Due to the nature of free software, there exists a great deal of choice. You have 100s of distros to choose from, and a handful of desktop environments, office suites, browsers, email clients, media players... you name a piece of software and there's almost always at least one alternative. And, if there isn't, there soon will be. Is all this choice a good thing? Or is it just too confusing? Should we strive to have an ultimate tool that suits everyone's needs or do we really need 50 types of hammer and a 1000 types of nail? Let us know how you feel about choice?
Is this much choice really a good thing?
Short URL: http://fsmsh.com/2247
Most forwarded
Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA
Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Interview with Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
Is better education the key to finding better software?
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
Most emailed
Free Open Document label templates
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
Creating a user-centric site in Drupal
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
Fun articles
Santa Claus - the most successful open source project
It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.
Most emailed
Editorial
When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.
Choice is a double edged sword
Choice gives a feeling that we have freedom. Want to have a very mature environment with minimal configuration? Use Gnome. Want a prettier desktop that can be configured to the lowest possible level? Try KDE.
Don't like the above two? try a different desktop environment. All this for free (as in beer and freedom).
However, choice also makes me think that perhaps I'm missing something. I use Firefox for browsing, Liferea for feed reading, Open Office for word processing and tool X for task Y etc. But is that the best scenario? Am I using the best of all worlds? With so many choices, it is very difficult to decide and is not practical to have the best tool for everything.
1. I think we should strive for the interoperability of various tools from different Linux environments.
As mentioned previously, I like linux for its choices. But maybe the same reason is keeping the people in Windows World from trying Linux. Perhaps they are intimidated by too many options. (Of course, I'm only talking about those who want to try something new, but fearful. Not the folks who are happy with their crappy and bloated Windows applications and can cope up with security problems).
2. We should create some kind of questionnaire about the distribution and tools to choose, for various scenarios and come up with the solution. For instance, a wizard that asks questions like "1. Will you use this system as a home desktop or a business system? 2. Do you want the system to be used as the e-mail server or run an engineering application etc" and come up with answers.
interoperability
"1. I think we should strive for the interoperability of various tools from"
In fact, of course, "interoperability" is a key to "choice". Without it, your choices become increasingly limited because of the inability to use tools together.
I say I prefer KDE, but the truth is, its the actual window manager and launcher that I like. Many of the actual applications are less appealing to me than their Gnome counterparts. So for exampe, I use KDE for my environment, but I use gpdf to view PDFs and Gimp to edit images. I use kuickshow (from KDE) for reviewing images before using them in Gimp. When I compose vector artwork, though, I don't use an official KDE or Gnome package, but rather Inkscape (except for those jobs I find easier in Skencil!).
For serious writing I typically use LyX, which isn't specialized for either, and I use gvim for coding.
So, it should be pretty obvious that I'm quite happy with the choice that is available. I do acknowledge that this presents some difficulties for the new user, but there are a lot of places to go for reviews. I think the biggest obstacle is that most people coming from a proprietary background are used to doing this kind of research before purchasing software, but when the purchasing step is removed, they no longer respect the time needed for review and selection. But rationally, of course, it's the same basic process, but without having to pay for the privilege.
I'm torn. I like having
I'm torn. I like having choice. However, there IS a problem for new users. When I decided to try switching to GNU/Linux last year, I was intimidated by choices. Plus, many users in the FLOSS world (particularly those with a strong *nix background) tend to be particularly evangelical: just because a tool works better for them, all other choices become invalid in their eyes. Thus, for a die-hard KDE user, using GNOME is practically blasphemy (and I won't even attempt to touch the issue of text editors...).
I think it helps if we define different solutions with a few words. For example, KDE is "the power user's DE", while GNOME is "a simple DE", XFCE is "Lightweight but complete and easy to use", Fluxbox is "A fast (but not beginner-friendly) WM", etc. A bit of differentiation would help newbies a lot.