open source as unpleasant subculture

[tim_maroney]

A /. story led me to the archives of the Linux kernel mailing list. In this I am reminded of one personal reason I have never been attracted to the Free Software or Open Source ideology. It requires a major lifestyle commitment which involves the company of unpleasant people, as a quick browse through those archives will demonstrate.

Comments

[tim_maroney]

Tomcat installation on OS X from source was giving me major headaches (kind of surprising since I've successful installed it before on Solaris). I backed off for a while, then did a Google search for better instructions and found this, which made it much easier. A successful install is pleasing, of course, but at the same time, this free software experience always leaves me scratching my head and asking, is there any reason just installing something needs to be this hard?

The question itself is politicized and subject to the status dynamics of the open source subculture, which is to say, asking it is punished in a variety of ways. Gee, I didn't have any trouble, wonder what's wrong with you is the most common one; a more tolerant approach simply complains in an exasperated way why this person is objecting to the same kind of thing we all have to do every day. A cynical approach welcomes the difficulty as a guarantor of job security and lashes out at the threat to the established order.

My point as an application programmer on Mac and Windows is that to achieve results in that kind of programming, I don't have to constantly jump through this kind of system administrator or system integrator hoop. There's no good reason the server-side software needs to be written this way. I view it as a kind of slackness I wouldn't get away with in my software world. In client-server software, though, it's business as usual.