The Failure of Open Source (and how we can save it)

The problem with open source is that it is inherently weak. It's fun for hobbyist, sure. But the more I think about it the more I feel like as long as open source projects operate under the delusional idea that they will be able to compete on the open market, much less put out products that are better than the big companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft we will fail. The GNU is a licence for commercial failure. It's an idealistic document that only works in the land of unicorns, like communism. Corporations that attempt to do business while adhering to the goals of open source are doomed to fail. They will always be outmaneuvered by bigger corporations that can just steal their code, modify and improve it and then sell it. No one will be the wiser to their exploits because their source will be closed so FOSS companies won't know their code is stolen. So the few times that the Open Source community will get ahead the gains will be short lived.

That rarely happens though because most of the time is wasted in FOSS communities arguing thinks like which toolkit is better Gtk or Qt or wxwidgets. Vi vs Emacs vs Nano vs Kate. KDE vs. XFCE. Gnome 3 vs Duke Nukem Forver. (Duke Nukem Forever wins, it's actually going to be released just read Vincent's blog about gnome 3). In short, Open Sources as a viable commercial enterprise is bad. It "strengthens our enemies and weakens the resolve of our allies"

So what's the solution you say? I'm glad you asked, the solution is the brand new FOSS for L33ts Initiative. The best thing that we can do is recognize we are writing for hobbits and hobbyists and no one else. So we need to get rid of GUIs, they are very un-l33t. We should keep the cool things though. So we can have a cube switch from each virtual console. So ALT+F2 leads to a nice cube effect. More over, we absolutely keep the wobbly windows idea. As you are not deserving for Foss L33t-ness unless you have wobblies on your desktop. But because there will be no more windows we must instead have wobbly progress bars that wobble all the text on the console every time the progress increases by 1% and the wobble should get more and more intense as you approach 100%. We need to get rid of binary distributions as they are inefficient. It takes 0.032 seconds more for applications to start working when you don't hand compile them using special flags such as -034 & -L33t-speed, which are computer and user specific. Which is a tremendous waste of time. Compiling programs from trunk ever time you have to use them is much more efficient and thus l33t.

Also, rebooting your computer should be fun again. In order to do that the kernel needs a Russian-roulette algorithm that uses a random number generator to determine if "rm -rfv /" is run immediately after booting (in verbose mode so that losers of the game get to watch in agony!).

We need to take back FOSS from all the people that want to use the community to make money for the big corporations!!! And this is the way to do it!


Disclaimer: The Contents of this post are only valid on this day and month. And will only be so in an annual fashion. By reading this sentence you also agree to empty your bank account to fund the new FOSS for L33ts Initiative. Thanks, have a nice day.

Design Decisions #1

I want to thank who ever it was that made the decision to NOT force KDE to develop a composited desktop with a fall-back to a totally different looking un-compositied desktop in the event the computer has a driver failure/poor videocard. (Edit: I know kde has compositing, but those are effects and the overall design of kde looks basically the same whether you have the compositing on or off).

I say this in light of the development work on Unity and Gnome3. Which falls back to gnome2 when 3d acceleration is not available. Why? The people developing their software are going to develop it with the "new model" in mind. However, when the thousands of previously happy linux users whose hardware is not up to these new standards try to use this new awesome software. They won't get the same experience the developer had in mind. I cannot imagine that the gnome3 developers will continue to actively work on things with the gnome2 based desktop. Ubuntu in the past couple of releases has done some pretty nice things to gnome2. However they seem to have determined that gnome2 was indeed on its way to the history books and went with a netbook setup for a desktop (???).

In Unity's "defence" they are working on a "Unity2D" desktop. However, that uses QT unlike the default "3d"Unity. While I have to admit I'm not entirely familiar with this decision, it seems to make little sense. It seems to now require twice the effort because they have to code the same interface in 2 different toolkits??? Why not just make all of Unity in Qt? Or just use plasma to design something new. I've been waiting for this since plasma came out. Interestingly enough distros seem hesitant to play with the default kde look (I'm sure many in KDE support this). So every time I try a new kde distro I get the same bar at the bottom with a folderview in the desktop. So perhaps the winner here might be Kubuntu if they decide to make a "kubuntu-Unity" using plasma. (Feel free to prove me wrong here).

In any case I think I might try messing with the default KDE setup and posting the results. And if you have screenshots of cool kde4/plasma desktops that look unique please share them with me! (I'm getting kind of bored with the windows-esq setup of a taskbar+panel+window launcher setup at the bottom.) I would like to say that I am a fan of the KDE-netbook interface, and I'd like to see some equally cool new setups for the desktop.

/* This is mostly an opinion/impression based post that I hope to follow up with more analysis based posts that deal with design. These will likely focus more on kde design than a lot of these other DE's but may include "plasma implementations" of some of the better design decisions in other DEs. */