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An anonymous coward writes:
"An interesting article about the shift in open source from idealistic to pragmatic. The author compares the relative obscurity of FOSS software such as MediaGoblin and KDE's MakePlayLive co-op to commercial software. The article then goes on to discuss the split between FOSS's goal to provide freedom to users and to provide high-quality software. Also mentioned is the split between commercial and non-commercial FOSS."
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What Happened to the Vision in Open Source?
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 1) by jon3k on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:10PM
If every idealistic dev and engineer had their way, we'd have thousands of devs and engineers bitching about the relative merits of init daemons and the like, and its resultant fragmentation
Uh, bad news, we do have that. init vs upstart vs systemd.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:15PM
Yes, a poor example. I think it was stuck in my head for that reason.
What I meant to communicate was more like spawning a hundred differentiated projects based the idealistic arguments that were made.
Instead, despite the noise, Ubuntu did the dreaded pragmatic thing.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:55PM
The wholesale "going corporate" or "selling out" is a sign that, yes, open source does work. Remember when the idea of a free office program which could manipulate Microsoft formats was radical? Or a Linux that worked out of the box, including playing any media and wireless? Growing up and going corporate will always happen, and when it does the more ideologically inclined will move on to other things or bail and create an alternative which better suits their needs -- and who knows that better than us?
It's the same problem that I believe is beginning to happen to music -- There's no more low-hanging fruit when it comes to being innovative. All the exciting stuff to be done has already been done, and what's left is mostly pure drudgery. Media players and messengers have now been done many times over. There's a window manager to suit every need and preference, all the new and exciting stuff being done with window managers is again all under-the-hood drudgery, at least until somebody develops a credible and revolutionary 3-D window manager/interface that doesn't look like it's stuck in the late '80's running on an SGI Octane.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @10:18AM
Uh, bad news, we do have that. init vs upstart vs systemd.
No, we don't. We have systemd and that's it, mostly.
In case you haven't noticed, Debian just went through a bunch of drama where they decided to switch to systemd. After that, Canonical conceded, and decided also to switch to systemd in the future, abandoning upstart. The other major distros are already using systemd, or in the process of switching to it. Everyone has now abandoned upstart altogether, and is either currently using, or in the process of adopting systemd, with the exception of some small distros like perhaps Slackware, or Gentoo (which I believe is allowing multiple options).
The OP's point stands and is correct: we're converging on systemd because of pragmatism and because every single idealistic dev doesn't get his way, and projects are governed usually by consensus.