Now, don’t misunderstand me. The idea of sharing your work and letting others profit from it, and you from them, is a very fine idea. It is my committed opinion that the source code for all software should be freely available to anyone. I have nothing against the GPL or any other OSS license, they have brought sweeping changes to an industry that might otherwise have sunk into total stagnation. I, in fact, use quite a lot of open source software in my daily life.
I mean what I said, though. Open Source is, or rather is infected with, a disease. The disease is a very simple one: “It works for me, so fix it yourself, noob.”
For some time, I’ve been using MythTV as my only TV system. For the most part, it works very well; recordings record, much TV is watched, and familial happiness reigns. But sometimes, and only sometimes, MythTV will stop working. Why does it stop? I don’t know. I look in the logs and find a segfault buried deep in a child process of the Myth frontend. Why did that make the whole system crash? I don’t know. If I was to be a good citizen and report this error, I would be told to go away. I would be told, if I really wanted to help report the bug, I need to install the debugging-enabled Myth, and sit at the keyboard with bated breath awaiting the crash. Then, I could type a sonata in G-minor into gdb(1), and get a proper set of debugging information. Finally, I would re-report the error, where a series of developers would debate the validity of a segfault in such a minor process, snidely blame my hardware, and eventually close the bug unfixed. Instead of diving into this deeply unsatisfying process, I simply told Mrs. Tepid to push the reset button frequently.
Why does Ubuntu make it so hard to play an MP3? If I plug a thumb drive containing a collection of 80′s-era German industrial rock into the slot of Windows, media player is there and can play it right away. If I find a Macbook and plug the same thumb drive in, it litters my drive with “.DS_Cache” files, but iTunes will play those MP3s immediately (although Genius may laugh at me for not being metro enough to use a Mac). If I plug my industrial ear-poison into a fresh Ubuntu install, Rhythmbox will happily try to open those MP3s, and cheerfully inform me that I need to download a codec. Of course I’ll indicate my consent to this codec business, but the opaque error message will leave me wanting. “Could not install codec”. So I dutifully search the internet for a solution, and soon come across this gem:
If an MP3 option is not shown in the Preferred Format list, install the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse package and restart Rhythmbox. The option CD Quality, MP3 (.mp3 type) should appear in the Preferred Format list.
If, as I’m led to believe, evil media conglomerates prevent shipping the software with MP3 support built in, then why can there not be a button labeled “Install MP3 Support” somewhere readily visible? And by the by, you can repeat the entire MP3 rant about DVDs, as the crew of the shuttle Atlantis discovered.
I believe I know the root cause of the “fix it yourself” disease. It is simply this: open source hackers do not value time. With the exception of sponsored kernel developers, Mozilla employees, and a small number of other corporate-backed open source projects, these developers do not think in terms of time—whether yours or theirs—as being an asset.
It is this disease, and not any monopolist tendencies from other OS vendors, that keeps FOSS in the extreme minority. If it takes you three hours to setup a DVD player, that’s not a negative. If getting an OS to the state where MP3 files will actually play as music takes downloading massive codec packs with cryptic names, that’s all big media’s fault. It couldn’t be done by an automatic prompt, that would be catering to the RIAA somehow. And If making an iPod talk to a computer requires a haiku on the command line, that merely demonstrates the system’s power!
I use all three of the major operating systems (BSD, Linux, Windows). By far the one with the most problems, the one that takes the most effort to resolve errors, is the Linux machine. BSD just doesn’t break, and Windows has a nifty roll-back that’s fixed everything so far. But between dependency hell, recompiling, scripts that assume I’m on RedHat 3, wifi that still refuses to even give an error message before failing, and crashing video drivers, Linux is a large time sink with very little return.
Rant over.
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