The Importance of Being Linux (ABC)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 9:21 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Apparently Mr. Dvorak doesn't have many hobbies...otherwise he'd understand the way that people work long, hard hours at the things they love to do. (Even without a 'mean boss' to inspire terror in them.)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 10:19 UTC (Wed) by pontus (guest, #3701) [Link]

Fear as a motivator at the workplace? I'm astonished that anyone could think of that as something positive. What world is this guy from?

Posted Jun 23, 2004 10:23 UTC (Wed) by shredwheat (subscriber, #4188) [Link]

I find this quote about the pace of open source development to be completely opposite of the "Real World". The quality of open source software is developing at such a rapid pace, it is hard to keep up. But it is also exciting to see.

Twice a year there are new releases from the major distributions. The included software is usually vastly improved over the previous ones, even if the distribution itself hasn't changed significantly. If you chart back and examine the development of OSX or Windows, it feels like Linux Distributions have come along further and faster than any of these in any period of time. And the pace seems to be getting even faster now. We are seeing regularly scheduled releases from projects like Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and many others I am always using.

Of course, you could point out several stinkers as far as development speed. Things like the Hurd kernel are probably the biggest offenders. I can't decide to laugh or weep at the Debian release cycles.

But overall I'd say Open Source delivers more in less amount of time.

Posted Jun 23, 2004 10:39 UTC (Wed) by Cinabrium (guest, #19569) [Link]

Mr. Dvorak doesn't seem to be very aware of the evolution of free software projects, or the sample he has taken is very poor and extremely biased. Even if a large number of projects move slowly (including those that have reached a mature status and don't need to go forward at fast pace), we could find hundreds of projects evolving amazingly fast.
From OpenBSD to MySQL, from gaim to care2x, from JBoss to phpMyAdmin, many free software projects show a vitality largely exceeding what is seen in the proprietary world. The subject of this comment refers to an old mathematicians' joke about an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician travelling in a train (you will find it in many places... let's spare the space). I'm afraid that Mr. Dvorak is concluding that all sheep are black. I just wonder why...

Posted Jun 23, 2004 11:20 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

I stopped reading Dvorak years ago, after I started to notice all the somewhat-subliminal plugs that were getting into his columns.

As for using fear as a way to get people working.....

Wasn't the whole Tolkien trilogy about getting rid of people like that, and letting people work and live based on their love of others?

The idea of a world where fear motivates people to accomplish somthing is about the sickest idea I have ever encountered, and, frankly, people who use that technique are the ones who make me wish I didn't have to go to work in the morning at all (and that I could do something to make them go away, and then enjoy my work again.)

In fact, I will say that my most productive years were those in which I felt very *little* fear, and was greatly appreciated by my bosses, who were not mean.

If anyone asked me for advice about dealing with a boss who motivates by fear, my first suggestion would be to leave the job and find another one; my second would be to try and find a kinder person over that boss, and my best suggestion would be to somehow get that boss in trouble with the police if possible (because someone who uses fear as a motivator is probably doing something else that's very, very wrong.)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 11:33 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

It seems to me that community-run projects only move for the sake of improvement, while commercial projects move for other reasons as well.

When I used it two years ago, JBoss was, as far as I could tell, perfect. Has it changed? Not so far as I can tell. Has Apache changed in the 8 years I've been using it? No, it worked right then, and it's the same now.

Of course, there are plenty of projects which show great improvement over a short period. But the projects that people think of are generally the ones which are already good, and there's generally not much to do to them.

The kernel changes because there were (and are) things wrong with it that aren't a big problem for the current users, but are a problem for a lot of potential users. 2.4 was no good if you needed a list of all of your known devices; the current code has problems with more than 256 processors; there are always new devices which need support.

Desktop software changes because it's an area that isn't well understood. Gnome and KDE (and Windows) are popular not due to being right, but due to the right thing having not been worked out yet.

The reason the article comes out positive, which I'm not sure the author realizes, is that he uses a lot of software which is perfect for his needs already. When he says that he wants Banyan Vines to be open source, I bet he doesn't have any changes to it in mind, aside from having it ported and built for his current computer.

Posted Jun 23, 2004 12:47 UTC (Wed) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

Years ago, someone pointed out the nearly EVERYTHING John C. Dvorak said or predicted was 180 degrees incorrect. I see this is still true..

Posted Jun 23, 2004 13:29 UTC (Wed) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link]

I'm constantly amazed at how columnists can write anything that they want to without the slightest bit of data to back up their arguments. Which projects are slow? What closed source projects are they slower than? Maybe I'm thinking too much like the grad student that I am but how can you make statements like "all the other open-source projects move along at a rate best described as glacial," with nothing to back it up? The funny thing is that since he says that "all" are slow, I only need one example to refute his argument. How about Gaim as an example? They release new updates about once a month, everytime Yahoo or MSN mess around with their protocals or servers. I think that once-a-month is considerably faster than glacial.

Being a technology columnist seems like a good racket, apparently you can write anything you want and they will publish it. I should look into it when I get tired of working for a living.

Posted Jun 23, 2004 19:30 UTC (Wed) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

If you look at the progress in some segments of the application stack, it
does seem glacial. For example, the office suite. Other than OO, which
has been under development for over a decade, most are progressing nicely
but far from being complete. Not for a lack of effort though. Completely
functional desktop applications are complex and large. And they take
years to develop, proprietary or free.

From the standpoint of someone who uses the full featured applications as
a baseline, open source development seems slow.

Derek

Posted Jun 24, 2004 15:55 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Dvorak falls into the same trap as many other observers, and as many open source evangelists. They don't distinguish between releases of stable versions, and between access to code under development.

ESR once coined the mantra "Release early, release often". (Sorry, too lazy to look up the full citation.) I would rephrase that as "Give people access to your development sources." There are many very good open source systems that haven't released a new stable version since years. Sometimes this is a Good Thing(tm), sometimes some interim version would be nice. Debian comes to mind, of course; but also less prominent examples like ht://Dig. Such stable versions are often released more seldom than their proprietary counterparts. I'm active in LaTeX development, so I know about late releases quite well... :-) Of course, this does not really matter for Open Source pundits; they can access the development version. For them, the system changes often.

On the other hand, for companies it's sometimes hard. Many open source policies in companies state that one may only use stable releases. From the view of such companies, there is also an other issue: They often get their software package updates from vendors, together with support. So the time gap from development to their vendor is often even more important for them. And we need only look at the security section of this LWN issue to learn about some update delays at distributors. ;-)

So, IMO open source has both properties: Fast update cycles, and slow release cycles. And that's OK, for most of the time. In companies, we don't want ever-changing software. We want, need, and get some stability. Sometimes stable releases might come a bit faster, but what the hell. There's the larger problem that it's sometimes hard to get support for older releases (say, 3 to 4 years old) that are still in production.

Disclaimer: I do consultancy work for executive management of multi-national companies. Part of that work is also on open source strategy and open source policies. That opinion above has been built by analysis of major open source systems I have recommended or wanted to recommend to my clients, and sometimes couldn't.

Cheers, Joachim

Posted Jun 25, 2004 8:43 UTC (Fri) by cliffman (guest, #13144) [Link]

Oh my duck.
This man, widely respected by sheep, writes that "critical mass has been achieved", wars over, you mooks won, and all ya'll can do is complain that he called some of you slow?
Sigh.
Look, I've watched some of you _eat, and it's worse than that!

Also, i _use mh, and i want to _keep using mh, so go have a beer, pat yourself on the back and then get busy!

"Release early, drink 'till closing"