Not informed enough
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Abe Jul 04, 2005 11:29 AM EDT |
When I read the article I thought they were listing the strengths that FOSS has. The people he is quoting sound like they don't know anything about FOSS, Has any of them looked in to it to see whether FOSS lack what they are concerned about? I think not. More enterprise-class support: What about the support that is furnished by IBM, Novell (Suse), HP and others? Isn't that good or sufficient enough? I personally think it is the best you can get and for sure way better than any support MS or its collaborator furnish. Better documentation: The documentation made available by the FOSS community is very elaborate and complete. It is even better than the documentation that is available from its MS-Press for a very high cost. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I am sure that these docs can be improved and made much better, but FOSS can't supply everything for free and I am sure you can still buy professionally written documentation from Reilly's and such. A sense of stability: Please name a FOSS mission-critical application that has been decommissioned unless it was replaced by another that is much better and more powerful? Access to more platforms: FOSS is based on open API, Standards, protocols and inter operates with every other platform in existence and including MS Windows Platform. SAMBA is an example, OpenOffice is another. FOSS goes the extra-mile to make sure they interoperate with others. It is MS that works hard to break interoperability with other to lock their user base in using its platform and only its platform. A commitment to stay open: Have you heard of the GPL? Isn't a good enough guarantee? A focus on the end user: I don't see how could you ask such a question? FOSS is a community of the people, by the people, for the people. |
| devnet Jul 04, 2005 2:01 PM EDT |
What I don't like about it is that it is obvious that more enterprise app support is the driver of this...and obviously if its open source it'll be free...and the article wants a guarantee about that fact so it is a high driving point of theirs...so, they want free enterprise apps developed for business with awesome documentation. It has to be stable and ported to many different architectures. Hrm...Give me Give me Give me. I'd say this articles' author is informed enough...they know they can get something for nothing and they want to exploit it. |
| tuxchick Jul 04, 2005 4:25 PM EDT |
Not sure where you see the author wanting a free ride- I thought the article made some good points. Businesses are used to paying for services and support contracts, and they want someone reliable, and they want good quality, which seems reasonable. Quite unlike a lot of FOSS users, who are in it only for the free-beer stuff like Fedora. Surely you recall the howls of outrage when Red Hat announced it was no longer distributing a free-beer edition? And yet you can still get free-beer Red Hat via glomming the SRPMs, or using CentOS or Whitebox or one of the many other RH clones. Anyway getting back to the article- to me it points out a wealth of opportunities for folks who want to earn a living with FOSS. Writing docs, like I do, or being the expert who can whip up a mail server or firewall or domain controller or put together a mixed LAN with ease is still all too rare. Lots of opportunities, and they will only continue to grow as FOSS grows. |
| sbergman27 Jul 04, 2005 4:36 PM EDT |
Maybe it's just a slow news day. But I must say I'm surprised at the overwhelming negative response I have seen to this editorial on all three (other) news sites on which I have seen it. It is a constructive criticism of the general state of open-source software. It makes some good points. But somehow it is being interpreted as an attack. Come on. Take the topic of documentation. What Open Source app out there has really good documentation? Quite a few nowadays, fortunately. But for every one that you can quote to me, I'll bet I could come up with 10 for which the documentation is absolutely appalling, and which are accompanied by README files from 1998 that are oh so apologetic about the fact. Is that an attack? No. It is a constructive observation. If we want more people to use open-source software, we need to hope that user's concerns are considered and addressed. If we only care about our own needs, we don't need to worry about that. Fortunately (depending upon your viewpoint), the community has evolved sufficiently beyond the "lone hacker in his parents' basement" stage that it's pretty clear (in my opinion) that customers will be listened to enough that OSS will indeed become ubiquitous, eventually. (And it is not ubiquitous, now. It is quite widespread, but not ubiquitous. Windows(tm) is ubiquitous.) But before the users can be listened to, they first have to speak. The article represents one, or a few, of the users speaking. |
| dinotrac Jul 04, 2005 6:33 PM EDT |
tuxchick and Steve -- I'm with you. I don't understand the fanboy negativity that some posters take. It's as if they believe that FOSS can grow without people using the software. Here's a clue, kiddies: Little in life is more valuable than people telling you what they need. It's like handing out a free roadmap so that you can broaden your user base. It's a GOOD thing, not bad. I'm especially puzzled by the folks who seem determined to pretend that FOSS has no documentation problems. For the record, good documentation (good documentation can be relatively terse and bad documentation can fill voluments) reduces the cost of using software by reducing the time needed to make it work and to troubleshoot it. That means $$$ to companies who have no way to do anything except by paying somebody. Having used a number of open-source tools, I nominate libxml2 for the documentation from Hell, though Zope's got to be somewhere in the game. As to stability -- I think of stability as more than going "poof". It can include stagnating for lack of a maintainer, or even the opposite -- APIs that change so frequently that you must spend inordindate (and expensive) developer time to keep up. Shorewall and Arts come to mind because they are fairly recent, but they are not alone. |
| PaulFerris Jul 05, 2005 3:52 AM EDT |
We're taking the wrong approach here -- we need to be gathering notes for a response. On the support side of things: Okay, you need more enterprise-class support. Speaking from experiences in enterprise-class shops, a couple of things will aid this greatly: 1) Hire people who have FOSS community experience -- even ones that may not have it in the size of shop that you have, but with related skills. One of my frustrations has been the blindness of corporate HR when it comes to these matters "But we wanted someone with IHS+Websphere experience in a large enterprise setting", this while they're rejecting someone who may have a ton of experience in smaller settings with the free software equivalents and application servers. Buy the community-minded aspect and related experience -- don't go for checkboxes like you're doing a bill of materials. Start the support from a community mind-set, in other words. Hire people that participate in the community -- they're going to be more likely candidates to understanding the type of support that is available, when to call a proprietary provider, when to google, when to hit a support message list and so on. They're likely to become actively involved in the support process when a fix is needed and so on -- the Linux community is not a coporporation -- but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value above and beyond corporate service when it comes time to provide solutions. (okay, I've said one paragraph -- have at it) It's a two-way street here, and it would be interesting to see who crafted the above "letter". We could respond in kind and sign our names. What do you think? --Paul Ferris |
| dinotrac Jul 05, 2005 4:07 AM EDT |
Paul - I think you are looking at the letter the wrong way. It is not an attack. As to support, I agree with the your observation on nincompoop hiring practices, but... Few shops have the resources to fully support every product they use. You just can't afford to hire enough people to have deep knowledge on everything out there. In proprietary land, you have several tiers of support (though I don't know why -- my experience is that tier one could generally be staffed by monkeys and deliver better service), with the final tier being the developers themselves or people with similarly intimate knowledge and access to the developers. Open Source gives you access to the source code, which, depending on the quality of the code and internal documentation, can give you the ability to provide deep support --- IF you've got the financial resources to staff that capability. It all comes down to money. It's cheaper to tap into somebody else's deep knowledge for support you may need only now and then than it is to maintain a full-time paid staffer with sufficient expertise -- and light workload -- to jump in and save the day as needed. |
| PaulFerris Jul 05, 2005 7:42 AM EDT |
dino: no, I'm not looking at it like an attack: I was looking at it as a chance to start a dialog. Re-read what I had to say. As for "few shops" I was specifically speaking from my enterprise experience, where, for example, someone gets very siloed in their expertise (I've worked places where they had, for example, and entire team to specify how webservers were rolled-out, enterprise-wide). There's room on a team like that for an apache contributor, for example, or someone actively involved in the community. I'm saying though, higher topic than this -- let's get together here, on LXer, and craft a response to their letter. I'd take the bullet points one at a time and make suggestions. The problem that probably caused the letter in the first place is that there is no "linux corporation" to sound-off to -- let's give them the community response, and be professional. Your obvious reflex, however, is to take what I have to say as some sort of combative reply -- and I don't understand this. I'm always professional and fair when I reply to you, even though you're a moronic loudmouth *sheesh*. --FeriCyde |
| dinotrac Jul 05, 2005 8:30 AM EDT |
Yes. Paulie, but I'm an old moronic loudmouth, and that makes me cranky. Sorry for misreading you there. Forgot to check the rant_mode flag. Note that I did and do agree with you that companies do a really crap job of hiring. |
| PaulFerris Jul 05, 2005 9:17 AM EDT |
What?!? An apology? (FeriCyde checks the window for pigs flying by) Wow. Listen, you're going to have to take those antibiotics and get better. What is it, flu season up there in Indiana?? |
| dinotrac Jul 05, 2005 9:36 AM EDT |
Paulie, Paulie, Paulie -- Here in the Land of Lincoln, we are concerned about your geographic confusion. Perhaps it comes as the result of living in a state whose name is round on both ends. As to illness, flu season has flown and all is well. BTW -- Mrs. Trac's eyes lit up at mention of the lake. Or perhaps, she was merely basking in the glow of my companionship... |
| number6x Jul 05, 2005 10:33 AM EDT |
Flying pigs are generally indigenous to South Western Ohio's Hamilton County. Check the statues in downtown Cincinnati. A lot of limestone and pig fat help when you want to make soap. Pigs were pretty important in those parts, how they learned to fly, I'm not sure. (The Wright Bros. were from nearby Dayton, and the remains of the weather balloon that crashed in Roswell, NM are supposed to be stored at Wright-Patterson AFB, but that sounds like a Jerry Springer episode. Wait just a second, Jerry Springer was mayor of Cincinnati! I smell a conspiracy, or maybe its those pigs.) In Illinois we're famous for slaughtering them and selling the parts to the rest of the world. Carl Sandberg had a few words to that effect. |
| PaulFerris Jul 05, 2005 11:38 AM EDT |
number6x: While your conspiracy theory here makes a lot of sense, you've failed to take into account the fact that statues are made from Limestone from Illinois. Okay, I made that up to debunk your theory... Dino will find a way out of this, I just know it. |
| dinotrac Jul 05, 2005 11:47 AM EDT |
Paulie: With regard to Illinois limestone. I'm afraid you are mistaken. Illinois does not sell actual limestone to Ohio because, well, we like to keep the good stuff for our selves. What you actually get is lyestone. It seems a lot like limestone when you first see it, but responds poorly to rain. On the other hand, everything around a lyestone statue will be sparkly clean after a good rain. |
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