The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy
Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically un-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. I've commented on the reasons for this before, but a new thought sprung to mind while reading Matthew Thomas' excellent (and old) "Why free software usability tends to suck."
Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it.
Thomas now works for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which arguably offers the industry's best Linux experience for personal computers. I got a sneak peek at a future Ubuntu release while at dinner with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth Wednesday night, and it was gorgeous. Mac freak I may be, but the day Canonical releases that version of Ubuntu is the day my devotion to Apple will be severely tested.
Yes, it's that good.
But it's "that good" because there's a company behind it, a company dedicated to making Linux usable for average consumers. As Thomas writes,
Every contributor to the [open-source] project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
This, coupled with the fact that experienced interface designers tend to be rare in open-source projects and, even when present, "they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions," as Thomas writes, means that many open-source projects are technically brilliant...and abysmal to look at.
In the short term, proprietary products are generally going to win because they can more tightly control inputs and output and, intriguingly, it is likely that the most proprietary products will win. Why? Because in new markets, control is crucial to delivering a complete experience. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author, notes:
Companies must be integrated across whatever interface drives performance along the dimension that customers value. In an industry's early days, integration typically needs to occur across interfaces that drive raw performance--for example, design and assembly. Once a product's basic performance is more than good enough, competition forces firms to compete on convenience or customization. In these situations, specialist firms emerge and the necessary locus of integration typically shifts to the interface with the customer.
Hence, Apple reigns in smartphones because it's a comparatively new market and Apple can control the complete design of the product. Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, will struggle to compete because they are only delivering software, and depend heavily on the device manufacturer. (It's likely that Apple is also exercising significant influence over AT&T and the other wireless carriers, influence that Apple's competitors likely lack.)
Against this backdrop, I wouldn't expect open source to win in new markets unless a company or other committed organization (e.g., Mozilla with Firefox) is dedicated to making it succeed. But in the long run, it's fair to expect open systems to win. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly articulated to me in response to my post "Is Apple 'open enough' to rule the next decade of mobile?":
In the long term (10 years +), I think that open systems will almost always win, because the systems will be better understood from end to end, there will be more places for individual innovations to happen, more commoditization, and [more need for] the diversity and variety of an open ecosystem.
I agree. The key, however, is learning to tweak open systems in the short term to be competitive, too, and that, I believe, requires a "cathedral+bazaar" approach to open source. It's great, for example, that Red Hat has successfully helped to commoditize the Unix operating system market, but many of us don't want to have to sit around for decades waiting for an industry to tire out, thus ripening for open-source commoditization.
We want to innovate. We want to compete. And we want it now.
For that, you need a little more than open source, it seems, to make products usable. You need control, and control doesn't always jibe well with open-source development. This is one reason that we're seeing the emergence of the Open Core licensing model for open source.
It's why I think we need a lot more such activity if we want open source to dominate new markets, and not merely clean up the scraps of old markets.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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Also, to your point about Apple, its iPhone and the control necessary to thrive in an early market (a la Clay Christensen) . . . I would emphasize that its not the smart phone market Apple is beginning to dominate, its the "handheld, always-connected, mobile device market". Apple has fundamentally changed the rules because it recognizes that its platform is really a handheld computer that is also a phone and general-purpose communication device (every mobile phone manufacturer believes the platform is a phone with some data capabilities). Huge difference and huge control necessary to make the early customer experience delightful.
Again, great post.
Brian Gentile
Jaspersoft
When I first bought my iPod touch (1st generation) about eighteen months ago, I thought of it as a music player with e-mail and a web browser. The game completely changed when Apple opened the App Store.
While the iPod touch does require a WiFi connection, it does plenty of things without a network. As I've mentioned here on Cnet before, ever since the App Store went online, I think my MacBook has left the house twice. It *is* a small handheld computer.
While Apple certainly has had its stumbles, the overall customer experience with this little device has been completely superior to that of any other electronics device I've ever used.
This class of devices is where the next decade's war will be fought: not between desktop operating systems, not even in web browser apps running on desktop PCs. It's all about getting your content and services to a handheld device.
The coolness of Apple originally was a byproduct of their innovations (and borrowings, such as the GUI) that went to creating a really useful tool, one that always pointed at the commendable target of the workplace (a reason that I avoided Macs and computing in general until 1993 - who wanted to work when one didn't have to?).
Now they are toys (and vehemently closed-system toys) whose fancy paintjobs are as much the attraction as their fading innovation. Fine; let them be as toys - toys are useful, too - but don't confuse them with the tools that have arisen since - Linux and *BSD computers. As to BSD, it is buried so deep in the Mac that it is almost completely obfuscated by the userland layer. Sure, you can open up a terminal and use some of the *nix tools, but try to find the Mac applications that you use with the mouse. They're not in any bin file. Try to change the mouse-focus rules. Try to open a terminal in the directory you're browsing in the finder.Try to tone down the ridiculous, distracting eye-candy.
No, Macs are marketed to, and find their natural homes with, morons. Ooh, I can dance down the street listening to the Black-Eyed Peas and every other piece of pop trash that's ever been released (at least all the way back to the late nineties!). Look at the way the shiny icons fly across the screen at a finger's touch on my exorbitantly priced iPhone (which /must/ connect to AT&T, who /will/ share all of your information with the NSA, btw)!
Free software doesn't suck by a long shot. On a bare TWM installation of Linux or *BSD, you learn the tools you need to use and use them. Maybe the interfaces are different on different applications - that's not going to keep you from learning the differences and using the tools. Truly bad apps will go away. And you can infinitely tailor your workspace from that extreme (actually, you can work without a GUI if you like!) all the way to a fully unified environment with the excellent KDE or the open-source (for now) Microsoft/Novell fork, Gnome.
As for the UNIX tools, I have everything I need. OS X took the majority of the useful stuff and left behind the decades of cruft that have accumulated in BSD. And for what OS X doesn't provide, there's MacPorts. I have yet to find any of my UNIX tools that don't run on OS X. And, for the record, I'm glad that Apple changed the filesystem hierarchy. The old FSH is cluttered and obsolete.
And what "distracting" eye-candy are you referring to? OS X only has one piece of eye-candy that I'm aware of, and that's in Time Machine's background. OS X is rather Spartan. Yet, for fundamentalist Linux and BSD advocates, I guess any form of GUI is considered to be eye-candy.
By the way, it's actually possible to put music from before 1990 on -- no, wait, don't tell me: only idiot Mac users don't understand why 8-tracks are superior.
Proud to be a moron, then. Gee, I've been a moron for almost 23 years now, and became a moron after 7 years experience with earlier PCs (bought my first personal computer in Oct '78...) And it's kinda hard to dance to most classical music (right now iTunes says I have about 43 days worth, and I certainly can't dance that long.)
I've also contributed to both formal de-jure standards (i.e. POSIX) and have a bit of code in at least one open source product (GNAT compiler). I'm very happy to take advantage of the open source/Unix underpinnings of MacOS and I've been a long-time Emacs user (to the point of having left pinkie carpal tunnel syndrome, the hallmark of heavy Emacs use.)
What I love about MacOS is the consistent, well-engineered user interface with all the power of Unix under the covers, -when I need it-. Just because I can write shellscripts and can administer Unix machines doesn't mean that's what I want to do all day. So I'll happily pay for the Apple total user experience; for me it's an appropriate choice.
Plus, FLOSS usability is good enough for real FLOSS advocates, and is constantly improving. The looks are pretty decent too, and improving as well, but only ignorants and shallow people can give more importance to looks than any other thing.
About value and functionality, FLOSS is top notch, it makes rings over proprietary software. Some people support FLOSS for practical reasons, those are the people who tend to the "cool" factor, not those who gives importance to the philosophical, ethical and political reasons of FLOSS, that should matter not only to geeks.
Let's remember that 'free' in 'free software' is about freedom, not price. FLOSS support and service are not free. Let's innovate and compete there. Let the software free.
We'll see if Apple isn't re-enacting the PC/Mac battle of the late 80s, where Google Android is playing the role of DOS/Windows. I hope it's not so, but with over 20 Android phones headed to market this year... it's going to be hard for Apple to hold serve in the smart phone market.
Fedora and OpenSuSE have Ubuntu beat in every possible way, by a large margin.
Very, very few judge them on technical or usability merits. Most of the time(like 90%) compalin about things like how icons look and other such meaningless tripe.
People are stupid and easily amused by bright shiny things. Of course Linux has had all those meaningless things years before Vista saw the light of day, and no other OS besides *nix can be completely installed(including all software) and configured with a handful of clicks.
Apple copied much of the Linux desktops and added a few twists to make it unique. MS just copies what Apple and the desktop teams in Linux do without understand the why's.
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all -- 2nd & 3rd sections have live media links.
I think you will find many of your complaints answered by the directions both Ubuntu and Fedora have moved in...in fact, I would have no compunction whatsoever against recommending Fedora to relatives. I use Fedora almost exclusively on all of my desktops (though my mac mini up in the library is still OS X).
I've used iLife on the mac mini, and there is nothing like it out there in the software world that i've ever seen. Indeed, with just (maybe) two hours of study & poking around, I was able to produce a DVD of my nephew's wedding, and was able to get it to him before his deployment to Iraq.
This (obviously) was very important to me, and involved a hard deadline that I had to meet...iLife was a huge success there, and I think Linux distros should think about how we could get the same kind of ease-of-use and functionality from a suite of FOSS media tools for Linux.
Regarding the iPhone -- don't get me started. I run free apps on my phone, and have done so since long before the iPhone was a gleem in Jobs' eye: I carry a Palm OS Treo 755p.
(I did end up with an iTouch that came with another purchase, and I jailbroke it yesterday to see what embedded OS X looks like. But all that is is a toy, i don't use it for any real-world application.)
Yes, Palm OS is a bit long in the tooth, which is why I'm thinking of jumping ship from VZW to Sprint & getting a Pre.
But in short: free software is _almost_ there, needing only a little bit of proprietary "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" to get video DVD's and mp3's to work. And I've been able to get quite a bit of video editing done with avidemux: a video editor that doesn't have to decompress the video to cut & paste it around. (Are you listening, kino developers? :) )
Share and Enjoy!
-vallor
- by msurman June 30, 2009 7:10 AM PDT
- Great and useful post, Matt. The other thing Apple does is fill in key holes in the app ecosystem -- iMovie, iLife, etc. If Ubuntu or any open platform play is going to win on the desktop, Canonical will also need to drive improvements in areas like office, photo and video apps. Either that, or web apps need to step into these voids, which will be a while for video and even photos.
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