A Gripe About Fossfor.us

The Sourceforge-run site Fossfor.us lets people read about, download and grade popular open source apps like OpenOffice.org or Firefox. But there's one thing about Fossfor.us that bothers me deeply: the voting system.

Everyone who uses the site, whether you're a registered user or an anonymous visitor, can vote on the software listed. But the only two voting options are "great" and "just OK".

Am I the only one who thinks such an approach smacks of the worst of open source groupthink? That you can't say a particular piece of open source is "bad", merely "just OK", even if you have specific, factual criticisms to back up your assertion? You can add comments to your vote, but that doesn't change the fact that "just OK" is not really a negative vote. It's as inane as only being able to choose "I appove" or "I really approve".

I'd guess that if there was a bigger reason for not including the ability to cast "bad" votes, it's to avoid negative ballot-stuffing from people with an axe to grind. But there are plenty of sites who have reasonably reliable mechanisms for avoiding that kind of mess (karma, cross-voting, moderation, etc.), so why not adopt something along those lines?

More benignly, maybe the Fossfor.us folks figured the bad stuff would be already screened out, and that this was a gallery of the "best of the best". Maybe, but that doesn't mean intelligent negative comments should be ditched wholesale. No matter how I turn it, preventing someone from expressing a negative opinion altogether is like cutting off your nose to avoid catching a cold.

And given that this is FOSS, where the whole point is to have the freedom to make informed choices, discouraging criticism -- even in a form this "soft" -- runs counter to what it's all supposed to be about.

That said, Fossfor.us is a fine idea (and a great domain name!). And without them I doubt I would have run into cool stuff like picogen.

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