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He may be lurking hereabouts, but if not, here's his bio. I've been doing open source for a fair while - 10 years or so - but he's been talking to companies and coming up with good answers to various arguments against open source for much longer.

Your points are all well taken, and I fully agree with your comments on HTML.

That leaves me with one question. Is Silverlight an open standard? Can I go and write my own implementation for my own platform and under my own license, and create a full implementation that can run any Silverlight app that has been coded to the standard, without having to fear lawsuits from Microsoft for infringing on their intellectual property?

A comment this ignorant, and yet this highly rated, pretty much demands a rebuttal.

1. "I think Red Hat has no right to attempt to coax or coerce companies into giving away code. If OSS is the future, then it will happen, with or without Jim's little tantrum."

Guess what? There are *a lot* of companies coming to Red Hat, right now, *asking how to participate in open source projects.* So Jim is not talking pie-in-the-sky here; he's talking about capitalizing on momentum that already exists. There's pretty much zero coercion involved here.

2. "It is ridiculous for a CEO to attempt to paint his company as some kind of inspired model upon which other companies should remodel themselves."

So why is it, exactly, that Sun and Novell are trying to rebuild their business models, again? Help me out here.

3. "If Jim wants to make a difference, he should fund new development from emerging pools, like Google with the GSoC (not that I'm a Google fan, but that's another story), or IBM with their paid employee time contributions, or EnterpriseDB with their backports to the PostgreSQL team or Sun with their (somewhat clumsy) contributions to the OSS community. There are plenty of companies already doing what he says, he should be happy for that and encourage those already willing rather than attempting to project an agenda onto those it does not suit."

Considering that *every engineer at Red Hat is an open source software engineer*, either full-time or part-time, I'd say that Red Hat is funding plenty of open source development all around, thanks very much. Or maybe you don't think that any of this stuff counts.

4. "Having a whine that companies in the Old Establishment should be putting free money into his playpen is a naieve, futile and potentially harmful thing for Jim to be doing."

As it turns out, executives at big companies are smarter than you are. See, they understand the difference between "differentiating value" and "non-differentiating value". (Read some Bruce Perens if you don't get that idea.) Jim Whitehurst was the COO of a Very Large Company that had a larger annual IT budget than Red Hat's entire annual revenues. He saw firsthand how much money and manhours IT departments waste on software that doesn't actually add any value to the business. "Old Establishment" is looking desperately to make sure that those IT guys are building value, not wasting time on stuff that doesn't differentiate them from their competition. Understanding *and participating in* the open source model is one of the best possible ways to do exactly that. Which is why "Old Establishment" is coming to Red Hat and saying "help us".

The limiting factor is that Red Hat is not yet big enough to provide all of the services and guidance that these customers need. Jim is committing himself, publicly, to meeting that challenge. At Red Hat, we're all very proud of him for saying so.

http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html#footnote2

And retail represents only a quarter of all software development.

We need to talk more about "free as in free markets".

Did you read my economic paper? I really do make a point of talking about it in terms of free markets.

Bruce

The whole ESR Cathedral blather is an embarrassment, in most professional circles it is an hysterical joke.

It's obsolete. ESR wrote it before IBM stepped into the picture, etc. I invite you to read The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source. At least one now-professional has based his thesis on this paper.

I think the major difference in objectives between Open Source and Free Software evangelists is that the Free Software folks say that proprietary software does not have a right to exist. Unfortunately, I can't say that and win the argument where it's important to win. You have to sound fair to everybody to win with politicians, if you ask to disenfranchise someone else you generally won't get very far.

Sorry if you don't buy that, and we'll have to agree to disagree.

Thanks

Bruce

``Basically, Flash is a ubiquitous open-standard with mature development tools and tons of 3rd-party partners.''

I wish. Open standard? Nah, I don't think so.

1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion? Theora is actually based on On2 Technology's VP3 codec and not an H.261. It may be comparable in quality to H.261 though. Theora is good enough quality for the current Web and the small size videos we are used to through YouTube. It cannot compete with high-quality H.264, but it was not designed to do so. OTOH, the BBC Dirac codec http://dirac.sourceforge.net/ is built to compete in that space and Dirac is an open standard according to the definition of Bruce Perens: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html.
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine. De facto standards come and go. There have been many image formats de facto standards before we got to the current set of jpeg and png. Flash is not providing all the potential a web video format should provide. Flash was never developed to do so but accidentally slipped into that role after Quicktime, RealMedia and WindowsMedia failed to make usable web video technology. There is only one thing certain on this planet: change.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks. Ah the old argument against Open Source software! Fear! No, I'm not going there. Too much has been written about this kind of marketing approach before - no need to repeat here.

You are correct in saying Ogg is not a codec. But when you compare Theora to VC-1, you must not have been reading the license terms of VC-1 properly. VC-1 is riddled by patents and there are royalites to pay when you use it: http://www.mpegla.com/pid/vc1/ . There is no such thing as royalties to pay for Theora. Also, the only patent on Theora were ones owned by On2 Technologies, who donated their VP3 codec as the *basis* technology for Theora and kindly granted an unrevocable free license regarding those patents: http://www.theora.org/benefits/. As for quality - yes, Theora is a generation behind in compression technology and H.264 is much better quality at lower bitrates. Again - have you read the license conditions? Theora is simply the only open codec standard (as to the definition of Open Standard by Buce Perens: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html) with a usable implementation. Mind you, I would watch out for the BBC's Dirac codec http://dirac.sourceforge.net/ which is based on Wavelet technology and is thus opening a whole new space of new video codec developments and improvements - a space H.264 didn't enter. And Dirac is an open standard.

I represented Denmark in the comittee that created the EIF and maintained the AG, so of course I read the Gartner-report with a biased view. Then again, I always tend to read documents from Gartner with a biased view. [..] If the Gartner consultants were my students, they should fear the exam, because I would confront their problem understanding, their methods, their empirical depths/shallowness, and not least their pseudo-theoretical analysis and model-amok. Having said that, I admit to finding some of their proposals pretty interesting, for example, their Generic Public Services Framework is conceptually interesting, but not very well explained and motivated.

Researchwise, the Gartner report does not go into much if any detail with respect to the national interoperability frameworks that have been established in several member states: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.

EIF presented a pretty clear definition of open standards. EIF 2.0 will, Gartner suggests, "allow open standards and other recognized standards to coexist", and Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se.

Gartner's advice to IDABC is so fundamentally flawed that, if followed, it would break down the interoperability that has been achieved via EIF 1.0 and set back any prospect of achieving improved interoperability in the future. Their findings are unbalanced to weight the desires of an IT vendor over the good of IT customers and the fundamental goal of interoperability. This unbalance is so fundamental that Gartner mis-states the very character of standards and the conditions that provide interoperability, and confuses mere formats with standards.

This comment counters Gartner's report with a simple explanation regarding the conditions necessary to achieve interoperability while being fair to all parties. The recent overpowered push for acceptance of Office Open XML in ISO made it clear that the proper conditions for interoperability must be explained to many nontechnical people, if political pressure is not to overwhelm technical reality. Thus, this comment defines basic concepts and uses terms that nontechnical people can be expected to understand. The more technical are requested to bear with us.

How do you think new words happen? People define them. So, I took that authority.

Bruce, I'd like to pin down precisely when you claim you defined (some would say redefined) the meaning of the phrase "Open Source". I haven't found any information yet on when that supposedly occurred. I ask because of two pieces of data I have located. One of them is an october 1996 press release from Caldera in which the phrase "Open Source" is clearly used to describe the conditions of release for Caldera OpenDOS. ESR Claims that the term was invented in 1998. And in your own document entitled The Open Source Definition you state the following:

"The Open Source Definition started life as a policy document of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution. Debian, an early Linux system and one still popular today, was built entirely of free software. However, since there were other licenses than the Copyleft that purported to be free, Debian had some problem defining what was free, and they had never made their free software policy clear to the rest of the world. I was the leader of the Debian project, at that time, and I addressed these problems by proposing a Debian Social Contract and a Debian Free Software Guidelines in July, 1997."

This leaves the question somewhat up in the air. If you first sought to define the term in the DSC and/or DFSG in 1997, then clearly you are a latecomer to the party. And if you did this thing in 1997, or even earlier, why does ESR claim it happened in 1998? Is it the truth, rivalry, or ignorance? I have no particular reason to believe ESR over yourself (and one or two reasons not to, but let us put those aside for the moment) and thus I am only seeking clarification.

ESR actually goes on to mention you in his document which places the event in 1998:

"Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea the day after that first meeting. We began acting on it within a few days after. Bruce Perens had the <opensource.org> domain registered and the first version of the Open Source website up within a week. He also suggested that the Debian Free Software Guidelines become the `Open Source Definition', and began the process of registering `Open Source' as a certification mark so that we could legally require people to use `Open Source' for products conforming to the OSD."

Would you please do us the courtesy of clarifying these issues? I realize that I may becoming across as rude or obsequious, but please believe that finding out the truth so that I can steer people correctly is more important to me than being right, or you being wrong.

Please consider studying a bit on the importance of open standards in the technology world. Many of the things that people take for granted today exist due to open standards, and might well not exist without them, or might exist but not be affordable to you. The issue is not about snobbery, that's just a FUD smokescreen you're blowing. You may like Microsoft and their products, but they have a long and well documented history of trying to crush open standards in order to prevent competition in the marketplace of software and technology. You may like Internet Explorer, but it has a well documented history of broken support for open standards. These things are not "bugs" or they would get fixed. The fact that they don't get fixed, for years and years, is indication that to some degree Microsoft intends IE to depart from the open standards, so that the "MUCH MUCH LARGER GROUP OF PEOPLE", sheeple that they are, will follow the herd to Microsoft land, and help cement Microsoft dominance by building broken web sites. If you own significant amounts of MSFT, then perhaps buy building broken web sites you are contributing to your own success. However, if you owned that much MSFT, you wouldn't be building web sites, would you?

I suggest starting here:
Open Standards: Principles and Practice
Open Standard

"You should also consider that ODF's license is written by SUN"

Actually OpenDocument was developed by OASIS and published as an ISO standard. As such Sun, or any other single company don't own it. Microsofts covenant only promises not to sue for certain parts of the covered specification that are convienently not defined in the license. Why it's split up into chunks like this is curious.

"So basically it seems that the licensing issues surrounding ODF and OpenXML are pretty much equivalent"

Essencially what it means is that if you create a completely independent working specification, the do_not_sue covenant don't apply. On the other hand anyone can create their own implementation of ODF from the published specs and the do_not_sue covenant from SUN still applys.

Both yours an Microsofts definition of open standard seems to be different that everyone elses. According to Bruce Perens MS open standards would fail the test.

Fair Enough? (Score:5, Interesting)

I haven't used it for a while, but I used to use Bruce Peren's efence for bits of malloc debugging, it hasn't been actively developed for ages but it's pretty light weight if that's what you need. There appears to be an up to date branch DUMA which I haven't tried. As far as I remember you can use efence under WIN and DUMA claims to work......

Unfortunately, what you prolly want is valgrind or purify.

Oops.. sorry, wrong link. Corrected here:

http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html

This is Bruce Perens's thing, isn't it: The World's Most Silly Technology Law

Arguing that Apple should open source their operating system is like arguing that one of the car manufacturers should open up their engine-control software - it removes a core advantage of their hardware and makes you less likely to buy it.

I thought the argument was just the opposite. That is, if Apple is a hardware company, then software is merely a cost center. By this theory, you open source the software to drive down the cost of development so that you can focus on the hardware that differentiates your product. That's what Bruce Perens said anyway.

That wouldn't mean Apple would open source all its software. Some of its software--like the OS X GUI--do differentiate Apple's products, so Apple would keep that proprietary. But it seems much less likely that the Darwin kernel would be viewed as a differentiating feature of OS X. Perhaps it would make more sense to open source the kernel then.

If you'd like to learn more about this, read The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

And regarding the gratification from writing a "duplicate", it doesn't work that way. Consider Firefox, or Apache: not duplicates of anything, although there are other products in the category. Or Linux: it works the way the POSIX standard says it should, so it shares a common interface with Unix. But everything else about it is different.

Thanks

Bruce

Ya know, the people who used to speak for the Open Source movement (ESR, John Parens, etc)

I am amazed how pragmatic Bruce Perens is. His paper on the economy of Open Source is much better -- both in terms of being concise, as in terms of being correct -- than anything I ever heard from some other Open Source or Free Software Gurus.

I highly recommend http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.htmlthis paper to anyone who has not read it yet. It is much more interesting than the interview itself (which is short, and, in my opinion, quite uninteresting given the experience and knowledge of Bruce Perence -- the interviewer(s) did not get as much of him as they could have).

The article is quite long, but very well researched, and definitely worth spending some time on it.

Cheers,
j.

That, at least, puts him in the same category as most well-known F/OSS advocates. Apparently outspoken is the new sensible.

Why's he so famous in the Linux crowd?

He was project leader of Debian for a bit, and was the primary author of 'The Open Source Definition' (an obfuscated version of the Free Software Definition, based on the Debian version, but with more equivocation). For more information, see bhis bio.

The entire reason the OSS movement started was to bypass the "suits". The frustration and aggravation of letting the "suits" make architectural design decisions, nerf a product so that it could meet some artificial deadline or sabotage a dependent competitors product (often focusing on changing the tech to erect barriers of entry). OSS frees software development from the whimsical vagaries of corporate politics and lets us focus on the technical merits of a design decision.

          Claiming that it's the "style" of OSS that's at fault for lack of Corporate uptake is just another way of saying that the "suits" are more concerned by superficial considerations of appearance (corporate politics) then they are by technical considerations. OSS wouldn't exist if the OSS developers felt the same way.

          What's necessary isn't that developers adapt to coporate politics, but an intermediate class of OSS Entrepeneurs who are willing and capable of marketing the OSS technology to the "suits" in a way that they will understand and appreciate. Similarly, the OSS culture needs to integrate more artists to help polish clipart and GUI's, and writers to flesh out documentation and instruction manuals.

          The best treatise I've read on OSS's role in the Corporate ecology was written by Bruce Perens:
http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html

          It is definitely worth the read and will put a lot of these dynamics into perspective. Corporations are slow to realize the need for them to take an active role in exploiting the tech that is now freely available. Their need to shift some of their spending from what would have gone toward off the shelf software toward OSS developers directly to customize what's already available to suit their specific needs.

          Does coporate politics hinder this adjustment? Yes. Because of blame game politics. What's necessary then? That middle class of entrepeneurs to sell a Consulting service where they are the business middlemen between the Corporations and the OSS community.

In non-Rails frameworks, does an 'add-on' provide features in a way that makes them cumbersome or distinguishable from built-in features? If so, developers must really hate using add-ons.

Fortunately, the story is different with rails.

Here's an example of a security 'add-on' for Rails written by Bruce Perens (yes, that 'famous' Debian guy):

http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ModelSecurity/Tutor ial.html

By providing security features in a base class used by controllers, ModelSecurity works in a manner that works seamlessly--as if it was part of Rails.

By the way, add-ons for rails can be via plugins, generators, or engines.

Nooo! You've got to get security right from the start! Start with minimal privilege and add only that that is required. Otherwise you'll end up with an unholy holey mess.

No, you don't, and no, you won't. There is this thing called "iterative development" and this other thing called "refactoring". Do you write your apps on a stone tablet? This is even more stupid considering that you're lobbing this complaint at a FUCKING TUTORIAL. I know! Let's throw the full complexity of the framework at people who have never used Ruby before! That won't turn people away!

If your web-based framework lets you write something that lets you modify anything on the server without either logging in or explicitly telling the code its okay, then choose another framework ASAP.

...what? So, in order to be a real framework, I've got to whitelist opcodes and rows in my DB before I actually get anything done? Again, what? This is even more stupid when you consider that Rails has like 10 different third party auth plugins. ModelSecurity would probably tickle your prostate.

Yes you can add-on security to RoR, but it'll always be an add-on...

Bullshit. Access control is trival to add with "before-filter". Even if it wasn't, your statement would still be a lie.

And you too, protect your software today!

See Electric Fence and your documentation for debugging malloc.

Only when the software becomes useful to others does the Open Source paradigm work fully, because only then will other parties have an incentive to use the software. Once they are using the software, these other parties will have an incentive to extend the software to implement additional features that are of interest to them.

The incremental cost of adding a feature is much smaller than the cost of the entire development. Parties that create modifications have an incentive to write them in such a way that they will be accepted by the other developers on the project and will be merged into the main body of source code that is shared by all developers. If this merge does not happen, the continuing cost of maintaining the added feature will be higher, since its developers must track changes to the main source code and maintain compatibility with that changing base.

Thus, Open Source tends to foster a community of developers who make contributions to a useful product. The cost and risk of developing the product is distributed among these developers, and any combination of them can carry on the project if others leave. Distribution of cost and risk begins as soon as the project is mature enough to build a community outside of its initial developer.

Bruce

Bruce

Bruce Perens is working on model security for Active Record sponsored by Soucelabs

A controller/model/view generator for easily adding authentication, users, and logins to your rails app.

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

The goal of this project is to create a portable, simple but effective RBAC implementation with common User infrastructure and models for Rails.

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.

• Home Page
• Tutorial.
• Reference.
• RubyForge project.

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.

• Home Page
• Tutorial.
• Reference.
• RubyForge project.

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.

• Home Page
• Tutorial.
• Reference.
• RubyForge project.

Bruce

Didn't Bruce Perens use a similar method of page protection to implement Electric Fence?

http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ElectricFence/

If this is the case, it's great that such a feature should go into an OS by default. I personally love anything that gives me confidence in the implementation of any applications I write, especially as this type of technique makes debugging much easier.

Check out his website for a bio, but he is in my opinion, the more vocal opponent of software patents in the US. http://www.perens.com/ Big open source proponent. Regards Ron Holmes

That [the development teams of GPL licensed projects will dry up and blow away] is not and has never been my position. There is no horrible fate awaiting GPL projects.

Then I guess you never said this: "What actually happens is people stop writing software so they can do something that makes money." Except that you did.

I look forward with amusement to your next attempt to wiggle out from under your own words. Of course, you could admit that you have learned something and have changed your position. But what fun would that be?

I am simply saying that the GPL is crap and should be killed at our earliest convenience, because it is actively preventing people from contributing to the community.

Nonsense. Only the small minority of companies that want to incorporate free software into proprietary products are prevented from doing anything at all by the GPL. As you pointed out, in those cases replacing the license with BSD would not result in any contribution to the free software community. Clearly no one is directly prevented from contributing in either case. Your argument seems to be that the GPL license is indirectly preventing contributions because it cannot be adopted by some organizations that might otherwise have had an incentive to offer improvements to the community.

But that argument is simply wrong. Read The Emerging Economics of Open Source by Bruce Perens. Companies who contribute to free software projects generally do so because the project represents non-differentiating technology for them. In such cases the disadvantage of allowing competitors to have internally developed improvements is small compared to the benefits of shared maintenence. This does not usually apply to companies that wish to incorporate free software into proprietary products because in those cases the software is differentiating technology. Such companies have an incentive to keep improvements to themselves because the advantage of denying them to competitors is worth more than the cost of maintianing an internal fork.

This means the GPL does not foreclose on any signficant source of contributions. One has only to look around to see the evidence. GPL and LGPL licensed projects such as Linux, GCC, GNOME, Samba and others are swimming in corporate cash and have many full time developers employed by a wide variety of companies. BSD licensed projects, while sometimes successful like FreeBSD and PostgreSQL, usually have more meager resources. This would be difficult to explain if the GPL actually discouraged contributions.

This is not about money. It's about code.

Then I guess you never said this: "Code under the BSD license can still be commercially exploited. That means you can still make money off it." Except that you did.

Proprietary license revenues may not be the best way to get paid, but that's not my decision to make for my clients, and it's not *your* decision to make for them either.

Can you name a specific instance in which I have even attempted to make business decisions on behalf of your clients? Can you name an instance in which I have encouraged you to make business decisions on behalf your clients? No. You can't because there aren't any. In particular, I have never questioned the right of your clients or anyone else to release software for which they own the copyright under any license they choose. Your statement is a clumsy rhetorical trick intended to distract from your inability to articulate a sound argument against the GPL.

The GPL puts us in the business of telling people their business models are wrong. That's a monum

While there are some few thousand programmers who get paid to write GPL code, they are WEIRD, and their employers are WEIRD, and the reasons they are in that position are WEIRD.

No, there's nothing weird about any of this. You simply don't understand the economic forces at work. Still, I notice you have retreated from your original position, which was that the development teams of GPL projects will simply dry up and blow away from a lack of proprietary license fees. That's a good start. No matter how baffled you are by this, smart people can and do make money writing and using GPL software.

The logistics don't scale. You may as well tell your careers advisor that you plan to be a rock star, or join the NBA, or become the President of Burundi: it's simply not a viable plan for your future.

No, sorry, you're wrong. Not everyone can be Linus Torvalds, but not everyone has to be. Around 90% of people employed as programmers are working on in-house project or in other ways not producing software for proprietary sale. Most of those people could, and many demonstrably do, incorporate GPL licensed software into the systems they develop rather than writing things from scratch. They and their employers then have a natural interest in contributing to the project, because doing so is more efficient than rewriting or maintaining an internal fork. These people are not rock stars, but they are being paid to contribute to GPL licensed software. This is one of the reasons there is such a staggering quantity of software available under this license.

Again, proprietary license revenues are neither the only nor the best way to collect money for writing software. Read the Bruce Perens paper linked above if you would like to understand.

While there are some few thousand programmers who get paid to write GPL code, they are WEIRD, and their employers are WEIRD, and the reasons they are in that position are WEIRD.

No, there's nothing weird about any of this. You simply don't understand the economic forces at work. Still, I notice you have retreated from your original position, which was that the development teams of GPL projects will simply dry up and blow away from a lack of proprietary license fees. That's a good start. No matter how baffled you are by this, smart people can and do make money writing and using GPL software.

The logistics don't scale. You may as well tell your careers advisor that you plan to be a rock star, or join the NBA, or become the President of Burundi: it's simply not a viable plan for your future.

No, sorry, you're wrong. Not everyone can be Linus Torvalds, but not everyone has to be. Around 90% of people employed as programmers are working on in-house project or in other ways not producing software for proprietary sale. Most of those people could, and many demonstrably do, incorporate GPL licensed software into the systems they develop rather than writing things from scratch. They and their employers then have a natural interest in contributing to the project, because doing so is more efficient than rewriting or maintaining an internal fork. These people are not rock stars, but they are being paid to contribute to GPL licensed software. This is one of the reasons there is such a staggering quantity of software available under this license.

Again, proprietary license revenues are neither the only nor the best way to collect money for writing software. Read the Bruce Perens paper linked above if you would like to understand.

Bias of Slashdot editors is a time-proven fact. Which is okay in the overall scheme of things--it is their website, after all.

Nonetheless, as a service to those with an interest, I offer the following (which the editors chose not to post):

11 May 2005: Bruce Perens, owner of Technocrat.net, a site based on the Slashdot model and running the same open source Slashcode http://www.slashcode.com/, has shut down the site, citing declining readership and lower than expected growth. Sometimes touted as "a more mature Slashdot," the site carried news and discussion on topics ranging from politics to technology, and many involving biological sciences. This blog article http://bre.klaki.net/dagbok/faerslur/978545404.sht ml suggests Perens might be making a mistake shutting down the site because syndication offerings through RSS feeds and other technology obscure the actual number of readers. The article contains more info and a letter to Perens about the shutdown. On a side note, as of this posting Perens' personal website http://www.perens.com/ was inaccessible.

The general concencious is that software patents are mainly stiffling the ability for new software to be produced. Here's an interesting tid bit about problems with software patents. It's a really interesting read I suggest it. Here it is http://perens.com/Articles/PatentFarming.html

About as happy as they have been with GCC bugs. They have seen more than their share of those, and they will deal with them in the same way.

Time will tell if that is good enough.

Couldn't I apply all of your arguments to Open Source in general? Shouldn't they be using Microsoft C and Visual SourceSafe for the wonderful support they'd get?

I can't imagine how much money Tigris have put into Subversion at this stage, and look at the criticism the product continues to incur and the major back-end overhauls that have been taking place.

Whatever they were thinking of, it didn't work. That's business - sometimes you lose. It seems that others have better ideas than Subversion.

with it's gargantuan achievements over recent years - still relies on private support and private funding in one way or another.

That's OK. Read my Economics paper. It will explain how and why, when it works, and when it does not.

Thanks

Bruce

check for a class of vulnerabilities called buffer overruns

Eerily reminiscent of VAX/VMS's "/ARRAY_BOUNDS_CHECKS=ON" option, around 1985 this was. Admittedly, this was for Pascal or somesuch.
Cool thing for gcc nonetheless. Don't forget to check Boehm's Garbage Collector for C and/or Bruce Perens' Electric Fence

How company can make money, if its products are available for free?

Easy. Don't sell products.

"How will programmers get paid?"

"Do you have a programming job?"

"Yes. I work for a closed-source software vendor."

"How are you paid?"

"By the hour/salary."

"Not by the project? So you're providing a service?"

"Yes."

"Would a customer buy a piece of software if it didn't do anything?"

"No."

"So the closed source model turns your service into a product, so that it can be turned back into a service when the user installs it. If customers are interested in services through software, why bother with products?"

Product-ification is an inefficiency in the marketplace. Competition is discovering this.

Ask Bruce Perens. Only about 30% of software is shrink wrapped, and the percentage is shrinking.

Alright....you asked for it.

Well, it says here:

"I am the person who first announced "Open Source" to the world, in an article carried on Slashdot and elsewhere."

He also trademarked the thing, wrote the OSI definition, and cofounded the OSI. I don't see why he couldn't or wouldn't be allowed to make that claim.

It might be worthwhile to review Bruce Perens' take on RN's dogoodism from their original open source releases in mid-2002.

• Freedom 0) The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• Freedom 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
• Freedom 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3) The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

I just wonder if SCO actually believes it. That Las Vegas roadshow last year was very interesting. (The one with the code shown in Greek font that turned out to be part of the BSD firewall code) I wonder if they honestly don't know what they are talking about.