They are meticulous about the look and feel of their products.

I have been through 5 or 6 different Ubuntu's. Several versions of RedHat. Both Gnome and KDE. I used Gentoo and Mandrake Linux back in the day. And just recently used Linux Mint.

I actually like the look and feel of Ubuntu12. And that is the only one that I actually like the user interface, the speed and usability of the desktop. Pretty much every other version of the Linux OSes that I used. The fonts were too big or the file manager was unresponsive. The software looked bad or was incomplete. Eventually, I just gave in and went back to Windows or Mac.

They will never admit it, but open source is not concerned with design or usability.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

I will do the deed.

I find the iphone ugly compared to a more rounded, plastic smartphone. I find the ipad's metal back uncomfortable to hold. I also find the size of the ipad too big for reading. The Apple power cables are very edgey(?) and I dislike that but that might be my common sense seeing the "planned breaking points". Ok, software next: I find the detachment of the menu bar from windows irritating. And on mobile devices I find the placement of the back button awkward to use (most distance from my hand as possible). Apple is considered great because of highly successful marketing.

sixbrx• 14 years ago

All fine until the last sentence which doesn't follow because all of the previous points were very minor (though I agree with some).

derleth3• 14 years ago

> Nobody will claim that Apple creates ugly, hard to use hardware and software.

I will. The current iMac keyboard is a bad joke and the mouse is just plain strange. Why would I need a touchpad on a mouse?

The Mac GUI is atrocious. Forcing the focused window to be on top is asinine. Making it impossible to change this is idiotic, and symptomatic of a deeper evil:

There is only One Steve Jobs Way. Unless you do it their way, well, "You're holding it wrong." Don't argue, just adapt your workflow to their technology and never expect the designers to be humble enough to admit that they might, in your case, be wrong about something.

So, no, the Macintosh is not my favorite computer system.

berlinbrown3• 14 years ago

Compared to the Linux (open) world? There was no real interface before 2000. Even with the core Linux developers like Linus, he absolutely did not care about the user space. Linux was sort of this competitor to MS Windows and the main creator of Linux didn't actually care to building user interfaces. Sure Linus was a kernel hacker and was trying to building the compliant OS system. I bet Steve Jobs didn't just look on the Apple OS kernel. He focused on the design of the hardware and the design of all the software. It is myopic to completely ignore the desktop arena. And a lot of open source developers were like that.

sethrin• 14 years ago

How many apps ship with OS X? 50, 500, or 5000?

Let's just say they're dealing with a more restricted problem space, where they have a great deal more latitude to enforce technology use. That's kinda the point of their vertical monopoly, don'cha think?

So you see, not only is open source kinda the opposite of a vertical monopoly, most open source budgets orders of magnitude smaller than those of Apple or Microsoft. But aside from those little problems, you also have to optimize in several opposing directions at once! Considering only the desktop, you gotta balance the needs of those who find more configuration options more useful with those who think such things are ugly and confusing. Both are right! In the wider range of open source (which both you and the author ignore), there are lots of people who don't want any GUI integration. There are many millions more headless linux installations than desktops.

Clearly, there are some problems to overcome. It's possible that they're really unresolvable, that you can't simultaneously optimize for all of those goals. However, it is possible that you can help bring about a better world, even if you're not an artist or programmer. The next time you say to yourself, "Man, I wish XXX desktop looked better,"

* Obtain an envelope and postage. * Write out your complaint on a note, preferably a high-denomination bank note. * Mail it to the makers of the aforementioned desktop environment.

Your comments will receive the most prompt attention. This could also be viewed as buying a right to complain -- if it's not your time or money involved in making it, maybe you shouldn't complain that your use-case isn't being optimized for? (What is wrong with deciding to optimize for non-GUI uses, for that matter?)

On a more personal level, I'm happy that you like Mac and/or Windows! It's nice to like things, isn't it? Thanks for sharing.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> open source is not concerned with design or usability.

Not if you define those words the way Apple has. But that's a perfectly obvious statement: Apple's way is antithetical to the whole idea of Open Source, at least to the extent of Apple being obsessed with forcing a specific workflow on everyone who uses their products.

kylebgorman• 14 years ago

"Meritocracy" is a paradox: if people are given higher status by merit, they can use that merit to give their less valuable ideas (or peers, or children, or colleagues, or friends) a leg up. [this is not a new idea]

swdunlop2• 14 years ago

Meritocracy is a term that is wheeled out by a critic when he doesn't think those involved have any merit.

jiggy20114• 14 years ago

Article could be aptly titled "Things people on HN say all the time about various stuff".

cabalamat• 14 years ago

The title is patently untrue since most of these (i.e. 2, 3, 5, 6 7, 9) are widely talked about and "admitted".

bad_user4• 14 years ago

On Ubuntu, it's actually ironic for the author to say that everybody started raising their eyebrows when Ubuntu shipped with its own interface, considering that in open-source everybody does whatever the fuck they want in general and as results you have at least Xfce, KDE and Gnome. Wasn't that the whole freaking point of open-source in the first place? And who's raising eye-brows exactly?

People also raised eyebrows when Android shipped. Android is a Linux operating system too, with a completely different interface. Android doesn't even have XWindows on it. And in the meantime, Android is the number one operating system for smartphones, while all other attempts at an open-source operating systems for mobiles have failed.

I also like Unity. It needs improvements, sure. But considering that there was no other significant progress in the last 7 years at least, only regressions like KDE 4, I actually like that Canonical has the cojones to push interface changes.

If anything, I don't think Canonical is bold enough, but unfortunately they don't have the resources for it.

Btw, Ubuntu 12.10 has the only graphical installer that's (1) intuitive and (2) offers to do full-disk encryption for you. You could do the same with Debian since years ago, but it wasn't for human beings.

vacri• 14 years ago

Sexism is a problem in tech, not a problem that's particular to open source.

SirDinosaur• 14 years ago

linux desktop is dead? linux desktop is awesome! http://awesome.naquadah.org

tiedemann• 14 years ago

99% of "OSS"-devs I know use Apple products, probably the least FOSS-compatible company I can think of.

Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source

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