<story><title>Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source</title><url>http://www.datamation.com/open-source/9-things-that-are-never-admitted-about-open-source-1.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>belorn</author><text>1#, Ubuntu is indeed no longer the public face to open source, but then is anyone actually surprised? At best, Ubuntu can be said to have been an symptom of the success Debian was and still is in collecting and maintaining open source and free software projects. Where ubuntu left, mint picked up, and I don&apos;t see an end in polished distributions ontop of Debian.&lt;p&gt;#2, The dangers of web-services in regard to privacy and property is only starting to reach the general population. In this regard, EFF and CCC has had a larger role to play than AGPL and FLOSS.&lt;p&gt;#3, While Stallman is the leading figure in free software, people like Eben Moglen has much better speaches and do more to recruit new members to the community. I think today, Stallman is more often addressing the members inside the community in what areas are currently in need of most work, and what new threats exist for the community.&lt;p&gt;#4, A true Meritocracy does not exist anywhere. People follow leaders, even those that do not deserve it. The goal might be to become a Meritocracy (I wouldn&apos;t know), but the truth is that open and free software communities are just made out of human beings.&lt;p&gt;#5, When addressing/claiming a serious issue like Systemic Sexism, two things need to be done. First, one need to show the problem exist. We do have nice statistic on it and the author did show some poor but uncontested data (so he get a pass there). Second one need to show &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; the gender diversity is so large. The author do not do this. Actually, no articles about sexism in the free and open source communities addresses the question of why (or at least no one has done so with data to back it up!). This is in my view the primary single reason why the discussion about sexism in free software has gone nowhere for the last 10 years. Its not about hushing or denying the existence of the issue, but rather the lack of data that is keeping us from fixing it. The question of &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; is a central part of any technologist or academic thinking, and without it we would be unable to fix any computer, create any program, or solve any problem whatsoever. As a answer to the question on &lt;i&gt;how do we show why there is a gender difference in open source and free software&lt;/i&gt;, I would start by looking at how this community differ from other similar sized communities with similar age groups. One particular group that comes to mind is gamer communities, sporting communities, and other communities that people freely perform as part of an hobby. One could also look at subgroups, such as IRC groups vs stackoverflow. If they have more, less or equal gender equality, one should ask the question &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; and try to build some testable theories. After that is done, and only after that is done, can one start to address the issue truly and in an effective way for the open source and free software community.&lt;p&gt;#6, Microsoft is never going to be trusted as a friend to free software. Too much bad blood, and honestly, who would want to be friend with someone who previously have gone out of their way kill you. Microsoft is also not putting down the symbolic knife, widely swinging secure boot around for everyone to see thus creating more untrust. At best, one can say that there exist bigger threats than Microsoft and thus focus should be redirected.&lt;p&gt;#7, the Desktop interface is the most visible aspect to desktop users. like with any area of design, it has had good times and bad times. It has a lot of discontentment, and is likely to see many people trying to do massive changes in a hope to get it in sync with what they perceive as current good design. Until design stop to change, the changes will likely continue without loosing any speed. I don&apos;t know if anyone tries to deny this or claim it is something not to be admitted.&lt;p&gt;#8, again I want to point towards human nature and that almost all cultures is monocultures. the top 1% of the musical bands are going to have 99% of the listeners. However, when people say that FOSS encourages diversity, the opposit camp is the devices which can&apos;t be changed, and are of questionable legality to modify (jailbreak). Those devices has one system, one store, one video player, one music player, and one company behind it. Compare to those places, FOSS indeed encourages diversity even if the majority of users are using the same software.&lt;p&gt;#9, open source and free software has indeed still a long way to go if they want to reach each communities goal that they had set aside for themselves. That said, reverse engineer is often a thankless job and without a political remodeling of the landscape (such as steam box might do but who knows), new devices is an never ending stream of new work. To make matter worse, old devices get old way to quick. Those people I know that work with this tend to burn out fast, and reach an unhealthy attitude to new people. Sadly this tend to happen way before those people would transfer knowledge and responsibility to a new group of people. So far, I have not seen any solution to this problem and can thus just hope that a major landscape change happens from outside the community.</text></comment>
<story><title>Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source</title><url>http://www.datamation.com/open-source/9-things-that-are-never-admitted-about-open-source-1.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>This article confuses &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;the Linux desktop&quot;.&lt;p&gt;I consider myself an open source person.  I spent a good chunk of my day today using open source tools, writing an article that I will give away for free.&lt;p&gt;And yet, I am typing this on a Mac.  I don&apos;t care about gnome or KDE.  Yes, I used several Linux machines today.  But I have not seriously used a Linux desktop in the last 2 years, nor do I care what is going on there.  (The last window manager that I liked was fvwm, but many years ago a Debian upgrade added integration with Gnome I did not want or need, and it stopped working in the way I wanted.  I have not bothered caring about a window manager since.)&lt;p&gt;I am far from alone in my views.  (Except for liking fvwm.  Most people consider that plain weird.)</text></comment>