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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.
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. "
Businesses like dealing with other businesses.
OK. So what's stopping people from buying support contracts for OSS? I don't tend to do that myself, because I've been a C programmer and Unix administrator for over a decade.
OK, so I blame M$ all the time for the problems I have using Windows. But does assigning blame fix the problem? Does it necessarily fix the problem any faster? No. If I submit a bug report to M$, is it likely that they'll look at it before next year? The only time a big software company like M$ pays attention to you is if you have a big, fat support contract.
In short, it's not MS's OS that everyone's buying - it's the support.
That's exactly right. However, with OSS, you get to pick who supports you. With proprietary software, you have no choice.
Sounds like a slam-dunk for OSS to me. Of course, it'll take the marketplace a while to come around. I believe the change is inevitable.