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Programming IT Technology

OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope 193

Posted by Zonk from the making-things-that-suck-less dept.
sebFlyte writes "In a recent speech at the ACCU conference in Oxford, software design guru James Coplein said that unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down. He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'"
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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope More

OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope

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  • it will go down? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:40AM (#12313731)
    > unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with
    > less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary
    > software would keep spiralling down.

    I don't think it has far "down" to go. People are too used to the rubbish they've not only been served with currently at home, school or work, but they've grown up with bad software and expect it as a part of normality. If the machine crashes in the middle of something people are trained now not to get angry at it - it's expected. If it gets infested with spyware then it's running slow and needs fixing by a tech, or reinstalling by some techier users. If their internet drops out multiple times a day, they just re-dial or wait for their DSL/cable to come up again.

    People are adaptable, and can get used to anything - and quickly, if they don't know better. Many software vendors take advantage of that.

    • Re:it will go down? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by spidereyes ( 599443 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:53AM (#12313877)
      I agree. How much farther can we go when we have to buy software to fix the existing software bugs? Firewalls, spam blockers, disk cleanup etc etc.

    • Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by soloport ( 312487 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:04PM (#12314000) Homepage
      Was having a conversation with an "I only do Windows" manager who was trying to be agreeable with me (knowing I'm an "I don't do Windows" contractor). He said he thought Microsoft would be helping to boost Linux growth by their recent push to enforce licensing.

      As much as I appreciated his sentiments, I had to respectfully disagree. I illustrated my perspective by pointing out how we had both spent the last six hours cleaning off spyware from the reception desk PC of one of his client's. (He needed my knowledge of Knoppix to pull important documents off the workstation, just in case.)

      To summarize, I said, "People will put up with incredible amounts of discomfort and expense, rather than learn something new." I think Microsoft has figured this out, long ago. I'll add that it doesn't help that most business software (e.g. Quicken, QuickBooks, Point, etc.) is built for Windows and that that fact will probably never change.

      Linux in the embedded world will grow. Linux in the server world will grow. Linux for the business desktops won't. Not for a long while -- if ever. After watching my friend scrape spyware dung off the Windows' registry, for hours, oh, how I wish it were not true.

      • Re:Agreed (Score:2, Informative)

        by ncb000gt ( 865657 )
        One thing you have to remember though is that should linux pick up as a desktop enviro it will have spyware and viruses written for it. Granted linux has it's security measures but it also has buggy code that people will exploit. Much less than MS which is why i use linux and am an advocate for it. But We sometimes also have to look at the other side to make sure that we are critical of all and not just one because 'our choice reigns supreme'.

        I do agree with you though that the linux desktop market will ta

        • I think you meant "glassy"...

          Which BTW just demonstrates the article's point - that people are so used to bad software that they simply don't want to hear about ANY more software, good or bad. That and the fact that, as one of my teachers likes to say, most people use software because they have to, not because they want to.

          Just look at the delight one feels when some little utility actually does its job without any major user intervention. It's so rare that it really is noticeable and provokes an emotiona
    • I don't know what other programmers are like, but when I write proprietary software, I want to know that the project is complete and bugless. However, there are people out there that don't realise the price of having completely bugless code. They see what they ordered and tend to just prefer to deal with the bugs rather than pay to get them fixed. In the end, it is what the client is willing to pay.

    • Re:it will go down? (Score:2, Redundant)

      by syousef ( 465911 )
      I think the quality of both proprietary and open source software is attrocious. The difference is you pay people good money for proprietary, and open source developers are often contributing to give something back to the community. It's ungracious at the least to fault someone who's giving you something for nothing. If you don't like what he's giving you don't use it. It's just as hard to look the other way when someone makes you pay for something and it doesn't work as advertised.

  • It's Coplien... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0xC0FFEE ( 763100 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:41AM (#12313745)
    For those not in the know like me. He is/was a researcher at bell labs and worked on all things related to the activity of developing software.

  • Summary (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:41AM (#12313746) Homepage Journal
    Person1: "Open Source is better and is making Proprietary software obsolete."

    Person2: "Is not! Open Source has the same problems as Proprietary."

    Person1: "Does not!"

    Person2: "Does too!"

    Person1: "Does not!"

    Person2: "Does too!"

    [this goes on for a little while]

    Person1: "Does not!"

    Person2: "Does too!"

    [end of article]

    And there you have it! The first definitive answer in the history of mankind! Or... maybe not.

    The reality is that software is software, and programmers are programmers. A really good piece of software will tend to get that way through the work of experienced and talented individuals. Projects lacking those individuals will produce poor software. Doesn't matter if it's open source or not.
    • And there you have it! The first definitive answer in the history of mankind! Or... maybe not.

      is too!

    • Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:51AM (#12313863)
      A really good piece of software will tend to get that way through the work of experienced and talented individuals.

      So the question devolves to one of, "Where do these experienced and talented individuals tend to end up?"

      In my experience they tend to be over in the corner banging their heads against the wall.

      KFG
      • In my experience they tend to be over in the corner banging their heads against the wall.

        Those are the lucky ones. Did you ever see Real Genius? Remeber the part where they were cramming for the big test, and the one guy suddenly stands up, starts screaming, and runs out like a lunatic? That's what happens to the rest. ;-)

      • Re:Summary (Score:3, Funny)

        by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )
        What? My ears are ringing... can you repeat that?

      • Amen. Several times per week I utter "let's drag out the drafting boards again" due to bad experiences with fairly sophisticated (but popular, in my field) CAD software that you have likely never even heard of. No, it's not AutoCAD, that's pretty straightforward as a digital pencil-type program.

  • I'm not totally concerned about quality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:42AM (#12313753) Journal
    Apart from the areas where there is no competition, the quality of software is pretty good. Even Windows has become fairly stable since Linux showed up.

    The reason Free software appeals to me is simply that I don't have to agree to hand over my first born son to use it. I'd like it if consumers would get a bit more assertive over the stringent and really quite unfair licencing terms. Then we can worry about quality.
    • The problem is that users don't give a flying fuck about licenses. Mainly due to the reason that they're written in terse legalese, and they don't affect the end-user. Licenses are seldom enforced on most end-users, and as such, nobody cares if they're entering into a contract in exchange for their first-born.

      Additionally, the users don't have too much choice (referring to a certain Office suite and operating system) - installed base can be a good thing for the company owning said software. The ones who do
    • Windows 'became' stable because they switched from 9x to NT and Microsoft wanted to compete with the big boys, ie Real Unix. Windows was stable and usable for a large number of things before Linux was. Linux hasn't been a contender long enough to alter Windows. For Longhorn however, that will be a different thing.

  • It seems to me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zenmojodaddy ( 754377 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:42AM (#12313757)
    ... that the general quality of EVERYTHING is on a downward spiral. Relentless commoditisation is forcing everyone to work on lower margins and wider tolerances.
    • Ever looked at a new car? Well I just so happened to be in the market for one, and let's just say the amount of plastic used to build a car nowadays is astounding to me. Where I live (Louisville Ky), I've seen far too many cars with broken plastic parts all over town to care to buy one.

      Taking that idea to software, I can only imagine what I'd get if I bought from a company that didn't care such as Microsoft. My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just fr
      • Yea, bring back the days when cars were made out of 100% steel. None of this nanby pamby plastic, and crumple zones? Who needs them.

      • Re:Amen (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sac13 ( 870194 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:14PM (#12314101)
        My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good.

        I have little confidence that Microsoft will create anything so great that it will completely change the face of computing. However, judging any software by an alpha release of a system that's final release is two years away is... not meaning to sound harsh, but ignorant. Longhorn will have its problems. It most likely will not be a better desktop OS than OS X. It most likely will not be a better server OS than Linux. However, Microsoft has demonstrated in the last few years that with respect to the general state of their systems, it will be better than the OS that they released before it.
        • Apparently you haven't seen this alpha. This is the Alpha that's being considered to move into Beta, and I can honestly say that absolutely nothing works; there are as many as four duplicate entries in a menu named "Properties" that each bring up something different, there are random stalls, freezes, crashes..

          The fact is, Alphas in this shape shouldn't be released.
          • Unless you honestly believe that the final version will contain things like duplicate entries in a menu, I don't see how your comments shed any light on the quality of closed vs. open source.
            • It's because of the GPL. Article 305 states that whenever a GPL'd piece of software is released RMS will magically appear and remove all duplicate menu entries.

  • OSS quality (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pecko666 ( 684783 )
    Opensourceness itself does not mean that the software will be immediately high quality. There are lot of quality proprietary software as lot of open source projects not worth looking at them.
    • "Opensourceness itself does not mean that the software will be immediately high quality" This is true and this is also why I like open source: Open source projects start out very simple and crappy. But people use them anyway and help the developers improve by small contributions. So over time, the software becomes better and more advanced. This is why I love open source: It allows the software to evolve. Yes evolve. There are dozen of examples of open source projects where the original developers have left

  • Yes and.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phuturephunk ( 617641 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:44AM (#12313782)
    ..there's thousands of people who seemingly cannot..or will not come to a consensus on how to design an easy to use, one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency, thereby scaring away the non-geek..and sometimes even the geeks..that would otherwize be willing to be more open to using OSS in their places of work and home lives.

    Seriously, I love the OSS movement, I really really do. It embodies so much spirit of what the internet, in an idealistic world should be. Free exchange of information and ideas..building one on top of the other in a collaborative effort that spans the globe..

    Yet for some reason, the geeks in charge of bringing us this can't seem to get their acts together. Until that happens, *nix will never be as widely accepted as the geeks in this world dream of.

    Get your acts together, because you're on to a good thing.
    • one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency, thereby scaring away the non-geek.

      Not only the non-geeks.

      x requires y
      y requires z
      z conflicts with a,b,c,d, and q

      Can't we all just get along?
      KERNEL PANIC
      Guess not.

      • I have mod points, but there was no "-1 Wrong". This is what would happen on a Debian-based system:

        $ sudo apt-get install x
        Password:
        Reading Package Lists... Done
        Building Dependency Tree... Done
        The following extra packages will be installed:
        y z
        The following packages will be REMOVED:
        a b c d q
        The following NEW packages will be installed:
        x y z
        0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
        Need to get 8000000kB of archives.
        After unpacking 9999999kB of additional disk space will be used.
        Do you

        • See, wasn't that easy? And if you don't like the command line, there's aptitude (ncurses) or synaptic (GTK).

          And unless you happen to be a ordinary non-technical computer user who happens to be stumbling around on /. to read your comment, just how are they supposed to *know* that?

          Sorry, but Linux on the desktop is *way* too painful unless you're trying to make a political statement. I speak as a 20-year Unix veteran who has spent thousands of dollars over the years trying to get a properly functioning Li
          • And unless you happen to be a ordinary non-technical computer user who happens to be stumbling around on /. to read your comment, just how are they supposed to *know* that?

            In all fairness to the parent, it's apt-get is somewhat well documented when you install Debian, so long as you actually take notes when it says "you can always run this again by using this command". It is nice, useful, and is a huge step forward in linux package management. Suse's Yast is also pretty spiffy.

            It doesn't change the fa
    • And chances are high that you never used any Linux distro for more then a few hours, until you were fed up with your own inabilty to learn new stuff and switched back to your teletubbies 'computer'.

      It says something about you, not about the software you tried.

    • Re:Yes and.. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ..there's thousands of people who seemingly cannot..or will not come to a consensus on how to design an easy to use, one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency, thereby scaring away the non-geek..and sometimes even the geeks..that would otherwize be willing to be more open to using OSS in their places of work and home lives.

      The ignorance of people about this issue is mind boggling. On suse, I run yast. It has a very, very long list of pr
    • The last time I used Mandrake (9?) it had a one-click installer. Find the app I want and it downloaded and installed all dependencies without a problem (at least for me). It also had a one-click process for only installing all security updates.

      The only thing I didn't like was that I often didn't know what apps I was looking for since I was new to Linux. If I knew I wanted a media player but never heard of xmms I wouldn't know to install it. So that required web searches. All they needed to do was add
    • or will not come to a consensus on how to design an easy to use, one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency

      I hear there's a tool called "apt" in development - I'd suggest keeping an eye on it, it looks interesting...

      Seriously; How is going out and googling / physically shopping for an installer, bringing it home, then installing (with several clicks) easier than ticking a program's checkbox and clicking "apply"?

      • Because software with the physical box will appear in stores. If you want Linux to get more users, you'll need Linux software to appear on store shelves.

        Because you can go to any website and download the software without even thinking about what distrobution you're using. Or, for that matter, having to open up a *second* application and search for the software *again* in it, and install from there.

        Thirdly, because commercial software developers will never support your apt system. They want to put an in
    • Yet for some reason, the geeks in charge of bringing us this can't seem to get their acts together.

      Work on FOSS doesn't get assigned by the Kremlin. Rather than complain, get off your tail and do something about it.

      If you can't program, learn. If that seems daunting, find an installer that almost works and ask the maintainers why such-and-such happens when you do so-and-so.

      It's a misconception that only the most talented are able to contribute. If you send in a bug complaint, you have helped whet

  • is this really true? how so? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:45AM (#12313784) Homepage Journal
    The statement only seems partly true for those who are really, really big and have a kind of monopoly (you know who I mean). For smaller, niche software, they have to make it good and even better for each version or the customers will demand something better by buying something else. So a company who neglects their customers needs will go broke and disappear, giving those companies who listen to their customers a higher market share. And even the biggest software companies are seeing that their market share drops when they do something bad, because even the biggest monopolies face competition from things like Linux.
  • The real problem with this kind of comparison is that versioning is black-and-white inbetween OSS and proprietary. OSS comes out with a new version once a week to incorporate all the bugfixes, while proprietary software aggregates them into many more patches. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but when it comes down to it a customer can write a large piece new version for OSS out of self-interest and have its fixes published to all other users of said software. This will be quite a bit rarer than N

  • Evolutionary Design (Score:5, Interesting)

    by paithuk ( 766069 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:48AM (#12313822) Homepage

    I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.

    It can even be taken as far as evolutionary delivery, which requires that the software be released into the market, and the feedback from that used to decide what will be in the next release. The time scales of this are much shorter than say, Apple releasing Panther and then Tiger, so not to be mixed up with major product releases.

    I only wonder whether the success of Linux as a household brand is compromised by the fact that non-proprietory software does not follow IID and hence doesn't actually deliver what is the customer wants, but in fact what the developers think the customer wants. I know that Microsoft are very much for beta testing on thousands of individuals which is a step closer to this, but from the serious delays in Longhorn, it's also true that maybe they have missed the point as well.

    There's no doubt the functionality is there in Linux as the guy mentions but I'm not so sure that the customer really fits into Linux like is required when moving beyond the waterfall model...

    • I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.

      Where have you been for the last 10 years? You sound like you just heard of this.

  • Doesn't match reality ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Titusdot Groan ( 468949 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:50AM (#12313848) Journal
    The two proprietary operating systems I use every day, Mac OS X and Windows XP are both much improved over their previous incarnations. So has FreeBSD which is my main development OS.

    I'm not sure where he's drawing this "death spiral" conclusion from because I'm not seeing it.

    Now, vendor lockin, DRM abuses, etc. etc. THAT I am seeing and OSS may be our saviour there.

  • thousands of developers only for very few projects (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ecklesweb ( 713901 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:51AM (#12313861)
    The thing that I always think about when I hear this argument for OSS, that there are thousands of developers who will find and fix the problem, is that the argument applies only to a very few of the "elite" OSS projects.

    Sure, there are thousands of developers working on Linux or Apache in one way or another. But, if you look at sourceforge.net, for instance, while there are 100,000 projects, how many of those have more than, say, 5 active developers? How many have even more than 1 active developer?

    The potential is there for thousands of developers to participate in any given OSS project, but the fact is that for probably 99.9% of OSS projects, it's still just one guy in his basement hacking away.
    • That's because 90,000 of those projects are text editors.

      The big problem here is that when people "get an itch" they don't "scratch" it by finding an existing project, but instead they start TextEditProPlus2005Extreme as a new project. There's a huge duplication of effort in the open source world.

      The "elite" projects are projects that have had corporate support (to get the 'boring' work done; Netscape for Firefox, Sun for OpenOffice) and are relatively unique in the open source world. There aren't very
  • I don't consider the activity of developing, testing, maintaining, and advocating FOSS and open systems to be "selfless".

    It's how I pay for the stuff I get. I owe Linus for Linux, Tridge for SAMBA, RMS for GCC, etc. There's no accounting, to be sure, but that's how I think of it.

    To whom much is given, much is asked.
    • Good call. I'm always amazed at how people will bandy about that word ("selfless") without really thinking it through. The whole point of working with a large group of users to perfect something you couldn't possibly have the time to do by yourself is: to feel comfortable that you're not simply a sponge on everyone else's efforts, and because, presumably, you'd like to see a little of your own thinking, preferences, and expertise wrapped up in the evolving project. That's the opposite of "selflessness." Rat

  • I love these bland quality proclamations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:55AM (#12313901)
    OSS is better than yada yada yada. I am perfectly happy to pay for several commercial development tools because they are far superior in terms of quality, functionality and performance than anything I have seen from OSS. When the OSS offering is better I use that.

    Rather ironically the lie to the OSS is always better is provided by the recent Bitkeeper kerfuffle. Linus choose Bitkeeper because for him it was the best tool for the job. The zealots moan about it but do nothing so 2 years later when politics interfere there is still no superior OSS alternative, let alone a comparable one.

    Lets just focus on letting the user choose the product that suits them best and let them get on with it.
    • Uh... the zealot (Tridgell) DID do something about it, and the proprietary software kings bitched and moaned, and now there is change and a new tool.

      Just a correction to your trolling. You're right BitKeeper was more feature-rich, but they also tried to preserve their monopoly on knowledge management and that is really what started the debate.
      • Sorry, forgot I was on /. where facts are equivalent to trolling. You agree with my point that there was a superior commercial product available for an important part of the development process and it STILL is better. I dont give a rats ass about who did what or how the bun fight started or how it pans out. I was merely using something close to the kernel to illustrate the stupidity of saying all OSS software is better than commercial software, just as saying the reverse would be equally stupid.
        • "The zealots moan about it but do nothing so 2 years later when politics interfere there is still no superior OSS alternative, let alone a comparable one"

          The tone of this statement makes it a troll. Whether you care or not, the very fact that this software was proprietary made it less useful in this case, because there were people who did not want to be locked into a particular type of situation.

          You've missed my point that the very development of a viable alternative is the thing that broke the who

    • Rather ironically the lie to the OSS is always better is provided by the recent Bitkeeper kerfuffle. Linus choose Bitkeeper because for him it was the best tool for the job

      And now he can't legally use it, so it's not very useful now is it? In the same way building your house out of twings in the middle of summer might be "easier" and you could argue it's "better" ... but come winter, your opinion might change somewhat. But, yes, without the trolling you can say that throwing money at a problem tends

  • Uh ... you mean proprietary software such as .... (Score:4, Funny)

    by whjwhj ( 243426 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:00PM (#12313962)
    Uh ... you mean proprietary software such as ....

    Apple's iLife suite? Horseshit. How about Apple's suite of professional video apps? Garbage. Hmm, Adobe's suite is also junk (along with the rancid piles of dung they'll be inheriting from Macromedia). ProTools? AutoCad? How about all of those proprietary games? All of them stinking and rotting piles of excrement. I'm sure I could go on and on but there's no question that proprietary software is uniformly crap.

    Now, by contrast, we can place our hopes on OSS, all of which is completely bug-free, extremely easy to install, and documented by poorly paid but well intentioned doctoral students in English. OSS is our savior and gace. God Bless OSS.
    • That's consumer level stuff, and high quality consumer level stuff. Wave after wave of business level software that I've had to customize and support has been, out of the box, rubbish. Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.

      We have a small dev team of 6, spread across numerous business projects. As a team, we all have
      • Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.

        It's this attitude that makes commercial software a sure win over any open source alternative - know-it-all programmer wannabees that are stuck being admins (which is really just a glorified script kiddie doing something actually useful - I know, I was one once). And worse, they

  • "Demanding More" is part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:04PM (#12314009) Homepage Journal
    The headline here says proprietary software will continue to suck "unless consumers start demanding more"

    The problem is, consumers are demanding more---more features, more bells, more whistles. Prettier interfaces. If your new word processor doesn't have more features in it, why would anybody take it over what they already have?

    The problem is that quality is suffering due to demand for quantity. Quality just doesn't sell. How's this sound on a box: "Now, more stable than ever!" If you're writing server software or industrial process controllers, it sounds great. But it won't impress the consumer market at all. This is how the market works: Quantity of features sells. Quality of software comes in the form of patches and service packs.

    • Just a little something to add:

      I was working on a paper today, using (surprise!) Word. At home I use Word 97. At work, I had been tinkering with it a bit using Word XP. I was perfectly okay with this (as was Word), because I needed not a single feature that Word XP that was not also in Word 97.

      Then I realized something: I was using not a single feature in Word 97 that was not also in Word 5.0 for DOS, which was first published in 1989. And the only feature in Word 5.0 that wasn't also in 1987's Wor

  • When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?
    • When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?

      This would be a better question if Linux weren't getting to be every bit as piggy and bloated as XP, but without the ability to run most of the world's really useful apps.

      It's enough to make one run screaming to NetBSD - somthing I'm thinking about looking at again, but will probably just buy a Mac because it's way easier and still runs enough useful software...
  • For me, Quality of software is important, but perhaps more important is the ability (as per the terms of the license) to fix the parts that are not doing what I want/need them to do, and to allow others to enjoy the same changes if they want to. With Closed Source ware, I often find myself with quality issues, and issues with getting the software to behave in a manner that I feel is important to the task at hand, without having to wait on some monolithic corporate firm to send me a binary patch I could hav

  • Underlying problem of private software (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scovetta ( 632629 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:10PM (#12314065) Homepage
    The underlying problem is that there is a short-term (and perhaps long-term) commercial advantage to shipping buggy, poor quality software "today" rather than higher quality software "tomorrow".

    OSS has no advantage to shipping software before it's ready-- This can sometimes backfire, because if the OSS developers stop making updates/bugfixes, either other people pick it up, or the project is stalled. A commercial company would still need to do at least major bug fixes if they want to keep customers coming back for version 2.0.

    Also, some projects just don't work well with the OSS model. Games, for instance-- some of them are more like movies, and needs $$$ to back them.
    • "Also, some projects just don't work well with the OSS model. Games, for instance-- some of them are more like movies, and needs $$$ to back them."

      If you lower the average salary of programmers to that of the average artist, I suspect that a lot more projects would become non-OSS compatible.

  • Down down down (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jon Peterson ( 1443 ) <jonNO@SPAMsnowdrift.org> on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:27PM (#12314224) Homepage
    Yup, that's software quality alright. I mean, look at windows for workgroups 3.11, and compare it with crap like XP or 2000 - we've lost so much stability, and performance, these modern OSes are just rubbish compared with the old ones. Don't get me started on how bad OSX is!

    Another bit of software that's been getting worse is Photoshop. I mean, have you ever tried using version 1? You can do _so much_ more than you can with the current version. They just keep removing features with each new release, and the software gets worse!

    It's the same with databases. It used to be that everything used fixed length fields, and really restrictive character sets. That meant that people like Mr Rénauld-Smythe could rely on always being refered to as Mr Renauldsmyth by their gas company. Nowadays, that kind of attention to detail and users is completely absent.

    And it's not just in ways like this that software quality is going down-hill. Customer services is going to the dogs! I remember when, if I wanted an update to my software, I could write a letter, then wait for a week to get some floppy disks with a patch on. Nowadays I have to connect to some huge wide area high speed network and download the patches myself! Just because the software companies want to save the cost of postage! Well I ask you.

    In every way, from speed, features, stability and customer service, software is getting worse and worse. I was so glad when Open Source came along and changed it! No sooner had Microsoft scrapped the excellent Windows 3.1 environment, and replaced it with the dreadfull Win95 one, but Linux came along with - X11 and twm! I thought quality and useability like that was dead!

    And that's not all. I remember when configuring a PC let you insert your own IRQ numbers and decide what drivers were loaded into what RAM segments - and then, DUH, Microsft figured they should do all that for us - as if we weren't clever enough to resolve hardware addressing issues ourselves! Imagine my delight when I found Linux. I spent _many_ happy hours manually configuring my drivers, I can tell you! That's the kind of quality I wanted.

    From the simplicity and ease of LaTeX, to the high performance and slick modernity of X11, there's nothing that OSS hasn't done better than their so-called rivals. It's true that some things are getting worse - ReiserFS instead of Ext2? I don't think so! But the for most important things, like printer configuration, and having a fully skinable CD player applet with it's own LISP based configuration language - well, Open Source is way out in front.

    P.S. I was disappointed to see that Opera is making such poor software - that's why I'm sticking to Netscape 2.1
    • Haha great post!

      I agree with you completely; a lot of software *does* suck, but for the most part software has been getting better and better and better-- not worse.

      Hell, even Lotus Notes, the HELLHOLE of user interfaces, now (version 6.5.1) plays nice with multiple users in WindowsXP and OS X and correctly registers itself as the default mail handler. Sure, the address book still sucks ass, but the product is still getting better more than it's getting worse.

      Look at operating systems. OS X is tons bet

  • Good, Cheap, Fast... Pick Two (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The consumer always wants what they cannot have. The consumer will demand perfect software, without putting them out of the way financially, and they want it now. The attitude I get a lot is "I just spent $1500 on a laptop, why should I have to pay for software?".

    I don't think the public gets an idea of just how much work goes into good software. There is a reason UNIX cost as much as it did; it was well designed from the ground up! Yet, sadly, the price-point led the market astray, and we're left with
  • There's plenty of good software for Windows. But a lot of it is made by small companies, or even individuals. Neither of which have the marketing/distribution power of the software companies who have their products on Best Buy's shelf.

    Unfortunately, the big, rich software companies have learned that you can sell the most broken crap to people if you bundle it with a PC, advertise the hell out of it, or give it a candy-coated (but annoying) interface.

    So, the vast majority of "consumer-level" software i
  • "The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger."

    How is it a selfless act to work on something you love to do and get paid for it? Many people making the major contributions to OSS are paid by groups such as OSDL, or companies such as IBM.
  • OSS has a problem as well. Program with crappy UI gets made and released into the wild. People go 'what a crappy UI' and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve it. Coders reply with 'f-off! it's free. it does what it's supposed to. fix it yourself', etc. People go 'we're not coders, we're users!' and 'what a bunch of elitist jerks', etc. New version comes out that's even more complex, with just as crappy a UI. Users go 'where's the docs? how do I use this, etc'. Coders go 'read the source!', or at b
  • Of the three talks Cope gave, exactly NONE of them had ANYTHING to do with this - he spoke on the topics of symmetry in design, and organisational patterns.

    The linked article is actually about an _interview_ he gave whilst he was here.

    Also, Linux is broken. ;P

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