6 ms·

> Open source produces quantitatively better software As someone who mainly uses open source software for most of my work, I'm not so sure about this.

by smegel 10y ago

scardine 10y ago
As someone who have to deal with crappy proprietary software for some of my work, all I can say is that with open source at least I can fix a problem or implement a feature that is lacking - instead of bang my head on the wall waiting for the good will of the vendor (even when I want to pay well for a hotfix).
- maze-le 10y ago
  I (and I think we all) have worked with crappy open source and good proprietary, as well as good open source and unusable proprietary software. But one thing you said stays true: "at least I can fix a problem or implement a feature that is lacking". And I think that is the main reason people stick to open source.
  - mamon 10y ago
    And I think that it's the main reason why some open source projects remain so crappy: main contributors are mostly interested in development of cool new features and users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves.
    - spriggan3 10y ago
      > And I think that it's the main reason why some open source projects remain so crappy: main contributors are mostly interested in development of cool new features and users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves. If these projects were crappy no one would bother using them. You're not entitled to anything as a user of open source software. Open source is about collaboration, not entitlement,it's not one dev having to maintain everything for other developers.
      - afarrell 10y ago
        > open source is about collaboration... you're not entitled to anything as a user of open source. It is true. However, this is why Proprietary software will always be around and why there are many markets where Free Software won't take over. There are many people that don't want to be a collaborator because they don't enjoy dealing with software. They just want to exchange money and have a problem solved for them. Free Software is, for some people/organizations, more expensive than proprietary software because they would need to hire somebody to solve their problems. You're right that they aren't entitled to someone else's labor for free. However when they pay someone's salary (by buying proprietary software, or a support contract), they are entitled to something: as much support and hand-holding as they can negotiate for given that they have the BATNA of paying a different company. For people/organizations that need that hand-holding, it is necessary to make some tool useful at all, so it ought be considered part of the cost when telling someone "you should use Open Source! It is Free as in Beer!" If you think that those folks are wrong about the cost of Free Software, then either tell the sales folks at Red Hat or do the arbitrage yourself. Ive seen arguments involving someone advocating Free Software for economic (rather than ideological) reasons and just not getting it, so I apologize if I sound like a broken record. (oh, and a tool can be useful enough to work, but crappy enough that it makes someone feel frustrated and stupid while using it.)
        HillaryBriss 10y ago
        > There are many people that don't want to be a collaborator because they don't enjoy dealing with software. Yes. Definitely true. Also, there are people/organizations who do enjoy dealing with software but don't have the time/resources to work on a particular piece of software that they need and use (because, for example, their core business focus is on some other area.) For them, too, it makes economic sense to buy it, even though they are capable of doing the work themselves given enough time.
        spriggan3 10y ago
        > they are entitled to something Yes they can fork and pay someone to resolve issues for them. If the maintainer isn't paid by the business using the project then he owes them absolutely nothing. That's why I'm talking about collaboration, and that's what developers often forget. Making a pull request is simple,80% of the time, the user has the capability to patch a bug, but he can't be bothered with that yet complains. That's entitlement.
    - scrupulusalbion 10y ago
      > users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves. FWIW, this is probably both an historical attitude and a population difference. If you and a colleague at a university just made csh to get your jobs done, then you will help each other out by doing the development. Because ya'll are also the entire userbase, then you are also the beta-testers. Back then, if you used a computer, it was because you were either developing software or entering data for a developer. Not very many non-developer users touched computers until the 80s; most people developed some kind of software, even if it was trivial BASIC programs on a Commodore. In the OSS world, you have always been expected to contribute fixes to bugs that affected you, because the tools and source code were in your hands. For most non-developers, there exists only a lack of skill to stop them from fixing bugs or at least filing usable bug reports. Nowadays, there are much more users who cannot or do not submit bug reports, let alone develop software. Nevertheless, the attitude since the days of csh has not changed much, because not a generation has passed since OSS went somewhat mainstream (e.g. in the data center). Whether OSS will leave behind the historical attitude that users should be able to understand the software they use (this seems a responsible attitude to me) remains to be seen. Regardless, the developer-base will likely continue to proportionally shrink and users will proportionally become less able to understand their computers.
    - Retric 10y ago
      It's my experience that most Open Source users pick Open Source because it's free.
- ksk 10y ago
  First of all why would you purchase software that didn't have the features you wanted or was buggy without evaluating it? Even so, many vendors accept returns. And if you think spending countless hours implementing and testing features in a codebase (that you have to spend hours just learning, and that is if you're lucky and already are familiar with the programming language its implemented in) is "better" than just paying a vendor to do it, then probably no rational argument would convince you otherwise, and I would withdraw my objection.
- xyience 10y ago
  You can do that with some proprietary software too -- proprietary doesn't have to mean no source code and no source code modification, unfortunately it has come to mean that for too many businesses and users willing to pay money to those businesses, so yeah, it's a point in favor of open source. I also appreciate that contributing to and encouraging use of open source has a societal benefit of training my eventual replacements for free, and open source of a particular license guarantees improvements to that software from other parties than the primary maintainer remain open.
akerro 10y ago
Depending on software... Eclipse is shitter than IDEA, but Linux/BSD beat Windows and Mac on servers in every aspect. OpenJDK gets updates and security patches more frequently than OracleJDK...
mathgeek 10y ago
It's an overly generally statement. What I believe the author really meant is that open source, given sufficient and equal time and resources, will generally produce better software than a closed source equivalent.
akerro 10y ago
Any opensource project has other opensource competitor. This makes OSS more competitive against proprietary software. If you choose to use PS1(proprietary software1) in your project and after 2 years PS1 changes their licensing and requests 3x more money of annual license you either have to switch to COMPATIBLE competitor, which means PS2 must operate on the same protocol/interface that PS1, which nearly never happens. Instead companies try to make their PS more vendor-locked. In opensource world, there are usually converters, importers, and switching from deprecated or slow OSS1 to better alternative OSS2 is easier and cheaper. At least that was my experience when we were considering various frameworks or libraries at work or in my projects. It's now one of the main reasons why I stuck with OSS at all times.
spriggan3 10y ago
It may look like this if one only uses open techs but that's absolutely not true. There is a wide range of libraries, apps that are commercial and have no equivalent in the OS world. Open source software might give the illusion that everything can be free and high quality when in fact very few open source projects are professional grade.
jordigh 10y ago
Yeah, that's a campaign slogan of the original OSI movement, sponsored by O'Reilly and spearheaded by esr and Bruce Perens. Other slogans are "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" or the promise that publishing your source means you'll get more contributors. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
- akerro 10y ago
  >with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow I'm pretty sure it's called Linus law and it was described in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
  - jordigh 10y ago
    Yeah, CatB became the "little red book" of the open source movement. It predates OSI and the term "open source" , but it was widely quoted as a motivation for it. The beginnings of open source, with the freeing of Mozilla, were all inspired by CatB.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      ahem Free software existed long before Linux, "Cathedral and the Bazaar", Netscape and so on. It started with the GNU project in 1984. While techincally correct to say that "open source" started then, it implies that the whole free software movement came out of that one group. It didn't.
      - jordigh 10y ago
        I said nothing of the free software movement. I was just talking about the open source movement which came afterwards. Open source started in 1998 during the release of Mozilla.
mcguire 10y ago
As far as I've been able to tell, after 20-odd years of software development and system administration, the only difference is that you have to pay for proprietary software and you can't change anything even if you know where the problem is. Literally, the only difference is the license.

> Open source produces quantitatively better software As someone who mainly uses open source software for most of my work, I'm not so sure about this.

by smegel 10y ago

> Open source produces quantitatively better software As someone who mainly uses open source software for most of my work, I'm not so sure about this.

scardine 10y ago

As someone who have to deal with crappy proprietary software for some of my work, all I can say is that with open source at least I can fix a problem or implement a feature that is lacking - instead of bang my head on the wall waiting for the good will of the vendor (even when I want to pay well for a hotfix).

maze-le 10y ago
I (and I think we all) have worked with crappy open source and good proprietary, as well as good open source and unusable proprietary software. But one thing you said stays true: "at least I can fix a problem or implement a feature that is lacking". And I think that is the main reason people stick to open source.
- mamon 10y ago
  And I think that it's the main reason why some open source projects remain so crappy: main contributors are mostly interested in development of cool new features and users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    > And I think that it's the main reason why some open source projects remain so crappy: main contributors are mostly interested in development of cool new features and users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves. If these projects were crappy no one would bother using them. You're not entitled to anything as a user of open source software. Open source is about collaboration, not entitlement,it's not one dev having to maintain everything for other developers.
    - afarrell 10y ago
      > open source is about collaboration... you're not entitled to anything as a user of open source. It is true. However, this is why Proprietary software will always be around and why there are many markets where Free Software won't take over. There are many people that don't want to be a collaborator because they don't enjoy dealing with software. They just want to exchange money and have a problem solved for them. Free Software is, for some people/organizations, more expensive than proprietary software because they would need to hire somebody to solve their problems. You're right that they aren't entitled to someone else's labor for free. However when they pay someone's salary (by buying proprietary software, or a support contract), they are entitled to something: as much support and hand-holding as they can negotiate for given that they have the BATNA of paying a different company. For people/organizations that need that hand-holding, it is necessary to make some tool useful at all, so it ought be considered part of the cost when telling someone "you should use Open Source! It is Free as in Beer!" If you think that those folks are wrong about the cost of Free Software, then either tell the sales folks at Red Hat or do the arbitrage yourself. Ive seen arguments involving someone advocating Free Software for economic (rather than ideological) reasons and just not getting it, so I apologize if I sound like a broken record. (oh, and a tool can be useful enough to work, but crappy enough that it makes someone feel frustrated and stupid while using it.)
      - HillaryBriss 10y ago
        > There are many people that don't want to be a collaborator because they don't enjoy dealing with software. Yes. Definitely true. Also, there are people/organizations who do enjoy dealing with software but don't have the time/resources to work on a particular piece of software that they need and use (because, for example, their core business focus is on some other area.) For them, too, it makes economic sense to buy it, even though they are capable of doing the work themselves given enough time.
      - spriggan3 10y ago
        > they are entitled to something Yes they can fork and pay someone to resolve issues for them. If the maintainer isn't paid by the business using the project then he owes them absolutely nothing. That's why I'm talking about collaboration, and that's what developers often forget. Making a pull request is simple,80% of the time, the user has the capability to patch a bug, but he can't be bothered with that yet complains. That's entitlement.
  - scrupulusalbion 10y ago
    > users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves. FWIW, this is probably both an historical attitude and a population difference. If you and a colleague at a university just made csh to get your jobs done, then you will help each other out by doing the development. Because ya'll are also the entire userbase, then you are also the beta-testers. Back then, if you used a computer, it was because you were either developing software or entering data for a developer. Not very many non-developer users touched computers until the 80s; most people developed some kind of software, even if it was trivial BASIC programs on a Commodore. In the OSS world, you have always been expected to contribute fixes to bugs that affected you, because the tools and source code were in your hands. For most non-developers, there exists only a lack of skill to stop them from fixing bugs or at least filing usable bug reports. Nowadays, there are much more users who cannot or do not submit bug reports, let alone develop software. Nevertheless, the attitude since the days of csh has not changed much, because not a generation has passed since OSS went somewhat mainstream (e.g. in the data center). Whether OSS will leave behind the historical attitude that users should be able to understand the software they use (this seems a responsible attitude to me) remains to be seen. Regardless, the developer-base will likely continue to proportionally shrink and users will proportionally become less able to understand their computers.
  - Retric 10y ago
    It's my experience that most Open Source users pick Open Source because it's free.
ksk 10y ago
First of all why would you purchase software that didn't have the features you wanted or was buggy without evaluating it? Even so, many vendors accept returns. And if you think spending countless hours implementing and testing features in a codebase (that you have to spend hours just learning, and that is if you're lucky and already are familiar with the programming language its implemented in) is "better" than just paying a vendor to do it, then probably no rational argument would convince you otherwise, and I would withdraw my objection.
xyience 10y ago
You can do that with some proprietary software too -- proprietary doesn't have to mean no source code and no source code modification, unfortunately it has come to mean that for too many businesses and users willing to pay money to those businesses, so yeah, it's a point in favor of open source. I also appreciate that contributing to and encouraging use of open source has a societal benefit of training my eventual replacements for free, and open source of a particular license guarantees improvements to that software from other parties than the primary maintainer remain open.

akerro 10y ago

Depending on software... Eclipse is shitter than IDEA, but Linux/BSD beat Windows and Mac on servers in every aspect. OpenJDK gets updates and security patches more frequently than OracleJDK...

mathgeek 10y ago

It's an overly generally statement. What I believe the author really meant is that open source, given sufficient and equal time and resources, will generally produce better software than a closed source equivalent.

akerro 10y ago

Any opensource project has other opensource competitor. This makes OSS more competitive against proprietary software. If you choose to use PS1(proprietary software1) in your project and after 2 years PS1 changes their licensing and requests 3x more money of annual license you either have to switch to COMPATIBLE competitor, which means PS2 must operate on the same protocol/interface that PS1, which nearly never happens. Instead companies try to make their PS more vendor-locked. In opensource world, there are usually converters, importers, and switching from deprecated or slow OSS1 to better alternative OSS2 is easier and cheaper. At least that was my experience when we were considering various frameworks or libraries at work or in my projects. It's now one of the main reasons why I stuck with OSS at all times.

spriggan3 10y ago

It may look like this if one only uses open techs but that's absolutely not true. There is a wide range of libraries, apps that are commercial and have no equivalent in the OS world. Open source software might give the illusion that everything can be free and high quality when in fact very few open source projects are professional grade.

jordigh 10y ago

Yeah, that's a campaign slogan of the original OSI movement, sponsored by O'Reilly and spearheaded by esr and Bruce Perens. Other slogans are "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" or the promise that publishing your source means you'll get more contributors. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

akerro 10y ago
>with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow I'm pretty sure it's called Linus law and it was described in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
- jordigh 10y ago
  Yeah, CatB became the "little red book" of the open source movement. It predates OSI and the term "open source" , but it was widely quoted as a motivation for it. The beginnings of open source, with the freeing of Mozilla, were all inspired by CatB.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    ahem Free software existed long before Linux, "Cathedral and the Bazaar", Netscape and so on. It started with the GNU project in 1984. While techincally correct to say that "open source" started then, it implies that the whole free software movement came out of that one group. It didn't.
    - jordigh 10y ago
      I said nothing of the free software movement. I was just talking about the open source movement which came afterwards. Open source started in 1998 during the release of Mozilla.

mcguire 10y ago

As far as I've been able to tell, after 20-odd years of software development and system administration, the only difference is that you have to pay for proprietary software and you can't change anything even if you know where the problem is. Literally, the only difference is the license.