OSNews

The trends in commercial software are moving more and more to user driven development, and not compromising on quality. Where I work we have a 1 month release cycle, where every month we ask our users (we call them product owners internally to try and keep from falling into holier then thou programmer attitudes) what the features they need the most are, and let that drive the features of the release. We have two testers to every developer, and these are trained people who give very good bug reports and methodically test the software, not just random people on the interweb. We aim for 3 lines of test code to every 1 line of production code, and most of the team practices test driven development. Every code check in needs to be reviewed by another programmer before it goes to the testers, and our build server automatically runs through integration tests on every check in to the source tree. And every iteration has time set aside for regression testing, deployment testing, and performance testing to be absolutely sure we ship quality.

Now, we are ahead of the curve on this, and Scrum is one of the more hardcore of the Agile processes, but this is direction the industry is moving in. The software industry has traditionally had an abysmal standard of quality, and has been driven by cowboy coders who dont give a crap about the people they are actually writing the code for. In anything even resembling what would be considered a modern process, we are now taking a more holistic approach, and learning how to stop wasting everybodies time and money building things that are un tested and features that are misunderstood, or just plain un needed.

By contrast, open source embraces that mentality. Unit testing is rarely, if ever used. The commercial software world is bringing the developer and the user closer together, while the open source world pushes them further apart. Users are something to be taken care of by downstream, and heaven forbid if any of them try to break that barrier and ask a developer directly for help, which they only do in desperation when a distro doesn't have a good working relationship with upstream. What I would consider good developers (i.e. people who care about the big picture) either do not stick around long (like con kolivas) or become completely disillusioned and just stop doing anything that effects the end user anymore (havoc, miguel)

Sorry for the huge rant, but that comment is exactly the reason that I post the things that I do in places like this. There is this massive misconception that open source is inherently better for the users, and it really isn't, except in a very abstract way that has little to no real value. You say that open source is like punk rock and commercial software is like top 40, fine. I say open source is like communism, fantastic ideas, very idealistic, inherently flawed in its inability to deliver meaningful innovation or an acceptable level of quality without doing so on the back of a more practical system.

And seriously dude, apple is punk rock. They are hip, revolutionary, and mean to the bone ;-)

And just so you know, this is coming from someone who has used linux for about 6 years now on and off (currently on, I am running hardy), has participated in a great deal of open source projects, and doesn't any more due to a serious disillusionment with the whole system.