Random Rants & Raves

A few months back I had written a post on how FOSS might suffer during the period of recession. My point was that FOSS depends on contributions – whether in terms of actual donations of resources mostly on their free time (code, writing, design, etc.)  or in terms of money. However in this time of extreme recession the world over, contributors will probably have much more important things to do.

• If a contributor (developer, technical writer, designer) already has a job, he/she is probably going to work twice as hard to keep that job – maybe working extra time and taking on more responsibilities – reducing time to contribute to FOSS.
• If a contributor is out of a job (whether out of college or been laid off), he/she is going to be busy making ends meet and looking for other employment. In such a case, contributing to FOSS is probably going to be last thing on their mind.

Now, it seems that others are thinking the same – including A Sr. VP of Novell and ex-CTO of the Linux Foundation, Markus Rex. In an interview recently said exactly the same thing.

Q: What are the challenges you see for the business moving forward?

I perceive a challenge always as an opportunity. It gives us the opportunity to change to a better way from the way things have been done in the past.

The other thing is in both Europe and the US the rise of the unemployment rate is something that is rather unprecedented. The open source community to a certain degree is dependant on the willingness of people to contribute. We see no indication that anything might change there, but who knows? People need something to live off.

“Something to live off” is right. We’ve already heard about the stagnation in main stream products like OpenOffice.org. We’ll probably see more such things happen soon – a little sad I would say. A lively discussion on this is going on over at Slashdot on this topic.

SourceForge is considered as one of the largest open source repositories for open source software especially for Linux. Interestingly though, a look at the All Time Top 25 Most Popular open source projects here reveals some startling data. Here’s the list comparing the top 25 all time projects and their availability on Windows and Linux.

This actually shows that open source software is not only available but also more popular on Windows. Note that of the top 25, there were 16 projects available only for Windows and none that were available only for Linux. So do note that considering “open source” does not translate to considering “Linux” since Windows now has a ton of open source projects on it as well. CodePlex is another place where you can find open source projects for Windows exclusively.

While working on a recent project working under Linux, I had to copy a large (>8GB) file over the network from the Linux machine to another one. At the end of a long copy process (even on a gigabit network), I got an error message that there was an error copying the file. Clicking on the “Show more details” showed me this:

How can an error copying a file show details as “Success”? LOL!!! More reasons that open source software on Linux need information architects and copywriters to check their error codes!