6 ms·

The Fall of Open Source

38 points by linuxhiker 10y ago

rxm 10y ago
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.
api 10y ago
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!
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "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 x 10. It's the reason Linux was and is so behind on the desktop. It's reason IRC with its cute commands fell behind IM, text, and Slack. It's why Tresys makes money on those who otherwise wouldnt touch SELinux. Probably why many people didnt do backups before specific, usable programs on Windows and Time Machine on Mac. Why they didnt share files so much on FTP but are all over Dropbox and SendThisFile. It's a huge problem they need to tackle immediately. Each thing contributing to bad UX needs to be knocked out of the equation. In many cases, esp configuration files, apathy is usually the reason instead of difficulty.
  - api 10y ago
    It's also related to the lack of diversity in tech. Arcane complexity affords an easy way to exclude people from the club in a passive-aggressive indirect way. It's similar to how some religions use complicated systems of ritual, symbol, dietary restriction, etc. to determine who is 'in' and who is 'out'. The thing is there's nothing wrong with this per se. If the goal is to create a place where geeks can show off to other geeks, that's totally cool. But don't get angry or self-righteous when people who are not in an elitist exclusionary club do not use the tools of that club but instead choose 'mainstream' options like Slack, Facebook, etc. After all you are intentionally making it hard for them to use your tools. The complexity and arcana are screaming "go away! this is not for you!" I've personally grown to loathe arcane complexity for its own sake and see it as a sign not of "elite hax0r skillz" but of inferior intelligence and laziness. True genius simplifies, explains, clarifies, and creates things that are elegant because that is harder. Simplicity requires so much more effort and intelligence than complexity.
- andrewbinstock 10y ago
  Quite agreed. The view that to be an authentic contributor to OSS, I need to use only OSS tools makes no sense to me. It's not even about my time (although that's part of it), it's about using the best tool for the job. If that tool happens to be closed-source, so be it. There's been no "fall of open source." If anything, OSS is increasingly the default for tools. And old, closed source tools are being opened up--for example, Microsoft's massive releases of source for their dev tools.
verandaguy 10y ago
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.
meira 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Have you looked at mattermost?
  - meira 10y ago
    It's not about tool replacement, but awareness enhacement.
    - bb88 10y ago
      Right, so I'm making you aware of mattermost.
      - meira 10y ago
        Nice :)
slgeorge 10y ago
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.

38 points by linuxhiker 10y ago

rxm 10y ago

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.

api 10y ago

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!

nickpsecurity 10y ago
"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 x 10. It's the reason Linux was and is so behind on the desktop. It's reason IRC with its cute commands fell behind IM, text, and Slack. It's why Tresys makes money on those who otherwise wouldnt touch SELinux. Probably why many people didnt do backups before specific, usable programs on Windows and Time Machine on Mac. Why they didnt share files so much on FTP but are all over Dropbox and SendThisFile. It's a huge problem they need to tackle immediately. Each thing contributing to bad UX needs to be knocked out of the equation. In many cases, esp configuration files, apathy is usually the reason instead of difficulty.
- api 10y ago
  It's also related to the lack of diversity in tech. Arcane complexity affords an easy way to exclude people from the club in a passive-aggressive indirect way. It's similar to how some religions use complicated systems of ritual, symbol, dietary restriction, etc. to determine who is 'in' and who is 'out'. The thing is there's nothing wrong with this per se. If the goal is to create a place where geeks can show off to other geeks, that's totally cool. But don't get angry or self-righteous when people who are not in an elitist exclusionary club do not use the tools of that club but instead choose 'mainstream' options like Slack, Facebook, etc. After all you are intentionally making it hard for them to use your tools. The complexity and arcana are screaming "go away! this is not for you!" I've personally grown to loathe arcane complexity for its own sake and see it as a sign not of "elite hax0r skillz" but of inferior intelligence and laziness. True genius simplifies, explains, clarifies, and creates things that are elegant because that is harder. Simplicity requires so much more effort and intelligence than complexity.
andrewbinstock 10y ago
Quite agreed. The view that to be an authentic contributor to OSS, I need to use only OSS tools makes no sense to me. It's not even about my time (although that's part of it), it's about using the best tool for the job. If that tool happens to be closed-source, so be it. There's been no "fall of open source." If anything, OSS is increasingly the default for tools. And old, closed source tools are being opened up--for example, Microsoft's massive releases of source for their dev tools.

verandaguy 10y ago

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.

meira 10y ago

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 10y ago
Have you looked at mattermost?
- meira 10y ago
  It's not about tool replacement, but awareness enhacement.
  - bb88 10y ago
    Right, so I'm making you aware of mattermost.
    - meira 10y ago
      Nice :)

slgeorge 10y ago

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.