czr114
November 12th, 2010, 09:42 PM
This isn't so much a complaint as it is an observation of a change in trend, and a hope to bring awareness to the bigger picture.
More and more with each passing month, I'm noticing a shift in development priorities across the entire FOSS community.
For one, there seems to be a lot more competition. While competition is good, the FOSS model makes cooperation better. Since development time is finite, we're better off with a fewer projects with increase development, increased feature creation, and increased code optimization.
I'm also seeing more and more development effort go into polishing the user experience through new window managers, UIs, docks, widgets, themes, monitors, etc. These are great to have as an option to use, but I'm starting to wonder if chasing Windows 7 and OSX in the look-and-feel department might be detracting from some open issues with basic functionality elsewhere.
With as many people as are now using FOSS desktop operating systems, I'm wondering if commenting on blogs and mailing lists is still the best way of bringing attention to stalled development.
Perhaps the various distro teams should get together and build a clearinghouse for feature requests and future development goals in popular third-party packages. While it's not a substitute for coordination on the project itself, such a portal might be able to direct the efforts of some of the enormously bright volunteers helping produce all this great software, if only some awareness could be drawn to foundational third-party projects with active functionality issues among the shared userbase.
Take, for example, libtorrent. This one library is probably responsible for more thoroughput of OS ISOs than all other transfer methods combined, yet it has languished for over a year without even so much as basic support for UTP. The main developer is a university student, who, despite his enormous contribution to the software we all use, can't be expected to sit around writing code 24/7. Development help from someone with C and low-level network experience would be enormously beneficial, but no developer seems to have emerged. The net result is a drastically reduced throughput for seeding free and open operating systems, as seeders are forced to back down their upload caps to avoid strangling their connections.
Take, for example, Firefox 4. This enormously useful backbone of so many free desktop OSes has seen its release date pushed back into 2011 due to the sheer enormity of open tasks.
Thunderbird languishes without native support for OpenPGP.
Our antispam systems seem stuck in a 2004 paradigm, forcing admins to augment with more integrated or proprietary solutions, like Barracuda units.
PHP has been on a slow march to 6 forever, with the 5 branch missing many of the features of high-performance, enterprise-grade languages.
We don't have enough AppArmor profiles, and updates are sometimes slow in coming.
We have a litany of IDEs, all of which are a bit rough around the edges, in one way or another.
We have yet to see an archiving and compression GUI as feature-rich and integrated as WinRAR is for Windows.
GIMP draws many complaints from professional photographers and graphic artists.
Our multitude of video editors remain lacking some of the heavyweight power of their Windows and Apple counterparts.
This is just a thought. I'm very happy to see all which has been accomplished so far.
More and more with each passing month, I'm noticing a shift in development priorities across the entire FOSS community.
For one, there seems to be a lot more competition. While competition is good, the FOSS model makes cooperation better. Since development time is finite, we're better off with a fewer projects with increase development, increased feature creation, and increased code optimization.
I'm also seeing more and more development effort go into polishing the user experience through new window managers, UIs, docks, widgets, themes, monitors, etc. These are great to have as an option to use, but I'm starting to wonder if chasing Windows 7 and OSX in the look-and-feel department might be detracting from some open issues with basic functionality elsewhere.
With as many people as are now using FOSS desktop operating systems, I'm wondering if commenting on blogs and mailing lists is still the best way of bringing attention to stalled development.
Perhaps the various distro teams should get together and build a clearinghouse for feature requests and future development goals in popular third-party packages. While it's not a substitute for coordination on the project itself, such a portal might be able to direct the efforts of some of the enormously bright volunteers helping produce all this great software, if only some awareness could be drawn to foundational third-party projects with active functionality issues among the shared userbase.
Take, for example, libtorrent. This one library is probably responsible for more thoroughput of OS ISOs than all other transfer methods combined, yet it has languished for over a year without even so much as basic support for UTP. The main developer is a university student, who, despite his enormous contribution to the software we all use, can't be expected to sit around writing code 24/7. Development help from someone with C and low-level network experience would be enormously beneficial, but no developer seems to have emerged. The net result is a drastically reduced throughput for seeding free and open operating systems, as seeders are forced to back down their upload caps to avoid strangling their connections.
Take, for example, Firefox 4. This enormously useful backbone of so many free desktop OSes has seen its release date pushed back into 2011 due to the sheer enormity of open tasks.
Thunderbird languishes without native support for OpenPGP.
Our antispam systems seem stuck in a 2004 paradigm, forcing admins to augment with more integrated or proprietary solutions, like Barracuda units.
PHP has been on a slow march to 6 forever, with the 5 branch missing many of the features of high-performance, enterprise-grade languages.
We don't have enough AppArmor profiles, and updates are sometimes slow in coming.
We have a litany of IDEs, all of which are a bit rough around the edges, in one way or another.
We have yet to see an archiving and compression GUI as feature-rich and integrated as WinRAR is for Windows.
GIMP draws many complaints from professional photographers and graphic artists.
Our multitude of video editors remain lacking some of the heavyweight power of their Windows and Apple counterparts.
This is just a thought. I'm very happy to see all which has been accomplished so far.