Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 18:14:48 -0000 From: "Paul Robinson" <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> To: "Terry Lambert" <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Open source (was RE: Hi!Dear FreeBSD!) Message-ID: <IPEDKJGCDFHOPEFKLIDHOEJLCCAA.paul@iconoplex.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <3E53B820.BC50E3AA@mindspring.com>
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This was going to be huge if I'd answered all that, so I've trimmed it where appropriate. It's still not a light read. :-) Terry Lambert wrote: > This grossly misrepresents my position. Wasn't my intention, and I must have got the wrong end of the stick. My apologies. That's how it read to me. > Maybe I should have said "Send Patches", like everyone else does... You just did. :-) > One commonly (and cynically) cited payment is "ego gratification". > While there are some people in the FreeBSD project motivated by > performing almost purely mechanical modifications of large numbers of > files, in order to get their login name on the most recent CVS stamp > and in the $Id$ tag of source files, this is not, I think, the > primary motivation for most of the project participants. Some of those modifications are necessary however, and need to be done by somebody at some point. Well, in some cases anyway. Personally I stay away from the development side of the project because I know I don't have the time to do the job as well as I would want to do it, and I can become a perfectionist. It might change later this year though. I hope so. > You would be hard-put to simply design a new set of systems, and > simply "throw the switch", and have the new organization spring, > full grown, from Zeus's head, Actually, the ease with which you can do that is inversely proportional to the complexity of the system. I'm sure that between us, everybody on the freebsd lists could get a working "count_to(x)" function working perfectly within the next 3 months and we would be confident in it's "correctness" without having to test it too much. I don't think the same could be said if we decided we were going to write a functionally equivalent piece of software to say, Visual Studio .NET in the same time frame and then just "release it" on a given day. That's why the concept of -RELEASE always makes me chuckle a little. > OpenOffice is a different phenomenon entirely. It is a copy of a > commercial product, with very little in terms of innovation. For Ah, but it opens a lot of doors. Five years ago, no even two years ago, if you'd said to the boss of a small non-tech outfit "install Linux or FreeBSD instead of Windows", the biggest thing preventing him/her from doing so would be the fact that they wouldn't be able to send and receive Word and Excel spreadsheets. StarOffice got rid of that barrier, then created another one that OpenOffice took down again. > What kind of idiot would create a word processor that required documentation, > without some overriding business/systems need for a need for someone to > provide it? What is so incredibly hard about merely the *idea* of word > processing, such that this should be necessary? It's a change of contextual thinking as far as the user is concerned. That's why stories of secretaries putting Tippex all over their screen exist. Word processors are yesterday's news these days, but back then, the idea of a Word processor or a spreadsheet and how it operated were alien concepts. Even now I know of accountants who have been working in small villages with paper based systems that don't understand that a spreadsheet *automatically does the maths*. When I have explained it, they've sat there in awe at how easy fiscal modelling becomes, never mind book-keeping. That's the point they become excited. Once that mental jump is made, it's easy. Making the jump though... > In other words, they are able to successfully defend their > existing market by way of increased complexity, and the inability of > Open Source equivalents to manage complexity. We see this in the use > of "embrace and extend" tactics, and in the pushing of increasingly > (and technically unjustifiably) complex standards through the public > standards processes. XML being one of those, IMHO. MS has been good at this for a while. They're cleverer than perhaps they give themselves credit for. If it wasn't for that damned calendaring thing they came up with, Exchange wouldn't be in too many SMEs these days. This isn't about complexity though, it's about functionality. It goes back to the MS Program Managers understanding what a user would like, and getting it into the product. Nobody does that in the Open source world outside of their own organisation. Even when the need is clearly identified - "we want shared calendars like in Outlook" - the complexity of producing an identical product THEN becomes overwhelming, so they produce something inferior based around a webmail package. This is a flaw in the process, it's virtually impossible to fix. > Source Forge is, to my mind, a failure, which has arisen from a > fundamental understanding of mutual altruism networks. One could > make the same case for GPL, which attempts to build enforced > altruism networks. Much of this misperception comes from sources > such as "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which have a fundamentally > incorrect model. Don't get me started on ESR. That's a whole new discussion. Cathedral and Bazaar did more damage to OSS than pretty much anything else I can think of right now. Good intentions, but the model is terrible. As for sourceforge, it's not a failure, it's just not very efficient. That is to say, there is a better model for what they want to acheive, the difference is, they've actually done it and nobody else has. > Yet Mozilla *did* screw itself, > and BSD-based Open Source projects all waited for the trigger of 386BSD > and the working code it provided. Somebody (let's not get into the argument) somewhere, one day sat down and wrote the beginnings of what eventually became Unix. They did not have existing code, just ideas. If you're saying all software must be evolutionary, then I disagree. It's easier for software to evolve over multiple iterations and restarts to get to the ideal system than it is to sit around and design perfection and then go for implementing the "perfect" system but that does not mean all software must be evolutionary. > The problem is the nature of the people involved in volunteer projects. Here we go... > Instead, your pool of volunteers is made up of people who like to > tinker, and are not satisfied with the way things are, but those > people generally have no great leadership skills or vision of a > future that they are then prepared to work hard at making real. That's a little harsh. It's true that many developers would rather implement things their own way rather than buy in existing products or use existing code that isn't quite perfect. Particularly if they know it's easy, but slightly fun and can go on the CV. > In a lot of ways, Jeff Raskin is right, and still no one is listening. > In two of your examples of products that you think should/will be > written, you yourself fell into this trap of cloning from bad gene > stock. Agreed. But that's because they work. They work very, very well. If there was a better way of doing what they do, I wish I could think of what it was. I'd probably not OSS it though, because I'd want to make some cash. :-) > At a former employer, there was an engineer who believed in this > philosophy so completely, they wanted everyone to accept Steve > McConnell as their personal saviour. An excellent engineer, but > they could not understand my reluctance to join their religion, > because they saw everything in terms of process: for them, the > process *was* the product, and any business was just a side effect. > It was very much like being back at USL. The process is important, but then my degree is Software Engineering, and I'm currently a manager who has little to do with code production. My view is probably skewed. The important thing is that the process is supposed to be lightweight and non-intrusive. The requirements cpature process is important though, and if you can adopt Extreme programming, or at least aspects of it, then you can through process increase the quality of your product. > "Why, if product developement is > changed to a fully user and quality-centric model, would people > continue to buy new versions of these products?". User requirements change in the same way as everything else. People don't buy new clothes, furniture and consumer electronics on a regular basis because they don't have something that was not user and quality-centric when it was designed. It's just that the requirements change. With clothing, this happens on a seasonal basis for some people. My old TV was fine, so why did I buy a 32" widescreen? My VCR was fine, so why a DVD? Functional upgrades? Change in perception of quality? Fashion? All these and more play into it. Software is no different. > The value proposition for the mainstream is whether or not they can hire a temp > for a week in accounting, and that person will be able to use the tools > in place, without needing training. The transition between WordPerfect and Word happened. The transition away from Word can happen. The issue though is whether people can get done what they need to, and if there are other advantages. At the moment, advocates are harming OSS by telling everybody that OSS has a lower TCO which is bull, but not pointing out the real advantages. Unfortunately, those advantages can be swallowed up by MS or anybody else on the commercial side the moment they wake up and smell the coffee. > Most people end up conforming their views to the community, rather > than selecting a community on that basis, in my experience. 8-). You evidently didn't spend much time as a teenager then. :-) I know I don't really belong in the Unix crowd - I'm a bit of an intruder. But I don't belong in the Windows crowd either. I definitely don't belong with the academics, but I would look stupid with a skateboard, so I just define my community as "me". Culturally, my views are orientated as to what I think is best for myself and the people around me. I don't listen to other people who disagree too much, and end up seeking out those communities who think a bit like me, as a result I have a remarkably diverse group of friends (everybody from criminals to lawyers, geeks to people who play polo). I thought everybody else was the same. Perhaps I need to drink more Pepsi instead of Dr Pepper, eat McD's instead of Tuna Ciabattas, play Grand Theft Auto instead of Poker, and watch more MTV instead of going to classical music concerts. :-) -- Paul Robinson To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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