Why Open Source Works
May 26, 08:21 PM by Eric Allen
When I look at the open-source movement, I see hundreds of hours of software development spent creating software that will earn no money. Yes, there is the Stallman model, but most normal users don’t pay for support and don’t expect to do so. I believe that I have finally come up with a conclusion as to why the open-source community is capable of sustaining itself.
I believe that the open-source community is, in essence, a communist community. I’m not trying to label them as commies in a demeaning way, I like the system.All members contribute to a common pool and all take from it. The pool is open-source software.
It may seem like this theory has an obvious hole. Why don’t average users just use the software created by the community? That way, the programmers would just be writing software that is used freely by everyone.The major reason is that most open-source software is hard to use. The programmers, writing software for themselves and other programmers, don’t bother to include a simple user interface. Because of this, most users, used to a simple GUI, can’t cope with the command-line options, scripting extensions, and other things that seem intuitive to a programmer but are indecipherable to many. this way, only other programmers, writing similar code, can easily use the software.
There are leaks from this community, as some more altruistic members try to make the software more usable to the normal user but it usually doesn’t work. There just isn’t the time and/or the funding that a normal software company has to make a stable, easy to use piece of software. I don’t want to give any specific examples because I may upset the programmers trying their best to be good digital citizens.
To sum it all up, the open-source community is a communist group that creates software for each other in their spare time. They maintain a partial lock on their software, to keep most users away, by making the interface intuitive only no the less than casually involved.
