The sorry state of open source today

[Valour]

This editorial is an experiment. It was originally written by Radu-Cristian Fotescu for his blog (http://www.beranger.org), but he offered us the chance to publish it here on The Jem Report as well. It is extremely long, and divided up into separate pages, which is something I don't usually do with articles. So the format in which this is published is the first experiment. The second experiment is a matter of this article's content. I don't agree with everything Radu-Cristian says in his article, but I very much agree with what he is doing, which is to take a brutally honest look at the failures of the open source community and demand that we begin to recognize them instead of continuing to ignore the parts that aren't working correctly. This is the first step in fixing some of the problems that frustrate us all as GNU/Linux and *BSD users. Maybe it's time for a great re-examination of our processes and attitudes, and think about what needs to be done to create great software instead of continuing to perpetuate old mistakes on the basis that tradition, politics, rhetoric, and dogma are more important than critical thinking.

The sorry state of open source today

[beranger]

Until Jem will find the time to fix it, here's what should be changed in page 16:

"Is this a good reason enough to change the default media player in a KDE version of the latest Mandriva from a KDE player (Kaffeine) to a GNOME player (Totem)? When the user reqires a KDE environment, is it fair to provide him with a mixed environment?"

should be changed to:

"Is this a good reason enough to change the default media player to KMPlayer? (Mandriva Corporate Desktop 3.0 had Totem as the media player in KDE, and I was expecting to change it to Kaffeine, but it seems KMPlayer is "more official".)"

[Valour]

It should be fixed now. We had some database efficiency problems in Mambo, and I had to clear them up before I could do anything to the content.