Journal athloi's Journal: Open source doomed by cognitive dissonance? 1
I was reading, through Dvorak.org, a Mark Perkel rant about open source software.
When I sold commercial software and someone called me needing something fixed or added I usually had it the same day. However in the open source world you have a lot of people who have a highly inflated sense of importance who think their software is the greatest thing that was ever written and it's crap!
But what the open source world doesn't get is that Windows programs actually WORK! If you want to install a windows application you download it, click NEXT, AGREE, NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH and the program is running. In the Linux world this almost never happens and when it does you're almost sure that something has to be wrong. In Linux you have to edit cryptic config files with poor documentation. Then you try to run the application, get an error, Google the error, and go back and edit again. After many hours you might have it working or you might have to give up.
^
Dvorak elaborates a bit further.
This is totally different from what you get from the Macintosh fan base when they are complaining. The Mac fanboys, as they are affectionately called, tend to love the Mac because it demands little of them, and they like it that way, and they can't understand why everyone doesn't see the light. It's kind of like a religion, or a lifestyle.
The open-source mavens circling the Linux drain actually know something about computers and coding, and they're defending the priesthood, not a lifestyle. If there's a lifestyle here, it's about coke, pizza, and porn, nothing more. The only thing they have in common with the Mac aficionados is a hatred of Microsoft, the evil empire trying to enslave them. And anyone critical of open source is part of an evil scheme.
These guys are not your intellectual or thoughtful types, in general. ^
What I like about Dvorak is that he is an intellectual and a big-picture guy, which means he's an intellectual that's useful (these are not as rare as surmised). He isn't buying into a class conflict between underpaid, underchallenged programmers who are truth be told usually cloning successful Windows software on Linux. He's pointing to the trends in human society at the intersection of technology, psychology and politics.
Programmers tend to eschew big picture guys, like many eschew writers, because they like to indulge in the pretense that programming is more difficult than quality writing or thinking. Given that the sheer amount of bad code out there balances the immense amount of bad writing, and how few programmers can write a coherent paragraph, I think it's a case of different specializations wrecking our brains for anything else. I can train writers to program, if they're natively intelligent, and I can train programmers to write, although it's a more cumulative discipline and may take longer.
I believe in shareware, and I consider open source an extension of the freeware and shareware of the 1980s. What I believe in more than that is quality design. A really good app has a great interface, great code, and great project management in that its designers know the tasks for which it is used and how to optimize it for those tasks. As with any great physical world tool, good design is apparent readily not as much in some shock and awe sense, but a solid sense of familiarity with using it.
The editor Perkel mentions, Textpad, is probably the best designed editor ever to grace a computer. It feels right. It works right. It rarely crashes. It can handle whatever you throw at it.
Because I'm a believer in good design, I know that design and leadership matter more than whether a product is open source, closed source and free, or closed source and commercial. There can be good music that's not on indie labels, and there can be commercial-styled products that are excellent and aren't made for pay. Think outside the box - we hear this phrase so much, we've forgotten what it means. Think outside the rigid categories that imprison us, and design better categories.
I know that good open source software exists. But I've also observed the butthead behavior that Perkel, Dvorak and others document. I have also seen that the loudest voices in the open source community deny this, because they're busy cultivating audiences for their own projects. They don't care about the truth. They want to make themselves bigger by getting lots of you to sign up for their deceitful misrepresentations (Eric S. Raymond, I'm calling you). They aren't doing anything wrong per se in that they're acting like commercial software companies do, which is they're trying to earn a bunch of money and retire to the hills above San Diego. Wouldn't you?
And that, I think, is where my heart, non-scientific as it is, is with open source software fanatics. I wouldn't. I haven't. I believe in something greater, and while I want money, I won't give up some things for it. I wouldn't allow myself to be in porno films for a million dollars. I wouldn't exploit third world workers for cash, although I refuse to buy products from those same states. I wouldn't sell drugs to kids. I would like to make quality products, and I think once the open source software gets over its bad psychology, it will see things the same way.
Cognitive dissonance is what happens when reality is so far from what you want it to be that you create an alternate reality for yourself based on intangible, non-reality-correlative ideas like morality, emotions, or how hip or swift you are. Cognitive dissonance is what grips the open source movement and retards it. If it is to move on toward a better future, we need to learn how to recognize the kind of cognitive dissonance that enables us to call crappy applications GREAT because they're not Microsoft and are open source. Even if these are our virtual friends, we need to let them know that their thinking is marred by bad psychology.
It's one thing to believe. At some point, you have to put that belief into action, and that requires treating your brain like any other technology, and mastering it.
Pal, im making serious living over open source (Score:2)