Too much choice in Open Source software

November 11, 2007 by phillip.

www.ted.comI watched a fascinating lecture on the Internet today (www.ted.com) The speaker gave a talk on the misconceptions of: choice and happiness. I found this extremely interesting and relative to how open source works. In a capitalistic choice driven society like the United States (my home) it feels almost sacrilegious to say. It is however, true. Let’s delve further into it.

What software can you say people are truly happen with in open source? Without a doubt I would say: Firefox, MySQL, and Apache. Let’s look at why. Of the top of your head, what are your choices? Not many. I’m sure you’re probably thinking “What’s that browser’s name?” for a second referring to Opera or “I heard I can run a lighter webserver” referring to Lighttpd. Fact of the matter is more often than not it’s either Firefox (or a perversion of it like Swiftfox packaged with some Linux distros) or you Operating system default such as Internet Explorer or Safari. PostgresQL is a choice to MySQL but who offers anything else? There are tons more but as long as you don’t think about those you’re happy in your MySQL world.

“Why is this good?” you may ask. My answer is simple but don’t stop reading after I answer, there’s more. It keeps programmers focused in the right directions.

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