Why not open source
Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.
0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.
1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.
2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)
Hi bhaiya, wassup.
Although open-source softwares are free (the best part) and can be modified (well i dont use this feature), I have a small query regarding the Open Source softwares. Don’t you think open source software are fragmented, in the sense that every community tries to make their own platform rather working on a integrated approach.
I think developers will be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than 100 variants.
Is open source community having a answer to this?
I got this as I see that Android is open-source but its different on different phones, means not all phones would be able to run all the apps. LG uses different android version, Samsung uses different. Atleast when it comes to phones I think iPhone OS and Windows Mobile OS is far better than Android. They are closed source, expensive but are stable which makes it worth the premium.
Also when it comes to PC, learning Linux is also a bit trouble as Ubuntu uses different sets of commands and CentOS uses different, maybe that’s the reason why Windows is still a clear winner.
Your concerns are genuine. However, there are few more things to consider here. There are 2/3 levels at which open source software development happens (in general). One is Kernel, second is libraries and third is GUI. Most of the Linux distributions you are talking about (like CentOS or Ubuntu) have kernels and libraries common. The command that you talk about are built above them. Hence, there isn’t that much work being spent on forking things.
Second point is, that a major idea behind open source is that a person/community should be able to do things the way they want. That is why, there are many forks of different open source softwares. Not everyone can have same ideas and thoughts, and hence we can not work towards same direction unless we force them, which is not desired.
About Android. You gave iPhone OS as an example. You should also observe that since iPhone is closed source, the only hardware it is used on is iPhone. Isn’t that bad? Also, if LG or Samsung decided to change Android GUI a lot, its not open source’s fault. Its rather good, because then we see many people trying their creativity to come up with different styles. In an ideal world, you want to cultivate the tendency of letting creativity flow the way it wants to flow, and open source is doing that.
About stability: I am sure if we make Linux based distributions restrictive (like iPhone did when they said no more than one application can run at a time), it will be much more stable. A major reason behind instability of these softwares is that it gives full freedom to users. Also, these softwares are not as unstable as you think they are. Look at Apache, Linux, mysql, postgres…. they are most popular softwares in server market, which has been pretty much the main target for these softwares so far.