Recently a couple of colleagues of mine engaged in a bit of a blog war about Open Source software. Miguel Guhlin is a vocal advocate of using Open Source software in schools and writes about it often. This particular blog entry, however, raised the ire of Tim Holt in a major way.
I know both of these men, and quite like them both. Miguel and I tend to agree with each other more often than Tim and I do, but I generally respect both of their opinions because they're successful professionals in my field and have experience from which I can always draw wisdom. I'm not going to rehash the arguments each made in his blog because you can simply go and read them for yourselves, and I encourage you to do just that. The comments on these posts are also fairly enlightening.
There are, however, two things in Tim's post that I haven't been able to shake out of my mind over the weekend and I think I just need to write about them to get them out. Tim writes that "OS, FOR THE MOST PART, is imitative, not innovative." and then later complains that "The experience, for the most part, is different."
Now, let me be the first to point out that I'm totally cherry-picking these two sentences out of dozens made in his comment on Miguel's blog and in his own blog post. This isn't meant as any sort of refutation of his points. I simply put them here to illustrate what got me thinking about this in the first place.
When people say that Open Source projects are imitative, they're generally referring to applications on the desktop. Apache didn't imitate anything when they pretty much invented the Web server. BIND didn't imitate anyone when they wrote the code that basically all DNS servers in the world run. Open Source projects have been innovating and creating and pushing the frontiers of the server room since the beginning.
But, all of that is behind the scenes. Most "regular people" don't even know that stuff exists. Where people most often encounter Open Source applications is on the desktop- GIMP, OpenOffice, Linux, TuxPaint, Stellarium, Audacity- just to name a few that you may have heard of before.
These are very imitative applications. GIMP was created to be as close to a clone of Photoshop as possible, for example. Linux was written to be a clone of Unix. OpenOffice looks and feels a lot like Microsoft Office, however I suspect the reason for that is not imitation, but simply best practices.
All modern office suites look pretty much the same because the tasks they need to carry out are all pretty much the same. There are only so many ways to display the interface necessary to change the size and style of a font. These tools look alike because their form follows their function, not because the designers of OpenOffice have a copy of Microsoft Word open in front of them and are painstakingly duplicating the interface. I, for one, hope the Ribbon never makes it's way into OpenOffice.
But here comes the tricky part.
When Open Source projects do look, feel, and behave differently than their closed-source, mainstream counterparts people complain that "The experience, for the most part, is different." If the OpenOffice team innovates, they're lambasted for not presenting the same experience as Microsoft. If they do provide the same experience, they're criticized for not being original.
There are certain tools, which for one reason or another, have become "The Standard." Microsoft Office is "The Standard" in desktop office suites. Photoshop is "The Standard" in high-end photo editing. Adobe Premiere, Avid, and Final Cut Pro have been locked in a battle to become "The Standard" in digital movie editing.
So, if I want to create a tool that photographers can pick up and use immediately with as little learning curve as possible, I'd better make it look and feel a lot like Photoshop. If I were in business and did this it would be called shrewd. If I'm a leader of an Open Source project and I do it, it's called unimaginative.
Why the double standard?
Tim complains that these tools are imitative of the tools he likes to use and cites that as a reason they're second-rate. Next he complains that they aren't enough like the tools he prefers and cites that as a reason they're second-rate- and he's not alone in that. I hear this so often when I try to advocate for Open Source that it almost becomes a refrain.
So, again I ask- Why the double standard?