Mark Roseman's Blog

Challenges of Open Source.

Here is a Wikipedia article on Open Outsourcing which talks about ways to hook up contract programmers with open source projects to get particular needs met. Of note is the section on the "challenges" of open source, highlighting systemic weaknesses inherent in most open source projects. Here it is verbatim:

• A lack of marketing to make potential users aware of the existence of mature projects
• Lack of excellent documentation
• Inconsistent or non-existent install scripts
• Lack of knowledgeable and available support staff
• Inconsistent and generally unknowable quality of projects
• Developer-centric designs highlighting feature creep
• Complexities of licensing

I've been meaning to write more on this, particularly in the context of educational software, where more and more people (probably as a reaction to the WebCT/Blackboard/etc. monoliths) are again starting to jump on the open source bandwagon. But the bulk of the enthusiasts pushing this, many of whom I have a great deal of respect for, are prone too much to boosterism, and gloss over the serious pitfalls. It's not to say that those pitfalls can't be addressed (the open outsourcing idea is one suggested approach), but I think it's disingenuous in the extreme to ignore them.

More at a later date, hopefully.

Doctor Shortages.

Some days you just have to wonder how any hospitals manage to attract doctors. Not that we actually expected any different, but the only place we've been in touch with that has actually been good at the recruiting process has been a privately run hospital. That place has a tremendously good reputation both at providing excellent quality care and at being incredibly well managed. People talking about the doctor shortage as if it is only about a lack of money in the system are just fooling themselves. In any case, several balls still up in the air, so we will (eventually) see where they all land.

Ancient History.

Jean-Claude has been looking at Tequila again for a project, which got me thinking again about some of the stuff we'd done in GroupKit ages ago.

I don't know where I'd put any of the really neat examples, so I dug around on the net and found a copy of GroupKit 3.3 (circa early 1997) that someone had kept (now copied over to SourceForge). This one was before we started doing all the big API and architecture changes in 4.x and 5.x, where we decided not to carry all the examples forward. So 3.3 had both a lot of the bigger toys/demos/examples we'd done, as well as some substantial systems that other people had done as well.

For fun, I decided to spend a few minutes and get the "megaconf" example running again in the latest setup (see screenshot). Basically, a little collaborative desktop where you could add small shared applets (written in Incr Tcl). Can't recall quite when this one was done, but it was obviously one of the very early designs of what eventually led to TeamRooms/TeamWave.

The Groupware Albatross.

Truer words have never been spoken...

How to Make Realtors Happy.

We happened to bump into our realtor at a restaurant last night, and mentioned that Pauline had quit her job and that we might end up moving - boy, his face lit up at the thought of selling this place again (he was the agent both for us and the builder when we first bought it). That, and the fact that it's probably gone up around $50k in the short time we've lived here.

So far she's talked to a few people around KW, in Hamilton, and Guelph. All still early stages. No worries. Meanwhile, the main hospital attached to the centre she's at now is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. Messy.

Socialtext Update.

New Socialtext version released, sounds like some nice stuff. They did the integrate RSS etc. thing that we did a while back, and have also added support for IM integration, something I've wanted to add to PF for a while, and integration with a few other services. Also added LDAP (we've got a few folks using that, though its more experimental so far), and some other goodies. Kudos to Ross and his group for a job well done.

Mitch Kapor on Open Source and Entrepreneurship.

"Open source levels the playing field and makes it more difficult for monopolists to triumph with technically inferior products which are also hard to use."