What BurningBird Didn’t Get:
(Sorry, this one’s a bit stale.) Back when I posted What Open Source Zealots Don’t Get, BurningBird flamed in response.
There’s a lot that the Bird didn’t get. For example, she claims I “stopped condeming zealots, and started condeming the entire open source movement.” Of course, if you actually read the rant, you’ll notice the thesis right there at the end of the second paragraph: “[This essay] is intended to be a pragmatic look at why open source hasn’t lived up to the hype.” Can’t get much more clear than that.
I’m not going to respond to all the flamebait, but the most egregious example of the Bird’s lack of reading comprehension was the interpretation of this comment of mine…
If consumers want these kinds of tools that are of interest to consumers, but not of use to the geeks who know programming languages, then the consumers are either going to have to learn to code themselves (ain’t gonna happen; we all have other careers) or the consumer will need to pay to have someone else develop them.
… as meaning open source developers need to “get a career.” Sheesh. They have a career, Shelley: developing software. However, contrary to the implication in the Richard Stallman post that started all this, the average consumer — whose career is something other than software development — doesn’t care about being able to view or modify the underlying source code of applications or about learning how to do so. That’s why commercial sofware prospers.
Bottom line: some open source applications compete with commercial products. When the open source community really cares about a product, it can create a tool that gives any commercial product a run for the money (e.g. Apache, Linux, Perl, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.). Some open source apps don’t compete with commercial products as well. Why? Harnessing the passion for open source projects outside of software development and information systems management (e.g. the careers of most open source developers) is not something open source is good at.
Open source has yet to create a consumer-oriented (as in “for the consumer desktop”) open source product that has been even remotely as successful as Linux, Apache, et al. That doesn’t mean give up. People on Linux want to be able to manipulate graphics, too, hence the GIMP. The GIMP’s fine if you’re on Linux, but don’t ask a professional designer to give up Photoshop for it!
These apps fill a niche. They’re just not ever going to compete with their commerical counterparts (and often aren’t intended to!) because there’s zero evidence that the passion driving open source development of apps like Apache and Linux simple exists on a scale wide enough to deliver on competitive open source products for the consumer desktop.
Unless…