If you’re lucky, the open source writer does care about the interface.

Even so, programmers probably only want to answer interesting questions if they’re not getting paid. Again, this is a problem if they also want open source to rule the world.

However, I doubt very many programmers are deliberately hiding how to get good use out of their programs.

Seth: Are you saying your experience with open source has been different? Lots of predictions about human behavior based on theories about “motivation” have turned out to be wrong.

That’s not a simple operation at all, it’s a hard project for a domain expert. I am not that domain expert, but I can see the overview, and it’s likely that David’s in *way* over his head.

Android didn’t support USB host mode at all before version 4, and a lot of hardware still doesn’t (for electrical and power supply reasons, not just software reasons). Notice that this is the most recent version – ie, it hasn’t been iterated on at all yet. Then you not only need to write a USB camera driver, against brand-new and therefore buggy APIs, none of the userspace camera libraries or apps support hot-swapping either, so you need to spin up in two more project contexts (a total of three distinct codebases to modify).

It’s not a documentation problem, a syntax problem, or a needle-in-a-haystack problem. It’s mostly a domain knowledge problem: you need to know kernel development, and to have done it on a well-trodden path in a more forgiving context. Implying that developers are skipping documentation because it gives them job security is highly implausible. (It’s because they’re busy making things, they’re not good at writing, they’re not good at modeling what other people don’t know, and/or they’re lazy.)

Try *that* with proprietary software.

As most other posts have said, it’s usually a matter of complexity, and familiarity. Any large source base is going to be pretty opaque unless you’ve worked with it quite a bit.

The purpose commercial software is to make money. Ideally the developers do this by providing the best software they can, but inevitably design choices will be influenced by the need to sell it (i.e. adding features vs. fixing bugs, flashy vs. useful interface, advertisements embedded, etc.). Anyone who has used software with the word “Enterprise” in the title knows what I’m talking about.

The purpose of open source software–it’s only reason to exist–is to be good at its task. So the developers don’t have any motivation besides making the best software they can. It removes 1 layer of obfuscation between design and implementation.

There’s a community of Android modders who flash their phones to upgrade the Android OS a lot. When a new mod comes out, it’s common to see a bug list like, camera and MMS don’t work yet.

Open source really is amazing in the macro but depending where you are in the open source world, your experience might be better or worse.

Android’s relationship with the upstream Linux Kernel, for instance, has been a lot worse in the past. https://lwn.net/Articles/514901/

I think your friend was very unlucky to end up in a bad spot. If he had been trying to build a web site with open source software he might have felt differently.

The argument that open source people obfuscate and hide their knowledge on purpose to keep their “knowledge” valuable is absurd. Yes, things can be complicated sometimes and issues can be undocumented, but that is not “on purpose”. It is just that life is complicated in general.

Obviously, if Linux crashes and you email Linus Torvalds, he is not going to get back to you and explain how to fix the problem. But this just says that resources are limited while problems are plentiful and hard.

There is much evidence that the authors of successful open source software go out of their way to help. What the author of these lines lack is perspective. Documentation? Go to Amazon.com: there is probably more books on programming with open source software than on any proprietary software (except maybe for the Windows stack).

I am not saying that open source is always the best model. Sometimes, in practice, proprietary software works better. And there are evil people involved with open source software, I am quite certain of that.

But the values behind open source are nothing like what is being described here. The programmers who pursue open source have motivations similar to the wikipedians. Sometimes they screw up, but they are very much motivated by the common good and by the hope that if they help people enough, their own status will rise up. Reputation is almost everything in open source and people care very much about it. They don’t obfuscate their work on purpose, and they try their best to produce the very best software they can (given the resources they have).

With closed source software such as the iPhone the task is also impossible: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12037169/is-it-possible-to-connect-an-external-camera-module-to-an-iphone-audio-jack

There no reason to expect this task to be easy. Smartphones aren’t designed to make it easy extend them with external cameras.

“The software won’t run, and there are maybe one or two wrong characters in 20,000 lines of code that made it break, and you don’t know where to start looking. Because the error message doesn’t tell you anything other than it won’t run.”
That’s a silly proposition. There’s a debugger that you can run to see where a program crashes. In Android you also have a log that provides you plenty of information about your program.

David’s girlfriend doesn’t seem to understand much about programming and is maybe not the best person to fairly describe the downsides of open source.

Couldn’t help but smile at this one – as Jill suggests above. none of these characteristics are particular to Open Source, and this seems to me to be a case where correlation does not imply causation! Equally in tune with the spirit of your blog, I’d suggest that your own daily experience is of more value than the assertions of a 3rd party…

On a serious note, I use Open Source s/w for preference where I can, because the support is so much better, I think because people who have shared a problem enjoy sharing the solution. I also have to say that the assertion that “a lot of the guys who wrote the code are reluctant to cooperate, because their knowledge of how their own code is supposed to be written and how to run it is their only job security” is not true of any Open Source community that I’m involved with.

Cheers,

PhilK