[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Dominique Michel]

Le Fri, 8 Jun 2018 11:55:17 +0200,
Louigi Verona <louigi.verona at gmail.com> a écrit :


> *... big open source products are often effective monopolies. Because
> a product is so big and has been developed for such a long time,
> typically no team will opt to create a replacement. It can even be
> considered a poor move that undermines the work of the community,
> wastes time and effort.
snip
> 
> *As a result, "free" operating systems usually have only one main
> program in a given area. For instance, there is but a single serious
> raster graphics package - GIMP. If GIMP does not satisfy the user -
> there are virtually no alternatives that are able to boast comparable
> stability and initial feature set. If one sees several programs being
> developed to achieve a similar use case, then it is a good bet that
> none of them are reliably good. Such is the situation with video
> editors on Linux as of the moment of writing.*

cinelerra is a very good video editor with a very active community. The
developers are very open and encourage users participation, criticism
and ideas.

> 
> *At the same time developers of the main package might be under very
> little pressure to make their product competitive, by virtue of there
> being no competition. This allows them to work at their own pace,
> prioritize new features over stability and over polishing existing
> functionality, spend time on experiments that are incomplete for
> years, and often hold bizarre views about software development in
> general.* And I have seen a lot of this.


You cannot generalize it. The star office story is an example of the
inverse situation. Star Office was an outstanding office suite with
unique features. It was so good it begin to make concurrence to
commercial software. As a result, Sun buy it, rename it to Open Office
and in its first Sun release removed some features.

On the other hand, Sun made good thinks with it, as example the oofice
file format is now an open standard than anyone can use. But with time,
as Sun was very conservative and unable to update features like the
html output compatibilities, the free software community said stop to
that bullshit, and we now have Libre Office. It took time but it is a
benefit to every body because Libre Office use the good things Sun made
possible like a standardized file format and new and exciting features
are added on a regular basis.

> 
> Also, if someone writes a library that can be easily used in a
> project, people end up using this library everywhere, reducing the
> diversity. In a closed source world people would need to waste effort
> writing a new library, but the overall result can be a net positive -
> new, diverse and more efficient libraries appear all the time and the
> technology moves forward.
> 
> So, the re-usability of FLOSS is both a feature and a bug.

Which give you liberty of choice. You can use existing software or make
your own and choose any criterium of choice you want or can. And sure,
for big project, it is more complicated, but with time the solution
will arise in most cases.

-- 
If you have a problem and you are not doing anything to fix it, you are
at the heart of the problem.