Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year.

That's not to say that challenges won't arise, but the consensus seems to be that 2009 presents more opportunities than difficulties for FOSS.

The Outlook for Business

The idea that software available at no cost will become popular in a recession is a no-brainer. As Peter Vescuso, VP of Marketing at Black Duck Software points out, "The recession is going to force a lot of people to be more careful with their spending, and look to get more and more value out of their resources as they spend." And, Vescuso adds, the pressure to do more with less will be particularly hard on IT departments, who are always under pressure to deliver efficient, uninterrupted service. Under the circumstances, interest in software that is available at no cost or only a small one is only natural.

But FOSS has many more advantages than simply being a cheaper way of building infrastructure. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, points out that not only is FOSS in general and Linux in particular well-supported, with billions of dollars of investment from top tier companies, but that, unlike Windows, it is "massively hedged," by which he means that it is available in every form from cheap notebooks through embedded systems to super computers.

"It's just unparalleled in computing in terms of its versatility and its diversification," Zemlin enthuses, adding that in the last year, "pretty much everyone has opened up their device drivers, giving it broad hardware support that is only going to increase over the coming year. Moreover, FOSS is already strong in areas such as virtualization, which many large organizations may turn to in their efforts to do more with less".

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When should open source projects release?

When they're done or on time?

31 December 2008 by Dj Walker-Morgan

Over the past few years, scheduled releases of open source projects have become the norm. Projects tend to release new versions according to a regular schedule as opposed to releasing when the developers consider all the work proposed, has been completed.

Releasing "When it's done" is based upon the simple proposition that if you only release when you think the software is complete and usable, then that release will be of higher quality. How a project makes that decision of completeness would be up to the project; an active benevolent dictator's project could be simply decreed complete, while a larger community project may use voting or other feedback, to create an aggregate decision. Whichever way though, there will always be the possibility of issues missed, or downgraded without the community noticing and therefore holding up the release while those issues are fixed.

More seriously though, when software goes through a major feature revision, feature creep can enter into the process, where the developers want to keep adding functionality to "get it in the next release". This can lead to the "eternal beta" problem, where there is an older more stable release and a new enhanced beta, which will be released just as soon as one more feature is added, or when a bug in a recently added feature is fixed. There are numerous projects that go into this rolling, feature-creep phase and after a while, the disparity between "The next version" and "the current stable version" leads to frustration in the users of the current version, sometimes this is enough to make those users look elsewhere.

Another problem is when there is a project community who get a stake in deciding when a project is ready for release and the community find the very basis of the project a matter for debate. Take the recent Debian Lenny 5.0 controversy; back in September there was hope that the release would be soon, but then a debate emerged over whether Lenny should include "non-free firmware". The debate then degenerated into a argument over the very nature of the Debian project (see also: Ts'o calls for pragmatic Debian). Lenny has yet to get a firm release date.

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It's Time for a FOSS Community Code of Conduct

Personal abuse, quotes taken out of context, misrepresentations, outright lies -- if you have any visibility in the free and open source software (FOSS) community, the chances are that you regularly face all these kinds of attacks. You can try to answer them, but the people responsible seem to have endless energy for debate.

In the end, you have to fall silent for lack of time, leaving the attackers crowing over your defeat, and yourself wondering where the attack came from and what you do about it.

You can see this growing viciousness in the hostile reaction to KDE last spring, or in sites like the just-defunct Linux Hater's Blog, as well as the articles of professional and semi-professional journalists who demonize anyone who fails to agree with them completely. More often, though, you see it on mailing lists or in the comments on news sites.

Aaron Seigo of KDE described the problem the other month in his blog:

Every so often someone with a real crank on will start following me around the intrawebs posting their hallowed viewpoint on me. It seems to happen to everyone with an even moderately public profile. Usually they get stuck on one message and then post it consistently everywhere they can as some sort of therapeutic outpouring of their inner angst. Most people don't last more than a couple weeks at this, though I've had a couple of people with real commitment dog me for a year or more.

Seigo admits that, being visible, vocal, and outspoken, he makes an easy target. It's not that he objects to views he doesn't agree with, he says, but that "I don't have time for pointlessness."

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Look, it boils down to bad behavior.  What you do in life, your comportment, dictates how you will be perceived, received and treated.  Act nicely, and try always to not respond in kind when someone has acted inappropriately toward you.  Basic good manners are lacking in most if not all of these on-line exchanges that might not otherwise occur in close quarter face-to-face encounters. 

If it helps, make pretend you are talking to your Mother or get a hold of a book on good manners and read it.  There. Be nice now, OK?

--Dietrich

October 28th, 2008

Why I don't like Canonical

Very important to preface this with: it's my own personal opinion, written on my own personal blog. This obviously relates to Mandriva and is informed by my own experience working there, but it is not the official opinion of Mandriva, and please don't read it as such. If you want Mandriva's opinion, ask our PR folks for an official statement, and it will not look like this.

So, I've just been (implicitly) quoted bashing the Mark Shuttleworth / Canonical business model. (The rating on my ZDnet post is a stunning -21 as I write - my most negatively rated comment anywhere ever - but, strangely enough, no-one's replied to refute my argument). I thought it was worth expanding my point from my own tiny pulpit.

I've written before about what I think about Ubuntu. It's a good distribution. It does a lot of stuff right. Around 2004 it was better than MDK / MDV in many ways. I don't think it was ever better in every way, and I think MDV is a better product now, but that's by the by. This is about Canonical, and Mr. Shuttleworth.

First, the facts:
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This is an interesting opinion piece. It is true that Canonical has nothing but expenses and it poses a good question--what happens if Canonical's benefactor Mark Shuttleworth decides to leave? Where's the stability in that? Companies like RedHat and Novell SuSE have a business plan to follow and are publicly traded profit-oriented companies vs. ill-defined expense-oriented Foundations.

Your thoughts?
--Dietrich