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So today I finally made official my move away from Linux, through a post on the rosegarden-devel mailing list : I’m an ex-free software Linux developer, aiming to be a free software OS X developer. My only use of Linux is now on my home server (except at work where I still write Java on Linux). It’s been 13 years since my first Slackware install, with kernel v1.2.8 back in 1995 on a 90MHz pentium with, at the time, 16Mb of RAM and 512Mb HD.

The first reply I got was a “me too” from an other user, who had made the same switch for the same reasons. He also mentionned that sound on OS X wasn’t that rosy either : USB peripherals recognition problems, stability issues with Logic Audio… However these problems are on a higher level than those on Linux. Actually, I wish Linux had this kind of problems, but instead we have to deal with the most basic “can’t hear anything” issues (or similar basic stuff like my mouse’s tilt wheel being broken by a kernel update). And I’m just so f*cking tired of this.

Plus there’s the fact that writing a music editor for an OS which already has the equivalent of alsa, jackd, qsynth and our own RG sequencer in it is somewhat more motivating than endlessly trying to debug random sound setup problems.

To tell the truth, even though I did gain a lot through these years, had I known that Linux would still be in such a state after all this time, I would have had jumped ship two or three years ago already, when OS X was starting to look welcoming enough. Core Audio might not have been as mature as it is now, though.

I’ve been using Linux and contributing to the Free Software / Open Source community since 1995. Ever since Netscape opened the code of its (now dead) navigator back in 1998, thus giving much greater exposure to the concept of free software, pretty much every year has been touted as “the year Linux will get a foothold on the desktop. Although for a few years now, more people have started to notice the repeating trend.

I gave into that delusion myself back then, but should you ever come across someone who’s still buying into it, this should help sobering him up.

10 years gone by, and it’s barely ahead of Windows 98. Sheesh.

(that said, I still find coding for Rosegarden is fun ).

I recently came across this article on Open Office and how buggy it is, despite the fact that it was Open Source (and therefore open to the scrutiny of thousands of hackers willing to help fixing it).

It perfectly illustrates the how ESR’s “enough eyeballs” are just about as mythical as the man-month.

The fact is, opening the source of any software is a requisite to attract hackers to help with it, but it’s by no means sufficient. After all these years dealing with OSS, I’m starting to think it can’t work at all except for a very small category of software. To gain a contributing community, software has to :

• be a hacker tool (like a kernel, a mail agent, a compiler – forget about business-related stuff, hackers don’t use spreadsheets or word processors)
• be easy to build (otherwise a would-be contributor will be frustrated before being able to do anything)
• be easy to find your way around (which means be modular, and business-related apps generally aren’t, because while it’s relatively easy to break down a kernel into specific modules, it’s much harder for this kind of apps)

Other than that, while opening the code still brings lots of benefits, you won’t get a community of hackers like the one of the Linux kernel.

Thankfully, the OSS community has matured a bit, and the idea that OSS isn’t the Silver Bullet doesn’t seem such a blasphemy anymore (except to newbies or non-coding zealots).

It’s ironic that a couple of weeks after this silly display of zealotry, this interesting video on how to deal with poisonous users would be highlighted on slashdot. We’re quite fortunate with Rosegarden that we almost never had to deal with this problem. I can only think on one occurrence, but the guy actually turned into a valuable contributor once we explained the problem to him.

The thread linked above on the merits of KDE’s new file manager, Dolphin has pretty much all of the standard features of the clueless user who can’t tolerate having to change his ways. His point is that his current way of working is the best one and must not be altered, more specifically must not be simplified or “dumbed down”. I’m pretty sure there’s a strong correlation between how much a user wants his environment to be configurable, and how not unproductive he actually is. I.e., the more you care about fine-tuning your tools, the less you actually use them. The extreme being, you guessed it, PC tuners . View it as a form of procrastination if you will, I’ve yet to see someone who’s adamant about “having choice” (which really means wanting to use his pet apps and considering that anything else is crap) also producing anything useful.

That won’t prevent him from demanding to see the data from usability tests, only if those contradict his own usage patterns of course (which are completely geekish but he can’t realise that).

On a side note, you have to be impressed by Aaron’s tactful and patient behavior all throughout the thread.

This slashdot story prompted me to write a post about free software and politics which I had hinted in a footnote of my first post.

Before carrying on, for the sake of clarity I should state that in France, I’m center-left, in the US I’m a dangerous leftist.

The author of the slashdot story is puzzled to see that right-wing people are more likely to use free software than left-wing ones. But, given that free software is generally considered to be a ‘left’ value, one would have thought it would be the opposite (and, as some comments explain, I believe it is the case in France). However there are two ways to see the problem :

You can consider the software industry to be the perfect example of capitalism and free entreprise in action, and therefore free software, aiming to destroy it, to be anti-capitalist (thus left-oriented).

Or, you can consider that free software, being the empowerment of the individual, is an even better free enterprise illustration against the state-like monopoly of the software industry. One of the basic postulate behind right-wing politics is that the free market always finds the best solution, eventually, a solution which state-driven economics (i.e. socialism) cannot hope to find. And that’s exactly what free software postulates : give free reign to developpers and they will create software that the industry (which is a state-like structure) can’t possibly produce. And there you have why libertarians such as ESR who believe in minimal government also support free software.

At this point it’s hard to resist indulging into an obvious statement : the little I’ve learned about economics clearly show that free market (or, the combination of everybody’s selfish motives) does reach equilibrium, only the worst one. And you have a perfect example of this in free software : people prefer to start their own project than to collaborate with an existing one. The very philosophy of free software gives them a perfect reason to do so : “let the users decide”. Only the users don’t have perfect market knowledge, they don’t evaluate different pieces of software rationally, but emotionally. Because they liked what the author said in an interview, because they like the looks, or some specific feature, but not because it’s really better written or designed (they may sometimes argue so but honestly, have they really looked at the code ?). So sometimes there is indeed stabilisation over a few pieces of software, each fitting its own niche. Most of the time however you get a big old duplication of efforts, with zealots on each side arguing on how their own favorite is really the best one and the other side are just a bunch of morons.

So there. If free market really was working so well, we wouldn’t have two incomplete desktop frameworks and Microsoft would be long gone. Instead, it seems that the State as a government system is still the best working solution : letting devs do what they like whenever possible, and constraining them to do what’s needed the rest of the time. And that’s why I’d rather pay taxes than letting the market decide if a school or a road should be built or not.