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Bob Metcalfe On NPR
linux slacker writes "Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of ethernet, writer of a
weekly columnn on Infoworld, was on Boston U's NPR show
The Connection this morning. Among other topics, he predicted the eventual downfall Open Source and Linux, citing as one reason the old argument that "Open Source leads to security breaches". Now, this guy did support the Microsoft anti-trust case and opposes monopolies, but he just doesn't like the Open Source idea. " To be fair, he did talk about a lot of other stuff - it was a pretty good show.
The beauty of open source software is that it cannot die. While the current momentum of the ideological craze and the love affair with popular computing may taper off, the software will never die. Grow old, atrophy, stagnate, whatever--it won't die. It'll be there for me to pick up in 10, 20, 30 years and start working again, if for nothing other than the joy of it.
Free Software and Open Source Software has been around since before I was born. In fact, the idea that you DON'T get the source code is newer than completely closed source projects. Sure there were some NDAs and whatnot before (which I agree hamper progress) but the source was still there.
This kind of prediction is frivolous and basically a higher form of trolling--and the poster and Slashdot bit. We've heard about the coming death of USENET, IRC, UNIX(tm) and even the Internet--none of which have died. In fact, most have seen a massive resurgence in recent years.
Open Source will die when all of the hardware that runs Open Source software is gone. I'm not forseeing that soon.
I think, Mr. Metcalfe, you'd find your time better spent solving technical problems. Leave the punditry to persons more deserving of the ridicule that goes with that job.
-fp
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Do you think [E]thernet would have evolved to 1Gbps if that had been the case?
Hmm. Hardware engineering. Tell you what, let's repackage this in terms of more conventional engineering--civil engineering, to be exact:
"Now imagine a world in which 3com published the schematics for their [bridges] with instructions on how to build your own [bridge]..."
Okay, we already have this world. Whenever an engineer drafts a bridge, that blueprint is put on file somewhere and any engineer who wants to look at how it's made is free to do so. This engineer can then use anything they've learned from studying the design, provided it hasn't been patented, in their own designs.
How many times do bridges collapse? With the occasional glaring exception (Tacoma Narrows), not often at all. This model works extremely well for civil engineers.
"Now imagine the 3Com Public License which states that not only are they giving away the schematic [to their bridges], but you don't owe them anything... Make as many of these [bridges] as you want, give them to your friends and neighbors. No licensing fees, no royalties, etc."
Well, here's the real question: why would I want to? If I can study their bridge as much as I want, both by studying schematics and walking across it a few times, then I'll probably find things I'd do differently. I might not like the curve of this arch, or I might want to use a higher grade of steel, or any of a thousand other small changes. I wouldn't make a slavish copy, but an incremental improvement.
Again, this world is not hard to imagine. It's the world we live in today.
"Do you think [bridges] would have evolved to [the Golden Gate Bridge or other masterpieces of engineering] if that had been the case?"
Well, judging from the fact that we have a Golden Gate Bridge exactly because of this being the case? Yes, I do think the state of the art would have evolved to that point!
"Do you think 3Com would have survived 5 years in the [bridge-building] business?"
Sure. In fact, I think they'd have survived 17 years. They could patent the nonobvious and useful portions of their bridge design and deny other people the ability to duplicate it without permission. That gives them 17 years of profitability, provided their patent is a good and sound one. Hopefully, by the time 17 years are up, 3Com would have found a new and even better way to build bridges--and would have received another patent, and have another 17 years, etc..
Moral of the story: We already have all the intellectual-property protections we need, without needing to make things proprietary.
(Before the anti-IP crowd flames me to death here, let me say that patents need serious revision. 17 years for a nonobvious, useful invention that makes for safer bridges is one thing--17 years on XOR encryption is another!)
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
I hope you know you have to be a big customer to get any clout. Otherwise, your complaints don't mean squat.
And it is getting to the point that some Microsoft licensees are finding out that they have to screw with the source themselves, Microsoft doesn't care about anything that doesn't affect at least 1 million people anymore -- seriously! And getting access to the source code of Windows is a tricky game. It's costly, and Microsoft could still withhold it from you at any time (e.g., Bristol Technology).
So, unless you are a Fortune 500 company, I really don't see the "somebody to sue" factor even being remotely applicable. The result is what we see in Internet servers ... big business chooses Microsoft, smaller businesses choose Open Source.
And it even goes deeper than that! 90% of those big businesses don't run their business on the Internet (and the ones that do choose UNIX/OSS), nor do they entrust Microsoft for most of their back-ends. It's still tried and true big iron and/or UNIX -- which is more of a testament to UNIX, and not so much Open Source (but wasn't UNIX developed akin?).
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Certainly much older than the hat he promised to eat if the Internet didn't collapse (or was it some other non-comestible?) He "invented" Ethernet while at Xerox, though it's being debated how much "inventing" it really took, since--as has been stated elsewhere--much of the technology was based on established principles. Since then he seems to pretty much have rested on his laurels, as befits one after so much hard work. I'm not aware of much further ground-breaking work he did after that.
Anyway, he wields his thusly-won fame to create the impression of much wider-reaching expertise and authority. He loves sitting on all sorts of panels and boards (watch those splinters now!) and taking his mouth for a spin. I've read his column at InfoWorld for years, and on average he has less to say than most of our development team members on a good day. He certainly is very fond of name dropping and all sorts of allusions to the lofty company he circulates in.
My favorite was his vitriolic article a couple of years ago or so to "impeach Clinton." He pretty much exposed himself as a troll and a person of little emotional consequence. He is in bed with Big Business, loves everything Big Business--as any good Republican should--and from that perspective he certainly has no love lost on Open Source. As far as the Internet is concerned, he'd probably much rather have it converted to one LARGE Ethernet network and do away with this pesky network-agnostic protocol called TCP/IP.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
The argument to stick with commercial software because of the culpability is the biggest pile of horse shit ever served up. EVERY shrink-wrapped piece of software denies any responsibility for failure whatsoever, and that also applies to OEM or site licensed software. I would like to hear of a SINGLE case where a commercial software vendor was successfully sued.
The only exception is custom written software. If you contract a software project out, the boundaries for success and failure are usually very clearly defined and can lead to successful legal recourse. But that's not what open source detractors talk about. They're talking about shrink-wrapped software, or its functional equivalents.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
So what's the application that will lend credible validation to Open Source?
Sendmail and Bind have been Open Source and running the internet for about 20 years...
Where have you been?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
The trouble with this argument is that it hasn't shown itself to be true over the last 20 years of computing and it is in fact making great strides in the OPPOSITE direction.
I'm beginning to empathize with RMS (that scares me...really). I understand his frustration. People just don't pay attention. HP is contributing significant resources to the SAMBA project which is, in my opinion, one of the most significant pieces of open source software available. IBM has devoted manpower and hardware resources to various linux porting efforts (specifically RS/6000). Apache, though not predominantly on Linux, still runs most of the web. Sendmail routes enomous amounts of mail. BIND works...what else can I say? XFree86 is in heavy use among commercial entities. SGI, SUN, IBM, HP are all involved in OSS. Are there bigger names in computing? Anyone?
Open Source basically isn't catching on in the Wintel world. I'm sorry, I missed the part where Microsoft won. Last time I checked, the battle was raging and OSS is still on the assault.
No, open source software is in use every day by companies the world over. They may not know it, but they use it, they fund it, and they LIKE it.
-fp
Open Standard is not the same as Open Source.
Take your analogy... Now imagine a world in which 3com published the schematics for their devices with instructions on how to build your own.
Ok, that's not hard to believe. A lot of electrical devices have readily available schematics for use by repair technicians.
Now imagine the 3Com Public License which states that not only are they giving away the schematic, but you don't owe them anything... Make as many of these devices as you want, give them to friends and neighbors. No licensing fees, no royalties, etc.
Do you think ethernet would have evolved to 1Gbps if that had been the case?
Do you think 3Com would have survived 5 years in business?
That's all he's saying. Without income there is no incentive to improve the product.
He probably thinks blacks are still 2/3rd of a human being and women shouldn't be able to vote.
We should just ignore these relics and get on with it.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
In a column released September 1, Bob Metcalfe announced that he is ending his column "after 51 columns for each of eight years." I'm sure he will find ample pulpits to do his chicken-little act regarding the Internet, but at least he is making room for someone at the rag I used to work at.
Yes, he's wrong. he was wrong the last six times, too. So let's actually be polite and do him the favor of ignoring his statements, okay?
Remember, this guy's technical specialty in in networking, yet he predicited in 1995 that the Internet would cease to exist in 1996. Why in hell would anyone expect his predictions in non-networking areas to have any more validity?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Umm...
I agree with what you say, but what you say also applies to Solaris, and many other good proprietary (read: closed-source) Unixes. And Metcalfe was specifically talking about Free software-- and not just Linux.
I happen to disagree with him. Free software has typically had better staying power than closed source alternatives. That's why Sendmail is still around and going strong, as is tcl/Tk, Perl, Bind, Linux, and even Unix in general, while NT has gone through 2 major re-writes since its introduction-- the last amounting to over 75% of the codebase.
In any case, I believe Metcalfe is wrong. Very, very wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
A small example of it at work...
p e=snippet&id=35
http://www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?ty
It all started with this itch...
PHP had no function for directly sending e-mail thru an outside server, instead assuming you had local mail services.
I hunted around for some means to get the prototype out the door, and managed to (quickly) hack together something that more or less did it.
I posted it, sloppy tho it may be, to help whoever else might use it.
And used it is! Somebody else came along and added to it, somebody else made a class out of it, somebody else extended the class, I fixed a few bugs when I needed it for something else, somebody else fixed something I missed...
It's a small example, but it communicates the idea...
This is open-source at work! Everybody contributes a bit, and everybody reaps the rewards!
Would I open-source my work? In many cases, YES! I can now produce better software for my boss because of open-sourcing this particular function!
It's really a no-brainer.
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yes, and it has far outstripped that goal. Although the primary protocol used on top of ethernet is tcp these days it doesn't really matter. Let's look at these big fat ISP's who provide broadband internet access through nothing more than switched ethernet every other block.
Goal or no, it's still not secure.
I also think it's true about security too. If there is something open in Unix, it is easy to fix, or get answers on how to fix it. On NT, you either have to work around it or wait until a service pack comes out to fix it.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
The person that invented technology for Ethernet which in turned lead to Internet would be down on Open Source. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the open specification of protocols and critical pieces of software(like sendmail) that paved the way for the technology explosion on the Internet? Or does he believe that all of that was a fluke?
Hemos, are you trolling us? -Dave
We're on the road to Tycho.
Open source has its place. The hobby community will accomplish things that commercial development will never pay for using Open Source.
That said, it's never going to be the predominant model for software development, nor will Open Source programs ever be the prevailing supply of software for businesses. Why? Businesses like dealing with other businesses. When things fuck up (and they do), it's nice to have someone to blame, someone who has a responsibility to back up their product.
No IT staffer will want their server support to come solely from the community. And the Linux IPO's are all hype - they're not a serious alternative.
In short, it's not MS's OS that everyone's buying - it's the support. Granted, Win2000 is an excellent OS, but that's not why it gets bought.
I haven't read the whole article yet, but I was thinking anyway...
Since he is the creator of ethernet, then obviously he has been in the industry for awhile (back to the beginning even). And way back when, most developing (like ethernet) was done in a pretty much open-source enviornment.
I was just wondering if his objections to open-source is only in relation to how it is going now (linux users fighting with *BSD users etc.) or if he doubts all of the open-source ideals (including the time when he used to work under them). And if the latter is true, if he thinks this because he has been at 3COM too long...
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Igor Stravinsky once said that there are only two types of music - good music and bad music. Perhaps its time that such a philosophy was applied to software. Software that is robustly designed and tested will always be preferable to software that isn't (obviously); but being 'open' or 'closed' doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. There are examples of 'good' closed software (ie on the space shuttle) and 'bad' closed software (You Know What).
It can be argued that open source increases the chances of a program being robust, but is not a panacea; at the end of the day it boils down to whether correct software engineering and testing principles have been applied. In many ways the open source movement is a backlash against appalling software quality in over-the-counter commercial applications - maybe it mightn't have been so popular if there had been more 'engineering' in software development from the outset?
-- briggers
-- briggers Remove blinkers to email me.
Metcalf on Open Source:
"The idea is that the modern, high tech modern capitolist corporation, is an out-moded model for the development of software and that there's this new model, this sort of co-operative comunity and that will work better, and I don't think it will. I think that ummm co-operatiave..ummm.. uh you have a day job and go home to your programing..has it's limits.
uhhh I have yet a third paradym which I call the ethernet pardaym where the standards are open but the implemtations are owned, so that a corporation has property ..and economics can work.
In the internet world, there is an open standard .. like the ethernet and internet world both have open standards but fierce comitition between companies, corporations who own the implementations of the standards and I think that's a superior model to open source movement which suspect will sorta fritter away.
(Interviewer interupts) If a hacker can improve a product and introduce to the rest of the world, umm why shouldn't the world be like that...in other words, why does ford have to make every car the same . . we understand that well, because I, tinkering with my V8 engine can improve yours . .but in software you can't.
Well, you could tinker with my engine too . .there are chips, I mean . people don't do this!, I mean. . btw Ford is not the only car manufactuer there are many others you could choose from. You're allowed to let your neibor tinker with your car, but no one does , or very few people do because it's dangrous.
There are very few people qualified to muck with the inards of an operating system like Linux, so the notion that there will be thousands of them, or hundreds of thousands of them ...
(Interviewer interupts)
It only takes one to improve it.
yea, but it's very hard to tell what's an improvement..the software development process is very very complicated and it's all about the control of complexity and uhh testing and uhh btw, who's to say one of these hackers isn't putting software in the system that say a security breach that they may want to exploit later, I mean there are many issues . umm
(Interviewer interupts)
It leaves a lot of the choice in the world to Bill Gates=, tho, doesn't it ?
Bill Gates isn't the only software developer. There's also such likeable fellows as Larry Ellison, I mean . anyone can develop software, start a company and try to vy for it uhhh look at Linus Torvalds, the champion of all this, a really great guy, but he works at a company called Transmeta. There products are not open source for a very good reason they need to have a product, they need to control it's content, they need to make money by selling it. "
We use them because even we can evaluate 20 of them without having to get spending authorisation every time.
even if it's small potatoes the bean counters tend to go red if i ask for another cheque every day without deploying anything.
photoshop may or may not be better than the GIMP. but its easier to write plug-ins for the GIMP, its easier to experiment with it before committing to it (because its free) and the GIMP revs more often (its getting better faster).
That and the uncomfortable truth that RMS is a prophet. And like all prophets he says things we don't want to hear, smells like something we don't want to smell, and look slike something we don't want to hear.
And much to our chagrin he's probably right. At least the things he says are not self serving.
So i've got more reason to trust him than the rest of the liars out there.
If you've got a limitless budget and want to be lazy then pay for something off the shelf from a bozo trapping you into an upgrade path.
or you can buy a book, learn something new, and make something better.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I count "the most secure" OS not as which one theoretically should be more secure, but which one I am more likely to be rooted using. I LOVE linux and I am not into microsoft, but I think it is MORE than fair to say that in the year 1999, you were far, far more likely to be compromised if you were using a Unix-like OS than using NT. I am not saying you could not secure any OS to be virtually intrusion-proof, but it really does seem now that there are many more exploits being discovered for *nix.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know that Microsoft probably has lots of un-found vulnerabilities, but that is my point: they are un-found, and unexploited. I know what you'll say next: "But Happystink, when they ARE found, they take months to be patched"... Is this really true? Microsoft respond very quickly now, just as fast as Redhat, Mandrake or whoever else.
So enough theory about which source model is more secure in a perfect world, let's re-evaluate and see which model works in the real world before we start posting comments like "I don't know who this Metcalfe guy is but he must be new to computers cause I've been using Linux 4 months and never ain't gotten rooted yet!" ok?
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
When the Metcalf article came on slashdot, I looked up some of his older articles. He actually said that the entire Internet would die. His reason was well, weird.
He had written this during the time of the CDA, when people were really frightened about censorship on the Internet, naturally people were using the internet to discuss this. It was Metcalf's hypothesis that since people were using so much bandwidth discussing pornography, and censorship actual porn would be drowned out. Without porn, he figured, the Internet was pointless.
Yup, if there's thing wrong with the internet today, its not enough porn.
He also predicted (incorrectly, he admitted) that the internet stock bubble would collapse in 1997, and that Yahoo stock would be worthless. While stock went down a bit in 1999/2000, and new IPOs didn't go so crazy, he was way of with that to.
The Internet, pornography, E-commerce, dot-coms, and Linux. Clearly Metcalf knows a loser when he sees one....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Bob has a Security Breach in his head, and the alien underground mafia is using it to fill him up with anti-linux propoganda.
why?
because if the source code is available, the alien underground mafia cannot sneak thier backdoors into our software, and that will ruin thier plan to TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
Oh wait, that was pinky and the brain.
s/alien underground mafia/pinky and the brain/g
I prefer not to. If I had to choose my OS based on what hardware I had I would be stuck with Windows 98 (AMD processor prevents use of Win95).
I could buy hardware from IBM and use AIX, but then I would be stuck wuth expensive IBM hardware upgrades. I could go with the Solaris - SPARC configuration but I have only been annoyed during my experiexnces with both. There's the SGI-IRIX combo, but I certainly can't afford that...
So let's see I can afford common X86/IDE/etc hardware intended for WinUsers. I can afford linux (or FreeBSD, etc.). So I can't choose a vendor that creates the OS and the hardware.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
I think the whole Open Source thing has a few more good decades in it. It's just now gotten back on it's feet. The 60's and early 70's had some great free software. Then we had the Unix wars, late 70's and 80's were somewhat mediocre. But the mid to late 90's saw a huge surge in open source popularity.
And now there are a whole generation of students who have always had free OS's, dev tools, and all sorts of software. When they get out of school and in to the business world they will bring some of that with them. Much like students past brought Unix from the campus to the work place.
And it's more likely to happen now because there are so many young execs (usally coder turned suit) that aren't afraid to use open source porducts at the enterprise level (Yahoo! is a great example)
I think we are just getting started.
Just remember that he was the one who predicted the fall of the internet, citing that its popularity was just a fad.
Being a good engineer doesn't make you good at seeing what uses people will put products created by engineers to. An engineer only understands the motivational structure of other engineers, unless he or she is uncommonly perceptive. It is possible that Metcalfe could be so perceptive. Of course his idea that the internet was doomed buries that idea six feet under.
I expect to see him on the Psychic Friends Network sitting beside Dionne Warwick any day now.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Whenever you hear about Bob Metcalfe you hear him referred about as the "inventor of ethernet". He talks about how insecure and terrible open source is and how awful it can be. The one thing that gets me is that Ethernet was developed in a very tight corporate world -- and gee guess what? It's about as insecure as they get.
Chalking another one up to windbagism...