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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: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:28PM
The problem with media goblin is "the idea of an all-in-one". What could possibly better fit linux / foss stylistic architectural guidelines than a giant monolithic application silo. This makes it completely uninteresting to me other than in an abstract sense. J6P only wants to use the dominant market leader. So neither of us care. Furthermore I already have a giant monolithic application for all in one file sharing called a web browser. No content also means no interest and that ship sailed long long ago. If I wanted to play with a federation model for academic or experimental purposes I would have played with Diaspora about 5-10 years ago. It is yesterdays news with a weird architecture/style. Its like writing a text adventure / interactive fiction in 2014, absolutely nothing wrong with that but its not insightful to point out its not going to grab many people. The website has serious issues; I spent a minute or two and can't really figure out what mediagoblin does or why I'd want to use it.
The problem with MakePlayLive is I have no idea what to do with it. It costs twice as much as a rasp pi but doesn't do anything beyond it other than have less support and interest. Its a me too in a big wide marketplace of me too. The primary metric of health in the FOSS community wasn't how many almost identical mp3 player applications existed which were used exclusively by the author and one friend. Go install your FOSS project on a pi or a beaglebone or about a zillion better supported vaguely linux compatible pieces of hardware. Or aim lower level and go arduino or a zillion competitors. I still can't figure out why I'd use this instead of better cheaper faster alternatives. I'm sure its very nice, but hyper optimization for me, very early in a project doesn't make sense. To make an analogy, why should I breathlessly hitch my wagon to a PIC 10F202 microcontroller vs a 10F204 vs a 10F200 when the 10F series is all about the same and I should really be asking myself bigger pix questions like atmel vs mc or microcontroller vs linux system on a chip product etc. Hardware is becoming more of a commodity, just put your "stuff" on whatever. Its a really large world and focusing on a narrowly optimized component is boring, although I'm sure this one is very nice. Their marketing website is beautiful and as usual a beautiful website almost certainly means its content free. I can't figure out in a minute or two why I'd possibly want their board, although I can see they are very talented web designers and marketing people.
The TLDR is two tractionless projects are tractionless because they're really boring.
The proposed explanation was a rewording of the classic "blind dudes encounter elephant and try to rationalize their sensory inputs". So we get random stuff including a GPL-3 complaint, LOL.
In true "blind dudes describing elephant" setting I'll propose that both websites suffer horribly from "talking down" to the general public. You know what, your clients aren't joe 6 pack off the street and never will be. And thats OK. And maybe by not aiming solely and exclusively at J6P you might get some traction, maybe, with people a little more involved in the field. Its essentially a failure of marketing in both cases... you repel the engineer and sysadmin without explaining to J6P why they should use this instead of the dominant leader in the field, then you end up with no one at all interested.