

Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source - CrankyBear
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/9-things-that-are-never-admitted-about-open-source-1.html

======
belorn
1#, Ubuntu is indeed no longer the public face to open source, but then is
anyone actually surprised? At best, Ubuntu can be said to have been an symptom
of the success Debian was and still is in collecting and maintaining open
source and free software projects. Where ubuntu left, mint picked up, and I
don't see an end in polished distributions ontop of Debian.

#2, The dangers of web-services in regard to privacy and property is only
starting to reach the general population. In this regard, EFF and CCC has had
a larger role to play than AGPL and FLOSS.

#3, While Stallman is the leading figure in free software, people like Eben
Moglen has much better speaches and do more to recruit new members to the
community. I think today, Stallman is more often addressing the members inside
the community in what areas are currently in need of most work, and what new
threats exist for the community.

#4, A true Meritocracy does not exist anywhere. People follow leaders, even
those that do not deserve it. The goal might be to become a Meritocracy (I
wouldn't know), but the truth is that open and free software communities are
just made out of human beings.

#5, When addressing/claiming a serious issue like Systemic Sexism, two things
need to be done. First, one need to show the problem exist. We do have nice
statistic on it and the author did show some poor but uncontested data (so he
get a pass there). Second one need to show _why_ the gender diversity is so
large. The author do not do this. Actually, no articles about sexism in the
free and open source communities addresses the question of why (or at least no
one has done so with data to back it up!). This is in my view the primary
single reason why the discussion about sexism in free software has gone
nowhere for the last 10 years. Its not about hushing or denying the existence
of the issue, but rather the lack of data that is keeping us from fixing it.
The question of _why_ is a central part of any technologist or academic
thinking, and without it we would be unable to fix any computer, create any
program, or solve any problem whatsoever. As a answer to the question on _how
do we show why there is a gender difference in open source and free software_
, I would start by looking at how this community differ from other similar
sized communities with similar age groups. One particular group that comes to
mind is gamer communities, sporting communities, and other communities that
people freely perform as part of an hobby. One could also look at subgroups,
such as IRC groups vs stackoverflow. If they have more, less or equal gender
equality, one should ask the question _why_ and try to build some testable
theories. After that is done, and only after that is done, can one start to
address the issue truly and in an effective way for the open source and free
software community.

#6, Microsoft is never going to be trusted as a friend to free software. Too
much bad blood, and honestly, who would want to be friend with someone who
previously have gone out of their way kill you. Microsoft is also not putting
down the symbolic knife, widely swinging secure boot around for everyone to
see thus creating more untrust. At best, one can say that there exist bigger
threats than Microsoft and thus focus should be redirected.

#7, the Desktop interface is the most visible aspect to desktop users. like
with any area of design, it has had good times and bad times. It has a lot of
discontentment, and is likely to see many people trying to do massive changes
in a hope to get it in sync with what they perceive as current good design.
Until design stop to change, the changes will likely continue without loosing
any speed. I don't know if anyone tries to deny this or claim it is something
not to be admitted.

#8, again I want to point towards human nature and that almost all cultures is
monocultures. the top 1% of the musical bands are going to have 99% of the
listeners. However, when people say that FOSS encourages diversity, the
opposit camp is the devices which can't be changed, and are of questionable
legality to modify (jailbreak). Those devices has one system, one store, one
video player, one music player, and one company behind it. Compare to those
places, FOSS indeed encourages diversity even if the majority of users are
using the same software.

#9, open source and free software has indeed still a long way to go if they
want to reach each communities goal that they had set aside for themselves.
That said, reverse engineer is often a thankless job and without a political
remodeling of the landscape (such as steam box might do but who knows), new
devices is an never ending stream of new work. To make matter worse, old
devices get old way to quick. Those people I know that work with this tend to
burn out fast, and reach an unhealthy attitude to new people. Sadly this tend
to happen way before those people would transfer knowledge and responsibility
to a new group of people. So far, I have not seen any solution to this problem
and can thus just hope that a major landscape change happens from outside the
community.

~~~
Flimm
"Where ubuntu left, mint picked up": if by this you mean in popularity, I do
not see any evidence of this.

~~~
belorn
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint#Reception>

One could of course argue that distrowatch data is not good enough, but until
there is data that contradict distrowatch, I would use the data as a strong
indication of where things are going.

------
btilly
This article confuses "open source" and "the Linux desktop".

I consider myself an open source person. I spent a good chunk of my day today
using open source tools, writing an article that I will give away for free.

And yet, I am typing this on a Mac. I don't care about gnome or KDE. Yes, I
used several Linux machines today. But I have not seriously used a Linux
desktop in the last 2 years, nor do I care what is going on there. (The last
window manager that I liked was fvwm, but many years ago a Debian upgrade
added integration with Gnome I did not want or need, and it stopped working in
the way I wanted. I have not bothered caring about a window manager since.)

I am far from alone in my views. (Except for liking fvwm. Most people consider
that plain weird.)

~~~
nwzpaperman
where do you write?

~~~
btilly
Various places. Occasionally to <http://bentilly.blogspot.com/>. But in this
case it is an article on A/B testing, which is a response to
<http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html>. It will be part of
a series.

The one I'm polishing now is a rigorous technique that lets you look at
results as often as you like, but lets you run the test forever. If there is
any bias at all, eventually you'll get an answer, and have high confidence
that it is right.

The next in the series addresses the question, "I have a limited sample size I
can realistically obtain for an A/B test, how should I run my test, and what
kinds of guarantees will I get?" (With, of course, multiple looks allowed.)

Hopefully this will be coming to a website near you in the next day or so. :-)

------
wereHamster

      > 8. Open Source Is Becoming a Monoculture
      >
      > [insert comparisons how one software is vastly preferred over another,
      > eg. git vs subversion]
    

If you'd make the comparison five years ago, half of the software would not be
present. svn would rule over cvs, abiword would rule over openoffice, a
konqueror would rule over mozilla etc.

It may be a monoculture today, but nothing stops people from inventing the
next SCM tool, the next word processor or the next web browser. That has
happened in the past, that will happen in the future.

~~~
theevocater
This was the only one I disagreed with. Everyone said GCC was it forever, yet
here we are ushering in an age of llvm/clang/etc. SVN was decidedly dethroned
by git (and also mercurial). I think you can cherry-pick places where
monocultures have developed but history shows that those are the places that
get disrupted.

~~~
286c8cb04bda
Anybody who said GCC was forever doesn't know their history very well.

See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_fo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_fork)

------
tommorris
I don't see how any of these things are "never admitted".

I'm not quite sure what the first point is even trying to say beyond "some
people don't like Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu is going down the route of profit for
Canonical" (both of which aren't somehow magically incompatible with the goals
of free software or are somehow being suppressed by the free software
movement).

The rest are quite freely admitted and openly discussed by free software and
open source people, even if some people don't necessarily agree.

On the sexism front, that's widely discussed (and, well, dismissed too,
sadly).

Microsoft? Sure, the loud-and-proud anti-Mono crowd make their feelings heard.
But I think most people pretty much know that Microsoft are changing their
tune on open source, especially around developer facing stuff (F#, IronRuby,
numerous other things like that have been open sourced; .NET developer
conferences have had talks from people talking about things they like and use
in competing free software projects like Postgres).

~~~
bad_user
As long as Balmer is still there, as long as they continue to threaten other
projects with patents, I couldn't care less about Microsoft or their products,
no matter what bones they throw out for free.

I'm not anti-Mono btw. I also like F# and .NET and I even think that Microsoft
isn't even the worst company around. I also have a Windows license that I use
back home. But I simply don't care.

Also, IronRuby is abandonware.

~~~
darklajid
Well, but if you happen to work in a Microsoft/Windows environment it helps a
lot to see these open projects.

Ignoring IronRuby: ASP.Net for example is a Big Thing (tm) that exists in a
git repository (and for all I know it's developed in the open now, not in the
typical 'code drop' style like Android etc.).

Do I love Microsoft? Certainly not. But I do think they changed for the
better, measuring with a certain set of values and biases here..

~~~
bad_user
On ASP.NET, you mean ASP.NET MVC, because the ASP.NET and its HTTP pipeline is
not open-source.

And this is my problem with their efforts. Even though I applaud them for it,
these efforts are half-hearted and half-baked.

------
bad_user
On Ubuntu, it's actually ironic for the author to say that everybody started
raising their eyebrows when Ubuntu shipped with its own interface, considering
that in open-source everybody does whatever the fuck they want in general and
as results you have at least Xfce, KDE and Gnome. Wasn't that the whole
freaking point of open-source in the first place? And who's raising eye-brows
exactly?

People also raised eyebrows when Android shipped. Android is a Linux operating
system too, with a completely different interface. Android doesn't even have
XWindows on it. And in the meantime, Android is the number one operating
system for smartphones, while all other attempts at an open-source operating
systems for mobiles have failed.

I also like Unity. It needs improvements, sure. But considering that there was
no other significant progress in the last 7 years at least, only regressions
like KDE 4, I actually like that Canonical has the cojones to push interface
changes.

If anything, I don't think Canonical is bold enough, but unfortunately they
don't have the resources for it.

Btw, Ubuntu 12.10 has the only graphical installer that's (1) intuitive and
(2) offers to do full-disk encryption for you. You could do the same with
Debian since years ago, but it wasn't for human beings.

------
maebert
This article, while making many valid points, seems to focus on open source
software for consumers - FOSS2C if you will. However, the last decade has
shown an incredibly rise of open source solutions for developers, and I think
most people here can readily name five or more open source tools without which
their daily work would be absolutely unthinkable.

And in these areas, points 7, 8 and 9 (regarding lack of innovation,
monocultures and lack of goals) are simply not valid, 4 (meritocracy) is not
as bad as in projects that have been running for several decades (who would
have thought?), and 1 and 3 simply don't matter.

------
vampirechicken
One more time, with feeling: Free Software != Open Source Software.

Open Source is a marketing term, coined by ESR because "Free Software" is
scary to businesses, much the same way that record labels coined 'New Wave' to
make Punk Rock palatable to the record buying public.

~~~
janardanyri
This comment is a great example of problem #3 from the article: nitpicking at
wording instead of engaging with ideas.

~~~
EvanKelly
While I agree with you and point #3 of the article. Semantic arguments
typically interfere with discussing the fundamental issue, but since the
article spent much of it's time speaking to the goals and expectations of the
FOSS community, I think the distinction between FOSS and open-source is an
important one, as the goals of the FOSS communtity are unique within the broad
scope of open-source software.

~~~
vampirechicken
Semantics is the study of meaning. Open Source does not mean the same thing as
free software. You're saying that the author should get a pass for being
egregiously wrong. Stallman being Stallman is part of what drove ESR to coin
open soource.

------
LukeShu
I subscribe to several blogs by members of both Free Software and Open Source
communities, and I hear about all of these things "that are never admitted"
quite often.

------
ChuckMcM
I thought it was fun that this showed up in Datamation. That is a brand that
has been through a lot, DASD anyone?

Seems to be mostly to draw rageviews. For each of their 'forbidden' topics
I've seen a flame war or two in other venues. Perhaps they are trying to
kindle those sparks.

~~~
steevdave
Forgive me for not knowing but, what is DASD?

~~~
Spooky23
"Direct Access Storage Device"... The fancy mainframe term for a hard disk.

Datamation was an ancient industry rag the went online in the 90's.

------
mistercow
Wait, so #1 is basically "A lot of people don't like Unity, so I don't
consider Ubuntu to be pushing open source forward anymore"? And why, exactly,
is Canonical being criticized here for building a new (open source and GPL)
shell rather than contributing to GNOME?

~~~
MBCook
These points often contradict eachother. Let's assume for the sake of argument
that Ubuntu is no longer pushing things forward because people don't like
their new GUI. That means...

#4 is wrong because the meritocracy has decided that Unity isn't good enough
and it's failing

#7 is wrong because Ubuntu is trying to innovate on the desktop with Unity

and #8 is wrong because the fact that Unity exists and Ubuntu isn't shipping
GNOME.

Really, #8 is very weak. User polls may favor Debian based distributions, but
I'd expect that if you went by install base RPM is winning thanks to all the
RHEL servers out there. Git is more popular than SVN because it's demonstrably
better for many use cases, but we also have Hg. LibreOffice is the only real
office suite out there, Google Docs is not quite the same thing.

#8 then goes to point out that we do have KDE vs. GNOME, which as the face of
the desktop is a BIG difference. It also points out the hot competition
between Chromium and Firefox, web browsers being one of the most used apps on
any computer.

Listing 5 different Debian based distros and deciding that's a monoculture
seems odd on it's face.

~~~
swdunlop
Agree entirely. I charged straight for the comments to rant about the
stupidity of #8 (the monoculture argument) in the face of how Ubuntu and GNOME
(prior monocultures by their criteria) are now on the wane in the face of more
projects that are more responsive to their users.

~~~
pekk
It's not really responsiveness to users so much as being more like Gnome 2.
That's it. xfce didn't really have to do anything to get those users.

------
GraemeLion
The one that strikes me as the most obvious is the RMS one. Richard Stallman
goes out of his way to scream at people because "software must be free", and
he points to his laptop , which has 100% free software on it. That's
admirable.. but he doesn't mention that his computer is basically built by the
chinese government, using near slave labor, that makes FoxConn look like
Disney World.

It's just misguided and a one trick pony. He argues from a moral position, but
completely tunnel visions that morality to software only.

~~~
r0s
As he always has, nothing is new or remarkable here. RMS is no more or less
controversial today than ever before.

~~~
GraemeLion
Its actually kinda gotten nicer. IN the past, one RMS zealot would litter your
project's mailing lists with inane ramblings if you even DARED approach
businesses. Then those kids got out of college and had to figure out how to
solve problems, and their entire toolsets were based on solving problems with
free software.

------
benrhughes
I think the author is being a little uncharitable to MS. While he's correct
that the whole company isn't going OSS any time soon, there's a decent number
of projects that are "fully" OSS (as in they take contribs) and even more
where the source is available.

So they're not just making sure OSS works with their products. In a lot of
situations (esp in dev tools) they are actively promoting and releasing OSS.

------
Yver
Weak article. Inflammatory content easily debunked. I don't recommend reading.

~~~
adjin
they lost me at next page

------
ChrisNorstrom
Once again, $ money is the factor here:

FOSS for consumers = Stalled.

FOSS for businesses = Strong & Growing.

And why? Because of the faulty anti-money philosophy that so many open source
developers have. They're afraid of making money, afraid of being rich, afraid
of selling out, subconsciously loath rich people, are blindly following
ideology over results, and think that they can create software in their free
time while working a full time job with a baby on the way. SourceForget.net is
littered with dead open source projects that died for these exact reasons.
We've all seen awesome abandoned software that we were willing to pay for but
the developer never charged for and left to rot when he settled down and had a
kid.

Meanwhile their FOSS2Business counterparts have found ways to have a constant
stream of income, have profitable parent companies, pay developers, progress
the software, pay for usability studies, and provide professional
consultation. They're growing their kingdom using money. While FOSS2Consumers
is still mumbling "don't be like Microsoft" to themselves. It's aggravating to
watch.

Stop being afraid of money. It doesn't make you a sell out. It's just hurting
the whole community. That's why each year Ubuntu changes it's whole UI and
color scheme and at the end of the year no one cares. It's not the UI. It's
not Ubuntu. It's the end software that the average user sees and uses, it's
the terminal, it's finding "sudo apt get" advice in the forums, and other
user-unfriendly bullshit that's dragging down open source software.

Businesses want "free", consumers want "easy".

~~~
Locke1689
Time for the real hard truths.

Almost all major open source success are the product of subsidized
development, either by a commercial arm (Linux via Red Hat et al., gcc by
Google et al., Java by Sun et al., etc.) or a research arm (OCaml by Inria,
Haskell by MSR, etc.).

Open source by hobbyists doesn't work (at scale).

~~~
jiggy2011
From my understanding nobody seriously involved in FOSS expects hobbyists to
scale apart from on small or niche projects.

The term "open source" rather than "free software" was coined at least partly
in order to make it easier for business to understand and adopt the software
and incentivise them to throw paid manpower at it.

It seems to have broadly worked too, "we should adopt this solution because it
is open source" is something that MBA types actually say now.

~~~
Locke1689
I don't know if that's really the case. The existence of the AGPL implies that
many people see open source as a development model quite different from the
one used by open source inside corporations.

In other words, how open source is something which is used and modified
internally by company X, but rarely gets changes released because company X is
exclusively SaaS?

There are people who have very different opinions on what open source means.
Some of them think that a lot of open source business models are bad for open
source. It is important to point out that a lot of these licenses are the
reason why certain open source projects are widely successful.

~~~
jiggy2011
The AGPL makes sense for either dual licensed things (like MongoDB) or for
projects that simply don't have the need for any direct revenue generation
such as people's side projects.

AGPL seems to be to the cloud what GPL is to desktop. There are certainly
those such as Stallman who are basically opposed to SaaS, though I'm not
entirely sure where he draws the line between "in house software" , websites
and SaaS.

It does seem to me that asymptotically software with freer licenses "win". For
example the Linux kernel. I would not be surprised if facebook was eventually
replaced by something that existed under an AGPL license.

However such a system would probably be powerful enough to be considered a
platform in itself with it's own DSLs and therefor this would become where
proprietary software lived.

From a pragmatic standpoint though the increase in SaaS seems to have vastly
increased the amount of open source stuff available (rails etc) and perhaps
this trend will continue as higher abstraction levels of the stack become
"freer".

------
berlinbrown
My comment:

Nobody will claim that Apple creates ugly, hard to use hardware and software.
Design, art and beauty of hardware and software is a primary focus at Apple.
They are meticulous about the look and feel of their products.

I have been through 5 or 6 different Ubuntu's. Several versions of RedHat.
Both Gnome and KDE. I used Gentoo and Mandrake Linux back in the day. And just
recently used Linux Mint.

I actually like the look and feel of Ubuntu12. And that is the only one that I
actually like the user interface, the speed and usability of the desktop.
Pretty much every other version of the Linux OSes that I used. The fonts were
too big or the file manager was unresponsive. The software looked bad or was
incomplete. Eventually, I just gave in and went back to Windows or Mac.

They will never admit it, but open source is not concerned with design or
usability.

~~~
aw3c2
I will do the deed.

I find the iphone ugly compared to a more rounded, plastic smartphone. I find
the ipad's metal back uncomfortable to hold. I also find the size of the ipad
too big for reading. The Apple power cables are very edgey(?) and I dislike
that but that might be my common sense seeing the "planned breaking points".
Ok, software next: I find the detachment of the menu bar from windows
irritating. And on mobile devices I find the placement of the back button
awkward to use (most distance from my hand as possible). Apple is considered
great because of highly successful marketing.

~~~
sixbrx
All fine until the last sentence which doesn't follow because all of the
previous points were very minor (though I agree with some).

------
quasque
Regarding his fifth point, that rings very true and not just in open source,
but many male-dominated fields. It's almost cliché to see a bunch of guys
complaining to each other about the lack of female participants in one breath,
and cracking sexist jokes to each other in the next. If I were a lady, I'd
find that sort of environment unworthy of my attention too.

------
cabalamat
The title is patently untrue since most of these (i.e. 2, 3, 5, 6 7, 9) are
widely talked about and "admitted".

------
zobzu
some - many - albeit not all - of the points are actually spot on.

I'm sure many will not want to hear or read them. There are alot of
misconceptions, specially from the programmers & admins & other interested
folks who started to use and figure out open source a few years ago.

I still see people using, indeed, Ubuntu, claiming its good for "Open Source"
and "Freedom", and, what not. That's the distro the community has little
control of (while we have full control of, say, Debian), and which ships non-
free stuff and even tries it best to make _you_ buy non-free stuff (that means
proprietary, mind you), and capture your data.

Also it's important to note that the article is focused on the "GNU spirit of
open source", not the "BSD spirit of open source". Ie with enforced freedom.

~~~
drivebyacct2
>the community has little control of

in what way?

> even tries it best to make _you_ buy non-free stuff

 _what?_

------
tiedemann
99% of "OSS"-devs I know use Apple products, probably the least FOSS-
compatible company I can think of.

------
jiggy2011
Article could be aptly titled "Things people on HN say all the time about
various stuff".

------
kylebgorman
"Meritocracy" is a paradox: if people are given higher status by merit, they
can use that merit to give their less valuable ideas (or peers, or children,
or colleagues, or friends) a leg up. [this is not a new idea]

~~~
swdunlop
Meritocracy is a term that is wheeled out by a critic when he doesn't think
those involved have any merit.

------
SirDinosaur
linux desktop is dead? linux desktop is awesome! <http://awesome.naquadah.org>

------
vacri
Sexism is a problem in tech, not a problem that's particular to open source.

