Bruce Eisner's excellent post on the frustrations of customizing server-side Open Source software inspired the following rant:
I feel your pain, Bruce.
I love the spirit of Open Source almost as much as I hate the execution. As a Linux user and Ruby / PHP "weekend code warrior" for several years, I don't go to the user groups any more looking for the future. Most of the people I meet in those groups or discussion forums are full of people who long for the days when only geeks could use computers.
Sure, Apache is incredibly stable. So is my TI30 calculator. And please don't try to tell me why using vi to shellscript a bad blackjack game is good for my character.
I cringe now when I read about Mambo, Drupal, and similar web applications as leading the way for a post-Microsoft world. While I have had issues with Microsoft (as any user facing a blue screen will), using hatred of one company as the primary driving force for developing an alternative seems to be short-sighted and depressing.
As I can already feel the flames heat up, Microsoft's Expression Web product is the best tool out there today for building standards-compliant, server-driven web applications in my opinion. A step in the right direction, it also has a long way to go before non-programmers can build something useful without contemplating suicide or murder (or both).
My guess is that the future of Open Source will soon be in better hands when a million or more kids in "developing" (read poor) nations like Rwanda, India, and Uruguay build ad hoc wireless networks between their One Hundred Dollar laptops. I hope they will want to talk with us (and maybe develop server-side tools that I would risk putting in front of my children).
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