The Poison in the FOSS

There’s poison in the community — you know — you’ve long suspected it. Perhaps you agree, there’s:

1. An obsession with licenses
2. Extreme allegiances to technologies and development houses
3. A lack of interest in practicality, and a lack of dedication to quality

An obsession with licenses

It hurts me when I see huge mailing list threads talking about removing code, or hampering it in someway because of this open source license conflicting with that open source license.

Licenses are too complicated. Shouldn’t it be about the source code? And not about “software freedom”?

Here’s my code, let’s both get something out of it. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you release some closed source app with it. I don’t care if you make money out of it. I’d be thrilled if you can make a living and something I wrote helped. I don’t care if you mock it on some blog somewhere.

Decide if you are making code for fun, for profit or in order to get some perverse pleasure out of the nuances of the GPL.

Extreme allegiance

These allegiances can be felt everywhere in the community. If KDE and Gnome were neighbouring states, there would have been war raging for decades now. But it goes deeper. There are so many competing technology stacks in the world of Linux, and you seem expected to choose one, and defend it with your life. Blog posts cannot pass by unnoticed without some user or developer picking apart the post, constructing fallacy after fallacy, quibbling the details. All to protect their territory.

Cliques form. Everyone is always patting each other on the back. “It’s alright!” they say, “It’s not true that it sucks! That guy is just mean!” Like a bunch of yes men around a medieval king. You can’t honestly appraise your product if you can’t see what’s wrong with it.

It influences interoperability. Who wants to work better with those guys? They’re scum. In fact I think the only motivator for things like freedeskop.org in recent years has been the desire to present Linux better to the Grandma’s of this world.

Lack of quality

80% of FOSS projects are over-engineered. Or have perfect code at the expense of useful features.

80% of GUI apps are designed by the programmer, and the programmer doesn’t have a clue about GUI design. But s/he ignores the advise of those who are good at that sort of thing. Or worse listens to the advise of people who are self-proclaimed usability experts, but actually they are just users with opinions.

80% of open source projects lack the dedication to finish up on the last 20%. The last 20% as we all know represents 80% of the quality and robustness of the app. The last 20% is not fun. But I can’t seriously in good faith recommend much Open Source software to my Grandma.

The future

Over the last decade a new open source community has developed. It’s mostly open (although never open enough for zealots), the people who work in it are fun and driven. They make money. It’s the web. And it is working better because:

Money, is a great motivator to finish that last 20%.

Web open source people couldn’t care less about licenses.

They give every new technology a spin, they make their own. They make systems that interoperate with each other. Where’s the bloody desktop agnostic virtual file system driver? Now compare the lack of interest in making that to the million ways to communicate data on the web. Allegiances to technologies that enable their work are thin, but communities are still vibrant and exciting.

I think it’s significant that the desktop open source projects with brands that have or nearly have public-awareness don’t have the above problems. Firefox. The Linux kernel. VLC. I’m sure there are more.

A footnote disclaimer

I’ve been guilty of all of the above I do not hate you or your work I do not have an anti-FOSS agenda and in many ways having written all of the above I now wonder if I’m actually right about any of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 13:30 and is filed under Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.