Yeah, Well, Deez Nutz Are Open Source Too...

On the one hand, okay, I get it. Cory Doctorow wins. Everything should be Open and furthermore Free, and we should all make our living from well-paid speaking engagements where we expound on our misguided beliefs about things we don’t understand. Yup. I’m all for it.

On the other, sometimes open source software can be really fucking frustrating. Okay. Strike that. Pretty much all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me preempt the first thirty replies by saying “okay, yeah, MySQL and Apache are awesome. You win. Firefox is the shit. Group hug!” But you know what? While I may use Apache and MySQL every day, it’s only by accident. I don’t go out and say “gee, I wonder what my Apache server is up to” because I’m not a fucking web developer. I’m a musician.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point. PureData is pure awesome; it is probably the most robust open source project strictly for musicians, and it does about 80% of what Max/MSP does, for free. (Free as in “I could give a fuck what kind of free you’re talking about.”) But these guys that built it, smart as they are, are living in the wonderful land that exists between the audio driver and the user interface, and the extremities are completely ignored. If I was going to give a class on how to make a program as unfriendly as humanely possible, I’d use Pd as a shining example. If the second semester was on how to make sure that the back end functions as poorly as the front, I’d still use Pd. The only reason I know how to use the damn thing is because I already knew how to use Max, and even then…

One example: boot up Pd on a MacBook Pro, using the internal sound. Run something that makes noise. Now plug in headphones. Yeah, you’re gonna have to go ahead and kill Pd and restart it.

I could come up with 20 such examples in as many seconds, but I won’t belabor the point, and I’m busy rebooting because Pd killed the audio driver when I had the temerity to load a patch. I saw a guy at Ground Kontrol a couple months ago, typical dreadlocked, neck-bearded, forehead pierced latte-tard PDX native, and he had a pink (natch) t-shirt on that said “MY FREE SOFTWARE RUNS YOUR COMPANY.” No, that’s not exactly true, is it? My imagination and Adam’s DSP chops run our company. Your free software makes running my company fucking frustrating because you half-ass your way through it, only working on what can hold your gnat-sized attention span for as long as it takes you to earn enough money to go to Burning Man. Pull up your pants.

EDIT: After reading through some of the comments, I think what I actually meant to say in that last sentence was “hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”