The author spends most of the article harping on the fact that most open source projects don't have any collaborators. The vast majority of software, open source or not, is completely irrelevant. Any conclusion drawn by talking about irrelevant software is also irrelevant.
I've met the author, and considering he's one of the founding members of Ubuntu I would read this article in a different light than most of the comments on here. I think it's more of a call to action to make us think not just what Open Source can do for us, but what we can do for open source.<p>BTW: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Mako_Hill" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Mako_Hill</a>
Why can't they call it LIBERATING SOFTWARE?<p>Seriously, it's not the software that's free (as in libre), it's you, to do as you want as long as others who receive your derivative software get the same freedom.<p>Liberating -- to bring about liberty to those who do not have it<p>It makes much more sense than "free" software. Why not take the opportunity to have everyone exposed to the name understand exactly what it means and be more intrigued?
I blame Sourceforge rather than the Free Software community. Take a look at my 150+ projects on Github; 90% of them have at least one commit by someone other than me. Look at the ones that have more than 10 watchers, and they all have commits by several people.<p>This is because Github makes collaboration and attribution easy. Sourceforge? I didn't even know it existed past 1998.
I think evolution of open source software resembles evolution in biology. There are many dead or one developer projects, but like in biology the projects that are actively developed and have many contributors are usually the strongest ones. They survived the competition with hundreds of other projects before they became what they are now.
From the article:<p><i>Free software is sometimes low quality. It is sometimes unreliable. It is sometimes inflexible.</i><p>Swap "free" for "proprietary" in that quote, and the statement is no less true. (Voice of experience, here) Continuing:<p><i>If people take the arguments in favor of open source seriously, they must explain why open source has not lived up to its "promise" and conclude that proprietary tools would be a better choice.</i><p>No, they need not. If even a handful of free or open source software meets the standards of quality one sets for proprietary software -- and I would argue not only that such a handful exists, but the so-called "standards" must be rather low to pass some of the proprietary software I've dealt with -- then open source has indeed kept its promise. Nor does the existence of some "bad" open source software imply that proprietary is better. If that were the case, we must also accept the reverse, that the existence of some "bad" proprietary software implies open source is better. Examples exist in <i>both</i> categories, so clearly <i>each</i> is better than the other.<p>Here's the deal: An open source package, once "in the wild", can become <i>very</i> hard to kill if it gains any traction to speak of. As long as someone keeps the source available, anyone else can not only acquire and use it, but build on and improve it. Not so, proprietary. With the source kept to the strict confines of a few personal or company machines, its growth and development are limited to what its owners see fit to pursue or permit, and they can choke it off at any time. As a consequence, we tend to see more "bad" open software roaming the net as abandoned projects are left to anyone who cares to pick them up, while proprietary packages that either don't make the grade or lose their luster meet a quiet demise behind closed doors. That's what makes proprietary software look better: the "bad" stuff just gets killed off more effectively.
I agree with author's observation. My personal open-source projects are developed 95% by me, and sometimes overhead of collaboration (documentation, discussions) outweighed the contributions I've got (small patches that I had to refactor anyway).<p>However, this should not be interpreted as a reason to drop free software or that closed/for-profit software would fare any better. I don't think that the "long tail" of projects in sourceforge graveyard would attract enough commercial interest to fund several developers.
The surprising conclusion of this article is that free software advocates have lower expectations. It sounds like for them every project released under a free license is a success, and features like quality, reliability, and flexibility are desirable but secondary goals.
Argh, are these old farts still making grunting noises? How many important projects started in the last 5-7 years are GPL licensed vs Apache/BSD/MIT? The battle is over, and the copyleft zealots lost. Time to move on.
If these folks spent 1/10th of the time they've spent on ideological wars doing something more productive, FOSS would be a heck of a lot better, especially for end users.