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Gartner Group Debunking Open Source Myths
6j3net sent us a report from the Gartner Group that attempts to debunk Open Source Myths. It looks like they got things pretty much right. It looks as if this might be a great url to send the bossman when he asks questions.
Lets face it, there are lots of management types out there who don't read/understand/etc places like /. and so on. They fear OSS because of all these myths. Now someone "respected" by many has posted a report saying that OSS should be reassessed, etc.
:)
Hell, irrespective of whether Gartner are paid mouthpieces for big-name companies or not, this kind of report can only help. All that was said is dead-obvious to us, but it's not to people who haven't been a part of the scene. This gives OSS a bit more of a legit status.
The thing to now be aware of is that this kind of report may very well lead to lots more "newbies" coming into the OSS world, from both the IT user/support side and the development side ("Carl, go check out OSS and see how it can help us sell more of product X"
It is now the responsibility of those who have said "Isn't this report kinda old-news & obvious" to ensure that the newbies don't go down the wrong path. Ensure that they are guided to reputable companies & examples. Help them avoid the pitfalls of the OSS world.
Gartner are opening the gates. It's up to the rest of us to ensure that OSS doesn't get a bad name as the "clueless hoards" crash the party and start milling aimlessly about.
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
You kick ass.
Sounds like a double-standard to me. You're comparing two things but using a different metric for each.
Perhaps you should read my earlier post, you anon. coward dope.
Hmm... so when W2K was in beta and they released updates for w98.. that doesn't qualify as two seperate development efforts?
May I further point out that my experience is that closed source companies often opt not to fix some bugs at all. In those cases it'll *never* get fixed. Which kind of leaves you in the lurch, doesn't it?
And from a user standpoint, the same can happen with open source. If I discover an obscure configuration bug in, say, Samba, the developers can still tell me it's not a "big enough" issue. There's alot of bug fixes that /could/ have gone into the linux 2.2 tree, but linus told them to merge it into 2.3 instead -- like all those hardware driver updates. As a user I'm still "in the lurch". Having the source code means nothing to me if I can't use it.
Do I hear the sound of Signal 11 smacking his forehead in chagrin?
Not yet. =)
The Gartner Group seem to have taken the side of RMS in the Linux or GNU/Linux debate... "Only about 2% of the software on a Linux distribution is actually the Linux OS.."
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
it's fun!!!!! in fact, that's the most important reason.
and now for something completely different
As a home-office worker, I'll attest to that (at least my experience of that). I would love to go all-Linux on my laptop, instead of clumsily switching from Linux to WinNT as I do now. But there are a few problems:
So in the end, I end up using the Linux side considerably less. If I'm going to have to flip back and forth between OS's, why not stick in the one I have to use anyway?
That's because they are two different things that don't really compare well to each other, ie apples and oranges. They're both reaching for different goals, so comparing the successes of each to any single metric doesn't make much sense. Once again, IMHO.
make world, not war
I don't know, whenever I do graduate from Tech, if I haven't seen this process start, I may try it myself.
We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of the dreams.
Because of file permissions, once the system is set up it will stay set up - your mom will not be able to screw up the config files, delete /vmlinuz, or accidentally reformat her hard drive. You only need to configure Linux once, so don't say it's hard to use because it's hard to configure - they're two different things.
Kudos? Give me a f*cking break. The only thing that matters is Dollars, not f*cking kudos. Kudos won't buy you a new car. And most places couldn't care less about some obscure little hack you did back in college.
Myth 4: It is against sound business practice to give things away. "Open-sourcing" a project can help developers do their jobs better. Many developers in IS or R&D departments expect that sharing a solution among peers who have similar problems will help them get a better solution in the long term (see Note 4). OSS development can also be a source of revenue from services, support or proprietary add-ons and extensions. New IT vendors that specialize in OSS products (e.g., Red Hat -- with the newly acquired Cygnus Solutions -- Linuxcare and Sendmail), as well as established vendors like IBM or Apple, actively develop OSS products as loss leaders for services, support and proprietary add-ons.
Delusional. Part of doing good work is knowing that you are accountable for it. With OSS, there is no accountability because no one actually paid you anything except those useless f*cking kudos.
If many follow in employing commercial developers R&D into opensource projects, it means a new world order... probably less capitalized and improved socially.
Bizar technology?
I'm printing it out and forwarding it to all my pointy-haired bosses!
---
Gartner Group have previously tried to play down the part of OSS in the commercial environment and now we see this report which is to the contrary; it would seem that gartner group (who have some interesting sources of funding) were originally playing into the hands of their corporate peers in justifying the use of commercial software as an exclusive means. :) have changed tack in order to 'gently ease' OSS under the corporate door.
:)
Now this is no longer what the corporate 'customers' want to hear so Gartner (who are never inacurate in reports, just evasive
This isn't strange; Gartner group just need to play the tune their customers want to hear.
1,000,000 frenchmen can't be wrong
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Deservedly or not, Gartner has a lot of respect amongst the corporate management and money people. Small thought this step is, (they could use a full out report to show the good business sense next), it is a big thing to those for whom this site is not a daily watering hole.
Spoken like a true Celine Dion and *ahem* Prince fan.
Think about it..Add up just the OS and the stuff needed to get it to init. Kernel, LILO, the kernel daemons, the contents of /boot.. I bet together that comes close to 10 M.
Save Jon!
.sig: Now legally binding!
They write two pieces. One praising OSS and another bashing it. Then they wait to see how the winds change. A year ago, OSS was just a fad. Now, hey - we knew you'd make it all along. Let us be friends, eh?
> Isn't OSS about less obscurity? Does this
> kind of article mean that I'm wrong and SOL?
ROTFL. AFAIK, hackers _invented_ the TLA! IMHO the key difference is that ours are intended to be funny (and ideally recursive), plus we have the Jargon file to explain them to newcomers, wheras suits intend them to look impressive and use them to indimidate newcomers.
The way "Open Source" news generates revenue is via advertising. This obviously doesn't translate over. Distro companies like redhat exist because Linux+GNU is so complicated and so enormously extensible that there is a demand for services.
However, most programs don't fit into this category - if you're writing a game for instance (very few "modern" open source games exist - do any in a finished form? I haven't seen one), theres really no service to sell. Let's pick something else, say digital audio/MIDI packages (another area where there really isn't much going for linux) - once again, no service to sell. There is no way to make a living off these things open sourcing your code. There is no service to sell. People aren't going to buy printed manuals, t-shirts, and mugs to the point you can exist off it.
So the answer is: Do it in your free time. That's how the vast majority of Open Source Code is written. And that works really well as long as there is so much interest in the project that you'll have a huge talent pool of people to draw from or your project small enough drawing masses of help in doesn't matter.
Unfortunately the "do it in my free time deal" while working 40 hours a week at whatever job simply isn't that satisfying to many. And if the program you want to code doesn't lend itself to selling-service or corporate sponsorship (IE - Redhat/GNOME), you're up a creek -- and there are plenty of programs in that category. Many, many big ideas for OS projects get started and fail because the people really interested in it simply don't have the time and not enough "outside" OS coders are interested enough to pick up the slack.
The only answer I've seen to this is the FSF's "Software Tax" idea, where funding for coding would be somewhat analogous to funding sciences. That of course isn't happening, and the problems behind who controlled the money and how much went where would be quite a mess to sort out.
So anyway, I don't think the reason we're not seeing certain open source projects and suceeding is because people HAVE figured out the OSS buisness model and realize there's no way for them to fund their project doing it. And so they close the source and sell the code as that's the only real way to generate revenue.
> Listening to RMS, slashdotters, and ESR's writings would have you believe OSS will revolutionize the world and proprietary software is /all/ bad.
/.. Who exactly has been saying otherwise?
/. and trash Linux out of ignorance" crowd that has been posting here so vigorously lately. If you have to set up straw men to knock down, you leave the impression that you're someone who feels threatened by Linux but hasn't actually tried it.
a) OSS already has revolutionized a big chunk of the world. (Or counterrevolutionized, if you realize how traditional it actually is.)
b) Show us some links on the "all bad" claims. I feel like you're mischaracterizing what most of us actually say.
> I direct you to several stunning *proprietary* software achievements which the OSS community has yet to duplicate.
a) You could also direct us to innumerable proprietary software failures, if only you wanted to see things in that light.
b.1) My mom can't use any proprietary desktops, either.
b.2) You seem to be blaming OSS for the fact that CAD and game publishers target the biggest market and neglect the smaller ones.
> have you been watching the source checkins/checkouts for hardware drivers?
Ummm, yes. And that's how it's supposed to work. The difference with CSS is that all this is hidden from casual observers.
Oh, yeah. Pick up a book on software engineering and you'll see this listed as the "evolutionary model", or whatever term the author goes in for. It has been around a lot longer than Linux has.
> most people in the OSS community a) don't have access to debuggers to catch this stuff earlier
Surely you've got some major typos in there that makes it sound like you're saying something you didn't intend to say?
> Often don't wait and properly engineer their drivers prior to implimentation.
Oftenest, they're working without proper documentation for the hardware. There's a heck of a difference in designing a driver based on internal engineering documents (some available before the device was actually built) and trying to design one based on publicly released documents that deliberately try to hide anything with the remotest possibility of turning out to be valuable IP.
It's a bit hard to get it right the first try when you're groping in the dark.
> That is to say they're impatient.
Check out some of the developers' lists' archives. You'll find some amazing displays of patience.
> I think it's because the programmers didn't know or didn't care enough to make it work correctly the first time and then need to go back and rewrite the code again.
Ignoring your slanders against my motivation and abilities, I can only wonder what kind of paradise you visualize for a CSS shop. Again, I've worked both sides of the fence, and (to the extent that it's possible to generalize between individual shops at all) the only consistent difference is that you get to peek behind the curtain with OSS, but not with CSS.
> Let's take another myth: that we're somehow superior to windows or macheads.
That's another one that needs to be supported by links.
> I'd also like to point out that there are other "source" movements out there that make progress approximately on par with linux
Again, you seem to mischaracterize the prevailing attitudes found on
I don't fault you for criticising Linux; I fault you for doing so cluelessly. There are many substantive criticisms that could be offered for Linux, but for some reason you've joined the "let's go to
Which is amazing, because you used to post some thoughtful things here. (Or have I been fooled by someone with a look-alike handle?)
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This will be found on many corporate printers before the end of the day...
You're totally right. We as people and society is not yet mature enough to have a full Open Source in our technological development. You can't suddenly force models of this and that down the throats of people. This is something that's going to take time to gradually improve. It's basically up to people to adopt and adapt, if they choose so.
This means people will have to be more willing to share, knowing that people will share with them too. It's like in a family, we need to learn to trust each other. Not breaking that trust, but also be strong enough to not break apart when promises eventually gets broken. Like it is now, we're frantically hogging on to our belongings. Our attitudes towards eachother creates alot of resistance in the community we live in.
Btw, Redhat and other supporting companies have and will in the future hire Open Source authors. Sometimes even finance their projects, especially with commercial hardware and software. Bottom line is: As things are now, everything needs money to exist in our society. There are alot of ways of making money flow into the vein of Open Source movement not yet fully explored.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I am a GartnerGroup analyst. In particular, I'm one of the GG analysts's who has covered OSS and Linux for quite some time. Consequently it should be a surprise that I am also an avid visitor to slashdot.
In lives before GG I was a technical architect and developer every bit down in the trenches as the typical slashdot reader and probably more than most.
I'm amazed at the notion that GG has been anti-Linux or OSS in anyway. In fact when you read the bulk of our research its quite bullish on OSS and Linux. Keep in mind that we've published LOTS of information of Linux and OSS; unless you're a GG client you probably haven't seen 99% of our research. Most of the comments I've read on slashdot are based entirely on ignorance or from a small snippet of published material.
I find it comical that advising our clients that Linux WON'T replace Win32 as the dominant desktop operating system in the next three years is somehow Linux bashing. I'd actually expect responses to be no sh** but more often it's the opposite.
Has Microsoft payed GartnerGroup to write Linux or OSS research? No. GartnerGroup does not write research specifically for ANY vendor. Furthermore, as any of our clients know GartnerGroup has consistently been one of Microsoft's strongest critics. Microsoft is a BIG company. Like most big companies they do some things very well and some things terribly bad. Gartner's value to our clients is an unbiased third party analysis and our Linux/OSS research IMO is an excellent example of balanced even handed view of an incredibly overhyped and radically evolving subject matter.
Are Linux and OSS overhyped? Of course they are. Every newly discovered technology trend goes through an inevitable cycle of hype and backlash as it enters mainstream IT environments.
Is there real substance under this hype? Of course there is. Gartner's charter is to help separate the wheat from the chafe. The notion that any negative position is bashing or selling out to a vendor is not only ridiculous but childish.
I thought long and hard before posting this response insofar as I'm sure it will bring inevitable flames but then again this will only prove my point. Bottom line, GartnerGroup is not the enemy, we will continue to track OSS trends, vendors, success stories (and failures) in an impartial and even handed manner. We will analyze and report on the good, bad and the ugly with regards to OSS. You'll probably like what we have to say in some cases and you'll hate it in others.
Do you have particular success stories of OSS projects in your IT organization? Do you have a specific OSS subject that you think we should be covering but aren't? I'd love to hear about them (gganalyst@hotmail.com). Do you have some asinime flame or insult to throw my way? Don't bother.
Open Source Myth? I thought Loki was just selling x86/ppc binaries!
A very good read! Maybe I'll show it to my boss and get him to get out of the NT biz.
If you feel that the whole report is too lengthy, you can print out the "BOTTOMLINE" and distribute it to whoever you think should take a look at it.
The "BOTTOMLINE" is as follows (as I copied from the website):
Bottom Line: Contrary to common perceptions,
open-source development is neither a recent
phenomenon nor a transient one, and more
significantly, it is one that will increasingly be
associated with commercial vendors and end-user
organizations. We recommend that IT organizations
which currently exclude all OSS from their
acquisition plans should re-examine this policy.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
All previous models of large-scale, even global marketing -- that's what we're really talking about, after all -- are based on corporate methods and billion-dollar budgets.
What's needed, IMO, is a marketing effort that's coordinated with people like Red Hat. Contributing code won't be enough for this, though. Cash will be required.
The consumer probably has at least two problems with Linux, or any Open Source Software.
One, it sounds kind of good ("Open" is better than "Closed". It's not more complicated than that in marketing), but what is it supposed to do in her life that would make her give up Windows, which, with all of its drawbacks, is still Good Enough? What's so compelling -- from a usability/functionality/price-- point of view to persuade someone standing in front of a cheap PC box at Office Depot pick and OSS over Windows?
The consumer, for whom a computer is just another buy for the house, more often than not, is gonna pick the safe choice, every time. Hell, they'll take their kid's advice before they take yours. Advertising and consistent marketing will help move the bubble, but it's gonna take time, and even then only if it's awfully, awfully good.
Actually, this effort could be kind of interesting. (I obviously like hopeless causes. I'm not signing on for this one, as I already have one, thanks.) How does one take the OSS philosophy and make it work in advertising? How would it be funded? Who would approve the ad copy? Who would hire the ad agency? How would goals be defined? Who watches the budget? How would development be crafted to aim more at the consumer market, and not just the IT market?
If this group has proven anything, it's that it can shape a new paradigm. This, I would guess, has never, EVER been tried before.
Bias is not how we get to truth guys.
-- Slashdot sucks.
Signal 11's list of good proprietary software has many missing (I could add a dozen right now), but one remarkable piece of software which any programmer can learn from was not added: Mathematica, from Wolfram Research. Please bear with the off-topic paragraph, I come back, and it's even relevant. :)
...). This has freed me to think about the matrix math that I want to do, and I don't have to debug my matrix math algorithms when I get a screwy answer. This power and simplicity was developed under the proprietary model, and Mathematica is considered by many to be the standard advanced math software.
:)
2 3223&cid=23
2 38&mode=thread
In an article on GameSpy, Tim Sweeney was saying that we need a new programing language which is more intuitive and has higher level commands. His example was adding the elements of arrays A and B to make array C. Intuitively, the algorithm is just C=A+B, but in C++ it isn't nearly that simple. When I read this, I was struck (for the umpteenth time) how simple/powerful Mathematica is. In Mathematica I can just add the arrays, C=A+B, and the program takes care of the details (add element A[i,j] to element B[i,j] and assign the sum to element C[i,j]; move to element i+1,j
Relevant now
The system of computation Mathematica uses could be a useful model to a programmer trying her hand at creating the afore mentioned 'next generation' programing language. And I had to buy it (well, I didn't _have_ to buy it, but pirating non-MicroSquish software seems unfair to the coder who wrote my new program; ethics, what a nuisance), I couldn't just download it and start solving sets of coupled partial differential equations. (How I love those PDE's.)
MicroSquish/AOL isn't the only proprietary software company out there (although it seems that way sometimes), and many of those companies are staffed by people of good moral character who make money doing what they love. And they're good at it, giving us good products. (Please don't misunderstand me, I am _NOT_ saying that MicroSquish='good product', just that many proprietary software companies do a good job. Qualcomm's Eudora, for instance.)
OSS isn't the sole repository of talented programmers, there are many who work at traditional companies. Ignoring, dismissing or insulting these programmers will not produce better programs or more OSS, it will just divide the two groups even more. As the non-traditional "fringe" group, it is our responsibility to try to build a community where both sides can come to talk, and not feel discriminated against.
end rant
Louis Wu
Signal 11's comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/01/28/07
Mathematica:
http://www.mathematica.com/
The GameSpy article:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.shtm
The Slashdot discussionof the GameSpy article:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/25/150
anyone else think this gartner group report was a bit light? ie, it seemed more like a summary than a report.
probably took a whole hour to put that web page together...
otoh, there's a lot of respect for the name 'gartner', so maybe just the fact that these folks have spoken up about opensource will get noticed by some fence-sitting managers.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
How to use TLAs to legitimize something.
Isn't OSS about less obscurity? Does this kind of article mean that I'm wrong and SOL?
TLA - Three Letter Acronym
OSS - Open Source Software
SOL - Shit Out of Luck
Maybe they reference the source codes in an rpm (yes, RedHat) package
Bizar technology?
My understanding has always been that the actual OS fit on a floppy...
:-)
Well, if you can fit the kernel source on a floppy, I want your floppydrive!
From the looks of it, Gartner Group is trying to save their sorry asses. When they released the report on Linux vs NT, many sites came up with contra-reports showing everyone how much clueless FUD Gartner Group were really spawning. Now they try to save their credibility by stating some facts the OSS people has been saying all along. Gee, that's really clever.
I don't buy it. If there's supposed to be any use for Gartner Group they better tell me things I don't already know. And their opinion is just that. What happened to researching for answers yourself instead of handing the power of your own decisions over to some over-paid consultant? It's not like you can sue Gartner Group if things are wrong. Just look at the nice disclaimer at bottom of their reports.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Open Source is not necessarily the same as Free Software, though the two overlap much of the time. Gartner is speaking in favor of Open Source and, frankly, I see absolutely no reason to keep source code closed off from people. Free Software, though, is not necessarily the same.
Only the GPL and its descendants guarantee Free Software, while there are many Open Source licenses (the Sun license, the BSD licenses, and the MPL, for instance) that are similar but don't necessarily accomplish quite the same thing. Rather than getting into a detailed discussion of licenses per se, I'd just remind everyone that Open Source comes in many flavors, and hopefully the market will reward the freer varieties over the less and non free ones. Gartner is on the right track, though.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I agree with your points about OS superiority being a myth, and overall I agree with the spirit of your post. However:
In reference to your points about proprietary software having some incredible success stories, your examples are all right on the money, and I guess that's my point. Until OSS developed momentum as a business model, there wasn't much percevied value (i.e. profit, i.e. money) in either releasing your code or open sourcing it. It took OSS success stories to convince companies that had long histories in the closed source model (the only model they knew that worked) to open up.
A parallel example is open-source news. A lot of newspapers were slow to get online because they were closed-source (pay-for-core-content) and that was the business model they knew. Now look at them clamber to get online and give their information away free, and develop other revenue sources. The example is not an exact parallel, but I hope my points come through anyway:
But i think that's your point anyhow; that CS can produce good stuff too, right? But maybe now we'll see more of these CS companies open up their source as well? Or maybe not. That's a different question, and I won't extend this post with it right now.
It looks like someone at Gartner is finally starting to get it. This peice, while seeming to be basically a summary piece (undoubtedly to sell other documents) actually gets just about everything right and unlike most of their stuff which does an awful lot of waffling and guessing is written in a straightforward style. It neither oversells nor dismisses OSS, and that sets it way above most of the stuff I've seen from similar organizations.
OK,
I don't mean to burst this bubble, but this does not seem to be any better research then any of their other stuff.
We are all going to have a lot of fun with this report, but seeming as Gartner Group usally try to debunk OSS, has anybody seriously consided what might have caused this change in tack??
Like perhaps it isn't just that they suddenly relised (16 years late apparently) what a good idea it is, and that perhaps this hints at slightly more cunning manoeuvring??
Jimadilo
'... I was here, you just didn't see me.'
With OSS, even if the developers blow you off, you can pay someone with a clue to fix it, even if you can't fix it yourself.
If you're not willing to pay someone to fix it, you didn't really want it anyway. If you disagree with that statement, might I kindly suggest that you've missed the point of free(libre) software.
Sheesh cut it out with the FUD already.
-t.
This report should be printed out and distributed to every boss in the world with that section highlighted for their convenience. Once the PHBs see an independant group telling them to consider open source they'll be more likely to not just shoot it down the next time some one brings it up, but actually consider what the open source products would do for their company.
Your are correct that at least one OS tops Windows in every single category.
What you leave out is that Microsoft comes in second or third in most of those categories. It's not best at anything, but it's pretty good at most. The only major failings of Windows are stability and reputation. The GUI for Windows is good, the software for it is good, NT's suitability for a server is good (though it is better as a LAN server than an Inet server). It's not BEST at any of these, but it's GOOD at most of them.
If you must standardize on a single OS for everything in your company, there is NO better choice then Windows. If you have the freedom (and IT staff to deal with) to install multiple OS, then you can get a good solution by using BSD for your servers and Macs, some *nix, or WindowsNT Workstation for your user boxes (95/98 isn't stable enough).
Of course, so many geeks blindly hate Microsoft that they never even look at what the MS OSs do well.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I agree strongly. While it is obvious to me that software needs to be open source to reach anywhere near its potential and to avoid a slew of evils, there must still be a way to pay the folks who make the software possible. The software itself is infinitely copyable and divisible. True enough. But the pool of talented designers, developers, qa, documentation folk and so on is not in the least infinitely divisible. It is in fact a scarce commodity. Which means that some means of allocating these scarce resources effectively is necessary. One means used in market economies is money. This works on the theory that the most efficient use of resources will generate the most profit and thus keep and attract more resources. OSS also needs some solution to the problemn of allocation. And it majorly needs a solution to paying those who lay the golden eggs well for their trouble.
Doing it for the love of it is wonderful but I would like to support myself and my dependents off of what I love rather than having some day joy I don't love (at least in the form of the products) in order to afford to still a few hours from friends and family to create software that I do love.
Ahem. Why do you guys always snivel about the games you can't get for Linux? What is THAT supposed to mean? I could care less if Linux ever gets turned into a gaming platform, a waste of cpu IMHO...buy a fucking gameboy or stay with windoze. Same thing for all the nifty plugins for your browser- Buy a webTV and get back on the couch, ya poser. "yeah, but it doesn't do....{split hair here}" bah, humbug. By the way, I use Linux and OPenBSD professionally- but no window$.....And I didn't take a vow of poverty and don't subscribe to the open source/hippie bullshit....we are simply taking over the OS world and YOU might want to get out of the way.....crybaby.
yawn. you bore me with your repetition.
This will take you to additional OSS viewpoints from other industry trend watchers.
NYC story
I will argue that Open Source is a better development method. But methods alone do not make a good product. Only good software programmers do. If you follow strict methods of implementation, and have good programmers, you will have a good product. Some people think that Open Source is the end all. But it is just a better way of doing things. The products you mentioned are good, but I believe would become better if they were opened.
You can't take a badly written product and just dump it out as Open Source and expect it to magically become better. Netscape, is a perfect example of this. Instead of making Netscape better, it had to start almost from scratch to create todays Mozilla. A lot of code had to be rewritten.
So I agree that a development plan is needed, but Open Source with the propper support will do this. When we have vendors releasing specs or drivers up front for Open Source programs, we have better quality. You're right that people don't want to wait for this, and just start writing code. But if the support from vendors was there in the beginning, you won't have this. I think that XFree86 is a good example of this. They have a lot of vendors that do support them, and those drivers are up to par.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
CNN article here
Depends. If I measure success in terms of installed user base, feature-set, and profitability (secondary, but it's there), then proprietary software is still handily beating open source in a variety of areas.
However, this is not broadly true for all markets - in the webserver market Apache is beating the _______ out of proprietary software - infact all of the leading proprietary software manufacturers /combined/ *still* can't touch Apache. But, if we switch over to the SOHO environment you'll be hard pressed to find any linux boxen. Ironically, this is the "market" linux ought to do best in - cheap, commodity, x86 hardware doing routine server work.
Dors AI site
No debate there. But I expect/hope this changes as OSS projects and businesses grow, thus expanding the installed base and increasing the "network effect" to promote even more OSS development.
Additionally, "Mom's GUI" is still a key issue here. I think we will see rapid expansion of OSS installed user base in the thin client space overtake proprietary systems before we see the same in the PC space, largely because thin clients running OSS will be developed by companies who have a vested interest in getting the UI right, and in the thin client space (I'm including net access devices in this) that problem has a much narrower scope than the GUI issues in a general application OS.
Until UI experts start collaborating on OSS, or until OSS coders with killer UI sense (and experience/training-- good UI design needs experience and education as much as good coding does) get on board, this may not happen. And I'm not knocking the work being done now. It is great, and entirely impressive, but it's not yet good enough to steal MS marketshare in the market Sig11 was mentioning: SOHO.
Note the date, the documents are a few weeks old, I didn't notice any change...
Bizar technology?
I mean the American Association Against Acronym And Alliteration Abuse, of course. ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's what I say to your mom, in my BOUDOIR!!
Cold, highs in the low 20s. Expect lows in the single digits tonight, and up to 40 below with the wind chill factor. Snow tomorrow, four to eight inches.
Good words for OSS from Gartner? I don't believe it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You are fairly right that different OSes are good at different things. But then you turn the world upside down and concludes Linux is not nessesarily better than Windows. Here is my personal conclusion of some OSes of today: Linux (and other UNIXes or clones): Stability, networking, programming, multitasking. OS/2: Flexible GUI, multitasking, (programming?). MacOS: easy to use GUI, _easy_. BeOS: video, multitasking, programming. Windows: widely used, many applications. From this list we learns that in fact anything is better than windows for any particular application, as long as the specific user application does exist on the said platform.
And last, but not least, Open Source is better because an OSS program can not by any means trade code beauty (maintainability, functionality, robustness, generality) for UI beauty. Of course, the OSS movement still have to learn to code good UIs, too.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Get your facts straight, guys.
Linux is just the kernel. How big is the kernel (include source if you like)?
Everything else is other OSS software
Now, this may fly in what you believe, but Linus only maintains the Linux Kernel, and if you look at all the supporting programs, you will find they are from someone else.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
Open Source is better because an OSS program can not by any means trade code beauty (maintainability, functionality, robustness, generality) for UI beauty.
You're not permitted to put UI beauty and Open Source in the same sentence.
Say what you want about trade-offs. Until the human factors people arrive, 'open source' projects, and the GUIs that they miscarry will remain the hideous mess they are at present.
10,000 brick layers don't make an architect.
10,000 coders don't make a designer.
I can write a 512 byte menu for an MS-DOS system that makes it easy for a totally clueless user to do a few basic tasks.
Add to that the fact that with the Linux equivalent it can all be locked down so damn tight that they can't even damage the Linux equivalent of the 512 byte menu.
It doesn't prove a damn thing, except that you can trap clueless users into relying on a self-proclaimed "guru" with a wide variety of computer operating environments.
Windows NT can be locked down damn tight too. I remember the fun one could have sitting down an experienced Windows 3.1 user at a secured NT 3.51 desktop, where they couldn't even move a program icon around in the folder. It was fun, but I wouldn't say that it pleased the user.
So, Sysadmins of the world unite! Fight back against the mere users and protect your precious expertise. Install Linux everywhere!
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
If all I knew about the Gartner Group was what I read on Slashdot, I'd probably think that they were just shills for Microsoft.
Hmmm, you don't start out so hot. Have you even read the different things that ESR and RMS have to say? ESR says the Open Source helps a lot of software get better, but all he wants is software that doesn't suck, so he'll take closed source for some stuff. RMS says he'll take free (not Open Source, and there's a perceptual and actual difference) software, even if it's worse, because of the freedoms granted. Maybe you need to go back and read some more.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I direct you to several stunning *proprietary* software achievements which the OSS community has yet to duplicate.
The desktop, we're working on. CAD, no, we're not on that level yet, but there are several projects working on it. Plugins? We don't have Flash because not many people cared. Games? Have you played Red Alert? The programming's not even vaguely interesting to a real coder. Recreating that game is an art project, plain and simple.
Just to name a few. On the hardware side - have you been watching the source checkins/checkouts for hardware drivers? Then you'll notice they follow a peculiar pattern - Initial Release (aka, it works, but it's slow). Revision 2 (it's buggy, but faster), and finally Revision 3 (finally get it right). The reason is that most people in the OSS community a) don't have access to debuggers to catch this stuff earlier and b) Often don't wait and properly engineer their drivers prior to implimentation. That is to say they're impatient. The result is hundreds of releases of software each day. Some people think this is because we "release early, release often" - I think it's because the programmers didn't know or didn't care enough to make it work correctly the first time and then need to go back and rewrite the code again. Now, if you listen quietly for a moment you can hear people already hammering at their keyboards crying foul. But I'm not done yet.
Huh? I don't even know how to begin responding to this. Of course it's the release early, release often attitude. Do you not bother to notice the version numbers somewhere below 0.01? This is how the development process works. I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience somewhere, or a driver didn't work right, but that's not because the programmers were idiots. You're just not getting the privilege of seeing the early revisions of closed source stuff.
Signal 11, I can't help but think you're displaying a real ignorance with this post. No real member of the community considers themself better than others just because of who they are. I'm not sure where you're getting some of these assumptions, but you're dead wrong.
(PS: unchecked fact, but how many Linux kernel + GNU util developers are there, vs. core BSD'ers? I'd not be surprised to find they're roughly on par...)
--
Ian Peters
I'm waiting for the remake of "Leave it to Beaver", with, of course, Jerry Mathers as "the Kevin."
Or would a closer parallel to Kevin be "Dennis the Menace" (with Scott McNealy as Mr. Wilson.) I'm not sure.....
I think the solution lies in the consumer. People should start using Open Source, and support companies that contribute to it with MONEY. Not because proprietary technologies are "evil", but because Open Source is superior and more beneficial in the end. Money is in the bloodstream of our society. People should learn that while corporations talk, money walks the walk.
That's a good idea, but here's a question for you: will the developers ever see that money? As it is, most of the "successful open source companies" don't pass the profits along to the developers, execpt for the few (if any) that they have working in-house. For example, 99% of the development effort that goes into a Red Hat CD goes unpaid for by Red Hat.
It's because of this that most open source developers need to have a "day job". Think of how much better open source software would be if those developers could actually afford to work on it full time. That will only happen when those developers are actually paid (in money) for the work they do. None of the "successful open source companies" actually do this, and I have yet to see a business model where this could be done. We can't all live off grants and charity like RMS.
If you are planing to show this to your PHB some time in the future you might want to make a private mirror on your intranet now. In the past Gartner has taken links down. I'm not sure what thier window is before EOLing a document is, but I used to link to some of their stuff on Java and then it went away.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
As we all know, the freedom in free software is the *user's* freedom: to use, to combine, to know, to debug, to extend. As such, it should be no surprise that the development progress to date meets up with the crucial needs of the system's user/developers, thus the focus on serving and networking: OS developers may prefer to play and write games, but they're getting paid to make sure the bosses' networks and apps run correctly.
As the user base extends to those with other needs: non-software industries' apps, games, personal software, PC drivers, ease-of-use, ease-of-development, etc, the quality and availability of those applications will improve.
Although this doesn't refute your point that free software is not always better right now, it does imply that someday it will at least catch up.
And, if you believe in the power of empowered users, it's easy to see that it will likely surpass proprietary software, as it has already done in the areas of greatest need. I suggest that it also will or already does serve needs that proprietary software would have taken forever to get to: child-simple programming languages (what's the prorietary advantage in that?); truly portable applications; unobtrusive, ubiquitous, standard networking; small, reusable, interactive tools.
In general, free software will be much better at creating a marketplace of commodity software: no lock-ins, no single-source, no platform-specificity, no buying the unnecessary to get the needed, no forced upgrade paths, better future-proofing, better accountability, better responsiveness, real choice.
The day when "open source is always better" is not here, but it's coming.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I haven't much experience/knowledge in the thin client arena, so the following comments may be inaccurate. I think we can agree on everything else though. =)
It's obvious that Transmeta atleast hopes to leverage it's Crusoe chip into the "net appliance" / mobile computing space, and it's also apparent they intend to use OSS methodology to build many of the applications for the Crusoe processor. As a curiosity, Crusoe is an anagram for "Source". I would think that if Transmeta's business partners are successful, linux and it's derivatives would dominate the embedded/mobile market. If this is what you meant by the "thin client" market, then I'll agree with you that linux will take off in that market.
I do have to wonder how long until somebody forks the linux tree - there are many specialized kernel tasks going on here and the existing kernel is almost 20 megs now to download. I wonder how long it will remain practical to keep everything bundled together.... although this has no bearing on any of the discussion so far...
OK, I really have to put a few slugs into this one right now. I've successfully set up Linux boxes for people who were clueless about computers, and they're _easier_ to use. Take a WM like XFCE, which I recently set up on a 486 laptop. You have a nice button bar at the bottom, which can launch Netscape, Abiword, etc...far easier than some lame "Start Menu". Really. It's even easier when people have never used computers before, because then they don't have to unlearn the "One Microsoft Way".
I have not set up Linux specifically for my mom yet, because she uses tax software, which is one of the few useful things not available under Linux (CAD is another, true). As for video games, I much prefer my Playstation--and, if you want lots of games on your PC, you can buy a $10 gamepad and download an emulator! I did.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
There's one other reason: the developer(s) might not want to put in the effort to sell software. Selling software can be quite a pain: you have to deal with bounced checks, credit card transactions, reporting estimated taxes every quarter, requests for fixes and enhancements (since they don't have the source code), hiring people to port the app to other platforms, and so on.
I think non-programmers sometimes don't understand what goes on in a programmer's mind. They see us labor for years to learn this stuff, so they can't comprehend someone spending months on a project, posting it on an ftp site, and then saying, "Here, have fun, I don't care if you use it or not." They look at software development as some kind of laborious black art. Sure, you need to be super-smart to be a programmer, but once you get to that level, whipping up a 1000-line Perl script (or in my case, Rexx) is something you do when you're bored.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Good points. Both sides need to chill down. No matter what model you follow, it's the driving force behind you that will ultimately leverage the result. No model is going to do this for you.
Now, there's little doubt in my mind that in the end, free mindshare and collaboration, even on forked projects, are superior to proprietary (forked) projects. But if the driving force is missing, you won't accomplish anything. Any company wishing to go Open Source, must do some real thinking before they go on with it. This is the real world, newcomers are eaten for breakfast every day.
I think the solution lies in the consumer. People should start using Open Source, and support companies that contribute to it with MONEY. Not because proprietary technologies are "evil", but because Open Source is superior and more beneficial in the end. Money is in the bloodstream of our society. People should learn that while corporations talk, money walks the walk.
Power to the people! Yeah!! Flower power!!! Etc...
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You're not making much sense at all.
You're going to take over the whole OS world?
With a server-only OS?
Oh, oops, I forgot about emacs, which is a robust user-friendly operating environment.
Well.. That's no problem LS-120 floppy drives take both normal floppys and 120MB ones...
Yep, init is just a user application.
Actually, the TCO of ownership is a point *for* free software, in this context. If only 20% of the TCO is buying the software, it means that there still is the remaining 80% to extract from the customer, so giving away the software as a "loss leader" may make perfectly good sense.
But then, she did used to bootstrap digico's by entering the boot code in octal on the front panel.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Pythagorous ran a Mystery school, i.e. a quasi-religion where you had to be initiated to learn
most of the teachings. Not all that different from a proprietary corporation. He believed numbers
could explain and control Nature and the supernatural.
Greek philosophers freely "borrowed" each others
ideas and salvaged some of Pythagorus's ideas, e.g. Euclid.
Wow. Amazing coming from the IT Fluff Factory. I rarely, if ever, listen to what these guys have to say. It's rarely worth a look. They're the big guys, so they can publish/say what they want and people will listen.
You are probably right, although that is obviously not what I meant. The PHB who is the main anti-OSS/Linux/Commie-pinko-liberal agent is the one who I figured would try to stretch even farther than before to maintain the Microsoft/Sun status quo and end up looking more stupid than usual (if that is even possible).
Yeah, I can see how it could backfire if not handled correctly. Hmm... any suggestions from someone who has been down this road?
Gartner failed to debunk the quality and support myth. In my opinion, they are the two biggest stumbling blocks in adopting OSS in the corporate world.
My manager still thinks that OSS software are of poor quality. For some antiquated reasons I don't understand (and don't want to), management still prefers the so-called brand name of a company behind any product they purchase. Often it has nothing to do with technical merit, but a psychological comfort and security.
As great as my manager thinks I am as a programmer/analyst/sysadmin (*ahem*), he would feel much more comfortable if there is an 'official' support of a company, usually the same company that we buy the product from. I would like to see Gartner or any other so-called credible media (that management reads) debunks the myth of OSS quality and support.
While we're discussing myths.. how about we debunk another one: Open Source is superior to everything by virtue alone. Listening to RMS, slashdotters, and ESR's writings would have you believe OSS will revolutionize the world and proprietary software is /all/ bad.
Not really. It's better because it's free. That's all I really care about. Non-free is evil. If a bunch of people want to come champion Linux on technical grounds, go ahead and shoot them down (not that i'm particularly convinced web plugins or the windows/mac desktop is any kind of elegant technological acheivment, but that's beside the point). I just don't care if Linux is "better" in that sense or not.
I suggest reading what RMS has to say again. It's not "GNU is technologically better." it's "GNU is free." That's it. and that's also what matters to me.
Let's take another myth: that we're somehow superior to windows or macheads. Comeon people, this is dogmatic and fanatical in the extreme. We have an OS that does *some* things better than the others. But NO OS is superior on the basis of it's name alone.
No, that's not it. If you run free software, you're not "better", you're simply on the moral high ground. I'm all for being dogmatic about that.
...since I imagine PHBs tend to believe things they read from "official" sources. Which brings up the question -- could somebody out there make an "official" page that demonstrates the benefits of playing Quake on the Office LAN?
"...our statistics show that regular frag-fests increase worker contentment and productivity by relieving stress..."
I'm shocked. This is a good and informative (to others. Nothing new to the
This is the first article I read from the Gartner Group that didn't bash OSS. Their other articles that I have read seemed to not be researched very well. I think this article actually debunks a lot of other articles that they have written.
Did they finally get a clue, or did they hire an OSS advocate?
Send this article to your managers!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
...and it only took them, what? A year more than the rest of the industry?
--Troy
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
It is actually encouraging that it isn't really hype. Just the facts. It doesn't tell you to or not to use OSS models, just why some people do.
Or maybe we saw different sections of their reviews... The last time I had access (about a year ago) there was a whopping lot of material on things like "Parallel Sysplex" and cost structures for CMOS mainframes and the likes.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Somebody is going to look even stupider than usual.
Point of view, my son, point of view.
Yes, I'm sure they'll look at you and think you look even stupider than usual. Make sure you wear one of those toked-out-penguin tee-shirts to the meeting.
All those months of branding Gartner as fools and Microsoft shills.... Hmmm.
This is a very perceptive, succinct write up by Gartner, and Rob got it right when he said this one would make a good executive summary.
But this misses what I think is the primary reason people work on open source: they want to use the program they're working on. Making it open source means they can get help from others with the same interest.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
On the hardware side - have you been watching the source checkins/checkouts for hardware drivers? Then you'll notice they follow a peculiar pattern - Initial Release (aka, it works, but it's slow). Revision 2 (it's buggy, but faster), and finally Revision 3 (finally get it right). The reason is that most people in the OSS community a) don't have access to debuggers to catch this stuff earlier and b) Often don't wait and properly engineer their drivers prior to implimentation. That is to say they're impatient. The result is hundreds of releases of software each day. Some people think this is because we "release early, release often" - I think it's because the programmers didn't know or didn't care enough to make it work correctly the first time and then need to go back and rewrite the code again. Now, if you listen quietly for a moment you can hear people already hammering at their keyboards crying foul.
That's kind of missing the point entirely. What you describe isn't even a side effect, it's the whole point. What makes open source "open"? You release the code, and you conduct development out in the open where everybody has the opportunity to participate. You release sub-1.0 versions and later unstable versions in the hope that others will try it out, make useful suggestions about adding features, and help you to fix the bugs.
In the majority of cases the developers will clearly mark which versions are stable and which versions have more features but are still buggy. Obtaining free software is a case of caveat emptor just as it is with any other kind of software.
But the *difference* with open source (as opposed to closed source) is that (i) the developers won't try to pretend that bugs don't exist; (ii) being subject to greater scrutiny, they'll put more effort into fixing them; and (iii) if you can't wait, you have the option of trying to fix it yourself, or paying someone else to do it.
I know that access to the source won't be much use to those without the resources to make use of it. But, if stability is your sine qua non, then obviously, get the stable version and leave development versions alone. And with closed source you don't even have the option.
May I further point out that my experience is that closed source companies often opt not to fix some bugs at all. In those cases it'll *never* get fixed. Which kind of leaves you in the lurch, doesn't it?
I'm surprise that you of all people would say something like this. I think you must have left your brain on your pillow this morning! Do I hear the sound of Signal 11 smacking his forehead in chagrin?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Wasn't autocad's scripting based on the open source code xlisp parser?
So while it has not been duplicated (and honestly does not need to be duplicated), it was based on at least one part on an open source code project.
Then there is the reverse engineering required to get autocad plug in's to work. Even costly packages don't do it.
There was some open source cad engine code released a while back.
Many programs can read DXF, some even right it.
(Based on the Dilbert Principle that the incompetent rise to the place where they can do the least damage, i.e., management.)
I wonder if this isn't just an attempt to get 'back in our favor' after the whole thing where they basicaly posted microsoft written material...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
..is to solve someone's vexing problem. The majority of software is NOT written to allow it's creator to drive around in a Ferrari but to get some work done. If my motivation for writing some code is to solve a personal problem or more likely a problem I'm having at work, then open sourcing the best thing I could possibly do. Others who can use a similar solution can make suggestions or even give me patches to make it even better. There is a tangible reward for open sourcing a project. The developer gets patches back! Come to think of the submitters of patches know that others are contributing so they too enjoy what the primary developer/maintainer enjoys....better software. If you look at it as working for patches rather than money then a lot of the mystery of just what motivates people to write open software goes away. The fact that non-coders can enjoy the fruits of this labor is secondary. Even non-coders can note bugs so they can get better software too. Remember: most software will not earn scads of money even if it were closed up and sold for profit. I would rather be an open sourcer getting patches and bug reports than a shareware coder getting two or three registrations a month. It's obvious which tends to produce better software.
by Lyle Lovett, from the album "I Love Everybody"
I don't go for fancy cars
For diamond rings
Or movie stars
I go for penguins
Oh Lord I go for penguins
Throw your money out the door
We'll just sit around
And watch it snow
I go for penguins
Oh Lord I go for penguins
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
To my needs
Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing - Pythagoras
Finally a topic that matches my login. :)
:)
Open source software treats the user like a developer. If you have the inclination to improve the software then you can. You know, "maybe you will find this useful."
Secondly, I would not say that commercial drivers are any better. Every drivers and supporting software that I have gotten with a piece of hardware did not work, and I had to get updates off the web. This includes my video card (Creative Riva TNT2 Ultra), CD ROM burning software (the Adaptec software that came with it had a major bug), motherboard (had to flash the BIOS to make the "do not wake on keyboard" setting take effect), external modem (Windows drivers AND flash the bios on the hardware), DVD decoder required several software updates before they finally got it right (crashes and bad playback. Creative again), and so on.
Now don't get me started on actual software. Every software package I have bought (dozens) has come out with bugfixes that you have to download. I wonder why they bother distributing programs on CD anymore. If you have to hit the web to finish installing your program they might as well let you download it and pay for it online.
So, to what standard do YOU hold open source software?
Granted, their words still carry weight with clueless business types, but I'm past the point of caring if they accept Linux or not. The more mainstream Linux becomes, the more we risk catering to imbeciles and watering down everything to a level acceptable to yer average AOL luser. We are to the point where we no longer have to go hat-in-hand to various hardware vendors begging for meagre driver support. That's all I ever wanted.
The biggest PH33R I've seen from companies is that they dread to touch anything GPL because they think GPL will "infect" their code and that they'll have to release it.
This paper may reflect a lot of the values of the open and free software communities, and it may eventually have an impact and sink in at the top... but it is the way it is because the junior analyst who wrote it is a script kiddy of the analyst world and he was sitting in the back orifice, he downloaded the docs from the various sites, reformatted, hit "print" and carried it out to the front office : )
Right now, he's slaving on the next project.
DOW 10K PROBLEM LOOMS LARGE
While companies are spending millions to solve their Y2K problems, another potential computer glitch is creeping ever closer -- the Dow 10,000 problem. As the Dow Jones industrial average nears 10,000 (it closed Wednesday at 9366.81), some analysts are predicting waves of computer-directed "stop-loss" selling as some older financial software is tricked into thinking the Dow has crashed to 1000. Most of the larger financial firms have fixed their software, but some smaller firms and brokerages probably haven't made all the necessary adjustments, says a Gartner Group analyst, who says the worst-case scenario would be a mistake in the index cascading through an Internet-based or automatic trading system, thus interfering with things like stock index futures.
(Investor's Business Daily 4 February 1999)
RFC1925
demonstrates the benefits of playing Quake on the Office LAN?
You forgot the all important ones, such as:
"Stress tests workstation hardware"
"Verification of LAN's ability to deal with high network loading"
and the best one:
"Quickly locate workers with outdated equipment."
:)
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I direct you to several stunning *proprietary* software achievements which the OSS community has yet to duplicate.
- Autocad. For that matter, any serious CAD program.
- A desktop my mom can use.
- web plugins (until recently, we had no flash!)
- Games. Quake and Loki's offerings may be cool, but they're a small subset of what the Windows world has. I'm still waiting for a Red Alert clone.
Just to name a few. On the hardware side - have you been watching the source checkins/checkouts for hardware drivers? Then you'll notice they follow a peculiar pattern - Initial Release (aka, it works, but it's slow). Revision 2 (it's buggy, but faster), and finally Revision 3 (finally get it right). The reason is that most people in the OSS community a) don't have access to debuggers to catch this stuff earlier and b) Often don't wait and properly engineer their drivers prior to implimentation. That is to say they're impatient. The result is hundreds of releases of software each day. Some people think this is because we "release early, release often" - I think it's because the programmers didn't know or didn't care enough to make it work correctly the first time and then need to go back and rewrite the code again. Now, if you listen quietly for a moment you can hear people already hammering at their keyboards crying foul. But I'm not done yet.Let's take another myth: that we're somehow superior to windows or macheads. Comeon people, this is dogmatic and fanatical in the extreme. We have an OS that does * some * things better than the others. But NO OS is superior on the basis of it's name alone.
I'd also like to point out that there are other "source" movements out there that make progress approximately on par with linux and it's related software despite the fact that it has a much, MUCH smaller developer pool to draw from: the BSDs. I'll now turn matters over to my fellow slashdotters for an explanation...
I like the line where they say free as in "freedom", not as in free of charge". That's a more direct formulation than the free speech/beer analogy.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
i love it!
Bill and Ted would be insulted by this, when they went in their time machine they visited Pythagorus who taught them how to do cool things with triangles. His research in progress was open to all and could be expanded upon by any who wished to take his work on. I am offended by the idea that Open Source is an invention out of 1984. I wish I hadn't stopped using my Tae Bo tapes otherwise I would be kicking some ass (only if you provoked me).
I disagree with your view that success is measured in these corporate-type bench-marking terms with closed-source software. That may be useful when comparing two companies, say microsoft vs. corel, to determine who's more successful. But the case is entirely different with OSS, IMHO.
Many OSS packages exist because someone wanted to provide themselves with either some tool/program not available as closed-source, or to provide an open-source option for themselves and/or others. I don't believe many people are trying to actively compete with closed-source to be the better software package, as you seem to imply in your quote. Thus, the definition of success between open-source programmers, who are doing it for either themselves, the community, or the sheer joy of doing it, and closed-source programmers, mostly doing it for a job and to become the number-one software producer in their field, are entirely different.
Thus said, I would NOT judge the success of open source software in terms of user-base, and profitability, as you mention above. In other words, if a commercial company only has 100 customers, they're not making much money, and hence cannot stay in business. Thus, they aren't successful. OSS, however, is not competing like this, and if ONLY 100 people are HAPPILY using some OSS software, it's a success. The key word is HAPPILY. IMHO, of course.
make world, not war
Perhaps the MOST compelling reasons for corporations to participate in OSS projects is the fact that many necessary pieces of software are not commercially viable. In the closed-source world, if something is not believed to be commercially viable, it is not made.
Now, say BigCo needs software that will load balance their IDKFA servers. There's no way anyone could market software to load balance IDKFA servers, for various market reasons. BigCo can either a) foot the bill to write their own software from scratch or b) share the responsibility of producing the software by making it open source.
In A, the cost will be huge and if the programmer that wrote it leaves the company, the bugs will be difficult and costly to work out.
In situation B, even if they end up footing most of the bill for the software, they will get lots of help removing the bugs from evreryone else who load balances their IDKFA servers. If the programmer who designed it leaves the company, there are still many other programmers familiar with the code they can hire to update it.
The value of software is purely the value of what it does. Sometimes, you can sell it based on that value. Sometimes, you can't sell it, despite it's value. If it's valuable and you can't sell it, Open Source it! (duh)
And, there's that other little side benefit to participating in an OSS project. You'll have a lot of information gathered on who out there is a talented programmer you might want to recruit. No job interview is going to match how much you learn about a candidate from actually watching their work.
Final Gartner summary:
"Bottom Line: Contrary to common perceptions,
open-source development is neither a recent
phenomenon nor a transient one, and more
significantly, it is one that will increasingly
be associated with commercial vendors and
end-user organizations. We recommend that IT
organizations which currently exclude all OSS
from their acquisition plans should re-examine this policy."
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The Gartner Group are great fools (as you put it.. my own description would be a little harsher, and probably include some real cursing :o)
... Tier 1 means companies that actually draft standards, and do hardware R&D.. names like IBM and Compaq.)
This is one time they got it right (there have been others as well).. but it doesn't undo the other harm they've done the computer industry... ("Gateway and Dell are Tier 1 companies" - BULLSHIT.. Gateway and Dell are clone makers (Tier 3)
The gartner group are consultants, they'll say good things about whoever pays them the most that day.
I believe (with the benefit of some hindsight) that OSS domination was inevitable. Why? Very simply, because source code can be copied and distributed at virtually zero cost. And what is the incentive to give away source code? Many valid reasons have been given, but I think the most important one has been overlooked. Giving away the code makes it more likely to become popular, and when that happens the authors of the code gain some control over standards, protocols, and interfaces (APIs). This gives them the opportunity to stop Microsoft or any other commercial entity from taking control of standards.
Incidentally, all the speculation about OSS being "anti-capitalist" is a bunch of bunk. OSS is the ultimate in competitive capitalism. Losers think that capitalism means exploitation of the masses by the elite, but when competition works properly, capitalism means that the masses will demand and get the lowest possible prices. How could prices get any lower than free? Capitalism worked perfectly! If you don't believe it, go try to buy a computer and run OSS in Cuba.
I told the Boss Man, but then he said he'd use that big old nightstick on me. He also fed me the remains of my own dog.
Where did they get this stat from? According to this, the linux os is about 10 mb. My understanding has always been that the actual OS fit on a floppy, and *everything* else was add-on software.
By another defintion, I think the minimum space to get the whole thing up and running is about 40 mb. But 10mb? I don't see any possible source for that number.
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
The reason that BSD development appears to be on a par with Linux is simply that there are a limited number of people capable of coding at the level required. Whilst Linux (probably) has more hard-core kernel coders overall, as a percentage figure above the number of people doing similiar things to BSD, it might not be such a great increase.
And then you come to some point in a system which is horrifically complicated (such as the VM system) where you probably have under 10 people on each side that understand it thoroughly.
On the other hand, practically anybody with a little bit of C knowledge and patience can whip up a nice looking GTK+ application without too many problems, so here, the larger user base of Linux shows up as more user applications are written.
Note that all this is just theorizing; I have no figures to back me up.
OSS developers do not work for nothing; an OSS project is a training and proving ground exposing young developers to large-scale collaborative development. Another reward is the accumulation of kudos -- this may be sought for its own sake or leveraged commercially, especially within organizations that follow an open-source business model (see Note 3).
This is a very perceptive, succinct write up by Gartner, and Rob got it right when he said this one would make a good executive summary.
My question is how sustainable this is. I worry just a little that OSS business model/business culture is a bubble that could burst (especially after enough IPOs and mergers etc etc). Look at Mozilla... what if Netscape programmers were suddenly reassigned to work on AOL 7 (seeing as AOL 6 is already out ;)? ATW doesn't strike me as anything less than a cold-hearted capitalist corporation bent on world domination. RH is a more encouraging example of an OSS business culture that I would expect to survive.
We can't deny that Linux has fueled a lot of the interest in OSS as a business model. If Linux ever stagnates or reaches a development plateau (gasp-shudder-perish-the-thought), and there isn't another project with it's momentum to "lead the charge", could OSS businesses fade? Or is it here to stay? (I personally feel that OSS business is more long-term profitable than closed-source, but IANAE).
If anyone has any links to research or projected growth models, I would appreciate it, particular ones with positive expectations for OSS business ;) Ethan
Now I have something to put us closer to equal footing.
I especially love this part:
I just can't wait for the next meeting to bring this up again and show these fat, balding, middle-aged, clueless management drones that they have been laughing off OSS at their own expense all this time. Maybe it'll do some good, maybe not. Just the recommendation alone that we "re-examine" the no-OSS policy will set off a flurry of activity as someone will get this action-item to report on this and most of the points that were cited in our poicy are directly debunked in the Gartner article.
Somebody is going to look even stupider than usual.