Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 24 Aug 2000 20:57:23 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org (j mckitrick)
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: OSS, Sun, GPL, random ramblings
Message-ID:  <200008242057.NAA15423@usr06.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000821140419.B13975@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> from "j mckitrick" at Aug 21, 2000 02:04:20 PM

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> i've been reading and thinking lately (uh oh  :)
> 
> Once there are OSS versions of software available, is it
> likely these will grow to dominate, and squash innovation?
> Sun is releasing OSS applications like staroffice and others.
> what will be the motivation to write a competing one from scratch?

Money.

It is becoming a common tactic to define standards with a high
enough complexity that OSS implementing the standard is simply
so hard to write that no one ever does.

Using this tactic, one can imagine all sorts of future work
for which people will continue to pay money.

Likewise, most OSS is poorly packaged; a lot of it uses the GNU
"configure" and "autoconf" and "automake" and similar tools.
These tools are provably vastly inferior to "imake" and "xmkmf",
out of project Athena.  The GNU tools were ncessitated by the
inability to tell from one day to the next where the OSS OS's
API's were going to be in Linux, and, to a leser extent, the BSD
family.  Customers want something that works, not something that
mostly works, sort of works, or might work with some tweaking.

Productization is not only about packaging.

Once built from scratch, unless the full validation test suite
is included, good luck getting an anser other than "well, it
works for me; have you tried running it on mumblety-frotz version
of Linux -- the one from last Tuesday, not the one from the day
before with the broken libwhatzit?".  Even with a full validation
suite included, how full is such a suite, really?  I have yet to
see one written in TET or ETET.

Crossing that barrier, we have documentation.  One of the most
intriguing, yet piss-poorly documented OSS projects is ZOPE.  I
would really have liked to use it for a project, but of course
I had to go with PHP instead; much less interesting, much higher
overhead (it's going to cost me ~$36,000 in extra hardware), but
rather well documented (so it's possible for people to document
their code well -- just don't expect it from any but the HTML
geeks, who mostly write text or a close relative for their living.

Then we have installation.  Most OSS operating systems really suck
at layered software installation.  None of them has reached even
the level of SVR4 of over half a decade ago, let alone Windows.  I
won't even try to compare them to that pinnacle of layered software
installations of almost two decades ago, VMS.


OK... now say you have it installed, and it's documented, and
it didn't try to kill you because it was badly packaged.  How
do you adminstrate it?  Does the administration fit into a
common administrative framework across all the places you want
to install it?  Feel free to assume homogenous machines.  The
answer is "no".  Unlike the products from commercial companies,
on commercial OSs, each and every OSS product feels the need to
invent the "perfect" adminstrative UI, convinced that everyone
who came before them either "didn't get it quite right" or "didn't
know what the hell they were doing".

Forget for a minute that most engineers are not cognitive
psychologits, and that most of them are not HCI (Human-Computer
Interaction" specialist, and the aren't graphic artists, and
they aren't UI designers.  One would think that it was not
rocket science to design a common navigation model, and then
stick with it, come hell or high water.

That's not to say that professionals don't screw up, either.  I
occasionally run Lotus Notes.  Like most groupware, it's in the
company because it was mandated by executive order.  People
really hate the hell out of groupware, but executives don't
care about likes and dislikes as much as they care about the IT
costs associated with stranding an IT person in the middle of
a desert of differeing applications, when it comes time for them
to answer the phone to support an internal user.  So I run Notes,
and pick up my corporate email late on Friday afternoon, whether
I need to or not (this last because I'm trying to show that I'm
a good corporate citizen).  Notes has a lot of UI idiocy, but the
worst offender of all is the "close window" icon on the "replication"
window, which, if you click it, does nothing, because it should have
been grayed out, but wasn't.

The point of the above rant being that, every time you screw up,
you throw all of the users prior training out the window.  The user
wants all their applciations to have the same look and feel, the
same navigation model, the same location for common menus, the same
left or right, top or bottom, for scroll bars, the same action of
the scrollbar thum in terms of its size showing, relative to the
size of the region in which it moves, how much scrollable area is
being hidden, the same location for the up and down arrow buttons,
the same action when you click between the thumb and the edge of
the region in which it moves ... etc. etc..

In other words, users don't want to be thrown into a different
random environment each time they start a different application.

I won't even go on about the morons who think that CD players
controls should look like CD players, or Internet telephony
applications like cell phones...

"Yes, but... what about my creativity?" whines the earstwhile UI
``genius'' (finger-quotes intentional).

Screw it.  And if you don't like that: Screw you.  The program
you are writing is not for you.  It's for your user.  And your
user's company has paid, on average, $2,500 a seat training their
employees how to work their desktop.  They don't like paying more
just so you can do something you think is creative, but which in
reality is just going to be confusing to the people who have to
use it, and have never seen it or anything like it before.

Users want a nice, bland environment.  There is a reason that all
of the little tabbed dialogs in the Windows control panel look
alike, no matter which one of them you run.  And even if users
wanted something else, the boss is not going to pay a hidden per
user cost to acquire it for them.


So the bottom line is that there is more to commercial software
than the quality of the algorithms, or whatever else.  It's a
gestalt called productization.  And OSS is still very far from
achieving that gestalt.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200008242057.NAA15423>