Moving Forward in Open Source

I started my career with PCQuest as a Linux hacker 10 years ago. Since then,
I've seen considerable amount of development happening in the Open Source space,
especially in Linux-- high performance clustering, security and forensics, and
virtualization. But despite that, I am a little disappointed about how things
have actually moved in this domain.

I think we are losing the value of Open Source. The core objective of Open
Source has been to let people learn the internals of a software application with
the help of source code, and improve it further so that everyone benefits.

But gradually, this focus has shifted from developing and contributing to the
community to using it as a free alternative to software applications. As a
result, everyone wants a free application today, but nobody wants to contribute
to its further development.

Anindya Roy, Associate Editor anindyar@cybermedia.co.in

Let's understand this with my favorite example-Anaconda installer for RedHat
based Linux distros. Anaconda is a fantastic piece of software, but it lacks
documentation. So to modify it, you have to be a reverse engineer, and not a
software developer. Therefore, contributing to its further development is
difficult.

There are many other Open Source applications with a similar fate as
Anaconda-no documentation, so further development is difficult. Perhaps that's
why we see so many Open Source projects available for download, but there's no
further development happening on them. If this continues, we might soon be left
with corpses of half baked projects. Another one of my favorites has already
died due to lack of contributors--OpenMosix.

This is possibly one of the reasons we're not seeing dramatic developments in
Open Source or in Linux for quite some time now. For instance, nothing path
breaking has emerged in Linux distros ever since the release of SELinux.

Most of the developments have been cosmetic changes and bug fixes, such as
the ones we see in the latest Fedora 12.

So the Open Source community needs to seriously put in efforts toward
building exceptional applications, just as they did in the early days. There's
no point of having endless debates, such as those on Open Source vs commercial
applications, unless something meaningful emerges from it. We've seen countless
examples where people come to the defensive every time a commercial application
does better than an Open Source one.

This is fine as long as the debate leads you somewhere. Maybe the commercial
application is indeed better, in which case the corresponding Open Source
community should assess the feedback and improve the shortcomings to improve
their application.

In other words, the judgments should come from the mind, and not the heart.
Your heart should be put into improving the Open Source application. That will
certainly help Open Source grow.

Please feel free to discuss this column at forums.pcquest.com.