Trouble With Open Source? 523
George Russell writes "Stephen J Marshall, writing in the BCS online magazine, provides a cogent argument detailing the ills of Open Source Software for the software industry - namely, the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership of OSS developed under the current Intellectual Property laws. Do these issues concern you?"
My biggest issue with open source software (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
So instead, lets discuss why they published such a piece. What was their motivation here?
I've read the BCS magazine on many occasions, and often found it to be factually incorrect from over-simplification. This is a magazine that is aimed middle managers.
This particular article is a Member view. Is this just someones blog piece, or a regular column writer? Does this piece matter at all?
Straw man argument (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll grant that the point about conceptual integrity may have merit. Distributed development makes conceptual integrity very hard to maintain. But how do I know that? Through commercial experience. It only applies to OSS because almost all OSS projects are distributed.
Frankly, the ideas attributed in this article to OSS people are so alien and fantastic that I doubt the author has even read any of the basic writings about open source or studied a single open source project.
Of course they concern me (Score:5, Interesting)
I consider myself to be a non-partisan technologist, meaning I'll use whatever platform or software that best fits the needs of the company, but what a lot of FOSS proponents seem incapable of grasping is that there's more to software and OS's than "power" and "technical elegance." There's user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support to be considered in any enterprise implementation. Saying that Bob's XYZ Library of Useful Widgets can do it all just as well as Bill & Steve's Really Expensive Library of Useful Widgets is only part of this equation. Just writing the damned software and slapping it in an RPM does not finish the project!
I can't begin to tell you my frustration at the current state of a lot of FOSS projects. I see some really good ideas, some fantastic concepts, some really bright people...but by and large their efforts are uncoordinated, poorly documented, and lacking in professionalism. It's hard enough getting stodgy company boards to accept that there's something out there besides Windows. It doesn't help when the application you're trying to sell them on is maintained by some 18-year-old geek with a ponytail and Cheetos dust all over his keyboard. I don't care if he is a genius, his product is generally unmarketable to a board because you can't convince The Powers That Be that his software is a serious contender.
Every year when I put our budget together, I cringe at the amount of dough we send to Redmond. But until FOSS gets its act together and treats the software business like a business instead of a hobby, we have little choice. Home users can get away with using half-baked stuff, but enterprises are far pickier.
Note that there are some shining stars of Open Source (not free, usually) that are producing quality products that beat the pants off some of the closed-source boys, and there are some FOSS projects that stand above all the rest. However, taken as a whole, so much of the FOSS we review looks more like the results of a college programming project and not like a serious business application. Perhaps it looks that way because the still-wet-behind-the-ears developers are still thinking about developing it in that way. More's the pity.
depends (Score:3, Interesting)
And there are plenty of companies, big and small, that willfully release their software as free/open source, and plenty of individuals who are consultants, contractors, or even hobbyists who are contributing, which the author just glosses over.
In the real world, most of my projects need robust components, open source provides plenty. Since they're granular (and have always historically been so) you can usually assemble something 'innovative' pretty easily.
On the desktop it is another matter. I do use a Gnome desktop, and it does have its advantages, but there are also big cracks.
In fact, the two aspects should really be treated separately since there is a vast difference between using free/open source software for servers and software development (great), and trying to use it on the desktop (inconsistent, at best).
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
(I'm a KDE developer. And yes we have usability groups.)
Hmm, professionalism, you say? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientists (you know, traditional chem/physics/biology professors or reseaerchers) PUBLISH their data so others (their peers) can look at it, verify it, correct it, or just plain refute it.
For a scientist to skip this step means their research is worthless.
For a scientist to hide or mangle the data means they WILL be ostracised on any other article they write/have written.
BUT!!! For a computer "scientist" (software guy), not releasing the "research" is perfectably acceptable. It's for "the profit of the bla bla bla". There's always a reason to not do this.
Take for example, nVidia.. nVidia was going to release source for their graphics drivers. They said no, when they saw that SGI had a "stake" in it. nVidia said something to the effect "SGI will sue us if we release it". SGI came back and said that there's nothing we can sue you over. Yet to this day, anybody with an nVidia card is chained to nVidia driver updates.
If anything, Open source IS becoming more like that scientist that goes through rigorous peer review to publish VALUABLE pieces of data.
(BTW, I wonder which corporation paid him to write this crap up?)
Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, to extend that a bit further: if there were a mechanism by which you, as a programmer, could work at your code full-time, people would then naturally assume "conceptual integrity", "professionalism" and you'd have far more time (and fewer restrictions) to achieve proper "innovation".
So really, this comes down to earning money from lines written, which requires something akin to a royalty set-up, which is immensely do-able, but I'm sure will never be implemented because there's a bizarre dislike of all things monetary built into the mind of the average GPL proponent. Which is not to say ALL of them, but a great many.
So yes. Keep on supporting the code. It's your best bet.
Re:Of course they concern me (Score:3, Interesting)
much of the FOSS we review looks more like the results of a college programming project and not like a serious business application. Perhaps it looks that way because the still-wet-behind-the-ears developers are still thinking about developing it in that way.
First, the "web behind the ears" jab is both unnecessary and highly inaccurate. Second, why would you possibly expect them to think about it any other way? People who write software for fun, or to solve their own problem have no need and no desire to polish it up so it looks like a "serious business application"! They can make it work, and work very well, and that's really all they care about. They often do derive some pleasure from the fact that others get use out of it, but not only is that not a strong enough motivation to polish and support it the way you would like, it's a motivation that gets squashed in a hurry by attitudes like yours.
If you want software that has "user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support" then you are going to have to buy it. That's never going to change. Just accept it. Now, there are multiple ways to buy such software. You can do it by:
Just writing the damned software and slapping it in an RPM does not finish the project!
See here's where you're wrong. Writing the damned software does finish the project. Producing an RPM isn't necessary, much less any of the other stuff you'd like to see. What finished the project from the developer's point of view doesn't provide you with what you want but that, my friend, is not his problem until you choose to pay him to take it on as his problem.
If you see lots of great software out there in FOSS land that could be fantastically useful to your business if only it were "finished", perhaps you should think about starting up a company a la Red Hat to polish, package, sell and support that software, or just wait until someone else does. If you're waiting for the community to do it in their spare time because it's so much fun... you're going to be waiting a long, long time.
A very British coup (Score:4, Interesting)
"The UK government's recently introduced policy on the use of OSS recommends that OSS solutions be considered alongside proprietary ones for public sector IT purchases.
So this needs to be seen in context - as a shot in the war for zillions of bucks' worth of new UK government software contracts over the next few years. Oh course, you could argue that the writer's "nightmare scenario" is precisely the one we've been enduring for rather a long time now.
Now, here's the kicker: The UK government has a catastrophic record with big software projects developed in alliance with large corporations. Huge installations worth hundreds of millions have had to be cancelled or redone because they didn't work properly and in some cases will probably never work properly (the UK's Child Support Agency's IT disaster is a celebrated example).
So here is this writer merrily suggesting that the best way forward is more of the same. We can't risk trying something else, still less entangling ourselves with loonies in beards and sandals, oh no siree. Run Debian? Well that must mean you are a) a tenth-rate programmer, b) dangerously idealistic and c) completely unreliable.
Oh well, I guess there is one born every minute.
Re:Too bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Essentially, what I am saying is, if you expect a high end solution for your business, go to Red Hat or Novell. But to shop around Sourceforge for business applications and then to criticize developers for not making their software suitable for your business, when that wasn't their primary goal in the first place is childish and selfish at best.
And, if you don't wish to pay these people for their work, then take their software as a base and make it suitable for your business....or, even better, buy something from Microsoft. I don't think the average Open Source coder on Slashdot or Sourceforge will lose any sleep over it.
So, to reiterate, Red Hat and Novell care whether OSS suits your business, your average Sourceforge coder does not, so go and bitch to them.
cogent? ha! (Score:4, Interesting)
If I had written such a poorly argued piece I wouldn't want to put my name to it, much less give my professional credentials. Take the argument about innovation. It's based on a single example! Yes, Linux is not particularly innovative. It originated as a clone, so of course it wasn't innovative. Insofar as open source attempts to replace proprietary software, there has to be a good deal of cloning. That doesn't mean that open source software is intrinsically non-innovative, just that there has been a lot of catching up to do.
Even so, software intended in the first instance to clone proprietary software has often been innovative. Many examples are to be found in the GNU project. GNU "clones" of standard Unix tools are often considered to be superior to the originals. Not only is the implementation superior (typically in having fewer bugs and fewer arbitrary limitations), but they often extend the capabilities of the original tool.
The other place in which innovation is readily seen is in areas in which there is little or no cloning activity because there is little or no proprietary software to catch up to. In my own field of linguistics, for example, there isn't a lot of proprietary software because there isn't much of a market for it. Linguists can't afford expensive software. The more interesting linguistic software that has been coming along is mostly free software. For example, the most advanced database for annotated text is emdros [emdros.org]. It isn't a clone of anything. In phonetics the acoustic analysis program of choice currently is probably Praat [hum.uva.nl]. It compares favorably to commercial products. (Phonetics software is a bit different from linguistics in general in that it overlaps to a considerable extent with software for use in areas like speech pathology, where there is money to be made.) As a third example, I'll cite my own program redet [billposer.org], which is a regular expression search tool. It has a few features of particular interest to linguists, such as widgets for entering the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ability to intersect user-defined named character classes (which enables matching over feature matrices), but in most respects it is a regular expression tool of the same sort that programmers and various other non-linguists use. There are a number of similar free tools and at least one proprietary commercial product. However you may judge it in comparison to the others, it is unquestionably not a clone. Among its innovative features is the fact that it determines the properties of the regular expression engine that it uses empirically, by running a set of tests.
Basing a sweeping generalization on a single example is a poor practice in general, but in this case it is especially bad because Linux is an atypical example. Much open source software is innovative, and much proprietary software is not.
Re:Intellectual Property (Score:3, Interesting)
And since the UT System is part of the Government of the State of Texas, everything I produce is owned by the State.
Welcome to Amerika
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Listening to those usability groups is exactly why I don't find your software very usable, personally. Of course there's another unnamed project that's notably worse, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a huge difference between good interface design, and copying MS (which has always had a very tenuous grasp on the notion of UI design, beyond copying Apple, badly.)
In another post in this article you advised 'looking at the bigger picture' even when it means doing something that seems suboptimal in the short run. Yes, if you don't mimic windows, in the short run some (definately not ALL) users are going to think you're less usable because you're not what they're accustomed to. But if you look at the long run, the benefits of doing things right are more than worth the small inconvenience to a subset of potential users, in my opinion. Particularly when balanced against the other subsets of potential and actual users, who find this crap annoying beyond belief.
Possibly that's because I'm NOT used to windows, of course.
Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
This is completely moot. OSS exists, period. People write it, period. This will continue to be true barring laws to the contrary, and I suspect even then.
Talking about where people can make money at it or not is like a world where gold suddenly falls from the sky, and people sit around talking about if the 'free gold' is going to succeed or not, because damned if they can see any way that people will make money at it.
Just because something doesn't make economical sense doesn't mean it can't happen, or it won't effect an industry. Things can happen that can destroy an industry for no apparent reason at all.
Now, this isn't to say I think the software industry is endangered. However, there is no logical reason to think it isn't, and there's no logical reason to think that if it is, OSS will just magically go away.
While it's nice fable to believe, industries do not magically transition to other things, keeping all their income and employees intact. Yes, if people buy cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, the buggy-whip industry can try to transition to seatbelts. However, if someone invents magical self-relicating teeth-cleaning nanobots and sets them free, the toothbrush industry is screwed.
You have a point, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a nutshell, open source excels at creating building blocks. Closed source excels at assembling the blocks into an application.
Re:Innovation (Score:2, Interesting)
With OSS options are completely limitless, perhaps in the development of systems that perform similiar functions such as Wordprocessors, Spreadsheets etc, innovation is less in OSS, but when it comes to providing interesting solutions built on OSS, all you need is a little bit of Imagination, business sense and some knowledge.
I have been building solutions on MS products for the past 7 years, and in only 6 months of embracing OSS, already have so much more to offer my clients for less.
And wasn't there an article on