Open vs Closed

Post by **Patrick** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 7:36 am

As a goof I listened to the latest MacBreak weekly:
http://www.twit.tv/mbw55

The conversation initially was about the I-Phone but progressed to Open vs Closed development models. Give it a listen but be prepared for your head to explode. Leo had the most tempered and grounded opinions compared to the other Macboys. He talked about the strengths and weaknesses of both open and closed systems. I agree the biggest weakness of Open Source is that some projects are ruled by committee and get bogged down in debate about what direction to go in. As a result the development crawls in comparison to proprietary projects where developers work full time on it. This is true to a certain degree. Eventually the open project will get it right. Often the best Open Source projects are the ones ruled by a benevolent dictator or a small team of developers. Focus is critical to the success of an Open Source project. What do you think?

schotty · Post by **schotty** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 4:39 pm

I listened to this one a few weeks ago. Your summary was pretty good. A few of the bozos dont get software at all. They just want functional software and for some reason will pay anything for it. Oh well, at least Leo gets it and got his due time to tell it the way it is. Alex Lindsay generally is pretty spot on, but I don't recall if he was even present for that show. Seems the Mac only world puds were there that if it aint apple it sucks, and apple can do no wrong, all hail kool aid presented by our Lord Steve.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 1:16 am

schotty wrote:Seems the Mac only world puds were there that if it aint apple it sucks, and apple can do no wrong, all hail kool aid presented by our Lord Steve.

Surprised?

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 10:42 am

schotty wrote:They just want functional software and for some reason will pay anything for it.

And what's wrong with that?

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 11:11 am

I'm pretty big on the "benevolent dictator" model, which seems to be like the old joke about democracy: it's the worst system there is, except for all the others that have been tried.

Where I work I've seen so many things get bogged down in committee and the subsequent analysis paralysis that I now believe you absolutely must have a strong leader in charge to make final decisions and get something moving. Even if they make a wrong decision or two, it's better than getting nothing done at all. If one person isn't in charge, it's not very likely to get done. It's better if that leader listens to people, obviously, but the thing about open source software is that you can choose to leave that leader, though there had better be good reason.

Occasionally you see two colleagues that can also work together and share leadership, but that's less common.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 11:17 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:
schotty wrote:They just want functional software and for some reason will pay anything for it.
And what's wrong with that?

I'm guessing his point was that this thinking might make things so simplistic that you'll ignore the consequences and suffer later for short-sighted thinking. MS Office and iTunes might be functional, but if you care anything about vendor lock-in and long term format viability, you'll be less inclined to "pay the price" both monetarily and ideologically.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 12:23 pm

The truth is that 98% of the population don't care about things like DRM and Lock-in since everything they buy and use is proprietary anyhow. Wanting something to "just work" is entirely sensible. People talk about how linux "just works" and "runs like a bat out of hell" all the time, but invariably these same people are always struggling with one piece of their system or another that's broken. X is screwed up, audio levels went nuts, missing codecs needed to watch whatever multimedia thing the need to see/hear, some new version of x, y, or z app no longer functions correctly, long working x, y or z hardware no longer works correctly, recent kernel updates broke something, etc. Even with my sysadmin hat on at work, I dread this sort of thing. I can't imagine wanting to dick around with a computer all day if I wasn't a technophile. And honestly, if I ever get out of the biz and do something more reasonable with my life, I'll probably have a similar outlook to most folks - I'll need something that works, doesn't break often, and has hardware support from most major vendors.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 1:14 pm

People do want "it just works" computing and I don't blame them, either. Most people don't care about lock-in, though I believe businesses are starting to care. The music companies didn't care for being locked-in to iTunes, and it seems they'll attempt to do something about it. As for DRM, I do hear some people grumble about how they can't copy music over to another computer, so there are perhaps a few more who care about DRM, but Snarkout is right that the vast majority don't care about that, either.

Of course, as long as their are proprietary formats, things will never "just work." I don't care what system you use, Microsoft's latest document format, the latest multimedia codec, or something like that is going to stop things from just working. Trying to get people to understand that is a challenge, though. We still have to deal with Microsoft Works files coming in, and even when we send out PDFs (using Adobe software, too) people complain that they can't open them. I'll be waiting to see how the vote goes on Microsoft's document format tomorrow, though I don't have much hope that anyone's going to resist the money and bullet stuffing Microsoft is doing.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 1:21 pm

Thinking about breakages, I haven't experienced any nasty breakage in quite a while. I don't stray from the main ubuntu repository, which might be helpful. One annoying bit is that in Edgy, F-Spot could export to Flickr, while in Feisty that feature is broken. That sort of thing does seem to happen pretty often, and is annoying. Guess I need to get a box primarily for testing and start helping instead of whining.

allix · Post by **allix** » Sun Sep 02, 2007 5:53 am

Archiving is a major problem which proprietary formats do not solve, I remember hearing about the some bbc archives not viewable and only being 10 years old.
I am personally in favour of open standards because with open/free someone could just make something similar add different features and close the code.

tuxtorials.com · Post by **tuxtorials.com** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 2:32 am

I've tried telling my father about how bad DRM etc is whenever there's references to it on TV and all he keeps saying are things like "but they can't do that" or "the Government will never allow it"

I don't think it's only that 98% don't care but some of them still don't believe how much behind stuff like this our Governments are. Not wanting to start a human rights style debate here, but those people are in for a hell of a shock once everything is run by one big monopoly forcing stuff we don't need onto us and when RFID tags start appearing in everything!

Chris