Saturday, August 29, 2009
A New Paradigm for Open-Source Software
Tweakability is the name of the game. If you don't give your user the means of customizing the software your written, it's not really open-source - even if the source code is available. What do we need then? We need to provide a package that contains both the source and the building tool. The user shouldn't have to install anything except press a button to get the end result. That will really give us great free software.
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Gentoo's package management system does this exactly. There's even a GUI for package management and configuration management. Behind the scenes it does the configure-make-test-install cycle, including the dependencies. I've used Gentoo for several years but it's not gone mainstream because of the time involved in getting packages built. On my circa 2001 hardware, for example, building KDE takes 2-3 days.
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