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.

Monoculture in open source software

Slashdot recently posted a story linking to an article about the "why Microsoft wins the development war so often." The excerpt from the Slashdot article:

"Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn't always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego, or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won't point fingers, everyone knows examples... The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness."

I'm wondering how true this is for other people. Joel Spolsky posted an article last year about choices being headaches (ironically talking about Microsoft!), but referring to GUI interface design, rather than choosing software in general. Even though Joel is referring to the quirky shutdown menu for Windows Vista, I'd like to think that it also applies to the context of the Slashdot article. I've noticed some projects fork off of others for no reason, or the ones listed above (pride, etc.); but regardless of the reason, it feels like the open source world has way too many paths to pick from. And to top it off, sometimes none of those paths are even worthwhile!

Don't get me wrong, the concept of open source software is good (even the software that's platform dependent on certain proprietary operating systems). I do think, though, that the whole "diversity" among existing software can be rather annoying. Quality software doesn't need to be forked (how many Firefox forks are out there, and who bothers to use them?). Maybe this is one reason why I'm still an avid Windows user; I have less decisions to make, and hurray for that.