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What I Love About OSS

October 29, 2007 at 23:35 by Mike McQuaid

I was thinking the other day why OSS appeals to me. I’ve spent more time messing with it that I ever did with Windows stuff and sometimes it frustrates me no end but there are some things that keep my love strong for OSS.

I stumbled upon a few of these the other day whilst searching through my brain looking for something interesting.

1. The OSS is a meritocracy. If you are the chairman of IBM and you submit a patch to the kernel or to KDE that is rubbish they will tell you. They don’t care who you are, how much experience you have or how nice a guy you are. If you are short, tall, fat, thin, man, woman, OAP or teenager your code is equally judged on its merit rather than on you. As someone who finds sucking up in business intolerable this is very refreshing
2. All the little programs you loved on Windows are integrated into the system. KDE has loads of these sorts of little helper applications and features that make you life easier. A lot of the time the code is small, lean and trivial on either platform, but on Windows you usually end up paying for it or suffering registration or shareware nag screens. Also, because of the GPL, these programs don’t seem to die as often in the OSS world, they just get picked up by other people. I’ve personally found it useful sometimes when I want a new program to do something a bit weird there is almost always a program that is close to the functionality I want that I can use to build on rather than reinventing the wheel
3. Pretty much everyone, from developers to users, in the OSS community cares about it doing well and also helps new people as much as they can. The days of “RTFM noob!” being uttered constantly on IRC I feel are somewhat behind us.
4. My system runs how I want it to run. Everything can be tweaked an adjusted to make me more efficient at my job and organising my information. I have to use Outlook at work on our corporate machine (I get to use Linux for my development machine) and it is painful to use. Nothing is configurable. Want to bottom-post? Tough. Want to change keyboard shortcuts? No such luck. There is no good reason for this lack of configurability and it really irritates me.

These are just a few of my many reasons. Friday night was a great example to me off them all coming together nicely. Opensync, which I used with my last phone to sync my contacts/events/todos/life with KDE, did not work with my new phone. This irritated me. It turns out it used SyncML 1.2 which wasn’t supported in libsyncml. 3 hours later with the help of Daniel Gollub (the most helpful man IN THE WORLD) a 16k patch was on my system which enabled Opensync to work flawlessly with my phone. This can then be added to the Gentoo Ebuild and is automatically installed with libsyncml now.

OSS rocks! Anyone else have any other good reasons or good success stories?

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