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.

Comments

Re:I've said it before

[adimarco]

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

Re:Let's not reward childish behavior

[Simon Brooke]

I'd like to see you actually argue against Allchin's point by using facts or at least opinions.

Alchin claimed two things:

1. Open source stifles innovation.

   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.

2. Open source is bad for the intellectual-property business.

   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.