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Red Hat CTO Responds To Allchin's Comments
A reader writes: "C|Net has a small interview with Red Hat's CTO Michael Tiemann rebutting the remarks Jim Allchin made about Open Source being bad for innovation. It's in Windows Media or Real media." It's a pop-up window on the right side - and this is continuation of the Allchin story.
But neither set of arguments matter. The current situation-- where some software is developed open sourced and some closed --works to produce diversity, as well as providing economic incentive to programmers.
--
Why? Because the top programmers will no longer program, if they don't get paid.
riiiiiiight. just like how writers will stop writing books when people can read them at the library for free. just look at how cd sales have dropped since people can download mp3s. what a shame it was when the whole porn industry died with the creation of jpegs!
obviously, nobody ever does anything without being paid! creative impetus, p'shaw! all the great creative works in the history of the human race were done for a salary, right?
oh my people, what have i done unto thee?
a
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
A message from your friends at Microsoft
.sig: Now legally binding!
Microsoft has been pounding on the word "innovate" and the phrase "freedom to innovate" so hard in an attempt to beat it either into submission, or to bend it into meaning what they want it to mean. There is innovation going on at Microsoft, in their graphics research division, but damned little of it to do with Windows.
They seem to have adopted Musolini's theory of "The Big Lie" that if you shout something at people loud enough and long enough that eventually they will will believe it, no matter how perposterous.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
''I'm an American, I believe in the American Way,'' he said. ''I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat.'' People like Allachin sicken me. I plan to serve in either the Army or the Navy after college and willing to die in defense of this country if need be. Yet I almost completely abhor Microsoft-the-institution, Microsoft-the-products and above all else, Microsoft-the-business-model. I believe that our country's IP laws are treasonous to the values of the American revolution and that anyone that supports the DMCA and the like is equally a traitor to the spirit of the revolution and the United States Constitution. These companies know that in a free market they can't make a honest buck. Allachin and his fellow big government stooges at Microsoft are just pissed off because within a year or so, RedHat will cut a profit and so will perhaps other open source companies. That is what they fear the most, the vindication of the open source ideal that freedom of speech/ownership of software and profit are NOT mutually exclusive. So Allachin or however you spell it, I have one thing to say about your comments about the dangers of OSS... don't talk to me about patriotism. You don't know what real patriotism is. It isn't loyalty to a bloated corporate burearcracy, it is loyalty to an ideal that forms the basis of the best nation ever created by Homo Sapiens. The loyalty to the ideal that each man and woman is free to live a peaceful, productive life, without people like you micromanaging them. To me, OSS is the epitomy of that ideal and a government which doesn't at least start planning the implementation of OSS-based systems is not a government that has any claim to calling itself the government of a free people!!!
Huh? Most of the major open source programs
I can think of are imitative rather than
innovative. Linux is an OS implementation
of Unix, Gnome and KDE are attempts to clone
MS Windows on Linux, etc.
The innovative OS programs I can think of
t(httpd, Mosaic, BSD) tend to come out from
universities and are more properly the side
benefits of research rather than the direct
result of the open source movement.
Innovation is usually the result of the
work of a few people rather than the
output of the million monkeys of the
Internet.
Besides, it isn't the job of the government to resolve this situation. In a free market, the person who provides the best value is supposed to win the competition, not the person who has the best pull of the government. If this means a few programmers end up switching to a different industry, hey, I have sympathy with them -- but then, as when the automobile put buggy-makers out of business, sympathy only goes so far. Should the government have stepped in to protect the buggy-makers? Or should the buggy-makers instead have switched to making automobile? Most of the buggy makers decided to get government protection. Only one buggy maker decided to switch industries, and that buggy maker (Studebaker) was the only one that survived.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
>I wish I'd saved the article:s play/0,3441,2129312,00.html.
:-)
I suspect what you are looking for is here:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_smgraph_di
The story is quite a hoot regardless of what Allchin himself says; this is a set of predictions for "NT 5.0 and higher" that is nowhere near what they've produced for Win2K or WinXP. FUD rules in all times and all places for Microsoft...
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Alchin claimed two things:
This is demonstrably arrant nonsense. The whole Internet is built on Open Source software and was innovated through Open Source software. The claim that software developed as part of research projects somehow doesn't count is nonsense. If the source is open, it's open source.
However, one of the most important innovations in recent computing, the World Wide Web, isn't the result of a research program. It was created at a research centre, yes, but one whose research was into sub-atomic physics. The World Wide Web was developed to solve an administrative problem. It is open source in the classic sense of scratching the developer's itch.
I can't refute this and neither would I try to. Businesses based on information hiding and artificial scarcity are going to get caned.
They're going to get caned anyway. Basic economic theory demonstrates that price varies directly with scarcity. There is no natural scarcity in goods which can be copied at marginal cost. Businesses built on artificial scarcity will fail and should fail. It just isn't a stable economic platform.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Having read Allchin's statements, and listened to the interview with Red Hat's CTO, I get the impression that MS is growing afraid of not just Linux, but any open source OS or software. Allchin's statement ''I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat'' raises my eyebrow a bit: here's a company under government scrutiny (not to mention the potential breakup) suddenly running towards that same government for protection??? Anyone else see just a teensy bit of hypocrisy here? Personally, I think MS is slowly killing itself, with new OS versions that appear to be little more than upgrades / bug fixes / new bugs, demands for fast performance on only the latest-and greatest hardware, and insanely high prices for OSes and software. We don't need the DoJ to stop MS, they're stopping themselves just fine, and trying to blame the Open Source community for their failings.
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." Bill Gates Yeah Right!
Probably the most important innovation of the open source community is the open source community. Linux was developed via the internet, taking advantage of this new communications medium. I'm suggesting that the innovation is social, not technical.
Progress can mean a lot of things besides a new widget. Sometimes it means finding a better way to do something. I'd say that the open source movement is among the most efficient software-producing strategies anyone has ever seen. I didn't say fastest, I said most efficient -- think (total output) / (total input).
Linus' model for kernel development wasn't obvious, to him or anyone else. Nobody even had a chance to try such a large distributed and uncoordinated undertaking before the Internet was made available to the world public. Linus helped the idea evolve, and made it work.
The GNU project has done something very similar with their development model though they were more academically focussed and based, if I understand correctly -- which eventually evolved alongside the Linux kernel. The model is still evolving, witness sourceforge and services like cosource.
These are very real innvoations. I expect that you have a very specialized definition of innovation which allows you to say "Innovation is usually the result of the work of a few people." In particular, I think your special definition is probably something like "Innovation is the result of the work of a few people." You mind seems closed.
-Paul Komarek
Allchin is a lunatic. It doesn't take any intelligence or balls to rebut a lunatic. It takes no originalty to take something that no one agrees with, hold it up to scrutiny, and announce that you yourself also disagree with it. It's like ridiculing the mentally handicapped. It lacks all tact and propriety.
Stop giving Allchin his soapbox. Let Allchin's ludicrous statements fall on deaf ears. Everyone knows that Microsoft is dead in the water in three years, and everyone knows that Linux and the open-source movement will replace them. These things are beyond refutation, so stop pretending you're so innovative for pointing them out.
When a company like Microsoft makes such ridiculous comments, just ignore them. Let the press decide to report on them however they want; don't sully your own reputation by stooping to Allchin's level. The truth will out, as it has been shown throughout history. Passive resistance is a far more powerful tool than vocal outrage. Just ask Gandhi.
In short, this "rebuttal" was unnecessary. I hope it's the last of its kind we'll be subjected to.
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