What's Wrong With the FOSS Community? 348
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, one of the major Free Software Magazine authors, has completed his second article on whats wrong with the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community, and what we face in this world. He touches on ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar essay briefly, and warns against cherry-picking style software development."
I read the article (Score:5, Interesting)
I challenge thee to summariser it.
This is what (/usr/bin/ots) a text summariser said (interesting to note it tents to focus on cathedral-style, bazaar-style, and gnome bashing)
A few years back, Eric S. Entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he wrote about how the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community does what it wants when it wants to. In Cathedral-style projects, your not-so-friendly neighborhood PHB (fueled by the lies from various ugly hunch-backed minions), although wrong 120% of the time, says what goes in a project. Backed by the Free Software Foundation and the FOSS community as a whole, the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat.
The GNOME project lacked true vision for those years, and feature creep and other long term development problems rushed in to fill that hole. Problem is, many projects are just like GNOME. Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same. someone with vision (corrupt or not) would control a project, driving development behind it, and have the project reach goals in specific time frames.
Re:Common sense says (Score:5, Interesting)
The piece seems to be claiming that good > mediocre > no > bad leader.
That's somewhat true, certain kinds of software and features just won't get done without a leader. That nifty little project doesn't need a leader, it'll get done because personal motivation is enough to get it done and it's small enough that a single person can handle the entire workload. Boring stuff won't get done no matter how grand the end result unless there is a leader to make sure it gets done, no one digs ditches for fun - even if the end result will be the panama canal.
I can pay the coder to do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
A leader without the ability to fire someone or give them a pay raise isn't going to be able to provide much incentive.
But with FOSS, I (the end user) can email the coder and offer to pay him/her to finish a feature I'd like or do some other boring job. And that is one of the great things about FOSS. Once I pay for it, everyone benefits from it (including me).
Try doing that with closed source products. You can't even find out the names of the coders working on it, much less contract them directly.
Re:In my opinion (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, try finding the Linux/BSD abuse you get asking similar questions for a decent commercial OS like OS X.
Re:In my opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
This of course begs the question, how can you expect n00b to be careful about how a question is asked? after all he is merely a n00b.
FOSS reminds me of Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
It does somethings better, others worse. It will never admit what it does worse or will even defend it as a strength.
It's arrogant and sanctimonious even though it often has its heart in the right place. Other times it's naive in thinking that because it believes *its* way is right, it *must* be so.
It mocks the U.S. as backwards, even displaying a near pathological hatred for it, yet it secretly wishes it could hold the same lofty perch.
Now replace "It's/It" with "FOSS" and "U.S." with "Microsoft".
Frankly, what turns me off about the FOSS community in general is it reminds me of the science acolytes in the recent South Park episode when Cartman traveled to the future. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If Linux were king it would be Microsoft redux.
Feel free to mod me down, I have plenty of karma to burn.
Re:In my opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:People.. the same as any community (Score:1, Interesting)
The great thing is that you can set your own fucking expectations, or choose to compare yourself to your fellow men. Either is fine, just don't go spewing bullshit.
(This rant is not specifically aimed at you.)
Ah.. That felt good.
Re:In my opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
> from commercial closed source software.
Really? Because I use them on the same servers in the same data centers for the same purposes.
> The success of closed source / commercial software could
> simply be measured by the amount of money it makes for the
> creator.
No it can't. That's not success of the project, it's success of the product. It's a whole different question. Microsoft Bob was a successful project, because it did what it set out to do. It was a wholly unsuccessful product, because nobody wanted it.
> FOSS success is less trivial to measure.
Not really. Does the project do what it set out to do? Yes or no. Very simple.
> You might as well say that the success of
> FOSS itself could be measured by the number
> of abandoned projects / period of time.
All projects are abandoned. Failed projects are abandoned before they work reliably. As long as there is either a development team actively working on the project, or an active user community available to effectively support it, the project is not yet a failure. It only fails if the developers AND the community abandon it AND leave it in an effectively unusable state.
> Does that mean that thos FOSS projects where
> a failure? Obviously not
Yes, obviously not. So what's the problem?
> I don't need any "Homer Simpson" statistics to
> know that open source is getting more popular
But that doesn't make it any more effective. The open source community is getting larger, but it is not becoming more responsive to support requests - quite the opposite. The use of successful open source projects is growing, but that is not making the projects successful any faster, nor is it making them successful any more often. Running fifty servers instead of five on a Linux distribution does not make the Linux kernel any more than the one successful project it was when you were testing it on your desktop.
More people using open source does not mean open source is getting better.
As opposed to what hard data, precisely? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some things to quantitatively evaluate are:
Failures per release, time to release, bugs discovered, function points derived, cost-benefit, TCO, testability, verifiability, number of severity one bugs, number of severity one bugs never fixed, number of abandoned projects, time to next version, rate of customer abandonment.
There are probably 50 more I can't think of right now but the only sure way is to apply engineering and project management discipline to the criteria and comparison of those criteria. Then one must capture a candidate group of commercial and FOSS projects and track them over a multiyear period.
In other words we've been looking at the development experience instead of the results experience. How you build something is less important than what it does. Anyone who's ever seen the movie 'Apollo 13' understands this. More to the point though, development modalities reflect more the cultural aspects that the development team has almost no control over. Even in FOSS communities, they will self organize and operate according to features that have little to do with development.
We really don't know or care that much what the differences between good and mediocre closed source projects are. They are unverifiable in either case. So one cannot focus on the method. It's a black box. Instead we need to focus on the outputs and metrics that we can see.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)