FLOSS 2013: the Survey For Open Source Contributors, a Decade Later 27
grex writes "In 2002, the first FLOSS survey was launched. With over 2,500 participants, it was the first large survey of open source developers around the world and had a major impact in the community, academia and politics. Over 10 years later, a group of researchers is replicating this survey in order to see how the community has changed. This time not only developers, but all kind of contributors to open source projects are asked to participate. How has the community changed in this last 10 years? Are the views the same? Is its composition and focus similar? These types of questions, among others, are the ones this survey is looking to answer (so far with over 1,000 respondents)."
Not enough application success stories (Score:3, Insightful)
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I completely disagree with your point. Part of the attraction for me is the ability to switch from one to another at will.
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I may be feeding a troll here. I usually do not respond to ACs unless they have gotten some mod points.
Pooling people to do one thing well is not good? You'd rather have those dozen non working programs, which you can switch between?
The AC is incorrect in assuming that everyone agrees on how the goodness of a program should be judged. The number of current ways of judging a given program's goodness is about the same as the number of current users of that program. That there are successful alternatives in some application areas reflects the different needs of different groups of users.
The AC is rather arrogant in assuming that everyon
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I have definitely been feeding a troll.
So sorry.
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Successful in the not-so-humble opinion of author of parent post. Others may use a different yardstick to measure success.
Gnome and KDE have very different, and basically contradictory, approaches to desktop management. You could probably combine the two: you could probably take the design for the biggest cement mixer truck ever and combine it with the design for the fastest Ferrari ever. But you would end up with shite.
The same goes for other places where there appears to be competition between FOSS prod
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Apache is a good counter-example. There is basically only one way to be the Best Web Server Ever, so Apache has no significant FOSS competitors. Persons who see a way to make a server better contribute to the Apache project.
Nginx maybe?
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To give you an idea of how open source software works and the forces at play, without getting into specifics I will tell you the history of a project of mine.
Like all lazy programmers, I didn't just decide to write code. Instead I was led there because I was using some software and it didn't do things the way I wanted them done. I got involved in the mailing list and explained what I wanted to do, offering my services to do it. Nobody else was keen on doing things the way I wanted them done, so I decided
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If everyone worked together on a single tool for each job, we'd likely have a bunch of tools which are bloated, complicated, try to be everything to everyone, and end up being useful to nobody.
Some projects might be wildly more successful than others, but that doesn't mean that one is a fundamentally better solution than the other, or that the less-successful one is pointless or useless. It just means that more people prefer one over the other.
Why is it seen as good that we have choice and competition in mo
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Choice is good and not having to choose is also good.
Thats the best aspect of KDE and Gnome. As a user you might choose one of these as a base desktop environment others are available but your still free to pick up the applications that you want to use.
I'd bet most users (who have a choice) use a mixture of Kde and Gnome applications.
Kde seems to be making some advances in supporting touch and making the view part of MVC more flexible and why shouldn't it be this way wimp and touch interfaces have differin
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To me, this is a big problem. There's a great deal less development of applications. There are tons of productivity projects that are years, sometimes a decade or more, out of date compared to commercial applications. Frequently they've been left in a halfassed, marginally functional state. Largely, the open source community has failed to deliver on FSF's vision of free software for the masses, unless the free software you want happens to a Linux desktop or an Android phone or some works-pretty-well-bu
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At the risk of getting flak, I always found it such a waste to have both KDE and GNOME desktop and overlapping related apps projects. Both are of course rather succesful, but imagine what the current status would be if people had stayed with one project instead.
Well, the reason there's both KDE and GNOME needs a little historical context. KDE relied (and still does) heavily on the then-closed Qt toolkit. The authors of GNOME wanted to build something basically like KDE, except with entirely free software components. Naturally, they also needed to write replacements for KDE applications too, because they also relied on Qt.
Of course years later Trolltech relicensed Qt under the LGPL so there was no longer any fear of Qt vanishing and KDE having to scramble to find a
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That damn free market.
Obviously the only successful way to run the show is to have a central committee decide what everyone needs and wants, and an effective 5-year plan to meet those objectives.
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There are 2 relevant cliches:
* You can please some of the people some of the time but you can't please all the people all of the time
* Show me your strength and I'll show you your weakness
Note: Capitalism has the same strengths and weaknesses as Open Source. Let me explains ...
The strength of having diversity in "competing" open source programs is that they help feed off one another to make themselves better. Think of a little friendly healthy competition. The user in this case benefits as "vendors" try
OMG (Score:2)
Two significant trends (Score:1)
Trend #1: Reinventing the wheel. We don't need yet another programming language or MVC framework. We don't need two incompatible and competing versions of Python. We don't need Google churning out new programming languages. The amount of time and effort wasted on reinventing wheels is significantly damaging the software industry, which needs to go back to standards. Pick a language and use it, and develop that language, rather than inventing new ones every month. Fragmentation is making progress difficult.
T
Fragmentation and Exploitation (Score:2, Insightful)
The responses here are rather depressing. As a(n extremely humble) coder, to have a half dozen posts complaining of fragmentation is rather depressing. Somewhere there must be a non-trivial program which was written purely for the sake of doing so, but for the general case we may say that software is written neither accidentally nor arbitrarily, but to remedy a lack in existing software. It is in exceedingly bad taste to complain about any article offered gratis, but to say that the work involved was counte
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FreeCiv (Score:2)