Open Source

I'm not a fan of the Open source concept. I know, I know, I'm the devil, right? Ok, let me rephrase. I guess I'm a fan of a company making their product open source - like Adobe annouced yesterday, if they can do it and still make a profit. I mean, I like buying legitimate software products that let me tinker with how it works so I can make it work the way I want. That's awesome. At least it seems like it at first. But here's the problem. You've only got two choices, make the code-base truly open, or have a central group of programmers control the code-base, either a corporate entity, or - as "open-source" usually implies - volunteers. And here's the problem. If you truly open up the source to anyone, you get a wikipedia-style mish-mash of ideas. I'm not sure that's even really possible and still have a product that will actually run without crashing. So you've got to have some sort of control over the code.

What that means in practical terms then, is that if I want to change something about how my version of Outlook works (I've always hated how limited the inbox rules were), I'm free to do that (if Outlook were open-source, I mean), but as soon as I upgrade to the next version of Outlook, I've over-written my changes and have to make them again. Sorry, but that's just too time-consuming to be useful.

The other thing that turns me off

is the typical volunteer-driven open-source projects. The crowning achievements of the open-source community are firefox and eclipse, both of which are buggy as hell if you're truly honest with yourself.

Yes, we hold them up as beacons of hope and of what we can accomplish if we all work together *hopeful-sigh-with-hands-clasped-under-chin*, but if we were to honestly evaluate these pieces of software according to the same standards that we judge, say, a Microsoft product, they would unquestioningly be labeled "crap." Not because they don't do what they promised, or aren't generating innovation. Indeed they are keeping up with industry giants in that regard, but where they fall grossly behind is in producing bug-free code and responding quickly to identified bugs. It's only because they were put together by a bunch of volunteers and made freely available that we give them a bit of a pass on the Quality-Assurance job. And the fact of the matter is, these two are the cream of the crop. With the vast majority of open-source projects, you're lucky if you can even figure out how to install the thing, much less get it to actually run.

Don't misunderstand. I am not coming down on open-sourcers. I've got nothing against the good people working on either of these projects, and under the circumstances, I'm impressed as hell with what they've produced. But for me, that's where it stops: "Wow! Good Job! Impressive as hell. Now, I'm going to go use some professionally developed software instead."

See, the problem is, in the end, someone has to do the grunt work. Software development is 60% fun (writing code) and 40% boring (QAing code). The fact of the matter is, no one would do true quality QA unless they are being told to by the person that signs their paychecks. And without good QA, a piece of software can cost you more time than it saves.

For my money (literally), I'd rather pay a reasonable amount of money and know there is someone, somewhere who is held responsible for the quality of the product, then get a piece of software for free that may or may not get worked on this weekend, depending on whether or not the Mets are playing.