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Are Bad Licenses Good For The Community?
mib writes: "ZDNet has an article about the history of OpenSSH that not only says that telnet sucks (duh!) but that that bad licenses are good for the the open source community because they cause some people to develop unrestricted versions of restricted software." This is a theme that develops more and more often when 'work-alike' apps are being created in order to migrate people from one OS to another.
Would people please stop comparing GIMP to Photoshop? Photoshop beats it in every aspect, hands down, with the exception of running through a web browser. But cooltext.com is far from a web based image editting application.
Photoshop is scriptable via applescript with the appropriate plug-ins. It has a thorough history tracking which you can save and saveable actions, so you can perform one task once and then apply that same task to 100 different files if you so desire. Saved actions will generate anything that the GIMP can, plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
I really think that GIMP enthusiasts should go to a design studio and watch a photoshop artist in action before trying to compare the two. The difference between the two is immense, and slashdot seems to remember photoshop 2.0 rather than 5.5
They say that bad licenses are good because they encourage people to write workalikes with good licenses.
Grade A prime bull.
If the license was free, then there would be no need to write a clone. Coders could instead work on othe, new projects instead of duplicating effort.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
In the same way that really repressive dictatorships are good for democracy.
While the SSH people are perfectly within their rights to release future versions under a more restrictive licence, one questions the business logic of pissing off your entire user base.
In part, the article seems to fall into the "OSS can only copy ClosedSS" trap, although he backs away from that in the end without providing an example of OpenSSH's innovation.
A standard would be good.
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E_NOSIG
Yes, but think about all the subtle improvements inspired by things like this.
GIMP. Photoshop. Which one has scriptable effects? Which one can run a script to *GENERATE* an image? Which one is expandable enough to run over a web browser?
Or the AOL IM clients. TiK, anyone? Aol *CHAT ROOMS* over the client? I think the biggest advantage is the fact that closed software inspires not only clones, but improved versions.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
My take on the article:
Bait and switch is dumb, and won't work...
Go over the story.
Someone wrote a useful program, made it Free, everyone liked it and used it. He tried to make a buck by making it not Free. Users got mad, took the version he provided for free (the bait) and redid his tweaks. Therefore, the switch failed.
Closed source programs aren't really covered in his article. Free software that pulls a bait and switch will result in the users getting mad and reimplementing the fixes.
In otherwords, you can sell propriatary software, maybe users will pay, maybe a bunch will reimplement for free. However, don't try to release it for free to get marketshare and then try to pull a fast one with the upgrades.
If you use Free Software to establish yourself, don't expect to be able to make it proprietary, because someone will keep it Free. Proprietary software can't leverage the community, that was my reading.
Alex
MIAMI, FLORIDA: Almost eight years after Hurricane Andrew swept through the city of Miami, causing billions of dollars of damage, most of those whose homes or businesses were destroyed have completed the rebuilding process. In the vast majority of cases, the rebuilt homes and offices are better-constructed and more modern than the buildings they replaced. "Hurricane Andrew is the best thing that ever happened to this town" said one city council member.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Closed software is good because it gives us an excuse to reinvent the wheel and make better open software?
No, we do that to ourselves... Closed software is still bad, and if the world was Open Source, we'd *still* have 18 zillion versions of everything. Consider:
How many open programs are named 'ya*' or '?in?', for "Yet Another ---", or "?-- Is Not ?--"?
In the meantime, how many closed-source programs dominate the field for their type of application? (MS-Office; Windows; Photoshop; Quicken) Even if there are closed *or* open alternatives, people generally don't use them because of the stifling effects of closed software.
Even if Outlook and Eudora didn't exist, I guarantee you we'd still have mail, elm, pine, mutt.... etc., etc., ad infinitum. One program *or* one license is never enough for everybody in the Open Source world, and most people are just coding for themselves.
However, a commercial program like Outlook that is designed for the masses *does* give us something to shoot for; it's an example of "programming for the masses", which is what a program needs for more people to use it. So the Open Source e-mail clients of the future should be better for it.
BUT--this does not mean that if Microsoft opened the source for Outlook, that this would be worse--it would be better. Then we could examine it, pick it apart, and hack up a new e-mail client faster, fix some bugs, and avoid some mistakes. So open source licenses are still better, and closed programs provide an example, but they certainly don't help us by being closed, AND they aren't the reason why there are so many Open Source app/clones out there--that's just because everyone has their own itch to scratch.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
And if the licenses had permitted it, we (using the broadest term of 'we' possible here) would have implemented those things in the original programs.
It was because he couldn't access the sources of a printer's driver.
In a way, you could say that it is because the driver was under a "bad" license (closed source) instead of open source.
So in a waym "bad" (restrictive) licenses started the whole free software movement!
The only way it could be argued that closed source software is good for open source software is when the open source software tries to emulate important aspects of the closed source software (e.g. AbiWord is intended to have a very similar look and feel to the market leader, Microsoft Word, so that AbiWord is intuitive to use for Word users). The larger financial resources of the software companies can be used to conduct research into what users require of the software and to design other aspects such as the user interface, and these fundamental features can be incorporated into the open source software. Therefore, the commercial software companies can lay the foundations for the open source programmers to build upon, therefore saving some development effort for the open source programmers.
So maybe closed source software can benefit open source software, but not in the way suggested by the article.
Bad Licenses are good for free software. This is the #1 reason why Linux and Apache are so relatively unpopular for Fortune 500 web sites compared to the sites of smaller enterprises.
You see a Huge company with 150,000 employees and a few Billion in annual profits doesn't buy software under the same restrictions as the rest of us. They don't suffer from bad licenses like we do.
Case in point. Nameless Big Company [NBC] buys a site license for NT. Latter it decides to create a web presence and simply grabs an NT CD and installs. As far as the internal developers are concerned NT Server is free because The site license essentially means paying for an estimated total number of servers with no penalty for adding more in the short term.
Even the CDs are different. I.e. No serial numbers to enter on the Corporate edition of MSOffice 97 when I had to install that.
Support is different too. They give the likes of NBC a different tech support number from the regular one. People answer that phone promptly and technicians come on site if needed ( for a pre established fee ).
Even Source code. yes. NBC can get the source code to windows if they ask for it. Sure it costs money but not nearly as much as that enterprise wide site license.
In short, bad licenses force ordinary users into open source and would have done the same to NBC. Except they get a not-so-bad license.
"Life Sucks. Then you die" -: Wolverine must have been talking to the small businesses who mistakenly believe that the fortune 500 became successful by choosing these tools ( which were only invented recently anyway ) and buy accordingly.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?