Eric Raymond vs. Larry Lessig On Open Source

Lindsay Sobel writes: "Eric Raymond and former Microsoft case advisor Larry Lessig have been cutting each other down in The American Prospect Online's roundtable on open-source software. Lessig calls Raymond's philosophy nothing more than Ayn Rand warmed-over, while Raymond calls the regulation Lessig endorses 'one-size-fits-all pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns.' " The discussion is pretty interesting with great points on both sides.

Comments

Spooky.

[Shoeboy]

Ok, I work for Microsoft. It's a good gig and I don't generally feel that I'm a servant of evil. After clicking the link and loading the ESR paper, my win2k box promptly rebooted. It took a few minutes of deep breathing before I was able to convince myself that this was a coincidence. Or was it?
--Shoeboy

Geek neolibertarianism

[toh]

I've always been amused and slightly baffled by the tendency of some geek types to endorse wacky libertarian viewpoints (a la ESR). Living as I do the ridiculously overprivileged lifestyle of a mostly-white North American middle-class male, it's long been pretty damn clear to me that the only reason I can play with all this high-tech stuff and these high-falutin' ideas is that someone else laid down the groundwork of the society to support me. I do Unix and network consulting; I don't grow food, provide childcare, clean up the environment (well, not directly), or do much else besides shuffle bits, and yet I have one of the most highly-valued skillsets around. There's no way I could exist at all without that enforced social structure, let alone with such highly specialised (and frankly useless in the real physical world) knowledge and skills.

In psychology there's a concept called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; basically you have to have the basics in life accounted for before you can get into the more refined and esoteric stuff. We're able to do open-source software not just because of government-mandated intellectual-property regulation (though that's a very real effect that Lessig argues for well), but also because someone else made physical life easy for us, and in a lot of cases (not all, but a lot) that someone was everyone, in the form of government trying to establish an equal basis. Technocorporate America isn't going to create the kind of society where you can work on cool code for free and still have food, clothing and shelter; they don't have the agenda, and they frankly don't have the social clue it would take.
It may seem non-germane to the IP-law argument to talk about broader social structures, but they're all part of the same viewpoint (basically, that far libertarianism is for blind kooks).

As someone else pointed out on /. a while back, you can be governed by elected officials, by corporations, or by roving street gangs (Chaos Overlords anyone?), but you're still gonna be governed.

Oh well, that's my rant. I'm sure most of the /. crowd is aching to moderate me down now. ;)

(note that I'm not slagging ESR personally, just his viewpoint - Even though I don't think as much of his OSS papers as some people, I've actually long had respect for him, pretty much ever since he took over editing the Jargon file / NHD)

Re:Geek neolibertarianism

[Sloppy]

the only reason I can play with all this high-tech stuff and these high-falutin' ideas is that someone else laid down the groundwork of the society to support me. I do Unix and network consulting; I don't grow food,

I don't think the existence of specialized people is an argument against libertarianism.

Yes, someone else does the hard work of growing the food, but they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, or because the state mandates that they feed you. They do it because you pay them money. And you have money to pay them because, as useless and unimportant as Unix consulting seems to you, someone else needs it, and decided that it was in their interest to pay you for it. They don't see it as useless at all.

There's an exchange rate between wheat farming and Unix consulting, where that rate is a function of the difficulty of the work, the supply of workers, the demand of work, the prerequisite education expense, and a bunch of other factors that I can't begin to imagine. We convert those two types of work into a "standard" value: money. Money is what lets you specialize, not any "enforced social system".

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The lot of em can hang

[B-B]

This is childish at best. Especially ESR. He really is as embarassing to OSS/Linux as RMS.

Just to respond to some posts:

ESR is NOT a definitive part of what we do. WE ARE.

ESR is not a great thinker. He is a clever manipulator. Lessig is not any better.

We are better than this. RMS's viral license, ESR's mouth and BP's ego do a dis-service to the work WE put in. You do not really see LT shooting his mouth off, do ya.

These three (and Lessig) are a joke. There may have been a time when RMS/ESR/BP made some contributions. Their time is past. The revolution is over. Linux won. Linux has legitimacy. It has coders. It has capital. It has standing. It has market share.

We need to retire the revolutionaries. In the US, we transitioned from a revolutionary tribunal to a Federal Republic. In France, they did not make the transition, and the revolutionaries committed atrocities and sold it out to Bonaparte.

Where do we want to be 5 years from now?

Retire them. They did their bit. But they are mucking up the jobs we need to do now. We need leaders, not ESR's bad logic and big mouth and warmed over Rand. We need people who can build something of this momentum.

If Linux loses momentum, you can place the blame not with the coders or the code, but the fanatics who represent us poorly.

Tom Dutton

Motivations behind open source development

[jms]

Eric Raymond has some interesting theories about the motivation behind open source, but his emphasis is misplaced. I believe that the best arguments for open source projects have nothing to do with establishing communities, or earning prestige among peers. Instead, it comes from a basic understanding of the value of software, and the desire to maximize the value of one's own work.

What's the value of a piece of software, as a physical commodity, in the sense that a piece of software is something that sits on your hard drive, takes up space, and hopefully does something that you find useful.

Here's one possible heirarchy for software value, in order from most worthless to most valuable:

1) A binary that no longer works is worthless. It has negative value in that it is a waste of disk space. Maybe the operating system API changed, or the hardware vendor changed the architecture slightly and broke the binary, or perhaps an intractable bug has come to light. Doesn't matter. The value of this software is zero. You can't use it, or you wouldn't want to. This is the fate of most commercial software in the long run, especially commercial software that runs on propriatary operating systems.

2) An unsupported binary is slightly more valuable, but not in the long run. Someday it will most likely enter category one, especially if it runs on a proprietary operating system. There's a lot of software, especially freeware, created and released with the best intentions, that exists in a publically available form only as MSDOS or obsolete Windows binaries. Relying on this sort of software is like being a passenger on an airplane with a dead pilot soaring through the sky on autopilot. So far, so good, you're getting from point A to point B, but you'd better have a parachute.

3) Supported binaries are more valuable. Commercial, shrink-wrapped software makes up most of this category. Of course, when you depend on binary level support, you know that any time you may be forced to upgrade, or your software supplier may discontinue the product, and your existing binary will enter category two, which you don't want.

Hardware with closed source drivers is also in category three.

One danger of category three software is that sometimes it slips into category two without notice. When we upgraded one of our Sun workstations to Solaris 7, for Y2K purposes, for instance, we had to eliminate a $1500.00 third-party ATM interface, not because of any problem with the interface, but because the vendor had, without our knowledge, discontinued driver support. The interface makes a nice, if expensive, paperweight.

The conventional wisdom in the software publishing world is that commercial software belongs in category three. Category three provides the most leverage by the software provider over the users of the software, and hence, the most opportunity for revenue. As part of one operating system upgrade, we had to re-purchase thousands of dollars worth of binary application software, because of changes to the operating system that broke the applications. This vendor made a lot of money off of us, and the new versions of the software had no new features -- they had just been recompiled to work with the new kernel.

4) Software with restrictive source code availability is more valuable. In this case, you have the source code, but few, if any other people have the source code, and in any event, you are unable to effectively collaborate with them, This includes both source code obtained under an NDA, and, more importantly, software you've written yourself but never published.

You have, at least in theory, the ability to keep this type of software working yourself, but you run the risk of having to actually put the theory into practice, and in a worst case scenario, you may find yourself having to dedicate tremendous resources to keeping the software working, and who wants that?