
The Fall of Open Source - linuxhiker
https://www.commandprompt.com/blog/the_fall_of_open_source/
======
verandaguy
I agree with the author's concerns. It's a bit unsettling to build upon a
closed-source ecosystem, but it's unrealistic to expect the world to work
otherwise.

When people have skills, it's natural and totally understandable that they try
and market these skills. It's something they're good at, and that they can
make a living off of.

I've worked on teams and with groups that use Github and Slack extensively.
The reason these services have succeed -- and why they were adopted, at least
by the teams I knew -- is because they got their foot in the door early on.
Someone was on a payroll, being paid to come up with a good, simple, user
interface, a useful feature set, and a decent API. Most OSS projects just
don't have the developer base to come up with an idea and develop it to the
point where it's a really well-polished piece of software ready for use by
even the most tech-illiterate users.

Once all of that was invented, it was trivial for just-as-good OSS and self-
hosted alternatives to surface. For Slack and Github, those were Rocket.Chat
and Gitlab (and more recently, gogs). There's nothing wrong with these
services; they mimic their closed-source counterparts really well, and are
sometimes even better than them in some respects. They just didn't come into
the market at the right time to get the critical mass of users early enough to
dominate the market.

So TL;DR it's less a problem that closed source G-men are trying to take over
the market, and more that developers have to choose between having the free
time to come up with an idea and to develop a well-polished OSS app, and
spending time having a steady source of income.

------
api
Slack is kind of my litmus test for whether someone understands what's wrong
with FOSS. If you do not understand why Slack has grown so much vs. IRC, you
don't get it.

User experience is a _huge f 'ing deal_ and FOSS doesn't care about user
experience. There are two reasons for this.

One is that UI/UX work is not fun and so programmers generally must be paid to
do it. This is an economic model problem and in some cases a management
problem. Jamie Zawinsky observed this over a decade ago and not much has
changed:
[https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

The second is that many in FOSS view mastery of arcane systems as a status
symbol and have active contempt for any effort to make systems easier to use
or more approachable. This is an elitism problem. FOSS is about freedom and
equality among developers, but there's also a mentality among many (but not
all) that looks down on non-technical people and resents any attempt to bridge
that gap.

IRC lets people message each other and chat on channels, and Slack lets people
message each other and chat on channels. The comparison ends there. Try
getting a non-technical person on IRC vs. Slack and now try teaching them to
really _use_ IRC -- to transfer files, etc. Now try getting IRC working on a
phone. Call me in a few days.

Slack is not just warmed-over IRC. All the apparently little things that make
Slack so easy to use for so many people took a _huge amount of work_ to
implement. UI/UX is _hard_ and _painful_ and requires loads of testing,
iteration, and attention to detail. Little things like the fact that when I
edit a Slack message it changes everywhere at once reliably are things that
took... oh god... I shudder to imagine how much pain.

I do believe that open source can overcome this problem, but step one is
actually understanding it. So far almost nobody in FOSS gets it, so I'm not
optimistic.

Edit: one more point about user experience...

It's not just about luxury and convenience. It's about cognitive load. Forcing
people to learn endless amounts of arcane nonsense to do trivial things that
have been done since the 70s is a waste of peoples' time.

In the information age information is cheap but _attention_ is incredibly
expensive. If something doesn't work instantly it's broken. If I have to spend
time figuring it out it's broken. If I have to learn anything more than I
absolutely need to learn to make it work it's broken. That's because there are
a billion more new things to learn that are waiting in the queue and most of
them are probably more important. Next, next, next!

~~~
bb88
A couple of points here.

1\. Slack is centralized. When you control the hub, you control the protocol.
Which makes it easier to modify and change. You don't have to worry about
people whining that you broke their client if you change the server. They
control the hub and the spokes.

2\. Slack is centralized. (I feel that's important). There are what 1M IRC
servers (if you count all the internal company servers) and 20M clients in
existence. You can't just change a popular protocol overnight without people
complaining that you broke a client.

3\. Slack is ... you guessed it ... centralized. IRC has a peer to peer chat
feature (that doesn't go through the server). This is ironically, the way file
transfers happen on IRC too. It's also what makes people able to host IRC
servers without paying a huge bandwidth bill, nor get sued when their server
is used to transmit Game of Thrones.

4\. Slack is ... you heard it .. centralized. Messages must go through slack's
servers. For people concerned about privacy, it makes it an easy target for a
National Security Letter.

5\. Slack is ... like a broken record ... centralized. Today I was told to not
send proprietary information on it, because my company doesn't have an on
premises hosted slack. Can any one self host slack?

6\. Why haven't you looked into Mattermost, if you're tired of irc?

You know, it's not that open source devs are elitist, but they have a history
of writing code for people that are the 10% technically elite. It's not that
they're smugly arrogant, but rather, IRC does the job they need it to. So is
there really any reason to change it? No. Just like there's also no need to
put a python interpreter in the linux kernel. Would it make things easier for
the average user to write a device driver? Possibly, I don't know? Is it worth
the headaches of maintaining a python interpreter in the kernel? No.

In fact, the FOSS devs I know could probably care less about this holy war.
Yes, slack is a great tool, and in some cases would work better than IRC. In
other cases they would say IRC would work better than slack. Oh, did I mention
they don't see it as a holy war in the first place?

~~~
nickpsecurity
BitTorrent is decentralized with lots of clients and tons of users. Users of
GUI clients usually download a Torrent file, see what files they're getting,
uncheck any they don't want, hit OK, wait a while, and stop it when finished.
Change the download directory in preferences like most of their other apps but
has sensible default usually. Opposite of all your points about Slack yet
still super-easy-to-use due to good UX.

See how your centralization point was pushing your ideology instead of
apparent claim that Slack was only good due to centralization?

"You know, it's not that open source devs are elitist, but they have a history
of writing code for people that are the 10% technically elite. It's not that
they're smugly arrogant, but rather, IRC does the job they need it to."

Oh no, he's right. Ask them to change anything to something easier. It took
quite a while to get the GUI clients that simplified key steps. They were
insistent on forcing people to learn and memorize commands instead of menus
with obvious options. They certainly could've improved look-ups and had "save
to favorites" earlier in usable form. They didn't care because they were
elitist.

Now, I'd consider a different explanation if tech people weren't doing same
thing for UNIX commands, GUI configuration, installers, incomprehensible-by-
default text editors, everything is a command line argument instead of sane
menus of text, and so on. The amount of mental load it took to use those
systems and apps vs Windows or Mac is a huge chunk of why they dominate the
desktop.

I recall the pain of switching to Linux from Windows. Everything that was
simple or easy to find just clicking around took thought in Linux. I knew that
was unnecessary because my previous supplier made it unnecessary by putting in
work. I later saw Apple do the same for network configuration, backups, and
getting apps mostly safely. Elitists are still bragging about their commands,
ports, and so on while _known_ UX or foundational issues never get fixed.

~~~
bb88
"See how your centralization point was pushing your ideology instead of
apparent claim that Slack was only good due to centralization?"

No. I don't have an ideology here. Just facts I'm sharing.

"They didn't care because they were elitist."

Do you have proof of that so called elitism? Maybe they didn't want to get
into a holy-war. Maybe they didn't want to break a 30 year old protocol.

I think, they didn't care because they just simply didn't care. Don't confuse
elitism for general apathy.

Also, have you looked at Mattermost?

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Do you have proof of that so called elitism?"

They get into holy wars, break stuff, and take action regularly. So there goes
three reasons. What they will do is call people idiots or lazy if they
complain about poor UX. Or remind them how you only do (arcane steps here) to
accomplish the task so why the fuss?

It's hard to absolutely prove elitism over all other things that go on in a
person's head. However, that kind of behavior resembles elitism. Hell, many
such people even made memes like "Elitist Linux Asshat" to rub others' noses
in it. Starts to get harder to deny their ego and aire of superiority is
involved at that point.

------
slgeorge
The problem for Free Software advocates, is that they 'won' but that's also
brought about a change in 'communities' make-up.

The key quote is in the first sentence "Once upon a time FOSS was about
Freedom": this simply isn't the case for many users of FOSS (and I mean people
who use code that is under an open source license which covers those that are
FSF compliant and others). The winning part if landing up with many more
users, and many more creators both personal and in a professional context - it
feels unarguable to me that there's more active FOSS than at any time before.

The user-base has simply changed, everyone can use FOSS not just the technical
elite and/or fringe. And FOSS is active in areas I never considered.

But ... if you care about the values/philosophy behind Free Software then you
may dislike the fact that the core philosophy hasn't made it across to a
substantial (majority?) of users. But, in terms of providing users with the
core freedoms (e.g altering/copying) it's certainly a win.

------
rxm
And many of these kind-of-free tools are built on top of open source code. I
also feel that Open Source movement is changing.

------
meira
I agree with him, but a new movement, stronger will emerge from this, just
like free software started. And I bet in #indiewebcamp (Freenode)

~~~
bb88
Have you looked at mattermost?

~~~
meira
It's not about tool replacement, but awareness enhacement.

~~~
bb88
Right, so I'm making you aware of mattermost.

~~~
meira
Nice :)

