Some recent developments in Free Libre Open Source Software lead me to believe there is trouble brewing. With growth comes problems. And it seems many projects aren’t living true to their principles. Instead they are once again just trying to copy proprietary or other software. Some examples. The new version of the Gimp plans to enforce a single window a la PhotoShop design. I sincerely hope they keep an option to have multiwindow mode. It’s a complete abandonment of Gimp legacy as well as Linux heritage.
OpenOffice recently showed off a prototype copying Office’s Ribbon. There was fortunately a loud and angry outcry. But unfortunately that doesn’t mean it wont necessarily happen. The ribbon should be a plugin for those who think that way but forcing that on unwilling users is the exact same thing Microsoft did. Next in line is Firefox new GUI. They appear to be copying chrome this time as well the Ribbon again.

Finally one more troubling example that happened recently. That of Ubuntu disabling ctrl-alt-backspace as default. According to this poll (albeit nonscientific) 88% thought it was a bad idea, yet they did it anyways. Fortunately its still Linux so you can go and change a config file and fix it. Ctrl alt backspace to me is one of the great things about Linux. If X crashes that doesn’t mean the kernel has so there is no need to reboot. For instance I was working on KQ recently and it completely locked up. (You need plain lua to run KQ you know ) I switched to a virtual console ctrl alt F6 and did a killall kq. But unfortunately KQ was stuck in fullscreen mode which left X on a wonderful 320-240 resolution. Trust me it looks great on my 24 inch Monitor. And the screen was locked to a small section so I couldn’t access any menus. With a quick ctrl alt backspace X was restarted and I could go on with my work. The reason behind the change was so people didn’t accidentally lose data. Personally I don’t know how anyone can accidentally hit a keyboard combination as awkward as ctrl alt backspace.

Some of these examples are probably only problems to me but it does make me wonder about the future of some of my favorite FLOSS. It goes back to why Wesnoth is such a good game, its not just a Yet Another (insert name here) Clone. (YAC’s I dub them.) I think that if FLOSS projects really wants to succeed they have to be original as well as functional. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case. Just look at all the horrible Office YACs out there(Office included). There has to be a way to make a word processor that doesn’t make you want to throw your computer off a cliff.

Hopefully this storm will pass but we shall see.