It’s been hard to read any of the open source Planet aggregators or check Twitter recently without catching references to the Linux Hater’s Blog.

I read it on occasion, and generally tend to agree with about 50% to 70% of any given post on the LHB. For example, now that Jeremy has drawn the anonymous blogger’s attention, he decides to rip into his issues with Samba, which mostly boil down to it’s a pita to configure.

Of course, my first response would be that Samba is pretty easy to configure using YaST’s Samba module, but the larger point he makes is valid:

If you want to provide a feature as part of a platform, you can’t just write the code and say “here’s the config file! have at it!”. When you do that, you get a bunch of other people who don’t really understand the configuration space writing config tools for you that all suck in one way or another. If you want to introduce a core feature to the desktop “platform”, you really have to make vertical integration easy, or even do it yourself. Samba, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done this. They’ve written a solid engine with tons of features, but have ignored the the core problem that very few people understand how to configure the damn thing. They’ve effectively left it to others, and the others have failed. Where as Microsoft? yea, their server code might even be inferior, but configuring shares is pretty damn easy in comparison.

Which really brings me to the main topic of this post: the silo effect. As far as I can tell, the silo effect has been around since the dawn of software development. Most software needs to integrate with other software, yet most development teams communicate very little with the teams that write the software they need to integrate with. Perhaps samba could talk to the kernel people, and the fuse people, and the freedesktop people, and the kde people, and the gnome people, and engineer a top to bottom solution that makes samba usable for desktop users. Sure. As some of you flamers like to say, just wait until 2020, and it’ll be there.

As far as I can tell, in the OSS world, the silo effect seems to be magnified. Which is ironic, since one of the things OSS was supposed to do is kinda solve this whole silo thing in the first place. Everyone can see each other’s code. Everyone can modify each other’s code. If the developers of some project didn’t care about your goals, you could always take their code, and do it yourself. Right? There’s open mailing lists and bug trackers so that communication is as easy and as smooth as possible, right?

I do think some of this is going on, but maybe not fast enough. Once you get to the user interface where it’s time to configure a service, things fall down quite a bit. (If this wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be able to list “Apache” on my resume as something I have experience with — who’d care? Obviously, it’s recognized that Apache and the other FOSS server software I’ve worked with professionally is, to be diplomatic, involved enough to manage and configure to count as a skill.)

So, I hope the hater keeps on hating — and I hope that FOSS proponents and developers listen up. It hurts a bit sometimes to hear that your favorite project isn’t seen as perfection itself — but Linux needs some constructive (and LHB is mostly constructive criticism, even if it’s a little sharp around the edges) criticism.

What’s really encouraging to me is the number of Linux and FOSS folks who’ve embraced the LHB instead of trying to deflect criticism. I think that’s healthy and a sign that the overall community is maturing. (I’m not sure the LHB would have been embraced a few years ago…)

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