Eyes Above The Waves

I was reading an interesting critique of the KDE Phonon framework and its comments. Without taking sides in that particular debate (although adding a layer of abstraction over complex frameworks that themselves are basically the same sort of abstraction over other components gives me a very queasy feeling), I do feel like ranting about comments like this:

It also lets the user choose whatever he or she wants. If a user likes Xine more than GStreamer, he or she can choose to use it.

ALERT! Most "users" have no idea what a multimedia framework IS. They don't know which one they're using, or which one they should be using. Pretty much everyone just wants something that works out of the box. If the user is ever forced to understand multimedia frameworks and choose one, just to get things to work, then something has gone catastrophically wrong.

I sometimes hear the slogan "Free software" (or "Linux") "is all about choice" used to defend this kind of diversity. That is a very misleading statement. Free software gives you all kinds of choices about what you can do with code, but a lot of those choices are bad ones. Sharing code has many advantages over forking or duplicating --- mainly avoiding wastage of development resources, but also simplifying deployment and support, and avoiding the need to pile on abstraction layers like Phonon which have their own costs. You shouldn't fork or duplicate unless you have a very good reason. Interestingly, we see very few forking decisions, and those we see seem to have good reasons behind them. Sadly, we see a lot of duplication decisions and mostly their justifications don't convince me.

[It could be that there are actually a lot of forking decisions but forks get resolved quickly (by all but one of the forks dying or merging back), while duplications don't. I wonder...]

This is particularly important when dealing with libraries and frameworks which other components depend on. If we have five MP3 players, that's not a terribly big deal. But if we have five GUI toolkits, then every GUI app has to choose one of those toolkits which encourages the creation of four clones of that app, i.e. more fragmentation.

Anyway, offering users a choice of which largely-equivalent desktop to use, or which multimedia framework to use, or which of five dozen crappy text editors to use*, isn't doing anyone any good compared to what could have been if those developers had pooled their efforts. It's far too late for the KDE/GNOME breach to ever be healed, but I still wish for consolidation in other areas of effort.

[* I have yet to find one Linux text editor with all the features I want. If the authors of some of the dozens of text editors out there had instead contributed to an existing editor, I think I'd have a better chance.]