Time for Open Source to Grow Up

Yesterday I had a phone conversation with one of my good friends who is an avid supporter of Open Source software. He is currently working for an Open Source company but is not very happy. He is making less money than he used to and his company made him purchase his own laptop instead of buying one for him.

Today I had a phone call with another friend who I met while working for an open source company. He now works for a large organization whose software division alone could qualify as one of the top five largest software companies (they also make hardware). He just got back from a trip around the world and sounded incredibly happy.

All three of us used to work for the same software company a few years ago and it was interesting to compare the two very different conversations. My Open Source friend wants to leave his current company and start his own Open Source company. My commercial software friend is happy where he is and just closed a couple of multi-million dollar software deals (with the correspondingly fat commission checks).

I thought about my own project that I am working on. Normally I use Open Source development tools but this one is using a commercial software package. I don't have to hunt around in obscure configuration files. Instead there is a pretty user interface for everything. I admit that it sometimes gets in the way of my productivity, but it is nice to not have to know about some special trick to get things to work right.

While I usually think that Open Source software is great, today I am beginning to rethink my views. I suppose that my Open Source software friends will think I am converting to the dark side. That's not really true. There are some clear winners in Open Source software. Why pay for an office suite when Open Office.org is free and feature rich. Why pay more than the cost of a new car for Oracle or SQL Server when MySQL or PostgreSQL will work just fine for your database.

Instead I would like to see open source developers take a little more pride in their work. It isn't that difficult to add a nice graphical wizard for configuration files. While the software interface may make sense to the person writing the code, he or she should ask a few friends to see if it makes sense to them also. If not, fix it. It is time for open source to grow up. Until then, my commercial software friend is going to keep getting fat checks while my open source friend wonders where his next meal will come from.