Open source in the mainstream world

A Slashdot article was [somewhat] recently (it's summer, I'm lazy) posted referring to a Wired article (seems increasingly common nowadays), debating whether or not Firefox was becoming bloated due to more users using it and requesting more features (integrated RSS, all that fun stuff). Everyone's favorite browser (including mine, a Microsoft fanboy! *gasp*), becoming bloated?! No way!

This topic actually came up to some degree in the comments for one of my earlier posts (which apparently got two diggs, thanks to Dylan--but apparently I'm not cool or interesting enough). It seems like a lot of open source projects in the past have [over]emphasized modularity in their application architecture. The Firefox developers seem to be well aware of this, otherwise this article would have never appeared.

The Slashdot article accused Firefox of heading in the IE direction, i.e. (ha ha) bloated, like all Microsoft products are, according to some. That's a rather interesting accusation, considering Firefox is the jewel of open source. So why is Firefox heading in this direction?

Shamelessly citing my own comment, I was arguing that "extremely modular architectures" are not acceptable for non-technical users, and because of this, the most popular open source software would have to "bloat up" to really grab the attention of this population (which is who the open source crowd is targeting nowadays, right?). Interestingly, this implies that software bloat and "normal" customer satisfaction have an inverse correlation. I'm sure a large quantity of people, myself not withstanding, want their software to work, work well, and do everything they need--without having to install plugins!

Microsoft is constantly accused of developing bloated software, and that open source alternatives are so much better, because they aren't bloated. Can anyone really win this war? If more users equals more bloat, then there's a bit of a Catch-22 going on, especially for the "elite" users that complain about bloat in the first place. How can you satisfy more than one group of people? For example, a few comments on the Slashdot article pointed out that things like RSS integration are unnecessary to a browser and are really just bloat, and another complaining that excessive memory wasn't really limited to just Firefox.

This seems to be a pretty hard problem (perhaps NP hard? hurr), that I have no immediate solution to--it's more than just a programming problem, that's for sure.

Summer plans

Well, junior year has finally ended as of last Wednesday. Now I'm just crossing my fingers for good grades. Anyway, summer has rolled around and now it's time to "be productive." So what's going on this summer? In no particular order:

• Research. I've gotten involved with two professors over the summer, both somewhat tied to security. One of them is with CERIAS, where I think I'll be working with Bennett. The other is with Professor Mathur, which means it's related to software testing (for this project, also related to security).
• shaim. I started committing to shaim before school ended, and intend to continue doing so. For the 0.4 milestone, I'll be getting the event notifications plugin out, and for 0.5, I'll be working on getting IRC to work (making the third IRC client I've ever made).
• CS180 preparation. I have a few things in mind to change to hopefully make CS180 a better experience for the students and the TAs, which I might post about later. By the way, for Purdue readers, if you're interested in being a TA, let me know.
• Purdue CS Planet. A few of us came up with an idea of setting up something like a Planet except a bit more automated so it's low maintenance. No idea how far this idea will actually be taken, but I think it would be cool.

There's one more project that I won't mention for now, but between all of these, I think I'll be rather busy, but if I can manage my time well, I think this summer will ultimately be very productive.

Democracy and Digg.com

Digg recently had an incident, which is kind of still ongoing, in which someone posted (according to Wikipedia) "the full decryption code for HD-DVD" and got banned for it. In response, there's been tons of uprising/rebellion, with the key continually being reposted, etc. I've never been a very big Digg reader, but now I really have a reason not to read it. Why do Digg users feel entitled to post whatever the hell they want on the website, regardless of legality? That's plain ridiculous.

Some people have started marking today as "the death of Digg," and I sure hope it is. Not to be offensive to the creators, but if Digg ever does go away, I'm sure all of their whiny users will realize that they probably had more freedom there than on other websites, since it's much more community-driven, from what I understand, than Slashdot. If one of these rebels tries to start a Digg replacement that lets everyone post legally controversial content, I'm sure they'll enjoy the pleasure of having a lawsuit filed against them. Please, use common sense.