The Futility of Free Software

Mar 26 at 12 AM

I was going to type up a short post on some rather badly taken pictures of my new computer parts; I upgraded my computer recently, and a few friends asked for specs and pics:

DSC00148It was a long-overdue upgrade; I have a fairly recent graphics card, but coupled with a CPU four years young, the card’s graphical prowess had been going to waste. With four cores and more RAM, this machine’s has been making Vista 64-bit fly.

As a matter of fact, it was surprisingly easy to put the parts together, and every time I build a box it seems like the manufacturers take the time to put in additional labels or helpful hinges to make the process as simple as possible. If only they’d stop making new standards on connectors every few years to force customers to buy adapters or shiny new gadgets.

You’d think that software – especially free software – would avoid these hardware follies.

Software engineers are too smart for their own good not as smart as they think they are. We tend to mistake nonchalance for idiocy, so in our geek hubris we create overly complicated, overly functional software resembling a Katamari rollup.  It’s the engineering curse of function-over-everything-else which lets companies like Apple bombard the industry with its claims of products that “just work”; everybody else is content duct taping their separate software Lego pieces.

In particular, I use gallery2 to keep my pictures on the site, chosen for its features as a picture viewer and organizer, matured with the embrace of years of open-source development and design. I especially like the customizability and the ability to host my own pictures. While the project allows plugins to run on top of the base software on the server, there’s no real client software interfacing with your desktop machine; my own cobbled solution consisted of GalleryRemote, ImageMagick, and jpegTran.

Turns out my old machine, with its year-old install of Windows, had the magic sauce which made this particular software recipe work, and in this shoddy analogy, I’ve apparently burned my cookbook without, uh, photocopying a backup. Since GalleryRemote has largely been abandoned, I went searching for an alternative, which I did find in a Picasa plugin…eventually.

Imagine you are following a cake recipe, and upon seeing instructions to add sugar, you open the cupboard to find that you cleaned out the pantry a week ago, and the sugar cane industry has since collapsed under the pressure from the high fructose corn syrup soda conglomerate. Okay, no biggie – someone tells you that you can use corn syrup, provided that you add something to balance it (1). Balance what with what now?

It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out how to make use of the gallery2 corn syrup and its mystery partner. Sure, the author of the plugin gives a brief description of his work, but neglects to mention what his code actually does and where it goes. Of course, from his perspective, all I really needed to do was put on his chef’s hat and gain the prerequisite knowledge in gallery2, Picasa API, and web infrastructure. Then I’d totally understand what he was talking about. RTFM, noob.

So I did exactly that – read up on the documentation, read the code, tried to figure out what he was looking to accomplish with his grandiose claims of Picasa-gallery2 integration, and I guess baked a few failed cakes laced with corn syrup and broccoli. With some help with kind forum posters, though – the posts coming two months after the initial release of the software – I got the thing working as its author intended, even squashing a bug along the way. Painful, but I wanted cake.

Which goes to show: free software is hardly free.

  1. note to actual cooks: I can’t cook, so my cooking analogies don’t make a whole lot of sense. But I do like coke, which is at least a phonic cousin, no? (↩)
 

Nothing has been said.