Open Source has alot of potential. Open Source is both free and transparent. Those are both really good things aren't they? Linux is a full blown O.S. with great security and tons of built in apps.
The tragic truth about Open Source, in spite of all of its potential, is that 99% of the time it is a complete waste of bandwidth. It is now, and will always be, utter garbage. From here on in, I shall refer to Open Source as Open Sores. Here are the ten most undeniable reasons why Open Sores will never be worth anything ...
10. Open sores is supposed to be about community and the free exchange of ideas. In reality, it is about a bunch of elitist schmucks trying their best to run new members, and old members with divergent opinions, out of the community.
9. Open Sores has millions of projects, 90% of which are actually 10,000 variations of the same thing. The end result is that 10,000 would be Diablo clones never mature. The better projects, invariably try to compete with smaller projects, or apply number ten to any of the smaller projects contributors who would try to join them.
8. The vast majority of projects start strong, then realize 9 and 10 are true, and then stagnate. Stagnation is where all but one person leaves a project, no one new comes on-board, and that remaining developer refuses to let it go. The end result? 5 million projects that will NEVER be completed, have useless features or major shortcomings that could only be remedied with outside influence. The best part is to find one half way decent application, you have to download, install and take a couple hours to discover the inherent suck of the other 4,999,999 programs.
7. Because 8 and 9 are true, there aren't enough Open Sores projects that are solid enough to justify swapping out the commercial price tag for inferior software. That is to say that it's typically better for users to just spend $500 than it is for them to try and deal with the Open Sores. If 8, and 9 weren't true, more Open Sores would mature into something that was at least of equal usefulness when compared to it's commercial counterpart. Without user support, especially in the form of new contributors coming onto a project, Open Sores is just a bunch of celibate nerds and their crappy pet projects.
6. Because 7-10 tend to be true, the few rare gems with potential end up never seeing the light of day, and they die off, or as they are developed they remain unknown and fail to become a significant standard in their niche. An excellent example of this is GIMP. It's a pretty good program, it has it's issue due mostly to 7 and 8 on this list. It's good, especially for free. But the commercial big hitters lack the irritations of GIMP. Thus businesses and pros tend to just use the big name stuff, and the rest have probably never heard of gimp. If they would up their game for one year, they would start getting support, even financial from businesses. That would require new blood, new ideas, and a willingness to make #1 not be true.
5. A lack of infrastructure standards murders most Open Sores. This is known around the Linux community as dependency hell. Dependency hell is also what lengthens release and patch cycles. If the Open Sores community would stop for ten days and deal with their actual development tools and internal infrastructure countless projects would find that most of their problems would go away. This also means that for any new blood willing to stay on and keep working despite the afore mentioned problems, there is a plethora of irksome problems they must learn to work around.
4. Due largely to 5, but also to 6-10; the turnaround for bug-fixes, implementation of new and improved features, and the ability to draw in new talent who is willing to struggle and bust their asses on a project is far slower and less effective than it should be.
3. Sort of a sub set of 4 and 5 (see how this is going), Open Sores projects are relying more and more as the years pass on commercial software for design and development. This means that in order to work on an a project, an incoming developer may have to spend thousands on things like Visual C++, crystal, Photoshop, Bryce etc. Unfortunately relying on the free equivalent versions of any of these tools means that 4 and 5 can quickly turn into insurmountable obstacles for the much needed new blood.
2. Because it is Open Sores, it is OPEN. This is a double edged sword. This has lead to an epic (or epicacic) lack of standards that contributes to every single afore mentioned problem. 400 varieties of Linux, 12 versions of python, 200 difference versions of any given library. Real nice soup-sandwich-waffle-dog ya got their Franken-app. Now find me any serious and sane individual that wants to sort through all that to avoid finding out that the code he or she spent six months on isn't going to work now because a new snippet of functionality needed some other obscure flavor of G-Lib or Python.
1. Nothing is ever wrong or lacking with Linux or any other open source application. If you don't want to spend an hour recompiling a library, and then another 20 minutes in a prompt to set the permissions and gain access to a cd drive twice a week, and especially if you don't know how to do this, then your a retard and an asshole. If you want something to be user friendly, just install and go get it, then your a Windoze loving idiot who deserves to die. If you go on a forum and ask how something works, rather than parsing countless poorly worded faqs, figuring it out for yourself(as if, the average user hires men and women like me to work on macs and windows machines), or reading all 900,000 poorly categorized posts by other folks who were just as confused, then you suck. Unfortunately for Linux and Open Sores, most sane people will go ahead and take the easier, more productive route. This means no support from them. Yes Linux is more secure. Hackers won't shit in their own back yard, duh. Even with the occasional virus related loss, the other guys are still too much easier and faster for anything Open Sores to catch up. They are also nearly universally supported by any app or vendor a person would actually WANT to use. But, I'm an asshole and Open Sores are just perfect.
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