Slashdot Mirror
Commercialization of Linux
m3.142 writes "Author J.S. Kelly in his LinuxWorld article says [summarized]
'In 1999, Linux became the Next Big Thing. Linux grew in market share and mindshare, in users and in servers, in support from hardware companies, software companies, and software vendors, in media coverage and in stock valuation. J.S. Kelly isn't convinced that the people who so badly wanted Linux to become the Next Big Thing knew precisely what they were wishing for, and thinks they may be in for an unwelcome lesson ...'"
I didn't realise that the goal of Linux was to "beat" anybody. I thought the goal of Linux, in its role as part of the Free Software Foundation's vision, was to provide a free (libre) UNIX-like operating environment that people who valued their freedom had an alternative to closed-sourced environments.
Or am I missing something?
Cheers,
Alastair
PS - and what's up with /.'s Extrans post mode? It's outputting HTML tags as plain text instead of interpreting them (at least in my browser)... I had to post this as "HTML Formatted".
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
Yes, theoretically dishonest businessmen will move in with their pirate ships. We all heard on Slashdot about the company going for an IPO with some weird plan to sell Linux at a swap meet.
But really, how many of the scam IPO's have been successful? How much harm has been done to the Linux marketplace by new distributions or software?
If someone writes a new distribution with the intent of using it as a basis for a business instead of out of the love of it, where is the harm?
The article also assumes that if one works on some technology other than Linux then one stops using and developing for Linux. A lot of developers fool around with Linux at home and will use it regardless.
Red Hat employees who quit to go work elsewhere will take their Linux-using habits with them and possibly entrench Linux use in their new organizations. That is not a bad thing at all.
The rising tide which the article speaks of has lifted boats. Has it really sunk any yet?
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
Let me put it this way - I was using Linux before it was ever the Next Big Thing, I'm using Linux now that it is the Next Big Thing, and if it's ever the Previous Big Thing, I'll still be using Linux.
In other words, I couldn't care less whether it makes it big or not.
One of the things I keep saying with the commercialisation of Linux is that it will lose it's appeal to a lot of up and coming non-commercial coders who will look to other products as the coporations take on linux. There will be a hard core of people who stick with it for love, those who milk the cash cow and others who see the romance dying looking to new and exciting underground projects where they can develope and hack code for fun rather than for others gain.
Working for the (other) man
It's all about freedom. The night I found gnu.org, I changed forever. I sat for hours, reading the philosophy section. And the next day, I started installing Debian. It's not about a bandwagon. It's about choice, and freedom. That's why I use Linux, and that's why I think many others do.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Somehow I think he's missing the point of open source. /at/all/ becuase the people who made it wanted it. The corporate raiders can come in, strip the land scape bare, and when they leave open source will still be here just like it was before. :P
We're not here to get big, make money and go home with the girl. No the folk who are acutally making a difference.
This guy is talking as if open source was a scarse resource.
Its only exists
I guess sucks if you were looking to get rich out of linux. But if you just wanted an OS that got the job done - no ones taking that away.
Moneys nice - but it's not really the goal is it? If it's your goal you deserve what you get.
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
One of the things that has held Linux back has been the fact that it wasn't a buzzword or considered acceptable for commercial applications by a large number of companies and IT departments around the world. Two years ago, suggesting using Linux for something considered mission critical wouldn't even be tolerated. Now marketing wants to issue a press release when it happens.
To me, this has been the greatest benefit for all the hype. We don't have to do things in closets in so much anymore! And once end users of these types of systems see the extra performance and stability they start asking about Linux on their workstation...Eventually they'll take it home as well if we don't drop the ball! Watching it trickle down is a great thing.
Case
I want software that doesn't suck. It's as simple as that.
Open source, while it has philsopical points that I think are important, main attraction is that it is the best long term means of accomplising that - for me at least.
Who cares is Linux is just the current "big thing", and in a years time all these companies that have jumped on the bandwagon have gone?
Provided they have open-sourced their stuff, the source will still be around to integrate (licence allowing) into things that we/I will find useful.
Not only that, but no longer do we need to put up with crappy software and feel powerless to do anything about it. Hate Windows? Contribute to Gnome/KDE. Think ASP sux? There's PHP for you.
Remember back in say '93 or '94 how bad Windows 3.11 was? Remember the first time you tried Linux and - after installing everything you could find, then deinstalling half of it - that it still didn't crash!
That's what it is about for me. I don't care if all these companies abandon Linux - provided the source is still around, no company can afford to put out crappy software anymore.
The business community works by making it interesting to make money. Regardless of how it is spun, in the end everyone needs money.
The reason why many open source projects work and continue to survive is because they offer
1) better quality
2) respect the business community
3) listen to their clients
Here are examples of this in action, Linux, Apache and Perl. Each of these three projects do not attempt to force the world to open source. They do their thing and let the business community be as it is.
To be quite honest I would think a VAT or Open Source society tax should be started. Companies that profit from Open Source should be required to donate some money to the Open Source community. The Open Source community would then spread that money to developers working on Open Source projects.
I know this sounds socialist, but I think the Open Source community as a whole would benefit. I would even ammend the GPL as follows.
"If you intend to not distribute the sources to this project, then you are required to donate a reasonable amount of the profts back into the Open Source community."
As much as the Open Source community hates this, but it makes a business of Open Source. Instead this will make interesting for the business community to use the vast number of sources available. And if the business community does use the sources then the Open Source community will benefit. The Open Source community can then continue and do their favourite thing, hack at code...
I think it is a very attractive business model. A small business could compete against the big players. To be quite frank this is a great way of breaking the hold of the big software companies on the software community.
If you think that this will only attract leeches and pirates, think again. Developing a product is one thing. Making it stable, creating effective documentation, creating a marketing campaign, providing extensive support is quite a bit of work and should not be underestimated. And as we all know, this part of the work sucks!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
A couple of things strike me as funny with these statements. For starters, I don't see very many more "successful" linux IPO's coming down the pike. Redhat and VA have solid reputations and put out respected products, and they were "first movers" as far as most of the people on the stock market are concerned. Anyone that would decide not to work for RHAT because they've missed the IPO better find a start up that has more to it's buisness plan than the word linux scatterred around, because this whole blind bidding up of anything linux isn't going to last. The current tech IPO fever probably won't last either. You're better off working for a company that has a solid future and that you enjoy working for. And I don't think that the current open source companies are too woried about losing the types of employees that would try to cash in on this market hype.
I'm sure the director of HR at RedHat doesn't lose sleep worying about how he'll be able to compete with LinuxOne for new talent.
I agree with some of the OSS points in the replies here so will not embelish on them. But I do want to make another point.
I'm walking the floor of LinuxWorld and seeing all of the excitement, etc....It's fun, lots of cool stuff, etc... Reminds me of the old USENET and Uniforum conferences in the mid to late 1980s when UNIX was the next big thing.
Yes, some of those companies died or if luckier were bought at a nice price (Apollo comes to mind). Some though went on to become very successful (e.g. Sun, Oracle) *despite* the IBMs and the DECs of the world getting into the UNIX world.
I'm not sure what the lesson OSS leaders are going to learn as implied by this article is, but it certainly appears that they are in a much more upbeat mood and excited and having more fun with cooler SW than say the Windows 2000 development team?!? Even if Win2000 is not a "train wreck" as ESR says, many in the development team must be so burnt out by now and depressed from all the negative press that *they* will feel like they were *in* a train wreck.
The OSS leaders do not have to fear this fate for reasons stated in other replies.
Army of Northern Virginia
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
The GPL deters standardization by creating an unnecessary and harmful split between open and closed source. It is already hurting the trend toward standardization brought about by the BSD-licensed, freely reusable TCP/IP stack that brought us the Internet. We may soon live in a fissured world: the GPL on one side, commercial programmers on the other.
It didn't have to happen this way. But because Linux was unfortunately licensed under the GPL, the battle lines are already being drawn. And, as usual, it's the little guy -- the small programmer trying to make a decent living -- who will be caught in the crossfire. The GPL will prevent him from leveraging and improving upon publicly available code to make money, while large software houses such as Microsoft will shut him out of commercial markets.
And, as usual, innovation will lose.
Those who favor open source need to wake up and realize that the GPL hurts their cause. In fact, it does not even meet the requirements laid out in the Open Source Definition, because it discriminates against a field of endeavor: the creation of commercial software. The OSD explicitly states that this sort of discrimination disqualifies a license from being a legitimate license for open source.
--Brett Glass
- all the nice linux companies go completely bust.
- huge nasty companies attempt to take over and their marketing machine convinces the public that linux == some uglycorp software.
- the public interest falters and dies.
It would be nice for the interest to maintain and the existing "nice" companies to retain their ethos and go from strength to strength, that way we get ports of commercial software easier, some games say, and a much easier ride in convincing bosses to allow us to use linux at workBut even take the worst case scenarios and examine them for a while, its still a win win situation. You still have your free linux, that source is stil free to use, you loose nothing. Whatever you had before the "commercialization" doesn't get erased when the "gold rush" ends. Sure a period of die back while the companies run away as fast as they can, but those of us who only wanted an os that they could afford that didn't suck and allowed them to plink around with some code don't loose anything.
Just rein back that panic and general frothing at the mouth and get on with it. Write some code it's very soothing and actually achieves something constructive. I'd recommend it to anyone.
C.
I sometimes write stuff
The main thing about the Linux movement is that no matter how rich companies like Red Hat and VA Linux systems get, as long as they support the open source movement people will support it.
How many times have you found a bug in a closed source piece of software, and were told to upgrade to the next release at "minimal" cost?
Open source gives us the options of fixing the bugs ourselves or talking directly to the developers that wrote it.
As long as the IPO companies remember this, things will be good, but they have to remember this. If they don't remember that the community is first, then the community would walk away from them.
Imagine for a second that a linux vendor called Purple Cap decides that its shares are falling because someone has a better product. Purple Cap decides to try the corporation approach: It tries to buy out the product, and fails. Next it hacks together a lamer copy of the product (even forking the source) and uses its IPO revenue to advertise it as the greatest thing since Babbage. Their lamer product ends up on the cover of magazines and is given away at Starbucks with each coffee sold.
How would the Open Source community react to this? I think that people would lose faith in that company. There would be a ground swell of opinion against them, people would stop using thier products, sending them code patches, downloading thier version of packages.
As long as there is Open Source there is another alternative. As long as there is another alternative, no company can control everything.
There will always be rogue comanies, such as Linux One. There will always be people that try to fairly or unfairly dominate a market.
As long as there is an alternative the Open Source community will follow what it feels is right.
The internet population has surprised analysts by its resilience to "commercialisation" - i.e. paying for information. I think the reason is that the Internet is more of a "perfect market" than the high street - everyone has complete, instant access to the same information as everyone else. This allows competition to work more fluidly than in the high street: the hassle factor for distributing information has dropped to almost zero. If you know the right forum, you can say something to all the people on the internet who it would interest the most.
[GNU/]Linux distritributions are such a forum for free software. Historically, if you wrote some good code, you could post it on web sites, or newsgroups, but only people who were proactively interested would find out. You'd have to wait for the program to emerge in people's consciousness. Now if you can write something which gets included in a distribution, millions of people who would never have looked for source code on a newsgroup can instantly install the binary from CD or ftp. This improves people's information levels about the free software marketplace, and makes it very hard for a propriatory program to survive if there's a better free program.
Let me contrast the situation with Windows, which doesn't have this distribution thing. Suppose you wanted to get Windows software together with equivalent functionality as, say, Debian's "main" CD. How would you do it? Trawl through thousands of pages of shit on www.shareware.com? Search using altavista 1000 times? Look in a catalogue (this wouldn't work cos some of the stuff in Debian would never achieve wide distribution if sold alone)?
With linux, you can think one day, "hmmm I need a music typesetting program" and instantly find the best free offering, available on your CD / the ftp site. "I want a Pascal beautifier." "I want the cursor on X to disappear after a few seconds inactivity." Because any linux user can do this so easily, it adds an order of magnitude to the weight that will get behind any free software offering. Linux distributions have undoubtably helped free software.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Are you so sure that the GPL will protect us like a shiny gold shield? Suppose some giant evil corporation (sorry I can't think of an example right now) decides to take Linux, slightly mutate it, and use every mass distribution channel it controls to force it down the throats of consumers without opening the source. And when someone cries "hey you're violating the GPL!" the company says "go screw yourself."
Then it ends up in court, where the open source community's 10-million-dollar hired-gun lawyer has to go up against EvilCorp's team of a dozen 100-million-dollar lawyers. Do you think just saying "GPL" is going to mean anything? Much smaller companies have managed to lobby the U.S. Congress into turning Article 1 Sec. 8 of the Constitution on its head. A license dispute would be peanuts in comparison.
Not that any of that would kill Linux, because the freedom-loving user base is still there. But it might take the wind out of all the big-corporate hardware and software support we've recently begun enjoying. They can't bomb us back to the stone age, but they might put us back where we were four years ago.
Here's what the "commercialisation of Linux" means to me: I can offer a solution based on Linux and not have to fight *political* and *non-technical* battles tooth and nail. Three months ago an AIX consulting crowd claimed we were "brave" to use Linux. Our management told them it fit our needs technically and to shove off.
*That's* what commercialisation means.
As for loyal employees, ethical companies, etc., well I doubt you'd see those whether or not Linux even existed. I hate to rain on anyone's parade but employees and companies are out to make cash. The rest is just frosting tomake everyone involved feel all warm and cuddly - and quite a few people don't care for warmth or cuddles.
The current state of Linux and free software is that it has a wider range of acceptance, it has a license that keeps it free (speech not beer), and beyond that I don't much care. If you *really* are concerned about free software do the world a favor and send your two cents to somewhere useful: http://www.fsf.org/
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
This is really unlikely, but let's consider it.
Well, this could have happened before the big linux hype and is more unlikely today because there are many resources nowadays to fork linux.
This is analogous to the famous "what if gets hit by a bus." and therefore doesn't pose a huge threat.
This is perhaps the biggest threat, now that there's a lot of money in the business there's the danger of individuals/corporations trying to get a piece of the cake and of rivals in the os-market trying to stop linux' growth into their territory.
The big players in the market which depend more or less solely on linux should see their role here.
Redhat, SuSE, Caldera, Turbo Linux should look at such events like DeCSS and try to find ways to position themselves as defenders of open source/linux. The same goes for a possible future court case in conjunction with the gpl. I think they should fund a institution whose purpose is to give legal advice and pays lawyers for an open source programmer in legal trouble.
But once again it shows that the success of linux gives a real chance to fight against these threats.
I don't think someone should force all kernel programmers (and opens source advocates) to see a hair stylist and get a comb
And many journalist give a fsck whether their writings make sense or not, as shown above.
Another example is "Linux update is behind schedule", huh?
Ask yourself, what's better, proprietary applications on a proprietary os or proprietary applications on an open source os where everyone has (theoratically) the same chance of competing because the API's are open for all?
After linux has gone it's way in a commercial os world, there's the a bigger chance then ever for open source applications to do the same, because they have more chances to evolve on an open os.
If there are types of applications where open source doesn't find it's way in, then open source is not the better alternative there, let the market decide.
The important point is, now that linux "is there", there are less artificial hurdles for non-proprietary applications left, for the remaining ones, which are non-technical, see point 2.
So what? There are many suspicious companies in any emerging business, hell there are many pirates in any business. This has happend in software industry (remember this "memory doubler" thingy for win95?), bio-technology, financial businesses and so on.
Did the markets suffer? No.
This thing is dangerous when there's only one company riding on the hype (amiga anyone?), but doesn't matter w.r.t linux. Or does anyone think that ibm, sgi, redhat, suse will drop linux when linux one might bomb?
I personally expect the whole IT-industry stocks to implode, but that is no specific linux problem.
How's this for commercialization: Hot off the business wire: VA/Linux is buying Andover.net for 0.425 shares of VA per share of Andover. This is good news for me, being that I like VA enough to own them and already bought into Andover at 37....
One error must be corrected:the tern "open source" was *not* invented for differentiation from the free software movement. The term "open source" has always been meant to have exactly the same meaning as "free software"; it's just a rebadging for marketing reasons, because when suits hear "free software", they think "free beer" rather than "free speech".
And for my part I think it's a laudable goal. I think we should continue to emphasise the importance of software freedom - and I'd recommend French speakers to stick to the term "software libre" - but in English, the term "free software" creates a misunderstanding in the mind of the listener that the term "open source" avoids.
--
Xenu loves you!
Why?
Because freedom is model-neutral. As such, you can bung freedom into any model and it will still work in exactly the same way as if you'd bunged it into any other model.
All this talk about commercialisation of Linux being bad for it implies that the model is greater than the substance. Whilst this may be true for individuals ("power corrupts"), it can't be true of concepts. Concepts can't be corrupted, because concepts have no physical existance -to- corrupt. You might as well corrupt "pink".
You can throw orange paint at pink wallpaper, and "damage" the wallpaper. Sure. I could equally go in and delete the Makefiles from the Linux source on my hard-drive. What does that corrupt? Nothing! All it does is make a mess. In the paint example, "Pink" remains exactly the same, no matter WHAT you do to that poor, wretched wallpaper. Likewise, the GPL and Linux aren't affected by what I do to the contents of my hard-drive.
You CAN corrupt people, because people exist in the real world, with minds of their own. You cannot corrupt a concept or a vision, because these have no physical components to attack, or minds to destroy.
Any journalist who argues otherwise is having troube seperating physical reality from their imagination, and should take up a career as a senior Government official.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
There is nothing inherently wrong with linux for game support. It is more driver issues. Even if you get the only hardware acceleration for 3D for Riva TNT, it is new and a development version with no optimization because they are waiting on XFree4.0 and the DRI to achieve better performance and not waste effort on a product that will relatively soon be obsolete. Voodoo graphics do well under linux now, and TNT2 will reach that point too. The infrastructure is great, it is just the drivers are either not there yet/not fully matured. Hopefully XFree4.0 will make companies less reluctant to develop for linux, *BSD, etc..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Linux is a scalable OS that runs on 20 different processors, you can install it on a floppy or a 100gb harddisk. You can have it 10 times as bloated as windows and you can have it as slim as dos. Linux is much more than windows. Personally I think embedded devices is the future of Linux.
I think that one of the biggest drawbacks to the commercialization of Linux and other Open Source projects is that commercialization tends to promote mediocrity. Men in suits and women in scarves who know how to poke around in a spreadsheet are not entirely interested in putting out the best product... they are only interested in putting out something that is "good enough". Take a look at the majority of commercial software- for ALL platforms. There are some good things, but there is an awful lot of junk. Take a look at what has happened to the internet and what is continuing to happen. Take a look at music- do you think that Britney Spears or the Spice Girls would have a music career if so many corporations did not push for mediocrity? ;-)
LinuxOne is a pretty good example of the dumbing-down of the Open Source world, they are leaching off the efforts of other companies and individuals without contriubting anything useful.
Things will level off eventually, and several main-stream "pundits" will pronounce Linux to be a failure because it did not manage to take over the computing world. Fortunately, there are enough true-believers around. The true-believers can sit back and laugh at the suits and scarves as they flock around The Next Big Thing.
Hey, totally off-topic, but did anybody notice VA Linux purchased Andover.net yesterday? Slashdot is now a subsidiary of VA Linux. Interesting.
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
The author clearly has some facts just plain wrong.
He claims Andreesen used the Mosaic code to "float netscape". Wrong. The Mosaic code was, in fact, the most valuable piece of code around at the time. It was licensed - to Microsoft. They then gave it away making it totally worthless to the people who invented the graphical browser.
Netscape rewrote the browser de novo.
Kelly makes other errors as well, but he misses the important commercialization point made at Linus' recent keynote. Big companies have done a LOT to make linux end user friendly in a short period of time, They've done a lot of menial bug chasing - the kind of code writing that is easiest done by paying someone. Redhat and VA linux especially do a lot. SGI is bringing some nfs work to linux, as well as the best file system in existence. IBM brought its (closed source) Java implementation. And on and on.
Yeah, big business is really affecting linux. Just not as JS Kelly thinks it is. Maybe he should actually try using it sometime.
And so, instead of teaching the corporations about the benefits of open development, I think that open source leaders are in for a lesson themselves. They won't have beaten the corporations by having joined them. Rather, it will be the other way around.
Yes, this is true as far as it goes. The change in the Linux marketplace does change who open source companies can find as employees and the terms on which they can hire them. It raises the stakes. It means that open source businesses will be competing on a business playing field.
But that is a separate issue from what is so dear to many of us. The code, the future of Linux, and GNU, and FreeBSD, does not live or die with a single open source company. The GPL isn't magic. Just because we have it won't make the future of free software be what we want it to be. The one thing that it does guarantee is the option to fork any GPL'd project. If it isn't going the way you want it to, you can take the source and go work on it yourself.
That means that mindshare can't be won by claims to owning the code. Some big company can certainly put out a Linux release of its own, with proprietary software running on it. They may grab a dominant position in the market that way. And it is still a smart move for them to play nice with the rest of the open source developers on the kernel and other free tools. Their other choice is to do all the work themselves, on software that anyone else can tweak and release a cheap copy of.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
An MBA student explained to me at length what Linux is. She had learned about it in marketing class. Yeeks.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
And I'm a 20 year old computer science student who wants to make a good living working on/with Free Software. Can you give me, and others like me, any advice?
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Yuppers. Suprised more people haven't noticed.
The VA Linux press release is over there. ANDN share prices have jumped through the roof on pre-trading, apparently.
...j
In the legal world, "I have X" means "Let's make a deal".
In the legal world, "Let's make a deal" means "I have information that you might need".
In the legal world, "I have information that you might need" means "I do believe I am in a position to screw you".
In the legal world, "I do believe I am in a position to screw you" means "Give me a lot of fucken money, now, you putz".
And that's why I'm in the Free Software world, not the legal world. I'd much rather live in a world of cooperation and mutual respect than in one where the fundamental driving force is hostility and greed. I like associating with people who don't let money rule their lives!
And, Mr. Montoya -- if you're looking for someone to offer you money to share that information, Slashdot is the wrong place to be posting about it. Try getting in touch with the FSF (http://www.fsf.org/); there you might be able to talk to people who could offer you a deal.
Of course, they're likely to turn you down, and I would do the same if I was in their shoes. See, this is our ballpark, and we play by our own rules. Those rules happen to include sharing and playing nice, not trying to hoard all the toys so the other children can't have them. If someone comes along who refuses to play nice, we just ignore them.
So good luck trying to make a deal, but I just don't think it's going to happen.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
I personally expect the whole IT-industry stocks to implode, but that is no specific linux problem.
thought this would be a good point to interject this, from US Early Radio History:
It took many years before radio's financial returns would match its great potential. In the United States, this resulted in a series of companies which sold stock at vastly inflated prices, backed mostly by vastly inflated visions of the companies' prospects. Frank Fayant was in the middle of a multi-part series about stock fraud -- Fools and Their Money -- when he stumbled across the shenanigans going on in radio stocks. The result was a two-part exposé, The Wireless Telegraph Bubble, which details the sorry state of much of the U.S. radio industry during its first decade--Fools and Their Money/The Wireless Telegraph Bubble, Success Magazine, January, 1907 through July, 1907. However, in spite of Fayant's articles, the fraudulent practices would actually accelerate.
And like I mentioned there's all these aging "baby boomers" socking away retirement money and it has to be invested somewhere. The emphasis should be on "it took many years" - look at how long it took msft to get where they are - those in for the long haul will make out, while the "get in/get out" superficial jump-on-the-latest fad & bandwagon crowd will, well, a few might make it and most won't.
Agent 32
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> Why should *all* software be open-source?
More to the point, why should I trust J random
Corperation enough to run proprietary binaries
on my machine. I have no idea what they do.
What have they done to get that level of trust
from me?
> People have to make a living, and that includes
> those who write commercial software.
There are lots of ways to "Make a living". I am
not aware of any universal right to have your
favored way of making money be viable.
> Would you expect Ford to give away their cars?
> Or Intel give away processors?
Well im not a proponent of capitalism and believe
production should be for use not profit. So in
essense, yes I would prefer that they did, it
would make money obselete. About time if you ask
me.
> This crusade by some folks to deprive me and
> tens of thousands of other software engineers of
> their livelihoods
It is not a crusade to deny you livelyhood. It
is a crusade to better the software "industry".
It is a crusade to further the rights of the
person using the system.
Again. It is espousing production for USE. When
I write free software, I am not writting it
because I want money, I write it because it fills
a need. I write it for use. If others use it then
thats great.
I LOVE to hear from users telling me that some bug
I fixed, or some software that I worked on is
making their life easier. That is all the profit I
need. Knowing that something I worked on is making
the world a better place. Thats more incentive
to write code then all the money in the federal
reserve banks.
And yes...I do write code for a living. I write
code to solve the problems our group has. I
expect to be asking for permission (and knowing
my boss and the people I work with, expect to get
it) to release some of the stuff I have written
under the GPL.
Also, RMS and the other Free Software advocates
tend to be anything but "14-year old" kids
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
People! You need to wake up and smell the coffee! This article was entirely wrong because in the not so distant future, everyone and their brother will realize that the *BSDs and NTs run their server software better.
In test after test, Linux has been shown to suck at networking after a certain threshold. This threshold is what seperates the men from boys, IMHO.
And IT professionals know about this.. They are very leary to use Linux for anything less than a print manager because of the headaches, hassles and slow downs it will cause due to scalability.
What Linux really needs, and I mean _REALLY_ needs, is dedicated developers to the kernel that will make it more suitable for larger purposes. Granted, it's already reliable as all get-out, but it needs to be fast.
Then, and only then, will the rest of the server market wake up and smell the coffee. (this is the portion of the market that actually have $$$ to spend) When this happens, there will be a great windfall for all.
Another key problem that could make or break our favorite kernel is the desktop usability factor. Even with Gnome/KDE/Your favorite WM it all still reeks of a bad hack. (no offense to the developers, but you need to consult UI experts)
Please note- I am not BASHING linux in anyway.. I am just restating what has been said numerous times-- the programmers need to take heed and make their software useful, the Kernel developers need to take heed and make it faster (this will probably involve changing the scheduling process around etc), and the Linux user group needs to stop making asses of themselves. (i.e., Slashdot posts)
So, in the words of the worst computer movie ever, "Hackers of the World Unite!" (or give up and switch to BSD)
Thanks
i was discussing this with a friend of mine the day. My other option is that open source software is fundamentally poor.
here are some facts:
linux is a great OS, true. but is a direct rip of the research efforts of AT&T. it is not a great open source design.
there are only a handful of quality software, namely: sendmail, apache, BIND, and a list of others that have been under development since the dark ages.
if you look at freshmeat, you will find that most of the projects are in beta, or alpha. they do not claim to be high quality.
my personal belief is that people are jumping to open source as a way to show there disgust for Microsoft. why do people hate Microsoft? because there rich. for instance, Americans do not hate Canadians. but a lot of Canadians hate Americans.. as a matter of fact most of the world has a poor view of the states. basally its human nature not to like your "rich neighbor".
another reason open source software is poor is the lack of incentive to do the "un sexy work" i remember just the other day Linus (yes Linus) saying "the problem is, we need people to do the unsexy work". that's what makes real "quality software". does anyone honestly belive something like Windows 2000 could have come out of an open source project? no way! there would be lots of loose ends where the work would not have been that much fun.
however, in the next ten years or so i think something will kill Microsoft, and there will be another OS that takes up 90% of the home market. it might be linux, i really don't know. but if you look at the history of consumer computer technology you will see that monopolies rule. for instance, look at the evolution of the floppy drive, first it's 8 (and something), then 5 1/2, then 3 1/4. and every time, one floppy was "it".
look at LP, to tapes, to CD's. or VHS, to DVD. or the 3dfx to TNT.. one tech must rule.
the way i see it the "Next Big Thing" will be "a server in every home". linux and it's flavors are a good choice. that could be a catalyst that takes it to the future.
i also see the open source failing miserably after it peaks. which is going back to my first point, that open source software is of poor quality. eventually another company will rise and dominate, much like Microsoft.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Do you think that most of the work done on Linux is done by people who earn their living doing it? Consider an oh-so-TINY example of Linus Torvalds. Does he make his living from coding Linux? NO. And really, that's the way most of it works. People come home from their sysadmin/commercial software programming/tech support jobs, and this is something they do in their spare time BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. This is Debian, and this is the #2 reason that it's my favorite distro. The #1 reason, of course, is that apt-get is the best thing in the universe :)
You have this silly vision that a small programmer could release a commercial app and become wildly successful? Don't bet on it. The world has now become "spoiled" by the GPL--others would quickly write an open-source alternative, which would most likely surpass the original in a short amount of time.
There is also plenty of software (MySQL being a very notable example) which is open-source, yet commercial (check out their licensing fees).
Sorry, but the only tragedy brought on by the spread of the GPL will be to closed-source commercial software, which is destined to eventually suck. Yes, it will--if someone were to attempt to take Perl and make a commercial, closed-source product of it, how long do you think they'd be able to maintain it, and keep it in sync (or even as good) as the real Perl? One of 2 things will happen to closed-source software:
1. The product isn't that complex, and so someone will easily code an open-source replacement.
2. The product is VERY complex, and so eventually a finite number of programmers will be unable to maintain it adequately. When it starts to suck and people get tired of it, someone will start an open-source project to replace it. This project won't be as good as the original at first, but in a short time will be perfectly useable to many, and given enough time may even surpass the orignal.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Folks,
Despite the increasing popularity of Linux, I think that if you want it to be popular, it needs two things:
1. A single, common graphical user interface with a common Application Programming Interface (API). This drastically reduces the cost of programming, because you only need to write to one API spec, especially when it comes to writing things like drivers.
2. Automatic system configuration, so when you change system hardware or add external peripherals, the system will automatically add the driver or prompt you to install the driver.
Yes, I know is sounds too much like Windows 95/98/2000, but let's face it: the current state of driver installation in Linux is too obtuse for most computer users. And we will need automatic system configuration sooner than you think, because Intel has already said they will kibosh serial ports, the parallel port and the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports in future motherboard designs in favor of USB and possibly IEEE-1394 I/O connectors. Right now, only Windows 98 and Windows 2000 can support such a motherboard design fully, despite what SuSE thinks.
It should be noted that common API design and the automatic configuration will have to be written under the GNU General Public License.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The hacker community who liked being outsiders will get fed up with the commercialized Linux and they will start their own distributions. Actually, they even go beyond having alternative distributions and start writing alternative Kernels that eventually become incompatible with Linux. Because it is all GNU, it is all good.
Another five years down the line, this alternative Linux now has all sorts of strange and possibly useful features that Linux doesn't have (the need to be stable will slow its evolution). All of these hackers are suddenly out there looking for jobs that will pay the bills and guess what, they are experts on this alternative Linux. So, some of them go to work for RedHat, others start their own distributions, Linux evolves, they evolve, and the cycle begins again.
Oh, and as for those AOL folks, they'll all be using Playstation 3's. If you can get web and e-mail with it, why on god's earth would you want to put up with the complexity of a PC? They'll watch their DVD's on their HDTV's (without regional encoding because that's going away). Of course they'll be running linux on their Playstation's but they'll never realize it nor care and that's exactly the way it should be.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
That's One Big If, and I'm one of those for whom "wants it to be popular" is not a particularly good description.
No, there should *not* be "one GUI". There has to be choice like there is today between QT & GTK+ and all that - your machine should run both happily at the same time, of course, like me currently running X, sawmill, kfm and gnome-panel all together even right now; however this is desirable flexibility, not a downer at all.
"Automatic system configuration"? That's for weenies, plain and simple. If you don't know what numbers to specify where for your new sound card, don't install it, as you certainly don't deserve to be using it. Whether you know *everything* about "what is an IRQ" is not quite the point, but some working knowlege or ability and willingness to experiment are essential.
It might be "too obtuse" but why is "for most computer users" something we should tailor it for?
Give me quality (cluefulness) instead of quantity (hordes of lusers) any day.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
VA Linux buys Andover, Andover makes close to a billion in stock and cash... 60 million in cash.
:]
So, the commercialization pays for some, eh?
A libertarian with heart would never do such a heartless thing as use the government threat of deadly force to extort taxes from the unwilling to give to their favorite charity.
In case you've forgotten, a libertarian does not believe in the initiation of force for political means. To put it in playground terms, you can't throw the first punch. If it's wrong for an individual to take my money without my consent, then it's still wrong for a group to do the same. Even though it's legal, taxation is still extortion.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"To be quite honest I would think a VAT or Open Source society tax should be started."
Aaaargh!! Stop that or I'm going to have to whap you upside the head! This is supposed to be FREE SOFTWARE. Don't you understand that?
Everywhere in the free software community, licensing fees are decried as "evil". Software that has available and modifiable source code, but still requires a licensing fee would never be considered Free or Open Source. Yet this is the exact thing you are advocating.
If you want to put such a clause in your own software, go ahead. At least it will still be voluntary. But don't expect anyone to use it. But should you ever get an actual tax levied on Open Source, you will have betrayed everything you say you are for in the foulest way.
Before you start calling for taxes to support Free Software, go pick up a dictionary and look up "free".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I wasn't speaking about his proposal, just the idea of socialism vs. libertarianism.
Taxation can be extorsion (and with our governement it often is) but we DO need it, otherwise we don't have schools, roads, libraries, etc. Turning these institutions over to corporate interests is far worse than having them run by the gov't. At least the gov't has a shred of interest in our rights, corporations have none. They just want money.
raping and pillaging. do shut up. I thought people finally came around on socialism, how they saw what kind of misery it created, but I guess there are a few people who still need lessons... Anyways, this article really strikes me as underlining the obvious. OF COURSE companies are out there to make money. OF COURSE they support Linux because it makes them money. Why else? Because of "the principle of the matter"? Ha. Linux is popular because linux is powerful. It is useful. And lots of people use it. And companies, by offering linux products, appeal to those people. simple market economics. it has nothing to do with raping, pillaging, or keepin it real to tha old-sk00l linux hackerz there at the beginning. Damnit. This is why I got out of punk rock; because too many people were more interested in out-classing each other by how long they've been there. Get a grip. Linux is an operating system, a tool for human productivity. Its a good tool. The fact that companies are buying it, supporting it and pushing it is a sign that they see it as valuable. Why is it okay for little guys to make it big, but its some grand injustice if the big guys make it big too? Oh, and to my marxist friend, your "community based social model" actually destroyed communities. A whole lot of them. In Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. In the Ukraine. The Caucasus. And myriad other places around the globe. Your "social model" also destroyed half my family because they were "counterrevolutionaries". So if I seem bitter, that's cause I am. 24 million dead, courtesy of Josef Stalin. 17 million dead courtesy of V.I. Lenin. And you say capitalism is bad.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
There are a great many people using Linux and chanting its mantras at a fast pace that are simply doing it because when they walk into a room, half the people haven't heard of it and the other half don't use it. They have no interest in Linux at all, they only have interest in whatever is the "outcast" OS at a given point in time. They see targetting Microsoft like targetting all of popular culture. They are the loser-lovers. The conformists of a different color. They base everything they think off of popular opinion - they simply turn it around first. They preach individualism and how diversity is the spice of life and crap when in all actuality, they don't have an individual bone in their entire body, they're just as much conformists as the people they lambast.
;)
Watch, the bigger Linux gets, the smaller its faction of die-hard anti-Microsoft fans will get. What will be left is the new businesses infusing Linux with actual innovation, and the Open Source teams around the net.... who will mostly be disgruntled because they remember the good ole days when you could write a utility, generate a readme, and you were good to go. Now the users demand a GUI, a graphical install, and hiding of the OS. Users always ruin everything
Esperandi
Why do people keep equating corporatons with the opposite of government? Corporations can only be created through an act of government!
But we do have schools without government and taxation. In fact, government schools only came into being this century in the US. And the US citizens of the 18th and 19th centuries were by no means illiterate. When the typical private school charges much less per year for tuition than the government spends for educating the very same child, I'm not thinking of the government as very enlightened.
Couldn't we turn these institutions over to private interests instead of governments or corporations?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Esperendi's point is good -- there seems to be a permanent class of "antis" -- whatever's Out is In, and whatever's In is necessarily bad. That's one reason that Microsoft-bashing is easily parodied, because its often a question not of the particular badness of a given company or idea, but the relish taken in being on the other, more righteous side.
;)
(And that's a very comforting feeling -- heck, being on the side of the penguins, intellectual freedom, etc is a big reason I like it!) But please consider whether the "commercial folks" are really ruining Linux, or just changing its nature in ways that are not necessarily bad. GPL is GPL, after all, and I'm confident that the GPL will hold its own when the inevitable test arises.
While it's neat to think about the PDP-10 with only Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie playing spacewar, the growth of UNIX and similar (not to mention *other*) OSes is what allows us here to play with them at all. I for one am glad that Messers Thompson and Ritchie didn't say "Ah geez - when we let other people play with this OS, they might change and RUIN it!"
And as one of my all-time-favorite angry childhood retorts has it, "Everybody wants to be a martyr."
Just a thought,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
While you wouldn't know it from the .com hype, most companies do not have IPOs that run up to hundreds of dollars per share. Picking winners ain't that easy.
(If I had that sort of crystal ball, I would have gone into debt to buy all the TIS options I was entitled to (this was years before they went public) then sold out when they got bought out by Network Associates and NETA peaked, and I would have netted about a quarter million dollars in profit. The fact that I am still hacking for food may inform you that this did not happen. (Though I did make a few dollars off the deal.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
When I say we need government, I say we need A government, not necessarily OUR government. I am aware of all the abuses our government commits (some of the worst in the world), don't misunderstand me. I'm against privitisation in the form of corporatization.
Your private school sounds good, because it wasn't run by a corporation. There are a number of companies out there now that are running schools as a for profit operation. I worry that they will cut corners in order to keep profits up. Most private schools are run by individuals or organizations like the catholic church which might make money but there isn't shareholder level pressure on them to do it.
Another fact is at this time there simply aren't enough private schools to go around, and if there was enough, will there guarantees that EVERY student will be able to go to one NO MATTER what?
Look, in my ideal world all schools would be run by the community, and it wouldn't be on a mind numbing schedle and the course work wouldn't be either, everyday citizens could come in and teach real life lessons, etc. Right now, this isn't possible. Therefore I take the best solution, public schools, which are bad, over corporate run school that have even less interest in students learning, your type of school not included in that category. In the long run I'd fight for my type of solution.
So say we take away the government. People always assert that corporations don't exist without government intervention. Whats to stop them from becoming totalitarian instituions when government controls stop? The government can give them enormous benefits (as they do) but they can stop them from commiting other acts as well like environmental damages, labor rights, etc.
It's not a bad way to earn my daily bread. So go ahead and be Mr. Windows...you just make less competition for me. B-)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Hmmmm....
I don't see how your comment has any real
relevance. Yes, the country which values
profit the most has the highest standard of
living. And?
As for France...
When some french citizens opposed the ways of
capitalism and tried to setup a community in
Paris based on production for Use and solid
socialist ideas, the french government put
a quick stop to it by slaughtering 20,000 people.
That was a long time ago, I am not sure to what
extent things have changed since, I supose maybe
they ar ebetter now?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Because I believe in Free Speech, not in Free Beer, smart ass.