Open Source Is Not a Democracy 641
itwbennett writes "A recent kerfuffle within the Ubuntu community serves as a reminder of an inconvenient truth: open source is not a democracy, writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The discussion started innocuously enough, within Bug #532633 in light-themes (Ubuntu) on Launchpad, where the order of the window controls within the Light theme were requested to be re-arranged to be on the upper right side of any given window. Light, it seemed, now placed the buttons on the left side, similar to the Mac OS X interface.' The discussion turned into an argument and culminated in this exchange in which Mark Shuttleworth lays down the law:
'It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this... No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source is utterly a democracy.
Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun. Those who come and join you are always there voluntarily, either because they feel like it, or you are payiong them to be there. And maybe no one feels like it. And maybe you don't feel like paying anyone. Maybe you are alone there. Maybe you didn't bother to make your tree at all. But you have that right to, at any moment. And this is utterly democratic, and it is at the heart of why open source exists. In fact, this is why it works so much better.
Shuttleworth has a very big, popular tree. He pays many participants and many others join him for free. He gets to make the decisions in his own tree, because it's his. He can't tell anyone else what to do in theirs.
Now if it's a Bill Gates product, and you do not like where those buttons got moved to, or i.e. you have a critical bug derailing years of your work, or whatever your issue may be, you will be ignored, or if you are very lucky, someone may even explicitly take a moment to personally tell you, "fuck off, peon." Your only real option is not to be so foolish as to use a Bill Gates product again in the future.
But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.
(All those who have never lived under a monarch, dictator, or cabal, please identify yourselves now with cynical comments about your democratic government.)
So I reiterate, as stories go, this is pure -1 Troll. IT World and Proffitt look like an 8 year old trying to say something "controvertial" about global warming by noting that it's snowing outside. I'm a bit sad that Taco rewarded them by sending them some traffic.
Any software project that is a Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Is doomed to fail.
We all know what a jackass is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a Thoroughbred designed by a committee, or in this case a huge community. Good for Mark. Inputs are important but final design decisions should not be subject to a vote.
People complaining..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Reminds me of gaim/pidgin... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some time back, gaim had a UI redesign where they replaced protocol-specific icons with generic ones, in the decision that hiding the protocol is the right thing to do. A lot of us thought that was boneheaded, and some people forked GAIM, others wrote plugins to undo the change, and a lot of us offered harsh criticism of the developers responsible. If it were a democracy, we probably would've voted it undone. Right decision? Wrong decision? We didn't like it, but most of us decided not to walk away from it (either to the forks or further away).
Opensource provides new possibilities for governance - the ability to fork is something we don't really have in nations (splitting into bits really isn't the same), and with the exception of protocol decisions we generally can reshape our environment as we like (local patches, greasemonkey, etc). By having so much local variance possible, we no longer have our elbows so close to our neighbours and so there's less hazard for technocratic or autocratic decision styles (provided they use licenses that sustain this type of environment - some developers like Tuomo Valkonen prove to be batshit insane and play license games to compound their boneheaded technical decisions).
With licensing messes out of the way and the ability to fork, the most precious thing for us is mostly time/attention. If we want to fork a project, we're balancing our time and attention versus how much we care over the relevant issue. It's the easiest thing in the world to follow a path paved by the actual developer, while maintaining patches of any size (or starting a parallel community for a true fork) is an ongoing burden. If it's for an important enough reason, we'll do it. If that reason turns out to be not important enough to be worth the bother, all we can do is complain and hope to convince whomever is already doing that work to pave our path.
A Pirate Analogy ... (Score:2, Insightful)
More of the Same (Score:4, Insightful)
This kind of bickering is the ugly dark side of an otherwise decent philosophy. The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity, is both useful and unpleasant and will always be a locus of justifiable criticism of the FOSS community in general.
Move along. Nothing new to see here.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Open source is not a democracy in a corporation like Ubantu. In that case, it's a hierarchy. In a pool of programmers outside the corporate structure it can be a democracy, but doesn't have to be.
Open source is more like art or science, where everything is built on what has come before. Science and art aren't democracies, either.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a democracy, in fact that isn't even a sensical comparison.
Yes you can take a copy of the ball and leave, but that's not the same as having a way to make decisions in a group.
Of course, Open Source should not even be compared. One is a way of developing, the other is about how to organize a community. In context, Mark is saying that specific group organizational structure is not a Democracy.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what you're saying. You're advocating that non-contributors to a project get a vote? I mean, I buy goods made in Europe, that doesn't mean I get to decide what the EU rules on what's called "sausage" are.
Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment (Score:3, Insightful)
Your posting makes not a bit of sense. Could you qualify that? In English? Please?
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe is not a democracy: it's probably closer to anarchy. A free-for-all, with nobody in any position to make any decisions.
Closer to a democracy would be Wikipedia, where the "consensus" idea is the one that prevails, even though it's a free-for-all. But the label "democracy" only works since everybody works off of the same fork and the leadership is (mostly) hands-off. Once the leadership gets involved, it's no longer a democracy.
With open-source, a single person still "owns" a fork. No matter how you try to make it fit, democracy doesn't apply when any one person/group can make the sole decision on what happens, and that leadership cannot be changed. Like it or not, almost all open-source projects have a governing body which answers only to themselves. Once the leadership gets involved in decisions, it's a dictatorship. When they're hands-off, it gives the illusion of being a democracy.
Re:Why left? (Score:4, Insightful)
I certainly agree that "because Mac does it" is not a good reason. But that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason -- you've made a straw man argument, IMO.
And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much.
But I can think of some reasons that might apply: "as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done, therefore putting elements there minimizes gratuitous movement of those elements" could easily be a factor in a reasonable decision along these lines. Or "as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense".
If you don't agree with the conclusion, prove to the design team that you're enough of a design expert that they should pay attention to you, and have the discussion with them.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:2, Insightful)
The information is out there freely available.
Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about fixing other people's code.
I can't imagine how you could set the barriers any lower....
Compared to most barriers in life they're right down there with the rats leaping over them joyfully.
Because everyone is a programmer, right?
Everyone with the desire to be a programmer, a bit of time, a bit of willpower, a working brain and a net connection.
So sure.
Not everyone.
And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's code bases and every library, UI toolkit etc that are also used, right?
yes. people are not omniscient. it's true.
Users do vote... (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time a user chooses what distro to use, they vote.
Don't like the way a distribution does things? Use a different one.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, it's kind of an asshole thing for Canonical to lure people into their "community" and then outright ignore them.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
Anarchy is direct democracy. I looked it up.
Re:Why left? (Score:5, Insightful)
You make a lot of assumptions.
"The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side,"
Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?
And no 'It's obvious' doesn't cut it. Data only.
Why do you assume if the scroll bar is on the right , then windows on the right is more efficient?
"Putting it on the left for no good reason* just makes you have to mouse farther to accomplish the same task."
First, you are simple stating 'no good reason' without any backing. Strawman.
Second, what do you base where the mouse is most likely to be at any moment?
"* And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason."
No, but why Mac does it may be a good reason.
~~~ About your sig ~~~~~
heh, I love stuff like that. While they may have a good reason for doing it that way, claiming it's green for marketing reason crack me up.
After they give you your coffee, you should pout it from your mug into a paper cup. To make a point.
Re:Why left? (Score:4, Insightful)
"And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much."
Job security?
Show me software that's a democracy.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll show you an unshipped product.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Whatever you're describing, it's not Democracy. In a democracy, the rules of the majority are binding on the minority. What you describe, however, is essentially the absence of rule - or anarchy.
In a democracy, everyone votes, and everyone follows the rules established by that vote. So if 75% of the people in a pure Democracy decided that it was illegal to wear blue, then the azure lovers have no recourse; they must either abstain from wearing blue or face punishment. The key traits here are: voting, and that decisions of the majority bind the minority. Effectively, minorities have fewer rights than the majority, since they have less power to enforce their will.
In an anarchy, everyone has the same power as another. Blue lovers have the right to leave and form the Sapphire Republic, where everyone wears one article of blue clothing every day. If someone living in Sapphire decides they want to wear green instead, they can pull out of Sapphire and form the Shamrock Union.
And I don't think it actually works better: It's still very difficult to find FOSS applications for many tasks, and it's even more difficult to find FOSS that's equal to or better than commercial versions of the same applications. Anyone who's ever tried to run a project by committee knows that in reality, good old fashioned tyranny is probably the best way to actually get things done.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points. Apparently some moderators have no idea what a democracy is. other then 'democracy is good and open source is good therefore anything you talks about how either one could be different is a troll'
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone is a programmer, right?
If you aren't a programmer and still care that much, you could always PAY a programmer to do the work for you. At least you have the choice. If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually open source isn't a democracy, it's a meritocracy.
In a democracy everyone gets the same vote, in a meritocracy the power is wielded by those who do the best work.
Meritocracies, at least with open source, actually work better than democracy. In a democracy it's mob rule because most people are making decisions based on very incomplete information. In a meritocracy it's the people who have the knowledge and the ability who decide the direction while the users have very little direct power. Now with a country this could lead to autocracy because the people are trapped in the landmass, but with open source there's no lock-in, thus the leaders can't abuse their power and you get a highly functional political system.
There's a reason people call Linus the benevolent dictator for life, he can do whatever he wants with the source tree, but he makes very good decisions with that power and that's why people follow him.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.
You own your source tree the same way you own your home or Taco owns this website. There is nothing the least bit undemocratic about being able to have your own code and your own opinion.
But it is only with open source that you can even copy someone else's code and do it your own way. No one can stop you from doing it your way, nor can you stop anyone else from doing it theirs. Hence, not anarchy, or even close.
It's so simple (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"
This is where you fork. End of story. kthxbai
Re:More of the Same (Score:4, Insightful)
The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity
Too broad of a brush. At Ubuntu, the dude who pays the paychecks and owns the servers has said, make it so. And it is done. Hope you like it! If not, tough cookies!
In Debian, its a bit different. Any developer can take that source package, fix it, and upload an new package named "whatever-better-ui" or something. Eventually one side will get tired of the game and there will be some renaming.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
In France, Marie Antoinette sometimes entertained visitors to her court who had grievances against her sovereign rule. I imagine even she occasionally agreed with someone's grievance and did what they asked.
France was still not a democracy until after the revolution.
Because her indulgence was optional. Anecdotes like this are worse than meaningless. They have the potential to be confusing.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
No not everyone is. But you could pay a programmer to fix it for you.
I find it amusing that FOSS users seem to think that they can dictate what a programmer must due when they are not paying the programmer a single cent.
If you do not like you have several choices.
1. Learn to program and fix it yourself.
2. Pay a programmer to fix it for you.
3. Convince the maintainer to fix it the way you like it.
4. Find a project that works the way you want it to and use that.
5. Start your own project and get others that agree with you to contribute code.
The only option that you don't have is the option to enforce your will on a project maintainer that you do not pay. You can not treat FOSS programmers as your personal code slaves.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
A contributed== some one that contributes
Code
Artwork
Testing
Documentation
Money
A contributor != user that does none of the above.
User Interface Design (Score:5, Insightful)
The old metaphor is: if someone builds a nuclear reactor, it is left to the most qualified engineers. But if you build a bike shed everyone wants to have their opinion heard. I.e. if you want to change the way an IO scheduler or a pagefault handler works, only experienced kernel hackers will bother discussing it, but if you move around two buttons, everyone understand what you've done and wants to weigh in.
But honestly if you are an specialist in building bikesheds, you can never expect to be taken as seriously as those who build nuclear reactors. Someone just reconfigured Metacity to switch some buttons because they thought it was better that way, surely this feat proves that they are the experts here and their judgement should be deferred to.
Back when I regularly contributed to Gnome they switched the button order on dialog boxes, I actually liked the new layout but it was just personal taste, their was no objective improvement to be worth the enormous amount of bitching from the community. And in the end this will be the same, I will get used to this new layout, all that will change is a few indignant people will stop using Ubuntu and it will mainly serve to piss off anyone who borrows my computer.
In a way, the new button order makes more sense, maximise is the opposite of close and should be on the opposite side, but ultimately, it's just not all that important but it serves to attract a lot of attention and impact a lot of people's habits. Surely a software developer who has nothing better to change than this is hardly worth taking seriously.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.
Ahh - the self-delusional. Those who believe that there is no ego or infighting within the walls of Microsoft. Those who can willfully ignore Windows' changes and the variations of even Microsoft's own applications. What a blissful world that must be.
Open Source is a Meritocracy (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.
This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.
If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, why did you buy Windows 7?
Duh! No software program is a democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Could you imagine?
Sprint item #1: Nominate alphanumeric names to assign to for-loop index in procedure named last week. Due: Monday - noon
Sprint item #2: Vote on nominated for loop index names - top 5 continue to run-off. Due: Monday 6pm
Sprint item #3: Run off vote simple majority. In event of tie, Sprint Master will cast deciding vote. Due: Tuesday noon
Sprint item #4: Marvel at the code dev efficiency and speed of the archaic waterfall model ensconced in the Mil-Spec 498. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498 [wikipedia.org]
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."
Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
Re:Full quote (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't only take part of why Mac does it (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac also has a different order of buttons, with the close window button on the left, just as Windows has the close button on the right. Both are at the outside of the window, a good place. This puts the Windows order of buttons on the left -- doesn't work.
Mac also doesn't have a menu right underneath the buttons to accidentlly hit.
Mac has a complete user interface thought of to work together. Taking one element from it is a risky proposition, because unless you did your homework you don't know what other elements you also need to bring over in order for the first element to work right.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
> You're free to fix it.
This is assinine.
Nothing was broken to begin with.
This is why everyone is throwing WTF's at Shuttleworth. There is no good reason to make this
change therefore it should not be made. It doesn't improve upon anything and actually breaks
the sort of UI principles that people like to bludgeon Linux over the head with.
Basic window controls should either be setup to allow for the easiest possible migration for
people fleeing the market leader or they should be consistent with established practice.
Changing them just to be cute is bogus. All it will do is annoy the current users and confuse the new ones.
The first step after installing Ubuntu should not need to be "install sane theme".
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."
Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
It's not really impractical so much as most people don't care *enough*. I'm sure you could go over to Rentacoder or something and find someone in India or China willing to move the window control buttons on that theme for under $100 on a particular build of Ubuntu. The Microsoft stock comparison is laughable. The issue is that for the people involved the time and/or money to make it the way they want it isn't *worth* the cost, no matter how little that cost might be.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Defaults should always be sensible and handle the typical case.
This is just basic common sense (Unix) design.
Something that's too weird or fancy violates everyone's expectations. That's why really freaky things don't gain much traction (and Linux ends up being accused of copying this that or the other).
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.
I would be surprised if the graphical shell in Win7 cannot be replaced wholesale. This has been possible in all previous versions of windows since 3.0.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Shuttleworth HAS been forked multiple times already. OpenGEU, Ultimate Linux, and others. I'm to lazy to look right now, but there are Linux distros out there that take the best that Ubuntu has to offer, then modifies that best into something DIFFERENT. I'll not say they are "better", but the fact is, the finished product meets the needs of those people "better" than Shuttleworth's official tree does.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
If you need to change your software interface every time you update, then you didn't spend enough time and effort designing the interface in the first place, which is a huge criticism I have of open source software. Things like UI's and documentation are seen as tertiary to a project, instead of core, where they should be. I've been using Linux since 1995 and this attitude of putting users last has permeated the culture of open source, to the detriment of many projects.
Design your user interfaces with the same care and diligence as you define your application's architecture and you won't need to fiddle with it every week.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why do you use windows?
Office 2000-2003 Major changes.
Office 2003-2008 HORRIBLE HUGE CHANGES.
2000-XP Big changes
XP-Vista BIG changes
Vista-W7 Big changes.
So what was your point? in fact the ONLY OS I have used that has remained stable in it's UI has been OSX and Linux at it's base (Slackware for example). Windows has changed radically every release.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
But what you contribute could be crap.
If you send a bug report with data then yes that is part of testing so I covered that. If you put a in a suggestion that they buttons should be on the right like windows and not the left and file it as a bug?
Not so much.
So not not all feedback is contributing to a project. Sometimes it is actually detracting from a project.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Office is not Windows. Office 2000 and 2003 will run just fine on the newest version of Windows.
Windows releases are also supported for a long time. 12+ years for XP, and you can still run current and 12-years-old software on it if that's what suits your needs. That's hard to do with Linux distros. You upgrade the OS and it upgrades every other program even if you don't want them to be upgraded.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
In a democracy everyone gets the same vote, in a meritocracy the power is wielded by those who do the best work.
Only in a very narrow sense. It tends to reward programmers, and programmers don't always make good decisions when it comes to issues not related to programming - of which there are many in software development.