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Topic: What's Wrong with Open-Source Software? (Read 980 times) |
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Walter Watts
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What's Wrong with Open-Source Software?
« on: 2007-10-17 15:52:17 » |
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PC Magazine
10.15.07
What's Wrong with Open-Source Software?
by John C. Dvorak
Though the open-source movement isn't going to die anytime soon, it's looking a little ragged at the edges. And with the appearance of the onerous GPL v3 and the slow deterioration of the popular Firefox browser, I now wonder if open source may have been a fad, or perhaps just a more elaborate iteration of the shareware phenomenon in the 1980s.
I mention this only because over the weekend, Uncle Dave posted a rant on my blog by longtime network admin Marc Perkel. He went off on MySQL, Linux, and much of the open-source philosophy. You can read it here ( http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=14098 ). I wasn't surprised that the number of comments immediately rose to over 100. But I was a little surprised at the sheer number of comments that featured that same peculiar whining you'd hear a decade or more ago, when you said something critical about the Amiga.
This is totally different from what you get from the Macintosh fan base when they are complaining. The Mac fanboys, as they are affectionately called, tend to love the Mac because it demands little of them, and they like it that way, and they can't understand why everyone doesn't see the light. It's kind of like a religion, or a lifestyle.
The open-source mavens circling the Linux drain actually know something about computers and coding, and they're defending the priesthood, not a lifestyle. If there's a lifestyle here, it's about coke, pizza, and porn, nothing more. The only thing they have in common with the Mac aficionados is a hatred of Microsoft, the evil empire trying to enslave them. And anyone critical of open source is part of an evil scheme.
These guys are not your intellectual or thoughtful types, in general. Things are simple and usually boil down to their communal tagline: "You suck!"
I've been thinking about this crowd as I read through the blog comments. And I have to wonder how anything actually gets done in the open-source community. In general, the collective crowd has to be a royal pain to work with. And that's why any large-scale project within that community goes so slowly, unless it's done as a closed shop with a strong leader. And by strong leader I don't mean some overbearing jerk—just someone whom the group respects and follows.
But I wonder if all open-source projects will eventually go the way of all software. Upgrade after upgrade adds more and more complexity, to the point where the software begins to get bogged down under its own weight. How many open-source projects have you seen in which the code gets leaner and meaner rather than fatter and fatter? With all the great coders out there, how many projects include coding features and how many include coding optimization?
Just look at Firefox, one of the poster children for open source. It loads more slowly than ever. It will be on some page within a tab, and that page will be refreshing ads or something in the background, and Firefox just hangs all its cycles there, slowing down the whole computer. Every couple of days the browser is hogging cycles, and I have to go to the Task Manager and kill it. Other people have this problem, too. Although it's still a safer bet than IE, I'm wondering exactly why Firefox has not forked into something better by now. Open source should make that process easy, shouldn't it? I guess not.
I always thought that a strength of open source was the ability of a group to say, "Hey, we can do it better," then change the product into something new, while the older version goes on its merry way. This happened with the CMS software Mambo when it forked into Joomla!. But now I'm noticing only a few examples of this.
Even before I began this inquiry, I realized that open source nowadays encompasses all sorts of software in which the code is available to look at, use, and modify—under various provisos. The provisos are infinite, but one group dominates. That group is the "non-commercial use" group, which thinks that nobody should ever make any money selling or using software. This thinking is spearheaded by the Free Software Foundation whose philosophies are utopian and anti-mercantile. These are the folks behind the hopeless GPLv3.
The basic mind-set of the FSF and its followers is simple: "We're right and everyone else is wrong. End of discussion." This is the same mind-set as the "You suck!" crowd I mentioned above. In fact, it's the same people. They will never make a nickel from their efforts, and they want to be darn sure you don't, either.
So because nobody is making any money, and because it's done for the utopian oneness, there will be no complaining. If you complain, then you suck!
Is it that simple? Yes, it is.
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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Hermit
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Re:What's Wrong with Open-Source Software?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-10-17 17:56:17 » |
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I'm afraid that if it were some other author in some other magazine, I might pay more attention. John Dvorak and PC Magazine have, to my mind, always epitomized the pro-Microsoft, anti open-source movement on economic ideological grounds, even as Microsoft borrowed directly from that movement for much which is good about Windows today.
The article misses the point, well made in Fred Brook's The Mythical Man Month, that the best software is written by small focused teams of highly competent people working with appropriate tools on projects with clearly defined goals. Break any of those factors and your software development and its outcome is unlikely to be optimal. Open source does not change the team or project related factors directly, however and it is a big however, open source carefully chosen can mean that one's tools can be tuned to the tasks at hand, better understanding of the tools (through being able to peer under the hood) can often mean better selection criteria, the absence of costs for many (though by no means all open source - which contra Dvorak is by no means all free) tools means that more experimentation can result in better match between requirements and solutions, and given code reuse, whether as examples or as components, all mean that the base one starts from in an open source environment is often a lot more appropriate and much closer to the end goal than in classical development environments. Which is one set of reasons why really competent people, who greatly enjoy working with other competent developers, tend to like open source.
Note that economics play only a small role in these improvements of the tools part of the development project establishment process, but even in the remainder, where economics do play a significant role, contra Dvorak, study after study post Brooks have shown that the critical aspects of team establishment remain "small, competent and focused;" things which are more likely to happen in an impoverished open source effort, driven by smart people with clear goals and tight budgets, than in behemoths such as Microsoft.
Interesting that the reasons I have articulated come largely from within the IBM environment which has undoubtedly recognized these historic lessons - which might explain why IBM, along with Google (which tends to buy products from small, competent and focused developers), neither of which are charities, and both of which dominate Microsoft in their chosen fields - have adopted, sponsor and strongly advocate open source development.
I think that a decade after first railing at Open Source, John C Dvorak just loathes still being wrong and wishes that his ongoing predictions of disaster in the open source movement would hurry up and be validated. In this, Dvorak clearly fails to recognize that the movement is far from unitary, rather it is made up of millions of individuals, a few of whom are very competent indeed - and so long as competent people pull off the occasional massive coup (like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgrSQL, Firefox to name a few), the open source industry will continue to thrive. Despite John Dvorak's remonstrances.
I have no difficulty with people who shortcut all my explanations by simply stating the conclusion. It isn't just John C Dvorak's supposed industry insight, but also his personality, which really, really sucks.
Kindest Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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