Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important.
That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT.
Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languages) is very hard. Many industries start life fragmented, but looking now at the tech landscape, sadly there is more hegemony in the proprietary world than the open source one.
If FOSS is ever to be adopted by a wider community that is inviting to newcomers (both users and hackers), this has to be addressed. It is not being addressed, and the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents.
One example I'll cite is Inkscape. I now honestly believe it would have resulted in better software if this has been written once per platform (WinForms/WPF + Cocoa) rather than with GTK. It's years between minor bug releases, and it gets slower with each release. The (just released) 1.0 is unbearably slow (i.e. unusable). I've spent many hours trying to get familiar with the codebase so I could contribute to it. There's no documentation to speak of for developers, and the little that I've grasped so far leads me to thing it's better left to rot. The core is based on Sodipodi, a project abandoned in 2003.
FWIW I have started writing a clean room replacement in Swift/AppKit, but I'm considering altering this to Swift/UIKit for iPad so it'll be cross platform (albeit Apple only).
I'm going to guess you're pretty exclusively an Apple user. I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of the people developing FOSS don't have access to Apple's platforms for doing development, and in many cases, even testing. Because of the walls that Apple has set up for it's platform, doing so is often impractically expensive.
I think this is part of what is meant by being slow to critisize. Yes, FOSS often sucks on Apple's platform, but it's also useful to understand the factors involved, and what motivates people.
P.S. The best of luck in your endevors! I think the world of SVG editors could use some solid competiton.
I'm guessing you mean something other than FOSS (free / open source software) in your critique of FOSS. Reason being, Swift is FOSS (https://github.com/apple/swift), both the compiler and the standard library. Likewise, the Microsoft C# compiler is also FOSS (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn).
You seem to enjoy closed-source platform libraries (WinForms, AppKit), and want to promote developing software that relies on them. The survival characteristics of this approach don't seem very strong. Good luck!
Yes, that's true, but unfortunately these libraries only work on a closed-source platform, namely Microsoft Windows. My apologies if this wasn't clear in my earlier post.
> The (just released) 1.0 is unbearably slow (i.e. unusable).
I've been playing with it on the work laptop (32GB, 16 core i9) and yeah, it's an unpleasant experience even there. But here's hoping they'll get to tweaking because it's pretty much the only way I can create embroidery files easily (via InkStitch)
FOSS seems to be adopted by most Internet companies, where Swift, C# and .NET are fringe languages.
clang and gcc produce faster code than Visual Studio and are more pleasant to use. IBM is now using clang in its terrible xlc compiler.
Mathematica uses gmp (in (gasp) C!), there's no commercial alternative to gmp or mpfr.
If you are writing apps for iOS or Windows, sure, the cited languages are better. That is quite a narrow field though and I'm not sure how FOSS could enter that field.
> the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents
Ignoring for the moment that both of those are open-source, I've used both of them for several years on major projects, and I'm not sure I see this "power and elegance" you refer to.
Did you mean to say "old concepts dressed in the newer fashion, and backwards compatibility"?
That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap...
I understood the article was about criticizing persons and their reasons for doing something. What you say is an opinion on results, an opinion that could be correct. But you can't make a convincing criticism of behaviour based on results, except with better results.
I think the Linux kernel is crap, for what it's worth. That's not to say there isn't very smart people solving very complicated problems with it. But it is a monolith with a egomaniac in charge. This view is not solely my own.
That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT.
Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languages) is very hard. Many industries start life fragmented, but looking now at the tech landscape, sadly there is more hegemony in the proprietary world than the open source one.
If FOSS is ever to be adopted by a wider community that is inviting to newcomers (both users and hackers), this has to be addressed. It is not being addressed, and the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents.
One example I'll cite is Inkscape. I now honestly believe it would have resulted in better software if this has been written once per platform (WinForms/WPF + Cocoa) rather than with GTK. It's years between minor bug releases, and it gets slower with each release. The (just released) 1.0 is unbearably slow (i.e. unusable). I've spent many hours trying to get familiar with the codebase so I could contribute to it. There's no documentation to speak of for developers, and the little that I've grasped so far leads me to thing it's better left to rot. The core is based on Sodipodi, a project abandoned in 2003.
FWIW I have started writing a clean room replacement in Swift/AppKit, but I'm considering altering this to Swift/UIKit for iPad so it'll be cross platform (albeit Apple only).