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.'"
So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Democracy is a really nice word but it's meaning is amorphous at best. Usually it is used to give the Westerners among us (myself included) a warm fuzzy. I don't want anything made by committee. Open source is more free market than democratic: if it works it survives and if it doesn't it dies.
This article seems like a gigantic troll.
Compare to the US Democratic Process (Score:3, Interesting)
The people do not directly get to vote on things like, oh, I dunno.. Health Care Bills, whether we go to war, who we want as President. Input is offered, sometimes accepted, but let's face it - once the reins are in someone else's hands the ego prevents a welcome and good-natured pass.
It's about control and structure, not about pure natural selection at the hands of plebes.
Ubuntu is just as Democratic as the USA, for better or worse.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)
I love how a lot of comments are all about this is how decisions should be made, just one person at the top gets the final say - period.
Makes it clear, I think. I'll keep on keeping out of F/OSS, thank you very much. I'm not going to waste my time contributing to someone else's dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.
Why left? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the logic of having the buttons on the left? The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side, and an idle mouse cursor is on the right side. Therefore, widnow controls should be ont he right side, where possible. Putting it on the left for no good reason* just makes you have to mouse farther to accomplish the same task.
* And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
Communism and democracy are not at odds with each other.
Communism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system.
It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.
Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process (Score:2, Interesting)
The United States of America has never ever been a direct Democracy and they never pretended to be. The United States of America is a Republic, stronger at the Federal level than it used to be and should be, but thats besides the point.
At the local level its a representative democracy (in some places direct democracy). We elect people to hold an office, school board, water board, sheriff, sometimes Judge, Mayor, town councillors, etc. We elect people to the county/parish and state offices.
It used to be that the state appointed the Senators but now its an elected position, so we vote for Congressmen and Senators to represent us at the national level and we get to vote for who we want as President and then the Electoral College votes for the President.
I'm damned glad that the US isn't a direct democracy, the people are too damned fickle.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
It certainly is. You may organize your own tree however you like. You can start a giant company and have a big office and spend a billion dollars on it if you want. Rule it with an iron fist. It doesn't change the fact that the smallest child can still fork your code and do it their own way.
Your giant company cannot tell that child what to do. Nor can the child tell the company what to do.
Websites are also a democratic medium, since we can all participate equally. Each of us brings just our own voice.
If we do not like Taco's story, does that mean the web is not a democracy? But no one says things like this, because they are absurd.
Obviously the web is utterly democratic, but feel free to split that hair and make up another name for what it actually is.
People are getting sick of Ubuntu. (Score:1, Interesting)
Regardless of whether it's a "democracy" or not, people are starting to get fed up with Ubuntu.
We are sick of the shitty quality as of late. The last few releases have been utter crap. Obvious bugs are present in the final release, even after they're logged during the alpha and beta releases, and sometimes even after a fix has been submitted before the release.
We're also getting tired of GNOME. It's an old, outdated desktop environment these days. It has stagnated badly for a couple of years now. All of the real innovation is happening within the KDE and XFCE projects. Like this incident shows, the only thing about GNOME that's changing is its fucking themes, and even then they're shitty changes.
For lots of people, those have been two major strikes. The third strike, whatever it may be, will be what puts Ubuntu down for us. We'll jump to OpenSUSE, Debian or even FreeBSD if we have to.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the strong rule the weak. Why is that a bad thing (at least, in the programming sense)? There are many, many programmers who should have little to no voice in what patches should be applied, simply because they are weak programmers!
But that's beside the point.
What you originally described is, by definition, anarchy. There is no centralized control, nobody to make decisions on what happens in general.
Within your own fork, you have free reign. This is totalitarianism within your fork. You apply whatever patches you see appropriate, and nothing else. Maybe you are "benevolent" and allow write access to your repository, but you still have the controlling voice whenever you want to exercise it.
The brilliance behind FOSS is that anarchy and totalitarianism can actually strike a balance that feels a lot like democracy: individuals have enough of a voice (by having the capability to fork) that the totalitarians are kept in check.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:2, Interesting)
That is incorrect, communism is also a political system. Even though, according to the original ideas, a communistic society (not the state since the states would be abolished, though who would define laws without states I have no idea of) would be democratic (the workers would decide what to produce in a democratic way). Communistic theory dictates that the proletarian revolution would need to be carried out followed by a period of proletarian dictatorship.
Thus, while somehow, the final outcome would be partially democratic (certainly not democracy as we know it), the way there would definitely not be democratic, and would actually be run as a dictatorship. This is at odds with the very foundation of democracy.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate the argument that "If you don't like how things are going in an OSS project, you can just make your own fork! It's so much better than proprietary software because of that!" The fact is that time and knowledge are barriers that bar most people from doing what you propose. I probably don't know the language the the project was built in, I don't have time to learn it, I don't have the time to get familiar with the project's code, I don't have time to figure out how change it, etc. So yeah, the code is right there, but it's useless to a large majority (probably near 99%) of users. There's a better chance of getting the current development team to make a change than me attempting to make that change on my own.
You're being oversimplistic.
You see, in most countries you have the right to property. You can have your own house, that's your right. The fact you don't have the _money_ to buy a house does not invalidate such right.
If you wanted to modify a FOSS yourself and lack the knowledge, nothing prevents you from learning how to program.
And it's even more insteresting that that: you don't have to program at all, in order to take advantage of the open-sourcedness. If you have money for that, you may simply pay other people to develop/customize the software as much as you want.
FOSS is not a right to enjoy from slave labour, don't expect people doing XYZ for you only because you want that. -- I would like someone to clean my house for free, would you do that for me?
Also, it's kind of an asshole thing for Canonical to lure people into their "community" and then outright ignore them.
I don't know how Ubuntu was advertised before, regarding development specifically (I don't use Ubuntu myself, so it's outside my radar range anyway).
Unless they claimed something not consistent with that position, they may develop their distro as they like. FOSS-ness alone does not give you the right to interfere in their decisions.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Interesting)
It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.
Yay, someone with an actual understanding of Marx's view of the endgame in the material dialectic! Once communism is manifest, a classless and stateless society will exist, with decisions about how to make use of the means of production made by consensus among the workers. In effect, you have an anarchy, in the original sense of the term (from the Greek, "without ruler").
Frodo is no better than Wormtongue (Score:4, Interesting)
Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo.
In the end, Frodo proved just as corruptible as Gollum, Wormtongue, the Ringwraiths, etc. I would rather have Canonical have aspirations to play Samwise. In today's story, Shuttleworth seems to be closer to Ilsildur.
Iain Bank's Culture (Score:3, Interesting)
If we are trying to make analogies to political systems, I posit that Open Source is more akin to The Culture, which is a post-scarcity, anarchist, socialist, and utopian society. Any part of The Culture can "fork off" at any time to form their own Culture and can also merge back in at any time. The Culture is nominally democratic but, in practice, controlled by super intelligent Minds. That's sounds pretty close to me. :)
This is total BS (Score:3, Interesting)
Asking "is open source a democracy" is like asking "is music a dictatorship". It's a flawed question. Democracy refers to a system of management and control. Open source refers to software with available source code. Anyone can take the source code and manage it anyway they want. It makes more sense to say "Are groups that release instances of open source projects democracies?"
LS
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why left? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are certainly counter-arguments.
Laymen have no real place in them. If you have design experts, trust them or fire them.
If you are not a design expert, resist the urge to micromanage design experts. That way crappy blink-laden web page design lies (for example).
A relevant link: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell [theoatmeal.com]
Another relevant link: http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/ [tumblr.com]
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
If you submit feedback, of any form, you are a contributor. You may not be a large contributor (in terms of data, not physical size) but you most definitely are a contributor.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Interesting)
2010: Year of Linux on the Desktop!
Re:Iain Bank's Culture (Score:1, Interesting)
No, we see the results of democratic action in The Culture in "Look to Windward". A large portion of the Culture were involved in the debate over whether to build the pointless cable car system. The builders sort-of won, but then lost interest, and the result is a decaying wreck. That sounds pretty familiar.
Also, the Minds don't control everything except in the sense that they're better placed to conspire than most humans. We see such conspiracies in each Culture novel (e.g. the conspiracy to start a war in Excession is defeated by another older conspiracy)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
So since the fundamental Windows UI has remained basically unchanged since 1995, I guess that means Microsoft did a good job ?
Re:We all know what a jackass is.... (Score:1, Interesting)
You're a severe case of authoritarian personality. You admire Shuttleworth because he's stinking rich and powerful. Yes, design by committee often doesn't work, but that doesn't mean that design by whim of somebody who happens to be The Boss Of It All works any better.
Some strong indications that there's something wrong with Shuttleworth and with the Ubuntu process:
* His underhanded way of sliding this in shortly before feature freeze of an LTS release
* His condescending way of explaining the change by not explaining it: he wants to open up some space on the right because he would like to try out "something" in half a year...
* His resorting to power instead of reason
* The sycophantic behavior of people in middle positions, praising the change as soon as they realized it comes from Shuttleworth, even if nobody understands what problem it's trying to solve