Is Open Source a mistake?

Once upon a time, the Free Software movement was about hacking. Blissful, unrestrained coding, about “what’s right”, not “what’s the profit in it”. Where have we gone?

Once upon a time, we just wanted to be left alone to hack. Hardware documentation would be nice, not having to reimplement existing technologies would be great, but just not being disturbed by the Proprietary software drunken giant.

Now where are we? MS targets the community unjustly, and tries to assail our God-given rights to program good software. Business exects talk of Open Source like it’s just another business tool, execs upbraid us to stop fighting among ourselves or we’ll scare the IT managers, and ignorant bloggers complain about the cournucopia of distributions, afraid we’ll overwelm the poor IT managers and, somehow, not achieve “success” for Open Source.

Free software isn’t about taking over the desktop, or the server market, or anything, really. We shouldn’t by interested in how many folk are using our software, but only that everyone who wants to can get a copy, and join the community. We’re the ultimate in accessibility: those who desire to must be able to access the software, according to his ability. Those who don’t should be free to refuse.

I’m sick of it all. I’m sick of execs swaggering about like they own the community, I’m sick of bloggers blogging on subjects they know nothing about, I’m sick of pointless patent scares and legal infighting. Aren’t we supposed to be working towards the day when coders won’t have to worry about legal threats? Where a fellow can code without consulting his attorney?

The hackers we revere, what would they have done? Greenblatt or Gosper in their prime would likely have compiled ZFS into the Linux kernel by now, not telling anybody. They would’ve created things better and more beautiful than we can imagine, we who blong and fight and strive to destroy Microsoft, at our own detriment.

It’s too late now; the battle-cry is up, the execs are hungering for more, the bloggers are raving with their usual mix of silver-tounged prophecy and sheer nonsense and FUD. For God’s sake, let’s just code for once. Let’s innovate, let’s try new things, let’s seek a newer world, forgetting about Open Source and the ungrateful Enterprises and the baneful trolls. Let’s see what we can do, and let the rest of the world go to Hell, if it will. If they don’t want us, why should we stick our necks out for them? Why should we make ourselves hated, just to force our work on the ignorant world?

Who wants innovation?

So “Open Source” [sic] isn’t innovative.

Not entirely surprising; most folks don’t really want innovation.

Why is “Linux” (that’s GNU/Linux to you, buddy) “essentially a copy of another operating system . . . that has been around since the 1970s.”? Because Richard Stallman wrote GNU to be UNIX-compatible, both for portability and so that “Unix users could easily switch to it”¹. Right from the beginning, the Free Software movement has had to answer the same question: can it do what my old OS did? Exactly the same way? I don’t want to learn a new way of doing things, just give me a clone of my old program please.

Take word-processing programs. The average word processor still makes the user specify format, style, and look while writing, as though one were still using a typewriter and had to worry about the bloody margins right now. Writing on MS Word, OpenOffice writer, or anything like that is simply a boring, arduous, repetitive process. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just mark up documents in a quick and intuitive way, according to what we mean, and later overlay a stylesheet to format the document as we like? And maybe if we need to reformat, we can just change stylesheets, rather than wading through the entire document changing everything? Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be . . . exactly like LyX?

LyX is an innovative, intuitive, wonderful document processor that lets you focus on your writing, is Free software, runs on all the major OSes, and turns out documents in beautiful TeX rather than that odd, not-quite-right look that most document processors have. But even in the Free Software community, it’s not that well-known. Most users blithely use OpenOffice, blithely ignoring the possibility of something better. And it’s not like LyX is secret or obscure–it was started by the same guy who started KDE, and has been around since 1995.

How about interfaces? The GNOME, KDE, and XFCE projects are all fine and healthy (despite looking like alphabet soup from this angle), but I don’t know that I’d call any of them “innovative”, at least what the user can see. XFCE’s great, with the menu-on-mouse-right-click thing, but none of the three really feels like there’s been much new since XEROX PARC. Now, take a project that’s trying to innovate with user interfaces: the SymphonyOS project. Last I saw them in mainstream tech news, the project was on the brink of failure because the lead developer couldn’t keep up with his bills and hack the project at the same time . . . once the storm of pity and donations was over, the innovative project slouched back into obscurity.

And what about projects that folks seem to think are innovative? Take the current belle of the ball, the iPhone. Or not. I wouldn’t take one if it were given to me. I’m still not convinced there’s anything exciting about it–it’s pretty, yes, and it’s got a gimmicky multi-touch touchscreen, and someone was finally crazy enough to hook up a hard drive to a cellphone (of course it was going to be Apple), but I’ve yet to see a feature that couldn’t be better served by something else, and the iPhone even lacks features that folks have come to expect from cell phones these days (No MP3 ringtones? No voice dialing?) . The only innovation I see is getting the average consumer to fork over $600 for a piece of equipment he doesn’t need, and locking him into several expensive services. (Would the average iPhone buyer normally have an AT&T dataplan? I’d wager not.)

And, of course, the Openmoko project is scarcely getting any attention from the world at large, despite being a truly innovative phone–the first really open development platform on a cell. What does that mean for average joe? It mean lots of coll apps. For free. And everything works like it should, you’ll never have to pay exorbitant fees just to replace your battery (they include a guitar pick and screwdriver to open the thing!), and you can do anything you want. Others may genuflect before the holy altar of Jobs; I’m holding out for October.

Wouldn’t it be great if folks really did want new & better things? Isn’t that the old Hacker spirit, the spirit of Free software–to fix things that don’t work, and to make things that do better? Why then do we settle so often for the status quo?