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Opposing Open Source?
Carl Nasal asks: "For a college class I'm taking, I have to write a research paper. I chose a topic of how open source software affects businesses, focusing on the use of Linux. While doing searches, I have actually found it hard to find opposing views of open source software. Mainly, what I'm looking for, are opinions, articles, looks, and evidence about the drawbacks of using open source software in business. They can either be online or offline, but preferably from reliable sources. (In other words, I'd rather not just have someone's homepage that loves Microsoft and hates Linux.)" The more constructive criticism we get about the drawbacks of Open Source, the better we can address and fix them.
When I was in college writing papers...
I always though that was what research was for - especially because I'd think it would be hard to cite a slashdot post.
Microsoft has had some high ranking people repetitively and forcefully claim that open source software is unamerican.
Salon's piece summarizes the criticism neatly.
Perhaps there is a reason you find it hard to find opposing views. Why? Simple.
When switching to open-source, the first thing to note is that the fact that the source code is available is usually not why you are switching. The fact that the software follows the 'open source' ideology is also not important. Generally, you switch because the software does what you want at a reasonable price.
In this respect, open-source is no different than any other software.
Now.. switching a shop to a DIY shop using open-source tools as opposed to commercial solutions.. that's a bit of a different story. But that's really an idological change as opposed to a software change.
There have been plenty of posts on there about why x company feels the need to not open source drivers.
In fact, there was even one from Intel.
You should talk to Jim Allchin, he has some non-biased views on open source and he's an industry leader.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4833927.html
Kidding aside, it's probably relevant to your assignment.
Microsoft has spoken out about the DANGERS of open source, and their company press releases are a reliable source. Their arguments are usually flawed to the slashdot crowd, but they are opposing views.
First decent post I hope?
Many eyes find many bugs - but many unskilled developers make many bugs.
And also you have to remember the insufferable whining of the aptly-named Open Source "movement", the self righteousness of malodorous parasites like RMS, and the cynical bandwagonism of organizations like Redhat and VA Linux.
In the DC area, at least, a common tactic is to contact companies or other entities in the guise of a "student" looking for information for a thesis, paper, project, or whatever. The advantage of this was that the person doing the research could gather information on behalf of their company/employer without letting on to anyone that the company they work for didn't know much about the subject.
You don't happen to work for Microsoft, do you?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Yes, it's FUD, but it's true to a degree -- it's often difficult to find support for open source things. And if it breaks, you get to keep both parths -- if you're not able to fix it yourself, you're at the author's mercy.
Yes, if Windows breaks, you're at Microsoft's mercy to fix it too, but many companies feel a lot more comfortable relying on a big company than on a few guys who program for fun.
Yes, you can buy support for many free software products, but these don't seem very popular for some reason.
I'm not saying that these reasons are particularly valid, but they are the reasons most commonly given ...
You don't need to look any farther than trolltalk or Adequacy to see some decidedly anti-OSS views...
The only things i can think of right now is the fact that is unamerican, Pacman and cancerlike!!!
no seriously, the only drawback with Open Source is that its nearly impossible to make money with
Sig you!
Microsoft has backed "shared source" as an alternative to opensource. They have a website, I believe it's www.sharedsource.com, which details why. Some interesting points, although I think only a few have real validity.
The only thing wrong with Open Source is that you get to keep your money.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Well I have looked for those myself from time to time, because I like to understand both sides of an issue when i am attepting to form my own opinion, and discuss it. Quite often I run in to serious road blocks in doing so the public opinion is overhelmingly positive, esspecially on the web where Open source is the core of everything, and the majority of participants are Open Source followers(Just try and find a decent opinion peice on what W3C's Rand Proposal is a good Idea, I've had no luck)
Of Course the Microsoft web site is an excellent place to start they have many comments about the "evils" of free/open source software. I know there were a couple artticles in the NY Times, and on MSNBC(take pinch of salt) with some reasoning agianst as well.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
This hurts open source software - closed source software generally costs money, which allows them to pay people like usability specialists, graphic designers, and technical writers (people who don't work for free out of goodwill). Currently it seems like only programmers are willing to donate their time to the open source software effort, and I see this as a weakness. Having a larger variety of developers would improve the quality of open source software.
closed source has a much more obvious business model. You write code. You sell the code. If someone else tries to use it, sue their ass off. In open source, a road to financial income is not as immediately obvious, and even so, it's probably not possible to make as much money writing open source.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Very simple. Developers generally don't get paid to develop Open Source. There are millions and millions of developers (like myself) who don't code for free. That's a big negative.
Technical support staff could is a big reason many companies aren't switching over to linux or other OSS alternatives. Companies with IT departments trained in MS software but unfamiliar with linux leave the company needing to retrain or replace their IT dept. to perform the switch over.
Closed, proprietary software sucks a**!!!
Umm... Wait, you wanted opinions AGAINST Open Source? I know!
Closed, proprietary software sucks a**!!!
Thats like going to Landover Baptist looking for arguments for atheism.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Here are soem links for ya! www.freeos.com www.osopinion.com www.osnews.com Sounds like a good project, but since I whole heartedly believe in Free Software I'm not going to be a great help for you. Though I believe that every thing can take some critic.. Good Luck !
Hey look - anti-linux view gets a -1. You forgot to think like the rest of us!
One of the aspects that the Open Source community touts is that support it available on the web, IRC, numerous news groups and of course via source code. However when it's 3am and your server is down, and need to have it back up in 15 minutes, spending 2hrs reading docs on the web or explaining the situation over a chat, even via email is out of the question. Chances are you need to speak to someone pronto. Either by phone or in person, and that comes at a cost. A cost that is generally not figured in when pricing out Open Source Software for your business. Outfits like Sun or IBM will figure in large support contracts along with their software making the price of Open Source solutions look much more attractive. This is a double edged sword. Eventually your business will spend money either on support or in customer related costs due to downtime.
"Profitablity"
I have yet to see a successful business model incorporating Open Source.
Secondly, without strict project management, a lot of confusion can ensue. In a business you hire someone to control everything on the higher scales.
A better example is simple coding style. Looking at code where 4 developers put their braces all in different places adds time to maintainability/reading of the code. I'll come up with more reasons, lemmie think some more.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Can be found here
The heart of the argument is that the GPL is like "Creeping Marxism", since software is written to be shared by all, instead of sold for a profit.
M$ is the onlly company opposing it, that i know of just about everyother company out there supports it in some fashion or another: HP,Compaq,IBM,Cisco,AMD. Although im not sure what Intels possition on it is it would seem they are fence sitting for now being that them and M$ are bussom buddies
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
- DMCA
- Passport
- Office
- Traditional Support Means
- Patents
- W3C: RAND
That should get you started.www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Hacker kiddies and the open/free troll crowd are not going to provide you with a constructive, objective view - just as going off and asking this question in a Microsoft newsgroup won't either. I'd probably try to get my hands on and use research organization data (except Gartner!). Your best bet though, if you have a couple of weeks to burn, is hitting Google and looking for what the average Usenet dude is saying. It'll be hard to get hard data but at least you can get a handle on the "heartbeat" of the issue.
Here's one from the granddaddy-of-them-all-open-source haters. When it came out I (belive) /. already noted it for what it was worth. Sorry, the link is to a MS-Word document (but it's their site, after all.)
I personally think what they say is crap, and I have gotten into many discussions on the topic over there, but they may make some points that would be useful to you... The url is www.adequacy.org... They are extremely anti opensource and slashdot... Specifically look at the post "That's it, let's ban programming."
hope it helps
peace
You mean being stolen like hot-cakes.
Do hot-cakes really sell that good?
Are there any public companies that are in the hot-cake business?
What are their ticker symbols?
The truth is that Open Source is a religion. Those who love it, write about it and preach every second they have. Those who don't care, quite honestly, don't care. I don't write open source code, I won't write open source code, so why would I waste my time trying to convince others NOT to use Open Source? I have plenty of work. I have plenty to do without proselytizing AGAINST Open Source.
1. Requires a higher level of techinical expertise to implement.
2. Can't always call "tech support" for help.
3. Fragmentation can cause confusion about abilities as well as compatibility
4. With no financial backing there is no gaurntee your apps will be enhanced or even supported in the future.
Some of you would applaud those points as positives. But being in a corporate environment those are the issues I deal with. I don't always want a full staff of programmers to support my day to day functions. For many tasks I would rather pay for support as I need it. Out of the box commercial products give me that ability.
We're all very pleased that you've figured out how to use a pseudonym, but I'm afraid you'll need to do your own research.
Run along now.
"Irony is so September 10th"
Matt Miller, alt.fan.spinnwebe
Open Source: Good and Bad + Customizable + Non-professional support (more of it) + Low cost, if not free - Can be difficult to use - Not up to par with most commercial software - No major funding Closed Source: Good and Bad + Higher quality than most open source sofware. + Corporate funding and more money leads to continuing support and backwards compatibility. - Not as customizable as open source software - Strict licencing schemes to stay 'legal'
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Do a google search for "Microsoft and Virus". Skip past the 4,023,821,349,128,312 entries that refer to viruses that affect MS products and you'll find a quote from Bill equating software libre with viruses.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
A valid concern of open source lies in the liability of the compay using it. This opinion can be validated from any number of companies, and is a real business corncern.
For Example: Company A uses an open source software app/platform to conduct business. For some reason, a bug happens or an uninvited visitor pilfers, changes or otherwise damages data held in the open source app/platform.
If the damage is severe enough, it can cost the company jobs, clients, reputation ect., and could be a thrust of a law suit. Picture telling a bunch of shareholder that your linux box was hacked and the company lost X amount of money during the time it took to repair the damage, and that is why their stock value fell. Somebody says "whats a Linux?" and you say open source blah blah blah. All they have to do is say "why dont you use oracle or microsoft or apple"
The names they know in other words.
The question of 'perceived' liability regarding open source should be part of your study. What are the extra burdens a company/individual takes on when using open source?
Actually, I'll just cross my name off my diploma and write yours in. It's not like anyone has ever asked to see mine.
"Mainly, what I'm looking for, are opinions, articles, looks, and evidence about the drawbacks of using open source software in business."
I don't have links to share with you, but I can share my experience.
Almost 2 years ago, in a think-tank setting a bunch of us at a company that I won't name here, refused to use Open Source program/code out of the fear that if anything goes wrong using Open Source program/code, there is no one to "hold responsible" over it. Read that as to "sue" the party.
Because of this legal issue, we stayed away from Open Source. I know few other companies that I got in contact with share this few.
However, I must point out that now IBM is supporting Linux, things will change.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Are you talking about USING open source or DEVELOPING open source? In other words, using software or having a business model based on open source software?
I don't see many drawbacks with just using open source software. Lack of support and not being guaranteed fixes (being at the mercy of the guys who are just doing things because they have 'an itch to scratch') are some reasons I guess.
As far as basing your business on open source software, I see lots and lots of drawbacks. More or less, it's very hard or impossible to make decent money on open source software. Support just doesn't give you enough revenue. A small business with a talented but small crew (think of.. say.. Epic Games that makes the Unreal series of games as well as the Unreal 3D game engine) can make a bunch of money with closed source software. What if Epic Games open sourced their engine? How would they make as much money as they do now? Or even, how would they make any money *at all*?
One of the major hurdles of using Open Source software (specifically, stuff that is GPL'd) is reuse of the source code. To give an example, there is a library that is GPL'd (not LGPL'd). Because of the license, and what I want to use it for (mind you, all personal works of mine are GPL'd currently, but thinking about switching to a free-er license like BSD), I can't use it. So, what am I to do? reinvent the wheel.. alas, that is the major hurdle I see with using Open Source software in a business (software dev) environment...
I mean, how can anybody argue with the notion that a Cathedral is somehow inferior to a Bazaar? We all know Bazaars where it's at, that's what people look at these days, and travel to Paris and Rome and places to see and marvel at. Hardly anybody stops by the Notre Damme.
It's also pretty clear that anarchy by design and design by anarchy work well. After all, open source has brought some exceptionally innovative technologies to IT consumers in the past few years. We now can finally parse flat text files with greater speeds and more flexibility than ever before! And we keep bug-compatibility to programs written for 1960s computers that can be outperformed by a wristwatch! Now, that's what I call technology! Object orientation? component programming? that's for wussies who can't code in C, sh, or perl!
Finally, how can traditional software businesses compete with the multi-level marketing scheme of proselytizing users that become testers and developers and finally evangelists? It's obvious that all great engineering and scientific endeavours have been benefitted by active recruitement and by popular opinion, not some arrogant dude's idea of what 'right' is.
After all, software is tantamount to *speech*, not machinery. It should be spoken and transmitted freely, not designed and crafted like some piece of steel.
Oh, yeah, there was something else, but I am sure the replies to this will fill you in... something about advocacy or something...
cheers
Damn right and you moderaters can goto hell, you cock sucking linux junkies
Just my $0.02 worth
-mrbkap
There's no fix for this one, other than simply avoiding anything that requires a restrictive NDA.
I can think of 3 ways to circumvent this problem, but neither of them is very nice (still better than proprietary code, if you ask me):
(I'd probably pick this option if I had to)
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Now, the ADVANTAGE to having the source is that you can technically work around any of these issues, but generally only by hiring specialists, at a great expense to your company. It's the big white elephant that no one's talking about in the middle of the open source bazarre: "Software freedom! You have the source! You are empowered!" Yes, but at what COST? For most companies, fixing an open source program to make it do what they want, just isn't a viable option. Plus, many in the community would view it as a "corporate co-opting of volunteer work," and the company could be flamed out of contention before they even decide on a policy regarding releasing improvements to the community.
Open Source does seriously empower expert individuals who wish to customize and improve software for their own use, and the community with which those individuals share the improvements. But that's not really a business situation.
In many open source projects, documentation, usability, design, interface, etc. are deliberately made bad. Take SourceForge, whose business model appears to be to focus only on power and not bother making the product something that is downright painful to configure, because installation / consulting is one of the few ways an open source software company can make money on their product.
imagine using linux for years and then one day Linus announces he'll no longer be maintaining it because he had a new baby and can't justify the time any longer. No-one else has the skills to pick it up so the project dies. Soon it gets left far behind other OS's and your time investment in learning linux is wasted and you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Open Source software turns normally intellegent people into freaks who care more about where their code came from than whether or not it actually works.
I guess you've read Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. You might be interested in also reading A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's not directly open source criticism, and doesn't focus on business usage of free software, but it's a good read nonetheless.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Moderators: please don't mod me down as a troll, because I honestly believe what I wrote. Instead, how about proving me wrong in a reply?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Open source doesn't seem like a great thing for people who want to make a living writing their own programs. I'm talking about the lone or small group of developers who can't afford the manpower to offer "services" to surround their product. There are certainly some people who still would pay for products without additional services but it is much harder to make a living off of Open Source, especially when your products are aimed towards the type of people who would know how to compile source. I personally am having problems with this because I would love to open my source up for the audio/video/DSP application I'm writing but if I decide to make my current side project my full time job it's hard for me to see how I can market something with all of the code base public so others can compile and run it from source in less than 5 minutes of effort. Even if I close my source a release before the public version a.)programmers who helped will bitch (like I've seen here before) b.)I doubt the functionality I add in a couple months by myself will be hard to figure out for, say, 5 programmers in their off-time and the spite I'd cause by cloosing my source would probably make them that much more impassioned to implement those new features. Perhaps it's simply my ignorance - if so, then you should put down "lack of public/programmer understanding" but I see little sign of a small business surviving off sales from OS applications without a stockpile of money from an IPO when every investor was an idiot or without other services being offered.
Kidding aside... Softpanorama has lots of papers, links to papers about open source.
I detail some of the flaws I see with open source software in my paper The Wall Street Performer Protocol.
VALinux, Linux, or BSD can now post and they would
be on topic. Nice way to eliminate trolls.
Seriously, you won't find anything against open source
itself since if someone is wanting to release a source
to a program they wrote, there really is nothing wrong with it.
If you wish to find stuff against it, you would have to
be more specific, such as looking at making money off open source
software, using open source in a production environment,
or if releasing an abandoned program as open source is
a good idea or not, etc, etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only valid reasons to not use open source are the same reasons to not use a particular closed source solution. The only question any one should be asking is "How much will it cost to do what I need?"
Cost here does not mean licensing cost, but the total cost of ownership including customization, support, hardware, training, upgrades, and licesnsing.
The first question to ask about any product is, "How much will it cost to do what I need?" or "How much will it cost me to settle for what this product does as opposed to what I actually need." Very few corporations are lucky enough to find what they really need on the shelf. They tend to either live with what they can find or pay to have something customized. This is the number one arguement both for and against open source. Often there is not an open source solution that is as good as a particular closed source solution. If a corporation has the resources to customize a solution, then often open source is a better way to go, since it is usually cheaper to customize.
Support is also critical for any software application. Every company has to decide to trust an outside support organization or support it themselves. Costs and quality very greatly for both open and closed source solutions.
Training costs do not differ based on wether an application is open/closed source, but instead on the popularity of the application. A company can expect a certain level of competence with popular applications, but not with those that are less popular.
Upgrades and Licensing are really negligable and tend to tie into support costs.
I know that when I decide on an application for corporate use, solving my problem and dependability are my first concerns. If an application doesn't do what I need, why even consider it. Dependibility includes not just not crashing, but how long it will take to get something fixed when it does crash. I would rather use something where I expect to be down once a day for a minute than something where I expect to be down once a year for a week.
In this case, troll site meaning the story submitters troll the posters. And you fell for it. Brilliant.
this is sad,
the slashdot users are helping this person do his assignment, and find sites that suport closed source! This proves geeks have no life at all.
No Sig
Ayn Rand.
Rand was an incredible author during the great Industrial period of the early to mid 20th Century. "Atlas Shrugged" is directed at the industry of the time (Railroads, Steel, etc) but it is entirely on track when it comes to the software industry and, especially, open-source.
It is a long read, but is considered a classic novel. One of her other books is "The Fountainhead" which was turned into a movie in the late 50's I think.
After reading "Atlas Shrugged" I think you may have a new understanding of why people would be against open-source and why they consider it "un-American."
Did anyone look at the URL above? Both URL's lead to eggforge.com which has nothing to do with this topic. I think this is a shameless plug rather than informative comment.
MOD PARENT DOWN.
http://www.microsoft.com
Share holder logic notwithstanding, using names you know doesn't buy you anything that names you don't know provide. No, you can't sue OSS for problems incurred by the software itself, but you can't sue Oracle, MS or the others either (well, you could try I guess, but you'll just end up losing more money). Of course, share holders typically don't care about the names or technology anyway, they just want to know what you've done to prevent it from happening again.
If companies need the ability to sue to insulate themselves from their share holders, they hire firms like RedHat to offer support.
In addition, in the scenerio above your answer to "why don't you use oracle or microsoft or apple" is simple and one that shareholders would most definately understand: 'because if spent $X millions for licences your stock price would be $X dollars lower, without buying us any technological advantage.'
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
No one else has mentioned that GNU and other open source licenses limit you to open sourcing your code.
This precludes you from selling your final product for the most part.
Real open source code is public domain with no licensing restrictions.
Many proponents of open source tout that you can do whatever you want with the code. That's simply not true because you cannot change it and ship binaries without releasing your source code.
As far as open source, get the real thing, public domain code without restriction.
I predict that we will soon see a source license which is:
You can do anything you want to with this source code except license it under GNU or under any Richard Stallman friendly license.
Have you tried the Microsoft website? Are you forgetting their use of 'viral' when talking about OS?
well this isn't the MOST opposing view but ESR's text "the cathedral and the bazaar" does have some points to the failings of open source such as the possible inability to start a project in the bazaar/open source method.
-
Perhaps you should look at the Halloween documents. They're an outside critical look at Free/OSS and comparison of different development models.
Some examples:
And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
OnMicrosoft's website there is a nice overview of their thoughts. Sadly it is a
Some Questions Every Business Should Ask
About the GNU General Public License (GPL)
On May 3, 2001, Microsoft publicly described its ``Shared Source'' approach to source code licensing. Shared Source covers Microsoft's spectrum of source access and licensing programs for its customers and partners. Microsoft has contrasted Shared Source with various open source software approaches, highlighting both similarities and differences. We encourage companies and individuals to consider carefully to what degree open source solutions make sense for them. While Microsoft does not oppose the concept of open source development, we do question the advisability of organizations' dependence on the products of a non-commercial community rather than commercially developed products that have a sustainable business model behind them.
The general use of the term ``open source'' describes both the different community development processes and the vastly differing licenses under which these products are developed, modified and distributed. In particular, we are concerned about the GNU General Public License (GPL) which covers some of the most popular open source software such as Linux. The GPL was developed specifically to discourage the development of commercial software and eliminate the creation of any long-term economic value in intellectual property that emerges from a community development process. This license diminishes, or even eliminates, the symbiotic relationship between academic and government research and the entire business community. There are benefits to having both an ``intellectual commons'' and businesses built on the premise of owning and profiting from intellectual property assets.
Microsoft encourages companies to read and evaluate the GPL. Based upon feedback we have received to date, it appears that many businesses do not understand the GPL or its potential implications for important business issues. To highlight those issues, we drafted this document to give businesses interested in GPL software a list of questions to ask themselves and their lawyers, as well as some background that may be useful.
). The comments in this document are based upon the Version 2 GPL, Version 2.1 Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the GPL FAQ posted as of 5/30/01.
One last introductory note: the GPL is a complicated agreement. To understand your potential rights and obligations, you need to interpret the many provisions of the agreement and apply them to your particular facts. We recommend that you obtain counsel from your lawyer as appropriate. This document does not, and cannot, offer any legal advice.
Have your lawyers read the GPL (and the LGPL)? Because the GPL is so frequently misunderstood and because it attempts, under certain circumstances, to impose significant obligations on licensees and their intellectual property rights, no responsible business should use GPL software without ensuring that its lawyers have read the license and explained the business' rights and obligations. They should also review and explain the Lesser General Public License, or LGPL, a related license that is sometimes used with open source libraries.
How are you using GPL software and what obligations does it impose? The obligations associated with the GPL vary substantially depending upon the way in which GPL code is used. Even limited or relatively obscure uses (e.g., including a few lines of GPL code in a commercial product or linking directly or indirectly to a GPL library) may have a dramatic effect on your legal rights and obligations. To understand the potential implications of the GPL, you need to have a detailed understanding of your use of GPL code. Basing any analysis upon a superficial understanding may present serious risks.
How does your use of GPL software affect your intellectual property rights? One of the most significant impacts of the GPL is its potential effect on your intellectual property rights. The GPL is widely referred to as ``viral'' because it attempts to subject independently-created code (and associated intellectual property) to the terms of the GPL if it is used in certain ways together with GPL code (see Sections 2 and 3 of the GPL). For example, a business that combines and distributes GPL code with its own proprietary code may be obligated to share with the rest of the world valuable intellectual property (including patent) rights in both code bases on a royalty free basis. Other uses of GPL code may also create obligations for the user. It is important to perform a careful legal and technical review of this issue before using GPL software.
What if you are simply a ``customer,'' acquiring GPL software from other businesses? Does the GPL have any effect on your rights and obligations? Section 0 of the GPL says ``[a]ctivities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted.'' So, a customer who only runs the Program should have no obligations to the author of the code under the GPL. As discussed below, however, such a customer also has no rights from the author (e.g., no assurance that the code is even free from ``known'' copyright infringement problems) and may have liabilities to third parties. If, on the other hand, the customer's use of GPL code involves even limited modification, copying or distribution of the code, the GPL arguably does impose obligations to the author, discussed above and below. In assessing this possibility, customers should carefully consider what the GPL means by ``copying, modifying and distribution.''
Can you develop applications for a GPL program, like Linux, without subjecting those applications to the GPL? This is a particularly important question. The answer will almost certainly depend upon a detailed analysis of the way in which the application was developed and distributed and will be subject to caveats regarding the interpretation and enforceability of the GPL. For example, the analysis will presumably involve a careful review of your development team's exposure to and use of GPL code during the development process, especially whether the application incorporated any such code or was otherwise derived from it. The analysis would also likely consider what libraries are used; how are they used (e.g., statically linked or dynamically linked); whether they, in turn, link to other libraries; and which licenses (GPL or LGPL) govern all of these various libraries. Similarly, the analysis would probably consider what header files are used; whether they, in turn, include other headers; and which licenses govern these various headers. In addition, the analysis would presumably consider whether the application is distributed with GPL code and, if so, how it is distributed and by whom.
Can distribution of your code with GPL code require you to license your code under the GPL? Have you combined your own code with code licensed under the GPL? The GPL attempts to address these questions directly. Section 2 of the GPL says that identifiable sections of a work that are not derived from a GPL program and that ``can be reasonably considered independent and separate'' are not subject to the GPL when distributed as separate works. But if these separate sections are distributed ``as part of a whole which is a work based on'' a GPL program, then this distribution of the ``work as a whole'' is subject to the GPL. Section 2 also says that a ``mere aggregation of another work not based on the [GPL] Program on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.'' A licensee is left with the difficult task of deciding whether a particular combination is a ``work as a whole'' (GPL infection apparently intended) or a ``mere aggregation'' (GPL infection disclaimed).
If your software becomes ``infected'' by the GPL, do you have to give it away for free? Section 3 of the GPL says that you can copy and distribute a GPL program (or a work based on such a program) in object code or executable form, subject to several restrictions. You are supposed to make the corresponding source code available, for example, by including the source code with the object code or offering to distribute it to any third party (Section 3). Section 1 says that you ``may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,'' but Section 2 says that you ``must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from [a GPL] Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.'' The net effect is, apparently, that you are able to charge a fee for your software, but that right is significantly undercut by your obligation to give others (including your competitors) the right to distribute your software for free.
Are your obligations under the GPL ``flexible'' or ``proportional'' to your use of GPL code? Suppose Business A uses a few hundred lines of GPL code in its existing 500,000-line proprietary program and makes copies for its own employees or distributes ten copies of the modified program as a collective work. Suppose Business B combines 500,000 lines of GPL code with an existing 1000-line proprietary program and distributes 500,000 copies of the modified program as a collective work. The GPL may be read as to require both businesses to share the source code for their modified programs (including their existing commercial programs) and allow royalty-free redistribution of those programs. This is true despite the potentially dramatic differences in the volume, value and copies of the GPL code used.
Do you have all of the rights required to use GPL code? Could your use of GPL code cause you to infringe on the intellectual property rights associated with code you have licensed from others? The seemingly obvious answer to the first question is ``yes'' because those rights are provided under the GPL. The correct answer, however, may require more careful analysis. If, for example, you plan to combine and distribute GPL code with pre-existing code, the ``viral'' nature of the GPL may require you to provide source code for the pre-existing code to all third parties and license others to use it on a royalty-free basis (see Section 2). Unfortunately, if you licensed some of the pre-existing code from a third party, you may not even have access to the source code, much less the right to license it to the rest of the world on a royalty-free basis under the terms of the GPL.
Do you have any existing obligations that might preclude your use of GPL software? Could your use of GPL code put you in breach of existing contractual obligations? As noted above, the use of GPL code with code licensed from another party could, under certain circumstances, arguably obligate you to sublicense the other party's code under the GPL. If you expressly agreed not to attempt to sublicense the other party's code, you should consider whether your use of the GPL code presents a risk that breaches your earlier contract. Even if no breach occurs, the GPL includes provisions that may make it impossible for licensees to retain both their GPL rights and rights under other agreements. For example, Section 7 of the GPL says that if ``conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this license, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.'' Suppose Business A has developed a program using trade secret rights that were licensed from Business B under an agreement that prohibited their disclosure. Now assume that A uses GPL code in a way that ``infects'' its program. Section 7 apparently says that use of GPL code in such a program is impermissible. This places A in an untenable situation: unless it persuades B to divulge its trade secrets to the world, A must cease distribution of its program. This may be true even if A's use of GPL code is minimal.
Have you considered the risk that GPL code might infringe on third party intellectual property rights? Although it is always difficult for a business to ensure that acquired products do not infringe on third-party intellectual property rights, the risks associated with the use of GPL software may be substantially higher than those associated with commercial software. For example, given the distributed nature of open source development, you should understand what controls, if any, you have in place to screen unlicensed code or trade secret information from inclusion in the GPL program. This view is perhaps reinforced by the fact that Section 11 of the GPL expressly disclaims any warranties, including presumably a warranty that the program is free from infringements of third-party copyrights or trade secrets known to the contributor. You should also ask yourself if GPL developers may conclude that this disclaimer makes it okay to distribute code under the GPL when they know they don't have the rights required to do so. Developers of commercial software, in contrast, typically have procedures, contractual obligations, and a substantial financial stake in minimizing potential infringements.
What happens if an intellectual property owner, who claims that your use of GPL code infringes its intellectual property rights, sues you? As noted above, Section 11 suggests that you are ``on your own'' with respect to defense of the suit and payment for damages.
What is the extent of your liability for GPL-related infringements? Several provisions of the GPL may be read as requiring a GPL licensee to effectively sublicense its rights to the rest of the world (e.g., Section 2, relating to the modification and distribution of GPL works). GPL licensees should ask themselves whether, and to what extent, they might be responsible for the actions of their sub-licensees. For example, suppose Business A distributes a modified copy of GPL code to Businesses B, C, and D, and each of them further distributes 1000 copies. If Business A is sued for patent infringement relating to its use of GPL software, the patent owner might claim that the business is liable for direct infringement based upon the three copies distributed to Businesses B, C, and D and is further liable for direct, contributory, or induced infringement by the 3000 additional copies distributed by these businesses (and, of course, any and all later distributions by such businesses and their downstream sub-licensees). While actual liability would depend upon a host of factual issues, if Business A has deeper pockets than the other businesses, it should not be surprised to find plaintiff's counsel pursuing such an approach and claiming theoretically unlimited damages caused by Business A's limited initial distribution.
Can the author of a GPL program ``unilaterally'' withdraw your right to distribute the program? Section 8 of the GPL gives ``the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License'' the right to preclude distribution in certain countries based on patents or interface copyrights. It is not clear that a licensee has any right to object to this restriction, which may be solely within the discretion of the original copyright holder. It is also not clear whether this restriction can be imposed retroactively, although Section 8 does say, ``this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.'' Companies relying on GPL code should carefully consider the potential impact such a geographical restriction could have on their business.
Can you use GPL tools in the development of your own software without subjecting your software to the GPL? As noted above, the GPL is sometimes referred to as being ``viral'' because it attempts to subject related third-party code and intellectual property to the GPL. People concerned about this aspect of the GPL are probably careful about modifying GPL programs or combining their code with GPL code, but they may assume that their use of GPL tools cannot ``infect'' the software they are developing. While this is probably true in many cases, it is not necessarily a safe assumption. For example, the ``Bison'' parser developed by Richard Stallman, Robert Corbett and Wilfred Hansen was licensed under the GPL for some time before users realized that the software they were developing with the tool was arguably subject to the GPL. The potential exposure resulted from the parser's inclusion of incidental GPL material in the tool's output. In response to this problem, Bison version 1.24 and later was distributed with a ``special exception'' regarding output files. The implication is that businesses concerned about the possible infection of their software by the GPL should make sure they consider: what, if any, GPL tools are being used by their developers; how those tools are used; and the possibility that such uses might subject their own code to the GPL.
If the GPL requires you to ``contribute'' your modifications to GPL code to ``the community,'' are you sure that your competitors are doing the same? Assuming that two competitors are making similar use of GPL code, their obligations under the GPL should be the same. There are, however, a number of scenarios to consider. Some competitors may not understand their obligations under the GPL and, for that reason, might not share their improvements with competitors. Other competitors' interpretation of the GPL might lead them to conclude that they have no obligation because they might believe the GPL is unenforceable in its entirety. Some competitors may intentionally ignore their obligations under the GPL to obtain a competitive advantage, relying on a variety of factors to avoid compliance. These factors might include obscuring object code to hide use of GPL code and the strength and enforcement of intellectual property laws in the country where they are doing business.
Does the GPL present any special challenges for businesses developing or distributing products with embedded software? The GPL does not expressly impose any ``special'' obligations on embedded software businesses, but embedded businesses should consider whether the GPL presents any unique risks based upon scenarios common to the embedded product space. For example, the manufacturer of a hardware system that includes some embedded GPL software and some of the manufacturer's own proprietary software may find it particularly important to carefully assess whether the GPL and proprietary software form a ``mere aggregation'' (GPL infection disclaimed under Section 2); a ``collective work'' (GPL infection apparently intended); or something else altogether. Some embedded software developers, such as Caldera and Wind River, have publicly expressed concerns about the risks associated with the GPL.
Are your software developers aware of the many development-related issues that may affect GPL risks and obligations? Are you asking (or allowing) them to act as your legal counsel and are you willing to accept that risk? Are you ``betting your business'' on informal or anonymous interpretations of the GPL posted on the Internet? As noted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the potential implications of the GPL on software development ultimately depend on the way in which judges will interpret provisions of the GPL. A host of relatively detailed, development-related questions are also likely to be critical. You should probably make sure your developers are asking themselves a number of questions, including:
What is the provenance of the code and tools being used?
What licenses govern that code and tools
What do we do if we can't determine which license governs code included in an open source distribution
What happens if those licensing terms have been clarified or purportedly amended
Does our code use GPL code at runtime, whether through kernel calls, dynamic linkage, static linkage, or other mechanisms; if we are using libraries, do those libraries, in turn, link to other libraries (and, if so, which licenses govern those libraries)?
If we are using headers, do they reference other headers (and, if so, which licenses govern those headers)?
Will our code be distributed, combined or otherwise used with GPL code?
Are we sure about our answers to these questions?
Given the subtle nature of some of the legal issues presented by the GPL, you should also make sure your developers know when to consult legal counsel regarding any potential risks presented by a particular development activity. All businesses would be well advised to avoid taking actions based upon general ``understandings'' of the GPL that are not based on a careful reading of the agreement itself.
Who can you go to if you have a question regarding the GPL's interpretation, want to clarify your risks under the GPL, or amend your obligations? The GPL was developed under the auspices of the FSF. The FSF is not, however, necessarily the owner of any and all intellectual property rights embodied in particular programs licensed under the GPL. Section 10 recognizes this by suggesting that a GPL licensee could write to a program's author (or authors) for permission to distribute the program under different terms. In some cases, no single person or entity may own all of these property rights. As a result, a prospective (or existing) GPL licensee may find it impractical, if not impossible, to negotiate a desired change in its rights and obligations or even obtain a clarification of those rights and obligations. Even if a licensee were somehow able to identify key contributors and reach agreement with all of them regarding a desired change or clarification, presumably those contributors would be unwilling or unable to represent and warrant that they had the entire right and title required to do so.
Are you using any software governed by the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and, if so, how does that license affect your rights and obligations? The LGPL was developed by the FSF to give library developers an alternative to the GPL. Specifically, although the FSF generally discourages use of the LGPL, it notes that ``using the Library GPL permits use of the library in commercial programs.'' The LGPL retains the ``viral'' provisions of the GPL in the context of modifications to an LGPL library (Section 2). But a different set of obligations are imposed when code is linked to an LGPL library (Sections 5 and 6). If you are developing programs that link to LGPL libraries you should review and understand these obligations. You should also check whether the LGPL libraries used, in turn, link to other libraries and especially consider the implications if the LGPL library links to a GPL library.
Does the use of GPL software reduce the acquisition value of your company (as a start-up) or a particular business unit (as a spin-off)? As noted above, the GPL attempts, under certain circumstances, to subject licensees' code and related intellectual property to the terms of the GPL (see, e.g., Section 3). Once your software is ``infected'' by the GPL, it is not clear whether and how this process can be reversed. So, while GPL code may seem like an inexpensive, convenient and useful way for a start-up to develop a new product quickly, it may also have costly and long-term consequences for the start-up. Parties interested in acquiring the business are likely to conclude, as a part of any acquisition due diligence, that the business has already effectively given away most of the commercial value in its code.
Does your use of GPL code present any issues re shareholder value and exposure to suit? In the context of initial public offerings, at least some businesses based upon GPL software have concluded that such software introduces risks that should be disclosed as part of the offering. These risks include: the companies ``inability'' to offer warranties and indemnities because the code is developed by independent parties over whom the offering business has no control or supervision; the uncertain future of the code base (will further development occur and, if so, in what direction); the availability of the same code from other sources for free; and concerns about negative reactions from the open source community. (These issues are discussed in the ``10Ks'' of several of the publicly traded companies that distribute GPL programs). If you are beginning to use GPL code, you should ask whether this presents similar risks to your business.
Do you have a process for reviewing and approving prospective uses of GPL software? Are you willing to use precious developer resources required to assess the impact of prospective uses of GPL code that you will depend on? Most businesses that are engaged in software development establish procedures to avoid tainting their development process with software that is subject to other people's intellectual property rights. Although GPL code is often described as ``free,'' as noted above it may impose severe obligations on users and is perhaps even more deserving of a company-wide process regarding review and approval before use.
Do you have or need any special procedures regarding potential GPL issues created by your licensing of third-party software and or acquisitions of software? Given the potential effect that the GPL may have on code and intellectual property acquired by (or licensed into) a company, it may make sense for businesses to develop procedures to ensure that such acquisitions and licenses are reviewed for GPL issues. For example, many companies have established ``due diligence'' procedures to help them identify and evaluate potential issues associated with the acquisition of businesses, product lines, and intellectual property rights. Companies pursuing software-related acquisitions or investments should probably consider whether their due diligence procedures
Rest got trashed by catdoc...
Mark
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
A paper on this topic could be absurdly long - mostly because open source only implies that the source is avalible to the general public.
I think the real opposition that people see is the way that certain licences are friendlier to certain groups. For instance, the GPL is not friendly to traditional buisness where the BSD licence is more so. The BSD licence is allows later closed sourcing of previously open sourced software. Each licence gives the writer, the publisher and the general public different rights, so each licence will have it's own crusaders...
The more constructive criticism we get about the drawbacks of Open Source, the better we can address and fix them.
Compare that to Microsoft which likes to claim that pointing out the gaping huge flaws in their products should be criminal.
In general, though, open source software is inferior to its closed source counterparts in:
Very little application or toolbox-level open source code is ready for prime time, in fact, whether we're looking at GCC, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, GIMP, or what have you. It's still hacker-oriented, better-enjoy-strolling-through-the-minefield stuff, and measurably inferior to proprietary solutions in most of the ways listed above.
One "killer argument" for many people here recently came in the form of consumer advocate Jamie Love's reasons for shifting his site away from an all-open-source footing.
Tim
2. You will only find competent IT staff for Unix based OS, and as such they will usually cost more.
3. Downtime costs and refitting costs for your machines
4. Most Open Source software/OS are still unproven for many uses. At most, there is anecdotal evidence of how wonderful it is to switch.
5. Script Kiddie style root toolkits, that enable backdoors, are easier to find for Unix than Windows. IMHO this is a biggie. An Open Source OS has the potential for having the kernel and all major programs to be replaced without changing the modification dates. Not only that, a more careful cracker would be able to change your checksum reports so that an admin would have to take unusually strong precautions to ensure any files haven't been 0wn3d. Just because you haven't heard of it happening, doesn't mean it won't.
Last, but not least....
6. CmdrTaco.
Burn Hollywood Burn
From a technical standpoint, that's a silly argument. Certainly in my experience (on the average), mature open source products are higher quality, more robust, and better-supported than your typical purchased application. On the other hand, from the perspective of protecting one's employment, open source is risky.
If something goes wrong, Joe CIO may be seeking new employment if his boss hears that the business is down because of open source software. After all, consider the common stereotype of "free software, downloaded off the Internet (the devil's playground), probably written by a bunch of socially malformed teenagers that are really trying to hack our credit card lists." Do you want to defend this to a technically ignorant boss who can't tell the difference between open source and open sore? Joe CIO is a lot more secure saying Blue Chip Computers screwed up, and we've got their Senior Account Executive on the line, promising that they'll fix it Real Soon Now.
In short, as someone else points out, FUD is a major issue with open source.
For some criticism see Nikolai Bezroukov, Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism), FIRST MONDAY, Oct. 1999 at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_10/bezrouk ov
Abstract: Eric Raymond's bazaar model provides a too simplistic view of the open source software (OSS) development process. This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm for OSS development. Open source software development should better be viewed as a special case of academic research. Viewing OSS this way probably can lead to a better understanding of open source phenomena.
as microsoft claimed, certian licenses, like gpl infect your projects that you build upon it and limit your rights if you continue to use the opensource code in your project.
some managers have bitten onto the FUD, and extrapolated that running on an opensource platform or using opensource software as tools to develop your project could subject you to the licensing of those tools and platforms.
So let me get this right. You are looking for problems with open-source, which you say are not that obvious ? AND you want slashdot to help........ do yourself a favor and disregard 80% of what you read here. Get together with your prof. and come up with a survey that makes some sense, find a few hundred ppl. to get together a mailing list (preferably from your schools alumni) and get the info from them..... do the math and you will see whats what....
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Missed deadlines: The open source projects that we worked with had limited commitment to deadlines, and frequently missed them. When you're counting on product launches, this can be very painful
Lack of Support: Things never go wrong at 3PM. Instead, they always happen at 2AM on Sunday. Commercial outfits have dedicated people to help when this happens -- open source people aren't around.
Development of commercial features: Any commercial product has features or enhancements that aren't strictly bug fixes or new enhancements. These are unsexy jobs, but they need to get done. We found it difficult to get people to commit to them
Obviously, your mileage may vary. I'm sure there are some great stories about open-source, as well as even worse ones. But that's my $0.02.
Use a Band-Aid.
One thing that has always annoyed me about certain open software licenses is the restriction that the software in question can not be used to make money. (Read: included in a product.) If the open-source ideals of free flowing information for the benefit of all are to be fully applied I think that open-sourcers should recognize that a lot of good development happens in a business setting and allow that development model (the commercial one) full access to all open sourced software. Better products would result, benefiting everyone.
Has anyone seen this opinion written up (read: expressed clearly in a paper)?
Hmmmmmm, interesting how there's hardly any replies to this at all......
Well, it kind of shows how bigoted the majority of the Slashdot readership is (yes, -1 for Flamebait, I know).
But, hear me out. How can we be proponents of Open source when we can't even be intelligent and critical enough to realise that acknowledging these flaws is the best way to address them?
To me, the obvious issue is support. Companies want to have someone to blame when the sh*t hits the fan. So that means they need to pay for support for the open source products they use. So, really, that puts open source on equal footing with actually buying a closed-source product, because, let's face it, the up front charge of most software products is negligible compared to the ongoing support/maintenance cost.
In my experience, this is the sole reason a lot of companies end up choosing closed-source solutions, and I tend to agree. What is open source offering me, a company with no IT skill, and never intending to have any IT skill? Nothing more than a closed source solution does. Except at least with closed source, there's a entity, a company that survives by receiving money from me, and if I threaten to ditch it's product, they'll bend over backwards to do anything I like. Open source? There's no singular point of control (generally a good thing, but in this case not) and if the community surrounding the product you are using sees no value in the enhancements you require, you're stuffed. Sure, you can hire someone to make your customisations, and it's easy cause you've got the source, but you aren't getting the main open source benefits here, are you? You're the only tester, the contributions are from a single point and probably not as good as they could be if they were developed by the community. And all of a sudden you're employing IT people when that's not your core business.
I could go on for hours, but I'm sure you get the point...
Gollo
Most of the advocacy is from people who love linux and hate Microsoft. I'm sure you're using those sources. Why not use Microsoft's FUD? It's all the same in the end.
Complexity costs money.
I write for a couple of Australian Computer Magazines. I've spent the last week interviewing a couple of people for an article I'm writing about server appliances.
One person I'd spoke to got the appliances to replace a Linux based firewall. The firewall worked, but nobody knew how to use it, and it seemed too complex for anyone on staff to operate. They couldn't read the logs, so they didn't know if anyone was attacking them. It was different from all their other systems, so it was hard to learn. And if they wanted to open a port for their Outlook Web Access (which they did) they couldn't. Hiring seperate IT staff to do this work is a cost they couldn't afford.
So they replaced the system with a firewall appliance - specifically a NetGear screening router.
These devices generally use some form os Linux inside them anyway, but the lady I spoke to presented an excellent argument against using traditional non embedded Linux firewalls in SMEs.
Trying to get hardware to run under Open Source Software is sometimes a pain. Hardware companies refuse to disclose specs for their products, leaving developers to hack away until they find something that works.
The other side of the coin, once a piece of hardware does work with Open Source Software, it usually runs quite a bit more stable than it runs under a proprietary operating system. I have yet to see a supported soundcard or video card bring down any of my Linux boxen, but the one windows workstation I have occasionally locks up because of the sound card (SBLIVE).
Many projects start out because college student X hates Microsoft/BillGates/Windows, and decides he is going to drive them into the ground by writing the killer application for Linux. Of course it will be Open Source, because Closed Source is Evil (tm). So he dives in and writes an application that attempts to outdo a major windows application like Word/Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever. Let's say he achieves some success and has a partial clone up and running a year later. Let's say it gets lots of press and looks like it might really be a killer app. Now what are some good reasons not to use it?
As the program is not someone's livelihood, there's no guarantee that the author won't lose interest and walk away from it. There's also no guarantee that anyone else will want to maintain it. With closed source the company could go out of business, but at least they have strong incentive (money) to stick around.
The program was initially written by a college student with no experience architecting large applications, and most likely no experience with any kind of real software engineering of any kind.
Without strong leadership there's no guarantee that the program will remain stable, managable, and continue in a direction that really suits the user base. This happens quite often because, say, a graphic arts program is not written by someone familiar with graphic arts, but someone who wants to get back at Microsoft.
I see little or no documentation out of Microsoft for the stuff I buy, either. Nor did I ever get much out of Sun or IBM. When I wanted good documentation I had to go out and buy it -- either from the vendor like in the case of MSDN, or from some book from my bookstore as in the case of X11/UNIX/IBM.
If you're missing documentation for open source products, you should check out your local bookstore. There is actually a remarkable amount of documentation out there if you're willing to spend some money on it. Much of it is crap, of course, same as with the commercial vendors -- but some of it is very very good.
It regularly astounds me that people who were willing to pay thousands of dollars a year for technical information from Microsoft/IBM/Sun/whomever won't spend a dime on the same kind of thing for Linux. Maybe they should. Certainly there are companies that fill this particular niche.
Can someone make money selling docs on Linux? I think they can. They certainly did selling docs on X11, which you might recall was open source too.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Are you now, or have you ever been associated with the Open Source Party?
m00.
He is right...egg in the face source has nothing regarding the discussion..IT IS BLATANT post to get traffic and should be mod'd down accordingly.
Funny you see ace905's name all over the egg in the face source page.
This isn't what he's asking for, but:
1.There's no support built into the product. Yes, you can hire people to support it for you, but it's a seperate cost.
Hiring an McSE to run around d/l'ing patches, rebooting, listening to user gripes, exterminating viruses and MAYBE getting someone on tech support who knows what to do is a seperate cost for licensed software as well. The $200/incident support is yet another cost.
2.Similarly, There is no warrantee of any kind. If it breaks, you have no one to complain to: "you get what you pay for."
You may have paid for a licence, but it also comes with NO warranty, express or implied, as to fitness for merchantibility or usability. We had a Wrkstation w/ WinME suddenly start spewing "wuauclt" errors. Who do I complain to? Being a small business with little volumn would it even matter if I did complain? Either way, you pay your money and take what they give you, and if you don't like it, tough. Ever try to get money back from a bundled license or shrink wrap box?
3.The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and there's nothing you can do about it.
Similarly, a business may suddenly decide there is no profit in a licensed software product and your left with an unsupported orphan, and no source code. Time to buy the upgrade!
Now, all the above is aimed at ONE PARTICULAR bad example of closed source - most all other companies software doesn't come anywhere near the problems we have with those guys, esp. considering all the licenses we have purchased.
In general I would agree that commercial sw is better polished by hard working professionals trying to keep their jobs, state of the art, a clean reputation and shield themselves from frivalous lawsuits, but the above arguments don't work for me.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You can find most any anti-OS argument you want off of MS website. But if you want a realy nasty, and indepth argument against OS look at the October Documents. They are a collection of emails meant to remain internal to MS. They list all of the things MS finds good and bad (From their unique perspective). It's more than you would ever need for a college thesis.
Also try looking into CNet and ZDNet they've both run frequent articles about how much they think OSource sucks.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Larry McVoy has some fascinating and well thought out arguments about cases where pure open source does not work.
Someone touched on this a bit earlier, but depends on if you mean using open source software or developing it, or developing using pieces of open source.
If you work for a commercial software company, who may not want to make their source open (because they have some proprietary algorithms or whatever - the reasons do not matter for my point), then you simply won't be able to use GPL'ed software. If you have a closed source app, or any software product that doesn't use the GPL, then you can't put GPL code into your app (without making your app GPL essentially). So, my point here is, you will have to beware of the licenses and how they impact your business and your code/application.
Second is a big one: patent infringement. There is a ton of open source software out there that comes with various licenses and such that say "no warranty", or more specifically "AS IS". What this means is that if you use this code (we'll call it "Code A") in your own code, yet Code A infringes on some patent, you can be held responsible for that patent infringement. Through legal wrangling, if the company who released Code A is reputable and well known, you may have recourse and be able to show that they should have known, etc, etc., but not always, and it may be a tough fight.
There are many benefits, but these couple things can be extremely serious issues to content with depending on your use of open source.
Ok, here are a couple ideas of possible arguments against open-source software:
- if the source code is available, then
there is a tendancy for people to cooperate and produce one really good product rather than establishing many mediocre ones. This is both good and potentially bad. Good because you have a really good product to play with. Bad because this good product will tend to be used exclusively. Imagine a world where every web server used Apache. When a flaw is found and actively exploited (worms, virii, crackers,
...) then at one blow all web sites could be taken down, which is bad.
- Free software is based on the egalitarian ideals of empowering people. If you accept that agenda then free software is the only sensible choice. Propriatory software, therefore, must have a different agenda. If you accept the alternative agenda (which might be "make as much money as possible"), then open-source is not necessarily the ideal software distribution model. A certain class of business (e.g. hardware manufactures) might view open-source as an unacceptable risk. Personally, I might disagree, but it's not my business and not my agenda.
Both arguements are fairly easy to refute, but they might help start some discussionThoughts?
| What, you were expecting
-O_O- +---- something witty?
Go back and study the kind of opposing arguments that people used to use against democracy (we can't let the people have a say in the making of laws. better leave that to experts.), jury trials (we can't let the people decide what the facts are for a case. better leave that to experts.), the freedom of information acts (we can't let the people have access to government records. better leave them to the experts.), the abolition of slavery (taking away ownership rights from the plantation lords would remove the economic incentives to produce.), vulgate translations of scripture (we can't let the people read and interpret religious texts. better leave that to the experts.) and a host of other prior controvercies.
Then see how you can morph those arguments into arguments against Free Software. You'll find it an enlightening exercise.
When I went to college and had to write papers (20-100 pages/paper, welcome to double majoring), I did research. When research didn't material I was interested in, you know what I did, I used my brain and reasoned through the problem.
Individual thought does NOT include going on to a small corner of the web and asking thousands of strangers.
There are open source games. But if you go to gamespy, games domain (etc.) and read about the newest, hottest games out there, none of them are open source.
Why not? Probably because it isn't profitable. Presumably you could run a MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game, for the uninitiated) with open source clients profitably, but since nobody has done it yet, it probably isn't that great of an idea (it would facilitate reverse-engineering to create alternate servers, for one).
My point is that software markets exist where open-source has yet to find a profitable business model. And if you're in one of those, you can't write (or in some cases, use) open source software.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Once you've made the decision of which software solution to use, you can't influence its developping process if it's open source (read non comercial).
In other words if there's no software in the market (open source or otherwise) that meets all of your requierements, you better pick a comercial software that assures you you'll get your missing features in the future, than count on the good will of open source developpers to implement them.
Much depends upon the specific open source software, the specific commercial alternatives and whether the enterprise intends merely to use or develop new software therefrom.
Key issues are support (legal and technical), and risk management. Many corporate General Counsels are deeply concerned about issues such as warranty and intellectual property indemnification, areas for which open source offers zero, nada bupkis, and for which varying improvements can be found in the proprietary sector. Technical support is well-covered in other responses.
Legal support in the form of support agreements and/or decent warranties have meaning to corporate lawyers and businessmen, particularly when coming from a decent enterprise. They are not always available, and in some cases expressly not available, but AT LEAST, these warranties are (even for Microsoft) much better than the NO WARRANTY, "AS-IS" warranty given by most open source licenses.
Indemnification *IS* a big issue, make no mistake -- and an indemnification coming from a large corporate enterprise is tantamount to an insurance policy against infringement; as compared to one coming from a small entity (worth less than nothing) or an individual, as compared to one offering no rep, warranty or indemnification against infringement at all.
This is not to say that these arguments are unanswerable in every case. The devil is in the details, and you need to compare specific products before you can balance and weigh the issues. But the questions ALWAYS need to be weighed.
Finally, there is a meaningful legal cost involved with open source compliance. Specific licenses need to be weighed depending how the software is used, and complied with in full. This means that procedures need to be followed, opinions need to be written and so forth, which in some cases (particularly in the development or modifications arena) can be pricey overhead that may outweigh the costs and benefits gained by differences in price. Of course, to do so, I would compare costs of an open source compliance policy against the price of a commercial source code license, but still, I have seen corporate folks decide to go commercial on bean-counting alone.
You might find this site helpfull. Take a look at : http://members.aol.com/erichuf/Linux.html
For the game idea, make a game that is opensource, and internet multiplayer. Make a server that is capable of handling many more people than anyone else could possibly try building, and sell the game service to the server for a monthly fee. Or make the server software closed, and only the clients open (not sure what exactly that would accompolish) Just an idea, probably wouldn't fly anyway... Opensource everQuest anyone?
Apple is an interesting example of a company which has an open-source foundation (Darwin) but is keeping certain parts of its MacOSX code closed-source (the higher level stuff, including the window server and GUI apps).
... right now, nobody else has features like these that are integrated so tightly together.
... but I also think that as the years go by more and more of the system including these apps may in fact be made open-source by Apple, once it makes business sense to do so. But right now, at this point in time, it would seem a bit foolish to me if they gave away all that source code for free - like "giving away the family jewels" to borrow the old phrase.
I may get flamed for this, but I think Apple gains clear and obvious benefit by keeping certain parts of its code to itself. Things like the unprecedented capabilities of the PDF-based windowserver, the ease-of-use of apps like iTunes and iDVD for CD and DVD burning, the integration of digital photography and DV editing
Windows XP clearly wants to get in on the action, and has gotten close to some of the smaller stuff like digital photography, but overall, from someone who's really used both, it really isn't even close.
Since nobody else has the technology, you can only get these features (and the killer apps being derived from them) on a Mac, so therefore to get them, you need to buy Mac hardware and get the bundled software. And that's where the money comes from.
In instances like these, it's not only smart of Apple to go closed-source to protect its unique technological advances, in many respects it could be downright foolish for them as the "underdog" (successfully turning a profit while competing with Microsoft and Dell/Compaq/etc, no less) to release their source code while they have a technically unrivaled product that is making good money.
I know that this argument can go both ways, and it could be argued that the higher levels of OSX need to be open-sourced as well
So that's one possible argument against a very specific application of OSS.
Well, if you think about it, Richard Stallman is always talking about freedom, and talking about talking about freedom... presumably this means that you have the freedom to telephone Richard Stallman in the middle of the night and ask him to give you free tech support for Emacs. I don't think he has any choice other than to provide it for you.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
He's outspoken against open source, but that's because he doesn't truly understand it. Many have tried to explain it to him, but he doesn't quite get it. If you do a google search on his name, you'll find reams of stuff.
Oh, and try not to laugh too hard at his hair. The man looks like he was a member of Abba.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
My god, this whole article is like some kind of special troll trap! Maybe Slashdot is going to delete the accounts of anyone modded up on the thread... (are you listening, Taco?)
What do I do with all this crap? Do I start posting reasoned replies? That would be troll-feeding, and might take hours. Do I mod them all to hell? Not really fair, since they asked for anti-OSS, but they're all so, so... WRONG!
It's like having my eyelids forced open to watch the XP launch or something!
Aaaaaugghh!
Quick, click on the Science section! Ah, that's better...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Linux implies a focus on GPL, which is one of many open source licenses, some of which may be more open. Other licenses with varying degrees of openness may be more comercially advantageous to companies then either a closed license or GPL, depending on the context. A paper discussing in which contexts a license is more useful is:
l as sification/dynamic_licensing_and_BSD_vs_GPL_debate .shtml
http://www.softpanorama.org/Copyright/License_c
Last time I checked you had to pay for support of proprietary software too. True, sometimes you get a free phone number that you can call when it's not busy, but's that's not an enterprise level support.
2.Similarly, There is no warrantee of any kind. If it breaks, you have no one to complain to: "you get what you pay for."
This is the most blatant piece of FUD that Microsoft trolls keep spouting. Ever read Microsoft EULA? (or a EULA for any other proprietary software for that matter). It reads, in part, something along the lines of: "To the maximum extent permitted by the applicable law, Microsoft hereby disclaims all liability". You have no warranty, no matter what software you use. About 2 years ago there was a case where some proprietary software caused millions of dollars worth of damage to some manufacturing company. The vendor admitted to producing buggy software but refused to pay based on EULA. The court agreed. (Search slashdot archives, ithe story is probably still there).
3.The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and there's nothing you can do about it.
False. The one key advantage you have with open source is that *anyone* can continue the project, including yourself. The original programmer cannot prevent anyone from developing the project. On the other hand, with proprietary software, you have no such recourse. If the company suddenly decides it is no longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
hehe
...was the obvious: who's paying for this?
It always seemed irresponsible to me to go around insisting that software be handed out in source form, freely reusable and redistributable by anyone, without regard for whether there was some expectation that the software would get paid for. Of course, I'm talking about fanatical promoters like RMS, not people who just put their own effort in for their own reasons without saying that others are immoral for doing otherwise.
But then, I have a bad habit of thinking that things change overnight. I suppose it's a reasonable assumption that some form of compensation would be worked out before all programmers ended up sleeping in dumpsters, and it was probably a better idea to get things rolling on principle right away than to demand that all the specifics get worked out in advance.
Anyhow, there's a bit of critique in the essay linked below (along with my 2 bits on how to get it all paid for).
You can read it at: http://praetor.bus.utexas.edu/leibrock/index.htm
It brings up some decent points for both sides. However the paper is definitely shady in some areas. For example, read the section on IDSs if you want a good laugh. (They call Nessus an IDS which is similar to Tripwire.) :P
This is an argument I've seen against open source software; it is not my own opinion. (I expect to be moderated down anyway). It's a little rough, so work with me here.
Open source software prevents little companies from breaking into the market, and thus hurts competition overall. I'm going to use an imagined example of a person who's got a few good ideas for a compiler. They're not enough to revolutionize compilers altogether, but they are a step forward in certain key areas. He would like to take those ideas and form a company that sells compilers, to fund further research into his ideas.
It's a difficult business to break into, and even if his compiler has improvements that would entice a few people to buy, those people alone aren't enough to fund a company. He could, however, get more people to buy the compiler by undercutting the big guys on price. He could build a bigger customer base that way; some customers are buying because they need his revolutionary compiler, some are buying because it's cheap, but in the end, it's enough to keep him in business. As his customer base builds, he puts the money back into his product, and eventually he really is competing with the big guys.
Unfortunately for our hero, he can't undercut everyone on price when his product is new, because gcc is absolutely free. There's no way he can enter the market now; this hypothetical product may even be better than gcc in key ways, but it's not good enough to encourage people to switch. He may find a few customers, but not enough to encourage him to sell a product.
This example is a bit contrived, but can you come up with a scenaro where a new company today breaks into the C compiler market? I really can't. There's a potential segment of the market (adequate and cheap compilers) that is not attractive to enter, because an adequate and cheap compiler can't compete with gcc.
He's a VP at M$, who is opposed to open source. Check out the article at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-0 3sharedsource.asp for his arguments against open source. If you want good arguments against open source, you make have to look elsewhere.
I am a user of both open & closed source products. As I see it, the only downside to open source is that you have to be prepared to fix bugs yourself if you develop a dependency on a product is not actively maintained.
There is also the issue of "hand-holding" support from a vendor's 1-800 line that you certainly don't get with open source. This is no longer such a big deal with most products, since the solution to your problem is probably on somebody's website, and it's tough to get a knowledgable person on the phone when you call for support. For the most part, you will be dealing with a clerk who is reading from the same FAQ that you can get online.
The concept of being "orphaned" applies to closed source products as much as it does open source. This happens when the vendor goes out of business. Sometimes the vendor sells the product to a competitor who simply forces the users to convert to the competitor's product. Whever a software product is sold from Company X to Company Y, you can assume that support and future development will be thoroughly slashed. Anyone who as been in the IT business for a few years has interesting stories to tell about customers being abandoned by software vendors.
Commericial softwares are developed with an attitude that the "User is always right". so it has to be designed to support all kinds of Idiots that they deal with on support lines. Usually specifications for commericial software comes from users who don't have any development knowledge. The specifications are such that the user doesn't have to do much to get his work done. But opensource specification is comes from a developer, that means lot of flexibility with lot of configuration files.
Testing for opensource is all done by developers again, who do things in proper way unlike end users, so lot of hurdles that end users face are not detected.
Support is the main problem, but not only for the obvious reason. Take, for example, StarOffice. We looked at the pros and cons of switching to this and it fell at the first hurdle, which is almost the first question you ask when thinking about bringing a product in: "Who is going to support it?"
Putting StarOffice into Jobsearch engines produce zero hits. Nobody wants to hire people with StarOffice skills. Equally, no one wants to learn StarOffice skills as nobody is hiring. Nice idea but dead at step one. Exactly the same with Bynari - no market in these skills either.
I know it's a vicious circle but it's one that I cannot, as a solutions provider to my company, break.
Another argument is training. Every new person that walks through the door at my company has MS Office amd MS Windows skills. Time to get the up and running is about 1 hr to teach them the company specific apps. If we used Linux/StarOffice training time is couple of days to get them to a sensible level. Time is money, and if you are learning how to use a wordprocessor you are not bringing home the bacon.
So vicious circle number two.
Everytime an alternative is looked at it comes up against these two problems.
The following article talks about the supposed disadvantages of open source and makes an odd link between OS and Ralph Nader--as if it were some conspiracy. This is the most in-depth anti-OS piece I've ready. It's also quite amusing.
--
Scott Brady
The author of the Salon article, Andrew Leonard, is a senior writer for Salon whose interest is in chronicalling the Linux revolution. Leonard, under the auspices of Salon, is writing a book about linux that is targeted to "linux veterans and newbies alike". The book is being written online and open for review, much like open source software. In Salon's own words, their goal is that "this format will subject the book to the same kind of online peer review that the open-source movement applies to its software code. Everybody benefits"
Just as the the requestor for this discussion is hoping to avoid closed source articles written by Microsoft's marketing department, this article has the same credibility coming from the other side of the fence.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
cheap to fund a muni FD, or too small to afford one, and remote areas, that ARE covered but maybe too distant to get immediate service. As for $$$'s for equipment, you live there PONY UP SOME MONEY and protect your investment.
to come up with reasons not to use Open Source software.
In the past, the argument was frequently made that OSS was inferior to available closed source software. In a lot of cases, that was true. Now, it is not true as much. And, even if there is a higher quality closed source alternative, you'll end up paying a lot more money for it, detracting from that advantage over OSS.
As a business user, it could be argued that using open source software gives you no advantage over your competition, who also has access to the source code. But, it would be difficult for you to buy closed source software that your competitor could not buy. Unless you happen to have a lot more money than your competitor. In that case, perhaps you can obtain an advantage buying expensive software they cannot afford. Assuming, that is, that the software is worth the money to you for your purposes.
No, really the only arguments against open source software will come from software producers and sellers, not from the users.
Users stand to gain from OSS at every opportunity in decreased costs, lower risk of lock-ins and upgrade treadmills, obsolescence, etc.
OSS puts software producers in a fix. They have to produce something substantially better than the OSS to justify the price. They have to create substantial, real value in their products, and the bar that defines that value keeps getting raised with time. It's a difficult endeavor that takes a more time, money and talent. No wonder various software producers are against OSS; particularly those whose software products are not based on providing real value as in locking in their customers to provide the company with future revenue streams.
So, OSS really is unAmerican, because America currently hosts many software producers that benefit from the world's dependency on closed source software.
I don't know about you, but this American thinks that we should be above such tactics which artificially inflate the costs of software to the world at large. That world could really stand to benefit from the use of software to improve their productivity and standard of living.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Everybody has the possibility to publish stuffs on the web. If Open source oponents do not publish, it do not have anything to do with the open source effort.
Well at least in the sense that you don;t really get any reasonable level of support from say M$ without shelling out some major cabbage.
Apple might be different, but it seems pretty unlikely.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Check out www.infoworld.com; they've had lots of articles for/against Open Source s/w and even have a columnist dedicated to this very topic.
When people use closed/shared source applications, there is an inertia that makes them less likely to use open source alternatives. This is sad, but true.
If you 're looking for arguments against open source an alternative way to find them is looking for arguments in favour of patents (not only software patents) Many of the arguments will be reusable.
:-)
However I can't promise they will make more sense of course
--red.
Open Source is not a problem, unless you are running a business off it. You want to run the business off supported commercial (not necessarily proprietary) software. This means, you PAY for it. Paying may mean spending the $30 on a RH 7.2 boxed set or $1000 on Windows 2k Server. The thing is you can moan all you want but the difference between the licensing costs for AIX or Solaris is much higher than the licensing costs for Windows 2000. This difference is far higher than the difference between Win 2k and Linux. That is why proprietary UNIX is losing market share (picked up by Linux and Windows 2k). Although BSD is also losing market share, it is doing so more slowly than Solaris, et. al. and I think that it will recover (BSD losses appear to be due to fewer new machines being bought, Solaris, AIX, etc. seem to be due in part to active conversion in certain market sectors BSD is FAR more stable than Linux, though, and will probably retain at least niche markets).
My point is that your business software has to be supportable as well as inexpensive. If you can get support from a vendor, then OSS is great. Otherwise it is dangerous at best. And what if your vendor goes out of business-- you may be better off than if it was completely proprietary, but it may be more likely to happen if you choose a product form a company like Eazel than if you choose a Microsoft product. Can you survive? Yes. Assuming you can support the software yourself. IMO, this is the main reason for BSD's loss of market share to Linux recently is the difficulty in finding people qualified to support it and/or good vendor support (though anyone who knows Linux well should be able to transition to BSD will minimal study-- just most people don't know that-- though the boxed set of BSD has an Awesome manual).
Business questions:
1: Is it reliable enough?
2: Is it vendor supported?
3: Will my vendor go out of business and leave me without support?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
that Landover Baptist is a satire site. You probably would not want to go there looking for arguments for/against anything.
Since their satire is directed towards/against Christianity, it might actually be a place to look for arguments for atheism (although I suspect that the authors of the site would tell you to get a clue and realize that the whole thing is a joke).
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
of Ghostscript fame is always worth listening to. Check out his OOPSLA2001 comments.
If you have ever examined the Communist manifesto, this is exactly what Communism is supposed to be. No, it doesn't work on a governmental level, due to corruption and sheer size. But this is where it excels: The program is freely available to everybody - as in everybody contributes his or her skills to better the community, and the authors/coders' skills happen to be that of writing programs. Another added benifit is that everybody can learn from Open Source, hence bettering future programs, as they can learn from all the programs and implement the best elements of them all.
So I leave you with this: Wouldn't calling Open Source Software "Creeping Marxism" be a compliment, as that concept is exactly what the Open Source movement is supposed to acheive? It is a harmless way for the community to benefit itself through sharing. Just some food for thought.
VA Linux is a good test case. There should be 100 articles about their move away from the hardware business and (arguably) from open source.
Search google and slashdot...
Pedro Côrte-Real.
One of the biggest advantages and disadvantages is the lack of leadership and direction in Open Source.
I'm not going to tell here what the advantages of lack of leadership are. I'm sure everybody here already knows. And besides: that's not the question ;-)
Lack of direction means lack of uniformity. Which means the system is harder to learn. Nobody in Open Source is forced to use somebody other's wheel, so the invent their own. This creates inconsistent interfaces, config files, file locations, distribution channels, licenses, etc, etc.
Now, for us hardcore Linux hackers that's no problem. I do know about sendmail.cf, named.conf, smb.conf, fstab, lilo.conf and all those nice and inconsistent file formats. But in my experience they tend to annoy beginners. Same story goes for Gnome/KDE/X-interface-of-the-week.
And there's next to nothing you can do about this problem.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
The FBI Wants to Tap the Net...
- but -
CmdrTaco would just like to tap your ass
If open source worked for every company then every company would work with open source. Think about it. Companies want to make profit, if they can profit by becoming open source or even if they can simply maintain current income levels but gain better product implementation, a company will choose to do so. It of course takes them time to make the transition but if it's truly in their best interest they would do so - or another company in their field would and would, in theory, gain market share if open source is so good for a company. Open source is not the "end all, be all" and many companies have looked at their options and seen that open source isn't feasible to maintain their profit structure and levels. It is very hard to convince someone to pay $500 for a piece of software if they can get the source and load it for free. Even if it takes them a full day to do so, a college student (for instance) will spend that time happily - enthusiastically, really - looking around and figuring out how to get the thing to compile rather than figure out how they can afford the $500 piece of software.
It is not impossible to maintain profits but I guarantee you lose sales if your product is open source. Most open source software companies' profit is made by things other than the open source software, whether it is additional closed source software, a closed source layer above the software (Apple) or other services. The software that becomes open source is no longer the same revenue stream as the closed source software equivalent.
The other problems with open source I see mainly as the incompatiblity of some open source licenses with other licenses and the collaborative development issues raised. Both of these problems can be solved in a much more simple method - thought. Picking GPL is great if you want to strictly enforce your "openness" but it isn't necessarily the most friendly license, there are others. Collaborative open source programming doesn't have to mean all changes made have to be allowed into the main development tree so you just change how that's done. The real problem is still profit. Yes, you can show me a dozen profit open source companies (even ones that never IPO'd or weren't bought out?) but I can name you many, many, many more companies that aren't open source and are doing at least as well.
if you conduct yourself like you are ALREADY being spied on, you've got nothing to worry about...
besides, they've been doing this for years...
the only news is that it has been made PUBLIC knowledge.
If a company wants to break into an IT market, in which there currently is no competition, open source would probably not be the way to go. You can make a hell of a lot more money when you come into an industry as the only provider of a technology with a monopoly strangle hold (due to lack of competition). Open sourcing the software may provide innovation, however it would also give the competition a starting point. If you're the only company in the field, there is little reason to create competition for yourself.
This means that non-coders (read: the 99% of humanity who are not programmers and have better things to do with their time) are second class citizens for the open source community. Not only do they not contribute to the code base, but their suggestions are met with a scornful "write it yourself if you want it". (This attitude is common on Mozilla's development lists, where you can almost always count on at least one "if you want X submit a patch, otherwise shut up" for any feature suggestion X.)
Down this road lies software written by and for hackers and everyone else can either shut up or get in the car. If you don't know C, you're worthless, and if you don't even want to try to learn C, you're worse than worthless. Besides, the common folk suggest really boring stuff that just shows they're stupid lusers. Our time is better spent on stuff we find fascinating. (For an example of "lusers say such stupid things" consider the recent KOffice usability review which found some users are confused by the case-sensitivity of formulas in KCalc. The response was not "Well, it'd be a mere few minutes of work to make KCalc formulas case-insensitive, so we'll do it", but "Don't blame KCalc that these idiots are too stupid to enter cell names in uppercase. If they care that much they can write their own patch.")
Imagine doctors telling you that if you don't know how to take out your own appendix, they're certainly not about to do it for you. Besides, the time they spend on your appendectomy could be so much better spent working on a new scalpel technique for an obscure procedure that's almost never performed in the real world. That is the image many open source proponents offer to the world: if you already know how to do what you want, we'll consider doing it, but what you want us to do is boring, so we won't anyway. And anyway you can do it yourself, so don't be a lazy luser.
This is an attitude that closed source could never get away with, by definition. Since the customer cannot offer code, all they can offer is money and feedback and they will be more than happy to stop offering both if they aren't listened to (or catered to, if you prefer). Microsoft has obtained its market position mostly by giving people what they say they want. (Feel free to insert a snotty "and never giving them what they need" if you'd like. The argument stands nonetheless.) Non-programmers are elevated from second class citizens to kingmakers. They are the ones who decide what software lives and what dies, based not on whether or not it is fun to code feature X but whether or not they want/need feature X. And this infuriates some hackers.
Not doing something because it's boring isn't a great way to run a hospital, and it's not a great way to run a programming philosophy that is supposed to bring freedom to everyone, either.
One of the only strong (i.e. non-Microsoft) arguments against open-source is that coders may want to retain ownership over what they write. You can't make a living off the satisfaction that you're supporting a movement, after all. The arguments of a lack of coordinated direction and perhaps of a high degree of zealotry also work for me..
That and validating 'qualifications.' How many times do you see, a certificate program qualification, and not general practice qualification. eg. MCSE, NCE vs BS in IT with a minor in accounting.
Seems to ba a lot of 'track' certifications, and not a lot of 'general purpose' certifications.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Developers all over -- the sort that don't have web pages because they're too busy debugging -- oppose open source. I'm one of them, to a degree, and our entire staff here is much more fanatical than I.
It has far less to do with moral issues or "what OS is better" -- many of these guys work on or with open source code fairly often. I run Cobalt Linux on my development webserver because that's what it came with and the logisitics of installing Sco or BSD over an rlogin is frightening. But I'm uneasy about it.
Why? Because in many ways it threatens our jobs! The problem with true open source programming when you're a lifetime developer for a large solution provider is that it suddenly becomes less feasible to develop custom solutions than to pay exorbitant licenses. A lot of the applications I've developed have been very similar to tasks you could probably perform in Access or Excel -- were it not for the cost of deployment of these packages. These apps were written from the ground up, they are very specialized niche pieces which are perfectly matched to what our workers have to do. Now, consider what would happens when an open office solution comes along and does something similar to what Access does. Suddenly, you don't need a programmer to build your application, all you need is a scripter. A scripter is much cheaper, and I get my walking papers.
Now a lot of you might chime in about how I'm technically doing too much work, or how I can transition to a "support" role (find a supporter who makes six digits and you'll have found a man with a silver tongue) or how the elimination of senior programmers is in someway good for the company. But the solutions I provide are easy to support because they only operate in one way, they're easier to learn for our customers and the code is well known by everybody here because we developed them part and parcel. The initial cost of open source seems low, but the support cost of pouring over lines of code written by god knows who using god knows what style to find some bug that may or may not be known and then fixing and releasing the fix legally under the license of the code is much higher -- rather than employ one programmer for a few hours to fix a bug he knows about, you're faced with either hiring a consultant at exorbitant rates to fix the bug or a scripter for a couple days to research, fix and release the patch.
I like getting free software, but promoting open source is something that is very delicate in our industry. It's harder and more expensive to support, extend (with exceptions, apache is much easier to modify than IIS, but in my experience that's very rare among open source projects) and deploy than homebrewed software, and often has no associated costs to use yet it purports to be "free as in speech not as in beer." It's really hard to get people to pay for steak when you're giving them hamburgers for free!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
He has an article here that gives some details. He did right a very good analysis in a book, I edited, Pro Linux Deployment, that for instance gave no software roadmap as one of the problems of open source but he gave the counter arguments. There might be an article that is almost the same on the Web somewhere. The Introductory chapter he did was also licensed under some open documentation license.
The open source system as i understand it is essentially similar to a genetic algorithm. Code is generated and submiited for review. that code is then accepted and then sent out for modification. An the process starts again. The probability of a piece of code making surviving is a function of its coefficent of selection. So the Open source software is then open to the same problems caused by bugs in evolutionary system. These bugs result in excessive complexity which results in large barriers to change due to elements in the system having a large number of interactions.
Consider this could the linux abandon linux in the same way that apple is killing classic and MS killed DOS. These are huge jumps that would be hard to achieve through the incremental nature of opensource
Head over to http://www.bsd.org/
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Maxim magazine has named goats as the number one most desirable animal to fuck. Also making the list are fish, ducks, geese, chimpanzees, snakes (for the ladies), dogs, ants (no, seriously, ants), cows and horses. Damn, and I thought I was sick when I fucked a calf.
To be brief because I doubt anyone reads this as far down the conversation as I am, there are very few viewpoints that are not highly political regarding the open-source debate. I would strongly urge anyone investigating the pros and cons to avoid what Microsoft publishes and avoid what the open-source community (myself included) publish. To get right down to it, we're all pretty self-involved and we don't really offer an unbiased view.
Do yourself a favor and find the IT department at your local bank, hospital, school, or other business. Seek out meaningful local IT companies that are asked to solve this problem for their customers. Ask businesses of different sizes.
I hate to say this, but Slashdot is very political on this subject. I, like most Slashdotters, personally believe that open-source has so many benefits that there's little reason to think of alternatives. But for yourself, go somewhere else to find your answers.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
Open source software is great if you're a programmer. You can look at the code, understand what's going wrong, fix it, etc. But non-programmers don't care about that.
What I want in software is ease of use. If I'm installing some normal, closed source software, it's incredibly easy. I stick the CD in the drive, and a screen pops up asking if I want to install it. I click yes, then I click Next a few times, and it's installed. I open up the software, and it's easy to use. Nearly everything I want to do is intuitive. Anything that isn't is clearly explained in the help file. No problems, no fuss.
Now contrast this with open source. I've only installed an open source piece of software once, but it was a nightmare. I went to the site on Sourceforge, and saw dozens of different versions. I didn't know which one I wanted, but assumed the most recent one would be best. So I downloaded it. But I couldn't install it yet, as I needed to make sure I had the right version of a Java compiler. So I opened up a command prompt and typed in what the instructions had told me to type. Nothing happened. Eventually I realized that I didn't have Java at all. So then I had to download that.
I finally succeeded in compiling the code, and opened the program, only to discover that I couldn't use it at all. None of the menu commands did anything, the buttons didn't work, and the software was completely useless to me. I checked the help menu, only to discover that rather than having explanations of how the program worked, it only gave a link to the raw code. I paused to curse my open source advocating friend who had reccomended the software. Then I was complaining about it to another friend who used it, and he told me that he hadn't had any of the same problems I did. I realized after this that I had a bad version of the software. So I downloaded a different one, which worked, although it still involved quite a bit of finessing and difficulty in figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
Now, I admit that I'm basing my judgement of Open Source on just one experience, but my experience matches what most non-techy people assume OS is like.
Ask yourself a question. How many non-techy people do you know that use Linux? I have lots of techy friends who use it and love it. But I do not know, nor have I ever heard of, a non-tech type person that uses Linux or even has the slightest interest in using Linux. This is not because they are ignorant. It's because ease of use is important, and Microsoft has invested a lot of time, effort, and money in making windows easy to use. I, like most non-techies, am willing to live with having to reboot my computer every couple of weeks because something crashed, rather than dealing with all the complications of Linux.
Another issue is name brand recognition. A lot of you may scoff at this, but it does have a real value. I know that for the things I do in my job, MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will work perfectly. If someone's willing to pay me $50K a year, they're going to be willing to spend $300 on MS Office so that I can do my job effectively. I'm sure that there exist open source programs that do everything these programs do. But I don't know what they are. I wouldn't know where to look for them. I wouldn't know what different software packages do. I wouldn't know which distros to trust. I wouldn't know what patches to take. This is all things I could find out, but any time I spend researching the issue is time I'm not spending working. It's much better to just go with what I know. It doesn't matter how nifty a program is; it's completely useless if the people who need it don't know it exists.
Finally, there's an economic critique of OS. It's a basic fact of economics that market failures arise whenever someone either doesn't bear all the costs of their actions, or doesn't reap all the benefits. The same principle that makes companies pollute too much because they don't have to pay for the damage the pollution causes will make programmers produce too little when they their code can be copied freely. It's a basic problem of externalities and free-riders.
There are areas where programmers will code for fun, that this won't be a problem. But what about other areas? Oh sure, you might argue that someone who needs the software would hire a programmer to create it, but this only works if there is a single individual willing to pay the entire cost of development.
I'd be willing to pay $150 for an accounting package. There exist closed source companies that are willing to spend millions to develop such a package, becuase they know there are tens of thousands of people like me. These companies hire dozens of programmers to write the code, QA monkeys to test it, tech-writers to explain it, marketers to get it out there, and market researchers to figure out what people actually want. This is simply not an effort I could replicate by paying a contract programmer $150. So I go with the closed source solution.
Mostly, it concerns the histrory of linux and the other open source software that makes it so great - sendmail, apache, Xfree86, etc.
Most of the book is (obviously) pro-OSS. However, if your in a hurry (if your anything like me in college, I get the feeling this essay has to be in tommorow ;-) copy & paste those slashdot replies in QUICK) the final chapter gives a nice balanced perspective on the pro's and con's of Open Source - addressing issues such as forking, propreitery extensions of existing standards, commercial pressures, GPL violations, etc, etc.
May Help
The Open Source Initiative is a horrifying movement led by the dangerous Bolshevik hacker terrorist Lenin Torvalds. Forget Osama bin Laden; the world-domination bent Lenin Torvalds is far more threatening to the American way of life, and the sooner he is captured and extradited to Texas from his secret hideout in Finland and sentenced to death, the better. If you are not on any heart medication, I recommend that you read Microsoft's Halloween Documents as proof of how frightening the Open Source movement is. The Open Source Initiative is a huge underground hacker organization controlling a large area of Finland, with chapters around the world capable of operating completely independant of central leadership. Led by Lenin Torvalds himself under the banner of the pirate operating system "Linux," the militant workers of the software industry have taken the matter of creating software into their own hands, and have succeeded to a frightening extent. If the workers began taking other facets of the economy -- energy production, manufacturing, the media -- into their own hands in a democratic fashion, do you know what that would be? Communism! Open source programmers -- many of whom are high-ranking officials of the communist subversive Libertarian Party -- are in a syndicalist open workers' revolt against the capitalist system. They have rebelled against their place in society as consumers and wage earners and have instead become communist producers, writing programs for their community instead of obeying their capitalist masters and writing programs for their employer's profit.
.NET technology to once and for all secure software for capitalism. And as Ethan Blair is fond of saying, "If you would not take a bullet for Bill Gates, then you must be a communist!"
When Microsoft's Craig Mundie fired the first shot against the dangerous cancer of the General Public License, I immediately powdered my nose in the posh executive bathroom of BMG to celebrate with my fellow plutocrats. The GPL, which forces any company that uses the free code to make their product free as well, is a threat to intellectual property. The "Copyleft" (the codeword that open-source communists use for the GPL) is a rapidly-spreading computer virus that prevents innovative capitalist companies like Microsoft from using a tactic vital to capitalism: using publicially subsidized risks for private profit. The GPL prevents Microsoft from taking the public code for Linux, patenting it, and making the use of Linux illegal unless the user bought a new Microsoft Linux. Such a license clearly stifles and even threatens the creative potential of a righteous business such as Microsoft and is a one-way ticket back to the stone age. How would capitalism develop if major risks, in one way or another, were not subsidized by the public? Imagine if large drug companies and other large industries were not allowed to reap huge profits from patenting taxpayer-funded projects from the military, NASA, and universities -- America's capitalist spirit would be crushed, yielding de-facto socialism. The GPL is doing the exact such thing to the software industry, and it will destroy all the progress capitalism has made in the software industry if it is not crushed and outlawed.
Liberal communist social rejects love to call Microsoft the "Borg," but the true "Borg" is the Free Software Foundation, who wants to assimilate capitalism and individuality with the General Public License. If you are one of the millions who work in the software industry, be aware that if the open source movement is not promptly crushed, it will cost you your job and put you and your family out in the streets to appease the sadistic socialist whims of Lenin Torvalds. Microsoft must be defended from the cancer of the open source movement before it prevents them from fully developing its
Adam Kensington, multimillionaire entrepreneur
(I'd never deign to officially registering here!)
The Pluto Institute
I think one aspect (which I'm going AC for phear of karma lossage) is that open source software is often adopted by amateurs and would-be companies. I don't think you have to go much further than, say, Slashdot for a good example. It would never have made it on its own as a company. And they don't hesitate to throw a beta into production and disrupt their entire site for weeks. Arrgghhh.
FWIW, I'm working on a big ERP implementation. I'm the technical team lead and I worked on the technical architecture at the start of the project two years ago. Linux could conceivably have been a candidate for our database servers, but we didn't short list it (we wound up using Solaris on Sparc). Why?
:)
1) Scalability: Our production servers started life with 8 CPUs and 8GB and were designed to grow from there. Our development servers were smaller, but switching architectures between development and production environments wasn't considered a wise move.
2) Hardware Reliability/Availability: We were not convinced that even high-end Intel boxes could measure up in this area.
3) In-House Expertise: Our sysadmins had extensive experience and certification with Solaris.
4) Vendor Support and Experience: Sun has been doing Solaris on Sparc, and Oracle has been doing Oracle on Solaris on Sparc, alot longer than anybody's been doing Linux on anything. That counts.
5) We didn't need to muck about with the guts of the operating system
Short answer: not enough RAS, too much risk. I see this changing thanks to IBM.
We did find a home for Linux on our developers' sandboxes, testing out the latest and greatest. One of our custom utilities runs on Tomcat.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
First, ask yourself who opposes it:
Mostly, it's people who, like Bill Gates, believe in IP as if it were equal to any other right. So find companies whose livelihood depends upon defending Intellectual Property as opposed to reasonable use and other such uses.
I would tend to, therefore, look at:
1. Microsoft - Bill G started off writing letters complaining about people "pirating" "his" source code - and their business model is based on this;
2. IBM - might have to go back a few years here;
3. Oracle - might have to go back a few years here;
4. RIAA - many of the same arguments used on music;
5. Disney - who have been behind many of the IP battles with copyright; and
6. pharmaceutical companies - who depend upon IP for patent extensions.
I'm sure there are more, so check the industry mags on this - some trade mags that are industry friendly would help here.
While it may be true that some of these are now pro open source, they were not always so. And during the formative years in the last decade, they helped create (and then linked to) many such articles.
(Caveat - I own shares in many of these companies)
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
If someone thinks open source software is unamerican, what's wrong? oss or america's image?
Funny, but many things I like turn out to be unamerican.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
If you want some antilinux material, try adequacy.org. They claim to be the most controversial site on the net. While I doubt this claim is true, head over to their gnu/linux section(use the search page and use the category gnu/linux). A lot of their facts are wrong(about linux), and they are openly 'anti-opensource' so they'd probably make a good resource to your research.
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Here are some of the shortcomings of open souce:
:)
1. Support -
There is limited support for most open source projects. Although I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this is not necessary true for larger open source projects.
2. Lack of innovation -
I don't think that open source has ever been the leader in innovation. Let's take a look at Linux for example. I'll grant you that the Linux kernel is becoming very sophisticated but it's simply a unix clone. Don't you think that Linus could have come up with something better? Most of the open source people, myself included, carry a lot of baggage with us, i.e. we tend to write code that's familiar to us. Linux became popular because a lot of people (coders) already knew unix not because it was necessarily the best way to go. This is true of most open source projects.
3. Limited applications -
There will always be far more closed source apps than open source. For example, do you really think anyone would ever write an open source turbo tax clone? The closed source community has no interest in writing software that becomes obsolete in a year. What possible glory is there in that? Would you use open source tax software? I know who intuit is and I know that they will make good if they screw up my tax return. If open source tax software was available, would you use it? Despite what the open source crowd says, it's nice to have a viable entity behind your software.
4. Open source won't cater to a limited audience
Our company writes proprietary software for public television stations. In our market, we have one other competitor. Since there are less than 230 public TV stations in the country, do you think anyone will write an open source software package for public TV stations. Clearly, there is money to be make here. We sell a complete package including scheduling, payroll, fund raising, accounting, asset managment for close to 100k. If it's not software that the masses will use, you'll never find a comparable piece of open source software.
5. Difficult to make changes -
Despite what the open source zealots say, it's not easy to fix problems open source code unless you have the expertise to do it yourself. Last year, for example, our organisation discovered that we couldn't get past 256 specialix serial connects on our linux box. We encountered a similar problems with our SCO based servers but we simply told the manufacturer that if they didn't fix their propietary driver, they where going to get all that nice hardware back. Specialix fixed the driver. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we did get the linux box fixed but it took well over a month, big bucks and many e-mails to a third party developer. Now everytime we upgrade the kernel, we have to add our patch back in.
6. The last mile -
Many open source projects get about 95% of the job done. The rest is left to the system adminstrator. You won't find this in closed source projects.
7. The idiot factor -
Any idiot can use closed source. It's also true that some very smart people use closed source OS's too. You won't find too many idiots using open source projects though. Since our company choses to employ our share of idiots, all desktop system are windows (closed source). Sad but true.
8. Competing software, poor user interfaces -
It doesn't matter whether you install gnome or KDE but god help you when you need an application written that uses a different user interface. As an adminstrator, I had to put up with questions such as, "Why does this look differnt when I run this function?" In some applications a button may say "quit" in other applications it may say "Done" and in others it just says "OK", etc. Since everyone is doing there own thing when it comes to writing applications there is no standard widget, toolkit, interface, or even desktop. Some say it's a strength but it's just confusing to the end user.
9. Patents -
There are very few open source patents. Say what you will about patents but in the long run many open source projects are going to run into brick walls because of software patents.
10. The wall street factor -
Over the long haul, it remains to be seen if any open source business model can survive. The jury is still out of this one.
Please, no flames over this post. I just thought I'd take a contrary view. I don't believe everything I said
Please no flames back. He asked the question.
;)
Writing OpenSource:
You don't own your IP. Anyone can come along and make a whole lot of money just by slickly selling what you've created without giving you a cut. (Witness all the Linux compnies that sprang up. How much of that do you think Torvalds or the GNU foundation gets back?)
In a sense open soruce end s up meaning that marketing is valued but engineering isn't. A backwards situation if you ask any engineer
Using Open Source
If you base your business on any sofwtare you need to ask yourself serious questiosn about support. Do you want to make supporting your sofwtare base an integral part of your business/ If so then Open Soruce is good because you can. If not however it puts you in the ahdns of comapneis with no real vested inetrest in the software. If demand falls low enough they may well abandon what you are relying on fto promote another Open Source solution.
Personally, I believe in freeware as a way of promoting learning and sharing the grutn work of coding, but I don't believe that there is any good finanacial model to suggest that any form of free ware (incl "Open Source") makes sense as a final business product or as something to base your business on.
My unscientific observation suggests that most often today commercial companies use "Open Source" as an excuse/mechanism for a comapny to dump support of a flagging product line. (So called "abandonware">)
Well, at least I know ONE PERSON gets my joke. It's ashame the majority of moderators probably don't even know what /dev/null, or *nix, is.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Hmmm this makes me wonder,
When can open source be bad for business ?
Only when you really want to sell it as close source, but you can cause its allreaddy writen with an open source licence.
There is no real other draw back, except maybe that some people can think its less secure cause 'hackers' can find holes in the software to exploit them.
I hear people saying things about its free, and all the other things they think that is open source, but it just means you are able to read to source, this gives you no right to use the source for your own good. There still things like copyright etc....on it.
I have been using open source software for about 4 years now and the only con i have found overall that there is a load of unfinished and undocumented software that or doesnt compile really nice on my system or fails to do what they say it does. But then this also has happend to me with closed source software except that i couldnt compile that myself, so i see no real difference here except that i could have fixxed the open source software myself cause i had the source.
Last stuff i am goign to say is that i think cause of not enough people jumping in the train of open source your options are a bit limited if it comes to use only open source software for all your needs, maybe all the software is around, but that doesnt mean they always work as good as there closed source counter parts. But open source is like giving away you ingredients its an honest way of business, cause you can check whats going on, you can check for qualitie ( or however you write that word.) and be damn sure it works liek you want it to work, even if it would take the same time as writing the software your self, you have the option.
Quazion...
Ps. Maybe i should have checked for spelling errors.
Press F1 in a MS app. Chances are you'll see a big "help" screen pop up. That's documentation.
There's a lot of OS documentation out there, of course, but how useful it is is another matter. MS documentation is generally aimed at the basic user, while OS docs are aimed at programmers, sysadmins, and l337 h4x0r5. The average computer user falls into the former category.
Note that this isn't quite the usual "ease of use" argument. It doesn't matter how easy an app is to use, if you can't find out how to go about it...
While there is nobody forcing them to release Emacs21 on a particular date, you can fare more easily get pre-release versions that might provide the support you need. It may be that you just need one nasty bug fixed and instead of having to wait for a whole new released version you can either fix the bug yourself or apply a patch.
If you are fixated on hard releases then open source is a little trickier, but if you can be more flexible then open source can be really helpful.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Just because software is open source doesnt mean that its made by Joe programmer with too much free time. There are tonnes of open source programmes created by ligitmate companies. If you want supported software, buy from a company. While their software is usually free, its stupid to think support should also be. You can buy support for the software. All in all it will still be cheaper, because to get good support from almost anywhere else, you have to pay for it(in addition to the software) anyway. This is especially true of Microsoft. Have you ever TRYED calling microsoft for tech support?(that came with your MS product) Last time I remember, I sat on the phone for an hour or two to finally get the answer that they couldnt help me.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
All that it means to say a work is "biased" is to say that it reaches a conclusion of some sort (and in almost every case, that conclusion motivated the work, rather than the reverse). The question is whether the data and other considerations which lead to that conclusion are valid, accurate, or insightful.
I've found that programmers without much experience with the code in an OS project fix it by creating a 'patch of least dependency'. For example, they don't want to change too much because they might change something they don't understand - and break it. So they make wee-little changes that allow the code to work the right way. There are two problems with this: as more people make changes to the code, it gets more complicated to make more changes. How bad it gets probably depends upon organization; If there are some people that are paid somehow to integrate patches and cover the larger architectural issues then things could be maintained with higher quality.
If you look at proprietary software and intellectual property protection, you see a model that makes some sense and certainly fits within an economic system. Developers are paid in accordance with demand -- demand is the best indicator for the benefit that your individual product provides.
Open source software is a development model that never accounts for real benefits provided; that is, nobody even knows how much a given piece of free/os software helps anyone. If I were to donate $100 to "free software", in what proportion would I donate to the individual products, or people? Is $100 enough? Too much? I don't know where to start, because I don't know how much help Linus is vs. Alan Cox, nor do I know how valuable Linux is when I could just grab FreeBSD, or any other BSD, or Hurd. I use linux, but if it never existed, how much would I be affected?
The point is that nobody knows. The developers are not compensated as accurately as in more standard business models. In my opinion, this is not economic justice.
I am not proposing a solution to this problem. I believe that the best software is created in this way. I also believe that no amount of socialism would correct this problem... the government has no better way of deciding a product's value than the people do (if you ask me, it isn't usually as good at such decisions... but that's a different topic).
As far as a credible source, you might try looking into RMS's writings, as well as the interviews/statements by MS. Both address the problem that developers don't always get compensated correctly (remember "unamerican"?).
Jeff Davis
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
I write/maintain closed-source software for a living. And there would be a big problem if that code became Open Source: we wouldn't have lock-in. I remember in 1999 when we found out that, amazingly, some of our programs actually did have a problem with Y2K. We "fixed" the Y2K problem in our Clipper programs by adding a single line of code:
If the programs were Open Source, we would not have been able to charge each customer hundreds of dollars for a few seconds of work. Why? Because we would have had competition. The customers would have been able to fix the programs themselves, or hire some other Clipper programmer to make the modification for $50. But since we were the only ones who had the source, we had a monopoly on modifications and bugfixes to those apps.
That's the problem with Open Source: it's too American and Free-Enterprise oriented. Reaming customers is "good for the economy." Competition prevents that sort of thing, and must be prevented.
People will have to decide for themselves whether I'm being serious or joking about my conclusion, but the aforementioned Y2K story is True.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Only 3 of these are ligitimate concerns for OSS (1, 3 & 4), and the crux of each argument is still FUD (not trying to coin a phrase either, each argument is either fear, uncertainty or doubt):
1) Requires a higher level of technical expertise to implement.
There are 2 problems with this as an argument against OSS - why would it ever be bad thing to have someone with a higher level of expertise on staff (would you prefer a first year CPA doing your payroll?) & second, that argument is based on the fear that it will be harder to make work. That fear is unfounded unless you have a reason for that fear - to a qualified admin, it's not hard at all. Depending of course on what your doing (see conclusion).
2. Can't always call "tech support" for help.
Without an example, this is vauge and could apply to any organization - Microsoft, Apple, Oracle or Sun can't always help either, it just depends on what you're calling them for. That's why I don't see how this is a ligit concern specific to OSS.
3. Fragmentation can cause confusion about abilities as well as compatibility
Foremost, neither linux, apache or sendmail have shown fragmentation, probably the 3 most widely deployed OSS solutions - as such, 'fragmentation' is an unfounded fear with no logical basis for support. Confusion (aka uncertainty) is caused by not knowing. An experienced admin would check for these potential problems, just as any shop would check before upgrading a MS (or any other) product. The compatibility issues are no different from ANY other software vendor, commercial or otherwise. E.G. Newer MS Word file formats not working in older MS Word applications. That argument against is based on a lack of information on your part, not a reality with the applications themselves. I'm sorry if this is rude, but the heart of your argument is based on not doing your research. Solutions and answers to each [fragmentation, ability of the product, compatiblity] question have been answered many times already, and the answer is invariably "it's not really a problem, you just choose to perceive one". Short answer is - you can work around it every time.
4. With no financial backing there is no gaurntee your apps will be enhanced or even supported in the future
This is textbook fear, uncertainty & doubt, although you're generalizing an entire sub-segment of software development which isn't really fair. Will the product still be there in a year? Can I depend on it? Will anyone work on it? Well, without being more specific no one can answer that question.
Conclusion: From experience, the two most important technological & day to day functions of a large corporation are the websites (internal and external) and email. Without either, your company is blind. Oddly enough, those are the two most famous success stories of the Open Source camp: Sendmail and Apache. Each of those 4 concerns can be addressed as follows - 1) Yes. 2) Commercial support available 3) See number one 4) They're built on internet standards, so unless the internet is no longer supported it shouldn't be a problem. Corporations should most DEFINATELY look at Open Source solutions for those functions (at least) of the business. It's cheaper, more reliable, and relieves the expense of maintaining licences on top of support contracts.
Sorry for the length, and no hard feelings intended.
Ctims2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Simple rules:
.NET standards.
1) Open Source is good for the consumer.
2) If companies can pull it off they are better off with a proprietary solution.
I'm as big a fan of open source as anyone but I'll laugh at anyone who tells me that Microsoft could be making more money for its shareholders by putting all of its software under open source licenses.
Open is great for building support, closed is great for holding control and making money. Look to the formation of standards - most are a compromise between open and closed.
Most companies balance open with closed - giving up what they have to in order to gain market acceptance but holding on to what they can in order to generate excess profits. Look to the Java standard or even the new
Open Source Software provides a more efficient business model: better software for less investment and less cost. However, any company that chooses open source when it can suceed with a closed model (not many companies can do this) is foregoing profit and neglecting their shareholders.
Most of the time, anyone finding a bug in the open source gnat Ada would be told that it's fixed in the next release, ie the current commercial release. Ada Core Technology sells the commercial release about 1 year before it becomes available as open source. That's how they make their money.
I could go on for days about this and I'm sure so could everyone else, but not I, too, have got some school work to do.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
try this link
e ns ing/Gpl_faq.doc
http://www.microsoft.com/business/downloads/lic
I would HIGHLY recommend reading Eric Raymond's book 'The cathedral and the bazaar' before you write your paper. In fact, I would recommend the book to anyone (especially if you are unfamiliar with the open-source movement.)
Amazon has it for $9.95.
"Jack and Wendy Wiiiiiiner"
Here is an upside to proprietary, for-license-at-fee software and a downside to free (as in beer) software. Those are not the categories mentioned in the question, but they do relate to the categories of Open Source and closed software in obvious ways.
Proprietary, for-license-with-fee software has one efficiency going for it that freely available (including Free) software does not: Resources (programmer hours) are more efficiently directed to its development. The amount available to fund development of a product relates positively to the demand for that product. To put it simply, if there is somthing that lots of people really need, then there is funding to pay for its developement. This is because there will be a lot of people willing to pay a for it.
(That is assuming that developers can both both estimate the demand for a future product and predict accurately the outcome of their labor, at better than chance levels.)
In the development of freely available software, there is not that mechanism for pointing resources to purposes. A company such as Red Hat could invest in developing a much-wanted utility, but the portion of gains returned to Red Hat as a consequence of their sponsorship is zero. What gains they do realize are not a result of their sponsorship, but of the improvement. Lots of people gain from the improvement, but those gains are not concentrated back at the source of the improvement to sustain development, or reimburse past effort. The gains are diffused throughout the community.
Of course, if you are a hardware vendor porting free sofware to your platform or supporting your product with a free driver, then that would be a different story. In those cases gains are realized by the sponsor, when the sponsor and the vendor are the same. (Assuming that your port or driver works only with your own product.)
In conclusion, the financing efficiency is the ONLY thing that proprietary and closed software has going for it. That is THE reason its on top. There are efficencies of Open Source: Small changes in function can be achieved with small effort. Just modify a few lines of source and recompile. That's not an option with closed source. Also, in the case of the GNU license, improvements aggragrate accross the community, because the license mandates that if you release an execetuable you must release the source. Seems those two advantages do not trump the proprietary financing model.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
where do we sign up to offer such services?
I have yet to find a good, well organized resource calling for such volunteers and matching them up against necessary projects. I'm not really quite yet up to a full semi-official "HOWTO" for the linuxdoc distribution, but that covers only a small group of needs, as you point out here.
If you build it, they will come. If someone is actively seeking these people and making it easy to match such alternative-resources to projects as necessary, the people will come to you. Just like any other meritocracy...
(not saying there's not one out there, I'm just still looking for it. something like sourceforge perhaps...)
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
The article asked for points against open source, specifically linux. Some people have provided valid and reasonable links (myself included) to articles providing points against open source, specifically linux.
in every other article on slashdot, i would expect these posts to be met with troll / flamebait moderation, but NOT THIS ONE WHERE THE GUY ASKED FOR THESE POINTS.
moderators: get a fucking clue, stop the mindless moderation for this article, and let the guy figure out for himself which are the valid points without having to browse at -1 with all the crap flooders and goatse.cx links.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
http://www.morons.org/rants/gpl-harmful.php3
I'm afraid I have no links to other sites to offer on this one, but it's something to ponder.
:-) If anyone else reading this has a proposed solution to the natural incompatibility between custom software and consumer behavior, please let me know so that I can make money in the consumer space with open source. :-)
The FSF and the Open Source / Free Software movement have generally focused on custom application development. That is, the market segment where Customer A goes to Consultancy B and says "Hey, write me a program that does X, Y, and Z, and I'll give you a fat check for it." In that market, the GPL (or BSD, or any other FS/OS license) works great. It reduces development time, encourages code reuse, reuses good code, and all the other fun stuff that the FSF likes to talk about. And the fact that you can't then sell or license it for money doesn't matter. You've already been paid a good hunk of change for writing it in the first place, and it's usually very targeted and specific so you wouldn't be able to mass market it anyway.
Things are entirely different in the consumer application world. The average consumer, that is, someone who plunks down $50 for a shrink-wrapped piece of software and expects it to just work, is not interested in a targeted application. Nor are they interested in paying for a given feature to be added (buying a feature costs a LOT more than a standard upgrade price), or in having their friend down the street hack a new feature in just for them. That could easily break compatibility with everyone else's copy, and is way more trouble than it is worth. And what is this "compile" you speak of? The user knows not what you speak.
Despite my best efforts to find one, I have yet to figure out a way to make money in the consumer space with FS/OS software. The most extreme example (though not the only) is the gaming industry. Blizzard Software would go out of business in a heart beat if Diablo were open source. Even if they sold CDs of it, I give it 10 minutes before someone modifies it enough to remove registration codes and makes an ISO. Even Linux-friendly id Software releases commercial, pay-per-copy programs, because they simply could not function otherwise. They make their money on producing a product at their own expense, and then getting as many other people to use it as possible, on a per-user fee basis. That is the only way to really make money in the consumer space, and is incompatible with the GPL and FSF philosophy.
You also cannot charge for "support." Sure, for a custom app you can charge for supporting the program, vis, running it, testing it, answering questions when it's broken, etc. Most importantly, you are being paid as a form of insurance. Companies LIKE having someone else to blame (you), and are willing to pay a pretty penny for it. In the consumer space, however, support is a bad thing. If a consumer ever has to call technical support, for any reason whatsoever, it is a flaw in the program. The only way to make money there is to charge a very hefty premium for technical support (which results in very unhappy users) and release a program that requires contacting technical support often. A consumer-oriented program that requires frequent communication with technical support is what we like to call "crap" (or a Microsoft product, take your pick). A business model that encourages the creation of crap is inherently immoral, IMHO.
Incidentally, I did pose this question to FSF VP Brad Kuhn a few months ago when he was in Chicago. His response was to brush off the consumer market as trivially small compared to the custom business market. Personally I don't consider anything that is measured in the billions to be trivial.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
go to ingenta.com
search for open source
go to a library.
do some photocopying.
there looks to be a few things there, you may need to read the whole article. a well written article that is on the whole pro-open source should still list some of the pitfalls.
you should read the more academic journals rather than dr dobbs for this sort of thing. try sloan management review, computing, and business texts.
Linux has reached that stage in many areas: as a server OS and as an embedded OS, for example. It hasn't reached that stage on the desktop, partly because desktops themselves are not yet at that commodified stage. Part of this is Microsoft's control of the standards (MS Office file formats). Another aspect is the complexity of GUI programming, which is still very primitive, regardless of all the technology that gets thrown at it (X, OpenDoc, Display Postscript, Qt/GTK, Win32/MFC, OLE, ActiveX, CORBA/Bonobo/Berlin, Java/AWT/Swing, HTML, DHTML...)
But this is simply a game of catchup in which the commercial products only have so many innovations that can be added to a word processor or spreadsheet. There are few ways they can be differentiated, in other words, the office products themselves are ready for commodification, even if it hasn't actually happened yet (although StarOffice et al are a good start). Open source products will catch up, and eventually rival their commercial counterparts.
NT5 was due in 1998. Lots of great features were planned. Many companies bought into this plan and waited for the great upgrade.
It finally came in Feb 2000 as Win2k.
NT5 was supposed to integrate the stable NT kernel with the flexibility of Windows 95, resulting in a single OS for home and corporate use. Later, Microsoft said that feature would not make it into NT5. Instead we got a set of fixes for Win95, called Win98. A second set of fixes was called Win98SE. Then instead of the single combined OS (NT5), we got WinME and several flavors of Win2k.
In late 2001, we will finally get the combined OS that was promised in 1998, with most of the promised features. In the meantime, Microsoft released three other operating systems (not including WinCE), none of which had all the promised features. Along the way, costs have gone up and vendor lock-in is running rampant.
There are reasons to use MS software, but the ability to depend on their announced release dates is not one of them.
No productivity software worth using, no web browser worth using, no ability to compete at all against Microsoft in the desktop market, no driver support, no developer support, no support for web services (which are the future no matter how much you hate microsoft). And then there is always the good old saying "If linux were a beer it would be in a giant keg that got passed around and allowed everyone to piss in it" which basically sums up the fact that for every good OS developer there are a hundred little hobbyists that think they can write software.
In addition to the good (and less good) observations below, recall the single biggest (IMO) reason businesses don't choose a given open-source solution: they need to use a particular closed-source product for business reasons.
For example, if you're a consulting firm exchanging documents with your clients, and most of them use MSOffice components, you really have no choice but using those same components. Open-source products just don't interoperate well enough for bulletproof use. This is not to say that plenty of organizations can't use an OS document processor; but if seamless document exchange is required, you need to have the real closed-source product in its current release.
Same thing with many other proprietary components: If you have a business reason to be in bed with Microsoft or Oracle or whoever, the benefits of Open Source are irrelevant. This is the flip side of the good argument made below by Jodka: the financing efficiency of closed-source product development means you can bundle a particular development organization, license, and support infrastructure. Many businesses want or need to do this as customers. Or to put this in more consumer-oriented terms: If you want to play Myst III, there's no open-source substitute.
IMO this is a fundamental barrier to open source in the "real world": Life is great in the bazaar, until the day you need to rent out the cathedral for a wedding. Then you talk to the priest.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I really appreciate those that try to develop the man & info pages (man ain't dead!) but I'm afraid that it somply doesn't compare to the quality of the material available when working on a commercial unix system (I'm thinking of AIX & Digital Unix (now tru/64 I think)).
Documentation is not as sexy as writing the code - the documentation exists in many forms but the quality jut isn't there when compared to systems that people pay money for.
Dave
To run a company, whether you're selling socks, financial services, or software, you need to form good relationships with customers and business partners. A good portion of attracting these relationships is done with establishing a good image. In the business world, if you are not using a commercial operating system, your business is less credible.
Think of your bank. If your bank's tellers wore ripped up jeans, and its loan officers had pink spiked hair, would you trust them with your money? A bank spends tremendous pains to make sure its halls are sparkling marble, and its employees are epitomes of stodgy office workers. Why do you see so many bankers dressing in dark suits and white shirts?
At my company, we employ the smartest programmers around. Most people have PhD's and Masters degrees, often in several different subjects. Many of them have come from "open source" backgrounds, hailing gcc as a great compiler, using Emacs over Visual Studio, but at the end of the day, we all use commercial products for our main course. Namely we use NT and Microsoft solely because it buys us the marble hallways and stodgy Armani suits.
What does this result in? A low-key company of 80 employees using just 50 NT server boxes doing $30 billion trades of securities a day.
Remember, technology revoles around the business, not the other way around. For every Microsoft basher on slashdot, there are 100 businesses succeeding because they use Microsoft.
What ya don't get with open source is a sales person taking the purchasing decision maker out to the titty bars patting them on the back telling them what a smart decision they're making by going with proven industry leading software. Here in the US marketing is much more important than actual product. If management can see magazine ads or billboards for a product they purchased they feel warm and fuzzy, like they're part of something successfull. The quality of the product is irrelevant. Quality may be important to the techies, but management could care less, after all, what do techies know about important purchasing desisions? MySQL will never look as good as Oracle on a company's balance sheet. Open source will never offer these warm and fuzzy experiences.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
...it would be like Islam, whereas the Microsoft model is more like the Catholic church.
In the MS model, there is a hierarchy of allegence, and you allways know where you stand (and where you kneel). There is a central authority that decides how the congregation shall evolve, err, find enlightenment. Everybody is promised that "things will be better the next time around" and that you just need to suffer through this current life... Forgiveness is a virtue.
Contrast that with Open Source, it has no central authority, but there are a lot of self-declared experts around tossing their particular spin on how things should be. Some are more radical than others, and some can be downright dangerous (I mean script-kiddies, of course). But most are simple, practical, and simplistic. The lack of central authority in the regligion seems to make it impossible to have a central political authority too.
Which is better? Well, after 2000 years, Islam outnumbers Catholicism but still can't manage to organise a single peaceful and prosperous country.
(flames incoming.... run for cover)
-AD
I support the use of our clients products on Linux. We however are not permitted to have even a standalone Linux box on the premises period because it was deemed by certain people a "security threat". We can download viruses all day, and offload our secret plans or whatever since they determined we needed webmail to communicate with our clients, but you need Linux.. sorry, thats just too big of a risk for us to take.
Someone explain. Apparently Microsoft has oodles of it and [Net|Free|Open]BSD, Linux (by virtue of the fact they are free) and Sun, AIX, HP-UX (by virtue of the fact they are more obscure and they don't teach those kinds support in MCSE courses) have none or at least less of it and it is more expensive.
But what is support? Someone explain to me how and in what ways they get more "support" from Microsoft and less from say Red Hat in a corporate setting in whcih support contracts wiht. If one is downloading
I have used registered Microsoft products and never quite understood what "support" meant in the context of off the shelf software. How exactly does one get "supported"? I at all the workplaces I've been at (and let's face it Microsoft is run at ~ 100% of workplaces) I hae never noticed any "support" going on. If something goes wrong it's the local crew or the user that have to fix it: eg. you're on your own. In fact most commercial software licenses stipulate to this - so I can't see how they're much different than "no warrantee" free software licenses. Microsoft software - take IIS - in particular doesn't seem to have any more or less attention to quality control than say Apache.
I really don't know what support is and the aove queries are *not* facetious. I really do want someone to quantify and clarify what is meant by the nebulous term "support". The IIS vs. Apache example is a good one. Let's start there and use that product space to explain the term "support".
site:slashdot.org flamebait
Optionally, you could add terms like "open source", "GPL" or "linux", but you probably don't need to (although -goatse.cx might be a good idea, just to be safe).
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
No, I was serious. Microsoft is the most vocal opponent of& acsFlg=accessBought)
0 3sharedsource.asp
/ ss faq.asp
Open Source (see citations below). If I was looking for
an opposing view point, I'd start with Microsoft. There
main points seem to be that open source is a threat to
the software industries profitability (hint: look up
Microsofts profitability at http://finance.yahoo.com/)
and that Open Source uses an inferior software development
methodology and software project management resulting in
an inferior product (Hint: see http://www3.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=340962
See http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/exec/craig/05-
where Craig Mundie states:
"The phrase "open source software," or OSS, is often used
as an umbrella term for a collection of product
development, distribution and licensing practices, many of
which have existed individually since the early days of
computing. There are actually a number of different
approaches within this community, but the common traits are
providing people with access to source code and allowing
others to modify and redistribute that code.
As a result of Microsoft's statement of position today,
many people will attempt to say that Shared Source is
Microsoft's failed attempt at being an Open Source Company.
This could not be a more incorrect statement. Shared Source
is not Open Source. We recognize that OSS has some
benefits, such as the fostering of community, improved
feedback and augmented debugging. We are always looking for
ways to improve our products and make our customers more
successful, and to that end we have incorporated these
positive OSS elements in Shared Source. But there are
significant drawbacks to OSS as well.
The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of
unhealthy "forking" of a code base, resulting in the
development of multiple incompatible versions of programs,
weakened interoperability, product instability, and
hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan for the
future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can
force intellectual property into the public domain."
or
http://www.microsoft.com/LICENSING/sharedsource
which contains this:
"Software providers need to assess the different business
models to determine how sustainable, growth-oriented
business can be built. Businesses built around a strong
intellectual property (IP) base have a much greater chance
to thrive. The contraction in the dot-com industry over the
past few months came about, in part, due to the pervasive
model of companies giving away valuable asset, like
content, with the hope of making money selling something
else later. The GNU General Public License (GPL), one of
the most widely used OSS licenses, poses a significant
threat to the IP base of companies seeking to build a
business around GPL-covered software. Even businesses who
may believe they are "mere users" of GPL software are
threatened since they combine what they believe to be
separate applications with GPL code. This licensing model
has the effect of foreclosing a business's choice of what
IP to share with the community and on what terms."
Finally, there's an article in an old CACM which describes Microsoft's (closed source) development methodology. The primary focus is on testing. Contrast this with OSS which concentrates on public code reviews.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Solaris 2.5 had a routing issue (I don't remember all the details from back then, but it was a bit complex). I spent about 2 hours diagnosing it w/o even needing to shut the system down and had it identified, and had a solution. But the boss didn't like the solution, so I was instructed to call SUN to get support. After 2 weeks of calling, being called, messages left, being forwarded around, the answer finally came back "Sorry, we don't support that, but our consulting people can build a customer solution for you". So I asked them to make a proposal and send it to me so I can give something to the boss in writing since it would cost money. Their estimate was $20K to $30K of consulting time and we wouldn't get either exclusivity or source for the results. My boss laughed at that. And while he still felt SUN should have just "fixed it", and that I should keep calling until they do (I thought this to be a waste of time), I finally did convince him to let me try out my solution. So I put a small Linux box running a 50 MHz 486 on the LAN with one 10 meg ethernet card, and default routed all the Sparc 2000 traffic through it. Performance actually improved. The boss not being entirely happy with a Linux box handling mission critical traffic, ended up opting to buy a well decked out Cisco 4700 to do the job (which it did just fine). Of course if it ever failed (it didn't) we'd have been down for a few hours before a replacement would arrive. If the Linux box were to die, we had replacements ready to go (I had Linux loaded on about 80 old no longer used hard drives sitting in storage, and we had plenty of old PCs around).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Most hardware manufacturers only supply the Windows drivers with their products, and many many times they don't provide the technical specifications to allow the Linux community to make their own drivers. The same happens with software: most games will never see a Linux port. Well, Wine is helping in removing this problem.
This is not exactly a drawback of Open Source, but I have Windows (illegaly) on my machine for those reasons.
Curro.
titled "Why linux will lose the desktop war." I found it quite informative. It was discussed a few days ago on slashdot (oh sorry... /.) and it genereated a few thousand childish and petty responses, but what do you expect from the average slashdot reader? Some people just can't except the fact that their choice for a desktop OS blows the goat they rode in on.
but at least it looks really kewl.
Well, if you want very well-documented drawbacks, you can go fetch VA Linux's SEC filing, quarterly reports and that nice graph of its plunging stock price.
Sorry to be mean, I really admire what VA stood for... But that company's financial history should serve as a big, fat warning sign. At least RedHat is doing ok...
So in other words he can only sell his product to people who actually need its specific features. So.
This sounds a bit like the I have this product but I can't sell it because someone gives theirs away for free so we have to make free stuff illegal.
It is hard to compete against a free product, if you don't have some means of giving your product value when compared to it. Free software has raised the bar on quality, your compiler has to be better than GCC in order to get customers. I think this is a good thing.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
The author of ultraedit (www.ultraedit.com) has outright told me he doesn't like OSS. Try emailing him and ask why.
Yup,
We build and install lots of little Linux boxes for lots ort small to medium companies. When we run accross a high dollar accounting system or any server based/run software package it is Windows NT everytime! Used to be Novell before NT became more stable (usable).
How can you expect to get Linux support from a software vendor that don't care about Linux and sees only NT and Netware? You don't. You put a $2500 dollar NT server next to the $800 Linux gateway/router. Linux is no option when a SW co won't support it
Ask slashdot: "Why shouldn't I use open source?"
Why not just ask microsoft why you should use open source?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
this is just the comment that DOESN'T need to get out & spread around. (open source = communism)
Communism is an economic system, not an ideals system. By saying that open source is basically communism, you not only show your ignorance, you show your acceptance of a economic system that fair & equal (unless you're corrupt). Rich people do not want to hear about systems that will put them on the same playing field as everyone else.
so shut up and call it what it is - open source software.
The guy is essentially open sourcing his thesis topic looking for information on why open sourcing is bad!
Talk about a brain explosion
:)
My win2k installation at work bluescreens a minimum of 3 times a week.
This is with "professional" MSCEs maintaining the box.
My linux box at home, on the other hand, has it's uptime blemished only by power outages.
(I am too cheap to buy a UPS)
Suck on that!
Finally, how can traditional software businesses compete with the multi-level marketing scheme of proselytizing users that become testers and developers and finally evangelists? This strikes me as funny, because I have often compared the open source movement to Amway (in my mind only) where the major advertisement method is some less-than-credible word of mouth, an almost religious fervor, and the belief that, in 10 years, we will hold the whole market because of the revolutionary, yet, somehow, still exemplary of the thoughts of 1789, model we use.
Put identity in the browser.
Well there are two main issues here. The first is that if nobody asks for a certain type of software or features programmers aren't always going to know you want them. I mean most people don't read through large files in hex but to a programmer that is a useful feature. Equally most programmers might not know that some sort of business information processing is needed unless someone asks and explains what they are asking for. The second issue is resources. If I'm writing a program the features I need will come first because I've only got so much time to put towards the project. If you want to bump a special feature up the list then you should consider hiring me to add it or at least making some donations. Someone that sends me a new computer or my rent money will be MUCH more likely to get the feature they want added right away. People who give away their work tend to need that extra buck now and then so don't be afraid to invest. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The other that you've missed is 4. Make your game online oriented, (like CS?) and charge fees for server use and / or server version of the software.
Put identity in the browser.
You're kinda right, but...
It's not that the product has to be better than gcc - it's gotta be WHOLE LOTS better. Orders of magnitude better. Because something like gcc is on every distro, and is so entrenched, that it'll take a LOT of work to displace it. Even if some of the feature set is better in a new product, people have learned to live with the issues gcc has that are solved by the new product. This is similar to the MS issue on the desktop. Doesn't matter if Linux is even free and still 'better' (when it gets there). MS is preinstalled on 90%+ of machines. OK, it crashes sometimes. Can't do feature X, etc. But people learn to live with/work around those issues. So much so that even if/when something somewhat better comes along, it'll be damned near impossible to unseat the contender.
creation science book
Microsoft's general response to open source (and anything that threatens its monopoly) is to use FUD tactics. Read about it in the Halloween docs. I suppose Microsoft does have a point about businesses not actually making money of off gpl software. But this is a pretty bleak point of view, because gpl software could be successful if built on a good business model.
Take off every Sig.
Sometimes it can be seductive to think that you can take an open source project and modify it or extend it to meet certain needs for a company. This is often not the case. Often a company will open source something that they couldn't sell. The internet is also full of projects that someone walked away from after graduating from university. It can be difficult to wade through all of that when you're working for a company that thinks they can take a short cut to getting a product out by reusing some open source project(s).
I was involved in a project to try to get Mozilla to do something for which it was never intended. It was pretty difficult to deal with and frankly we should have done something else. However, to our very non-technical management, it seemed like a cheap and quick way to create a general purpose HTML engine.
That doesn't mean that taking something like Mozilla the browser and using it *as a browser* isn't perfectly fine. Mozilla is a great browser, but it's a poor starting point for making a general purpose HTML rendering engine to run in a small footprint.
So, I like open source, but it can be a trap for people who think it is a "magic bullet" or a shortcut for a project. When you hear the phrase "don't reinvent the wheel" followed by the description of a completely insane project that involves major changes to some huge open source thing - run!
I appreciate the availability of open source software, and have done my part to contribute to a number of open source and free software projects (Xerox PARC's ILU, MIT pthreads, UMD's Jazz, etc). Nevertheless, I am still not a true believer in open source or free software.
For me, it is a simple matter of economics, value and incentives.
I believe that the original, creative act of writing software has value.
The open source and free software finatics like to tell you that they are not opposed to making money on software, and point to a number of so-called "open source" or "free software" companies as supposed evidence that it is possible to make money writing free software. If you look closely, you will see that these so-called "open source" companies are NOT directly in the business of writing software. These companies are really in the service or tech. support or consulting business. The software they write might help them sell their consulting services or tech. support or whatever, but they are not profiting directly from the software that they write. Red Hat would not break even if their sole source of revenue was selling Red Hat Linux.
Personally, I'd love nothing more than to start a small software company. The problem is, I want to WRITE SOFTWARE, not start a services or support or CD-pressing company that does software as a side-line hobby or loss leader. However, I know of no evidence to indicate that a company can even support itself (let alone make a profit) by "selling" something that is also freely available.
Personally, I consider this situation extremely unhealthy. While many of us are motivated by more than greed or profit, software is an organic entity that requires resources to do well. Open source and free software products will always be buggy, incomplete and unreliable, because the software development efforts of "open source" companies is just a side-line or loss leader to the company's real business. What company can afford to invest in good documentation or QA or *design* for something whose sole business purpose is to act as a gimmick to sell more services? As a matter of fact, some clever companies (like Sendmail, Inc.) have figured out that needlessly complex software is a great way to make people need your support services!
Although with the half-life of most new companies it is almost a null point, as is the support issue.
it's one of the major advantages to Open Source as well, but also a pitfall...
I don't have any links for you, but if you need to exert tight control on a project, I don't think it's really something you can change. If you did, it'd also remove the advantages of lack of control as well
just my 2 cents
If you were running a telnet based Point-of-Sale system, then Open Source might rule, but for typical corporate computer work it would be far to difficult to install and train employees to use open source solutions. Remember that in the Universities, typically only compsci, engineering, and science students every really get to play around with workstations. Your typical business person just learned to use computers on the job.
Not to mention a lot of companies had unix(tm) systems running before they got pc's, and they were considered to be expensive, mysterious, and associated with dumb terminal POS-type systems written in unix(tm); unibasic(tm) sphagetti code.
The novice X11 user needs a very restricted shell, almost a chroot to home; however, the pro requires group access and a variety of permissions. I think that most MI$ personnel consider the ramifications of 1000's of users on unix(tm) style systems to be a management disaster, and so they quickly opt out for the more expensive yet easier commercial solution.
Business often has to pay for a quicker solution when they know they could do it themselves just because their time is better served elsewhere. In this respect a lot of Open Source solutions lose because of the time required to tailor the solution to the problem at hand.
At home I use Debian exclusively on a SMP system and it is all I could ask for in a PC, but at work it will be many years before the average employee could walk up to a Debian box and know what to do or expect.
I think that if you are smart enough to figure out how to install and use open source software, then you are perhaps foolish not to do so.
Clickety Click
CASE 1: "We deserved it for choosing free software!!! Fire the jerk that deployed that solution inmediatly and buy some Office XP licenses".
With Closed Source (meaning Windows/OSX) you can blame a multimillion elephant company for just about anything.
CASE 2: "Boss, MS-Windows had a bug exploitable in about 400 million computers. It's not our fault we did everything right and are already downloading the patches from MS Pay.net. Maybe we should buy a respectable Antivirus solution to secure our bussiness best."
I can tell you this: i could go and install Linux for everyone in my company (it's a small one) but:
If ANYTHING goes wrong i will be the one to blame.
If programs get unsopported/incompatible i will be the one to blame.
If a virus is found to infect Linux (users do stupid things) i will be the one to blame.
If ANYTHING (yada-yada-yada) happens, i will be the one to blame.
And i sure have enough problems already!!!! So i use it for myself and, if they ask, i show them the software and they seem to think of it a strage copy of Windows...(they quite like it)
So unless Open Source build more reputation and brand awareness, it'll be a little more hard to deploy because nobody would want to get blamed for that decision.
IBM, SUN, COMPAQ and others are greatly helping change this blamability issue.
unfinished: (adj.)
IEEE Software magazine has had a decent coverage on the broad subject of "open source" software development in recent years. Open source was the main topic of the January/February 1999 (Vol. 16, No. 1) edition. Unfortunately IEEE Software is not available on-line (I can't remember any peer- reviewed software-related magazines that are), so you'd just have go to your department's library and copy the relevant articles.
I fear most of his arguments are due to listening to RMS too much (I have great respect for genius, just a problem with his views in public). They don't reflect Open Source, more the FSF saying "all software must be mandated/forced open".
But, the valid case against Open Source is (realize I _AM_ a proponent, it's just good to know the negatives):
Suppose I tried to sell a customer a desktop Linux operating system and distribution.
The first consumer question is: is it compatible with MS applications?
The answer is "of course not". While Linux has many "Office" applications, compatibility with a proprietary protocol or format is a moving target, compatibility can't ever be guaranteed by anyone, and any competition is always one step behind, because MS changes their proprietary "standards" at will. As long as consumer's demand proprietary standards, their can be no real standards nor competition.
(It's very tough, but not insurmountable to overcome proprietary standards.)
Then, the consumer asks: I want to watch my DVD's... can Linux do that?
The answer is "yes... but it's illegal". No distribution can install the necessary DeCSS code, or the folks who sell the distribution would be charged with a criminal offense under the DMCA. Only those companies approved by the MPAA can legally sell the software for watching DVD's, and they aren't allowing any Open Source projects to do it. But you can go off shore (France) to get DVD viewing programs; but realize that software is illegal to possess in the states. Note that you bought or rented the DVD legally -- they're just trying to control the applications that allow you to watch it. The legislators decided that they couldn't stop those illegally distributing copyrighted material, so they wrote laws that make it criminal to write programs that compete with programs that handle copyrighted material.
When Open Source gets beyond proprietary standards, laws benefiting those with the proprietary lock-in kick in to help maintain monopolies and proprietary standards.
So, the customer asks: you mean to be compatible with Windows I have to use illegal "hacker" software.
The answer is, in the states, "yes".
As long as the answer is "yes", no Open Source distribution can be a legitimate contender for the desktop.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of unhealthy
"forking" of a code base, resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of programs, weakened interoperability, product
instability, and hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan for the future.
Furthermore, it [Open Source development model] has inherent security risks
Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General
Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates
source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must
make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no
additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the
intellectual property of any organization making use of it.
In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the
business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They
ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that
is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling
something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the
independent software sector.
But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isn't
successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software
broadly accessible to consumers.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Where there is a market demand, it will be met. In the case of documentation for open source software, documentation is written and distributed by companies like O'Reilly.
As for "usability, design, and interface", that's a matter of debate and preference. To the degree that UI designers and researchers know what they are doing at all (and much of their methodology is questionable), they are usually designing products that appeal to a "naive" (in the technical sense) mass market. Sorry, I'm not part of that market. If I wanted to use what these professionals come up with, I'd be using it--God knows, the stuff is shipped with every PC and Mac whether you want it or not.
How nifty! :-)
Man, that would write several papers from both angles!
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
Both open source and proprietary software have bugs. The questions are: how much time does it take to get them fixed, how many resources is it going to take, and will we miss our release date because of it?
If you have ever tried to get a company like Microsoft, Sun, or Oracle to acknowledge a bug, fix a bug, or enhance their product in some minor way, you'll know that this eats up lots of time. And your programmers will have to try to come up with workarounds for the bug, often with very little information to go on.
Fixing or enhancing open source software is usually a breeze, if the fix is reasonable, it makes it into a new release quickly, and you can usually easily come up with simple workarounds for your problem if you have the source (replace a buggy library function with a statically linked fixed version, etc.).
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
From that, one can't conclude where open source software's advantages are, only that in total, many people prefer it to the proprietary stuff, all things being equal. Personally, I can say that on almost every point you list, I consider the mainstream Microsoft stuff greatly inferior to its open source equivalent.
The fault with Microsoft and its proponents is not that they produce the stuff they do, but that they think that everybody else must be just like them. Grow up and learn to understand that what you may consider "usable and beautiful", I may consider "awkward and ugly", and neither of us is wrong in any objective sense.
Yes, closed source benefits software producers and those who sell software. They have made businesses out of it, they pay their mortgages with it, and their kids go to college on it. It also employs a lot of programmers. Closed code needs many paid man hours to develop. If I write code, writing it closed guarantees that I get paid what I think it's worth. Marx pointed out over a century ago that under the current system, it's very hard to stop me from taking "surplus profit," but I am worth more than a footnote in someone else's fix of my code, yes? I unfortunately liked to program more than I wanted to pursue a Master's or a PhD in Computer Science, so I cannot teach for a living and create Open Source modules in my spare time. Closed code feeds me.
You should talk to Jim Allchin, he has some non-biased views on open source and he's an industry leader.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4833927.html
This has to be a coincidence ;-)
The article is about Microsoft blasting open source, and on the right side I get an ad from Gartner group saying "Need to control your IT costs ?" and some guy holding a pice of paper begging for "more money" ;-)
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
You may not have come to the best place to find OSS criticism. Most of the threads are focusing on support. I have not had much success getting credible support for any windows product I have "experienced." I have not had much success getting support for any of the "proprietary" programs I use for that matter. For microsoft support at work we turn to whoever knows the most. If fruitless, we go to the newsgroups. The same support path is taken for linux issues. We tend to have equal success turning to the respective communities for support. Perhaps better in the open world because more hobbyists are involved.
The shortcoming of OSS in the business world is accountability. Who can be held accountable for the flaws of the program? Cynically speaking, how easy is it to hold any company accountable for the "problems" its software causes? Nonetheless, we like to believe that someone's bottom line is going to be affected by their failure. It is safer to assume that personal greed will compel satisfactory software production than it is to believe that personal integrity will win the day.
Business management is about minimizing the adverse affects of the unpredictable. We feel better predicting behavior driven by the greed we understand than by the integrity we question. This can change. For now, consider the greed factor and lack of accountability as key shortcomings to the evolving OSS alternative.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
He's dispelling FUD. And I would have said the same thing.
The machinery of the proletariat is oiled by the blood of the workers, blah, blah, blah.
:)
I just liked the subject line.
I don't get it: if you're looking for opposing views on Open Source, why should a person's Microsoft-fansite be of any interest to you? True, Microsoft have said negative things about the GPL, but not about 'Open Source'. Open Source!=GPL.
If you're looking for opposing views on Open Source, first define what 'Open Source' means to you: is it just what it says: 'Open' up the 'Source', or is it more: a political view wrapped in a software philosophy: GPL. After you've defined what Open Source is for you, you can search for opposing views on THAT definition of 'Open Source'.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
You can't find them at all because the equation of open source = bad business isn't real, but made up on intangible considerations and concepts that aren't trully provable. What you will find is companies that supported Open Source and failed to profit (but implying that one leads to the other is IMHO a long stretch of the true). On the other hand, you will find lots of vantages for Open Source...
I don't believe this: somebody has chosen a homework assignment (because that's what it is) over his or her head and now gets all this attention? Why? Did the moderator want us to know how open-minded /. is to opposing views so badly?
My advice: ignore this thread, and let the kid do his/her own work. (S)he can also change topics: I'm sure there is one on which a complete paper can be found with Word macros for filling in your name and all.
"Slightly skeptikal Open Source Software Educational Society
This page is devoted to the research of the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomena without rose-colored glasses. I am convinced that we need to understand both strong and weak points of OSS and the former is impossible without the latter. Both exists. This page neither promotes an OSS euphoria nor the cynical pessimism of some commercial developers."
The main site of the bloke that wrote that reasonably high profile critique of CatB a while ago. There is mountains of stuff here in the same vein, and to my mind it makes interesting reading, if a little over laboured at times. A few spelling mistakes and technical errors but I don't think English is the chaps native tongue.
-- Oh Well
Yes, but after trying to do what Exchange does using Free software, I have come across problem after problem.
/etc/shadow for authentication - this is not an unusual setup...) is almost always missing. Maybe because the authors of courier IMAP don't want to step on the toes of the qmail authors? Whatever the reason, it makes my life more complicated and reinforces the view that while OSS is perfectly capable, each new program must be thoroughly researched and learned before installation. And even then it doesn't work entirely as expected.
Want to switch users from using exchange to IMAP? You have to reinstall outlook, and choose the "internet" option rather than the "exchange" option.
Want to use calendar sharing? I found a workaround up to win2k (using the web publishing wizard to a file:// share) but outlook 2000 won't do this on XP (can't find the web publishing wizard or something).
IMAP mail doesn't go to the main outlook "Inbox", but a different inbox. You can rename the box to "Inbox" but can't remove the old one, or set the new one to be opened by default.
IMAP connections time out - outlook is keeping them open permanently and Courier IMAP doesn't like it. You can reconnect, but it confuses users.
There are a bundle of other problems, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.
So, the result here is that you *can* replace exchange functionality, but Outlook does its darndest to make it awkward. Alternatively you can install Exchange and it just runs. In comparison, a qmail/courier IMAP solution is confusing, difficult to install, puts files in all the wrong places (/usr/lib/courier-imap?) and doesn't integrate with Outlook properly. Yes, yes, I know that Outlook is doing this on purpose...
IMHO, this is the real problem with OSS. Everything is different, everything has its own quirks. And nothing is ever easy.
Readable documentation with a walkthrough for a variety of different example configurations (eg qmail as SMTP, courier-IMAP as secure IMAP/POP3 for 10 users with aliases, using maildirs for storage and
Oh well..
To be fair, by the time you get escalated to third-level support, I have dealt with some excellent people, but this takes time.
The OSS mailing-list seems to be better and the response time seems to be equivalent to having a support contract with a heavy and reaching the level of somone who actually knows something.
See my journal, I write things there
What this means that it is difficult to be part MS, part OSS, particularly away from the developer and in the office. Most bits of MS Office integrate well, they can be scripted and they feed into an enterprise messaging and schedule repository.
See my journal, I write things there
A superb rebuttal of "open source", using Linux as an example.
This makes it easy to hack things together with VBScript which would be very difficult to do in another scripting language with open software.
However, MS independance of open standards costs. If you don't update everything at the same time, it is very unlikely that anything will interoperate well. However businesses do love integration and interoperability.
The gotcha is when you have to work with something that really needs open standards, for example if you have a mixed Unix and MS Windows shop then you will find that the MS stuff will work quite happily with itself, but not with anything else. Star Office couldn't give a monkey's do-dah whether the file was created usingt the Windows version or the Linux version.
See my journal, I write things there
Open source such as Linux is week in Quality. Regardless of the good things it can do for an organization server-wise, open source is generally written "by it's fans for it's fans". Consequently, it is weak in the Quality department.
For example, there are no Linux office seets available that approach MS Office in Quality. Yes, there are many out there and they are free, but each has a myriad of quirks in them that will not be resolved anytime soon. The reason for this is that unlike the closed-source community, the open-source community can't muster enough people with the time and dedication needed to work as a team and rigorously root out quality problems with the software. The reason for this is the fact that such operations are expensive and very unglamoorous - it's the expensive "donkey work" of computer program development. Ont the other hand, MS has a lot of donkeys that work as a team 24/7 ferreting out flaws in the Apps and while they don't get them all, they do identify and fix enough of them such that the Apps are infinetely more usuable than anything seen in the Open-source comminuity.
As Quality has been the bain of Linux Apps, it is also a been a source of frustration concerning the many available Linux GUIs. While these GUIs are imaginative and offer many, many redundant ways to get things done (I think this is a great feature), the GUIs also suffer from a lack of both standardization and common-sense approach. The "standardized GUI" argument isn't that hard to follow - Lord let me count the GUIs - but the common-sense approach is a bit more difficult to understand until it bites you. Basically, all the Linux GUIs I've seen offer many and varied insidious methods to violently down the operating system - options which MS would never allow without a stern warning on a pop-up screen first! I guess a lot of nerds think it;s cute - but it's really Mickey Mouse programming at it's worst. Worst yet, Linux does not yet have a standardized, reliable JFS so recovering from such an incident can be a bitch.
The lack of Quality in Linux apps and GUIs has no doubt been one of the reasons that the major PC manufacturers have been slow to support it as a cheap-server or desktop solution. Although a Linux install doesn't have a price tag associated with it, it is by no means free: someone pays for the time to install and maintain the O/S. Unlike MS products, the odds of finding the right drivers for your hardware are significantly less than with a Windows install and so the "Great Driver Safari" begins where the installer must search the web hoping someone has written a compatible driver for some piece of hardware that doesn't work. When a driver is found, it's likely to be poorly written and cause the system to crash. Yes - Linux crashes like a SOB with a bad driver load and don't let anybody tell you different. Also, I've seen Linux xrash a lot because of poorly written apps too and, as was said above, there are a lot of poorly written apps out there so expect Linux on the desktop to crash a lot. Consequently, a very rigorous backup schedule is in order here.
Thats all.
> No, they weren't. They struggled along for ten
> years without ever achieving sustainable
> profitability. The buyout was a rescue.
That happen not to be the case. Appart from the first year, they had a comfortable profit during their entire run. And that was well *before* the Linux hype started.
This is from their employees, if you have any hard fact showing they lie, show them or shut up.
> How do you figure that they [gnat.com] are
> profitable? You get to look at the balance
> sheets of this privately held company?
As he said, they have been around forever. That is an indication (not a proof) of profitability. If you have seen anything indicating otherwise, show them, otherwise it is just fud.
> And how do you figure they're open source? It
> looks like it's "source included," not open
> source. There are no source downloads available
> on their site.
"Source included" plus redistribution and modification rights is enough for the original and most autoritative definition of open source.
In any case, the GNAT sourcecode is part of the GCC CVS tree, and can be downloaded (via anonymous CVS) from gcc.gnu.org.
> No, they just had big layoffs
Big layoffs and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
Well open source is a very successful model, but there are some drawbacks, and they are not due to some fault in the Open src model but mostly due to the structure of the community. though the open source community works in close conjuction, there are many inctances where many parts are threaded. :-)(I did this from such a slow connection i used to timeout whenever I tried to log on :-)
A simple example is the linux distributions, though they are compatible but for a newbie, who wants to use linux for simple applications, for example surf the web using a winmodem(the cheapest available) or use an USB device or many other such mundane things, life can get tough.
the Open src model is not responsible for this, the responsibility comes from a bit of arrogance on part of developers. This is by no means an offence, when a person goes to the top in programing expertise, some arrogance is liable to come in. Happens to me happens to you happens to everybody.
I rememeber the LInus and tannenbaum flame wars. It was a lot about ego. The prof. forgot that a teachers job is to learn continiously.
so instead of the direction OIpen src community is going, it should try to be closer to the cause Richard Stallman(This guys amazing) intended, Open source is not about ranting and raving about some non free software or abusing everything that is not Open src, it is abotu freedom. Freedom to people, common people from corporate shackels. So i say again it is not Open src model but the people who are associated that cause whatever drawbacks it has. If it is to triumph and succeed, we need to bow down a little bit.. and address the computer illeterate consumer who just wants to send email and nothing more
regards
The Coward
Is Linuxgram a serious site? Their "about" claim how fact oriented and professional they are, but a lot of their content look like is has been written by rejects from the /. troll community.
...but not anti-free software. He is very happy with the BSDL type licenses.
Two problems/risks that my company has identified with open source are the following:
1. Software patents. Can you be sure that the piece of code you are shipping to you customers doesn't contain software methods that are pateneted? I'm not talking about copyright violations of the 'cut & paste' variety, rather software methods. The climate of software patenting is so out of control these days that it is a real risk that Open Source software may inadventantly contain patented software methods, and if my company sells that as a product/service we could be violating someone else's software patent which has legal implications including monetary damages, development stops, and product recalls.
2. Some open source licences are incompatible with the laws of some countries. In Germany the Apache License doesn't fly because it explictily states (forgot exact wording but something close to this) that the if software were to provided to another party (customer) that the transfering party is not responsible for support/service. By German law we have to support/service our products, independant of open soruce or not. So we can't use ANY apache licensed software.
tundog
The more people I meet, the more I wish I had a dog.
All your base are belong to us!
My question with regard to open source development is how people get rewarded. First, you need a few full-time people doing the 'benovolent dictator' job if you want a good product. Fair enough; these can be people employed by the service-sector part of the business, and get paid by support fees.
But what about everyone else who contributes? I'm not saying that every time a hacker uses 2 free hours to make the program work on his system and posts a bug fix needs financial reward, but exactly how do we ensure that these dedicated people get food? Way back when, it was the computing departments at universities and other big institutions. Now it seems to be whoever can find the time.. like students, or employees at unrelated institutions.
More and more I'm coming to the opinion that an academic model is a good one for a lot of IT work these days: we fund some public institutions that have mandates to help maintain standards, infrastructure, and good code. A bank of experts who are not answerable in terms of profitable products that fulfull a given market, but rather people who are advancing the cause of good code. Something halfway between a ministry of transportation and a university. Thoughts?
But what would be interested in a specific version of Emacs (or any other program for that matter)? What you want, usually, is to have bugs fixed or features added.
With open source you can fix bugs/add features yourself or pay someone to do it right now. If they do a good job your changes might make it into the main source tree - especially if the change you want is widely useful.
Release dates and version numbers are convenient for the vendors not for the customers.
If you ever worked on an internally developed system at some company, when a bug is found it is fixed right then and there, there is _no_ "wait 6 months for the next release" thing.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
You shouldn't use one-person projects, free and especially not non-free, for critical purposes.
The free software projects that do compete with non-free software also involve many people, many of which livelihood depend on the software, because they work for companies that use the software.
Software projected started "to spite Microsoft" rarely produce anything useful enough to consider an alternative to a non-free product. They might be common measured in head counts, but rare measured in lines written or impact made.
It's hard writting something on the net saying you hate open source when you'll be attacks by the islamic foundamentalists of the internet(open source zelots).
Is open source even about a business model?
You can, too, get a source license for Solaris for free: http://www.sun.com/solaris/source
And, to clarify further, there is a licensing fee for Solaris IF you're running it on a server with more than 8 CPUs. On systems with eight or fewer CPUs, you're right, the Solaris binary license is free.
Most businesses will say that their main concern is intellectual property (IP). They are concerned that their "invention" will be forced into the open source community. They are also concerned with being sure that all licensing is properly taken care of (as some open source is not GPL'd). The biggest problem, however, is future liability. Instead of 10 or 20 people seeing the code for a closed source library, literally hundreds or thousands of people will see the code. Errors may be detected in a library months or years after it is employed in a product, opening the company up for recalls and lawsuits. I believe that the liability problem is bigger and more significant than potential IP problems.
1. There's no support built into the product. Yes, you can hire people to support it for you, but it's a seperate cost.
2. Similarly, There is no warrantee of any kind. If it breaks, you have no one to complain to: "you get what you pay for."
With commercial software, this is mostly true. Some companies still offer free call-in tech support, but it seems like more and more companies are moving to model where you have to pay if you use up one of their employee's time. Many commercial vendors do provide web sites with searchable tech support info, but the same kind of thing is available for lots of OSS, too.
3. The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and there's nothing you can do about it.
The same thing can happen with commercial software, too. Not for Micros~1 products, maybe, but there are commercial software vendors that go out of business or discontinue products.
If you're talking about custom commercial software, it's a whole different ball game. None of the above 3 issues are problems, but you pay through the nose. In a lot of these cases, though, I would think you'd be better off with an OSS-based custom system, since then you're not tied to the people who did the customizing.
For some companies, for some applications, OSS makes sense. For others, they're better off with commercial software.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
No, an MCSE is to meaningful certification what McDonalds is to food.
You are looking for opposing views in slashdot?? Thats like looking for water in the desert.
There are a number of issues associated with Open Source / Free Software, only some of which are presented below.
1) Does open source encourage innovation? Probably not. Anyone who has tried to get funding for any idea close to an Open Source implementation realises Open Source can discourage innovation. It increases risk (OS are zero cost base competitors) so if a competitive product is launched, the laws of economics demand that it must have a high rate of return to compensate. (There is no free lunch)
Indeed there was a article (on Slashdot?) not long ago re Frontpage regarding the failure of OS to innovate rather than copy MS. Linux, for example, is the nth incarnation of an OS from the seventies writtten in C. Even MS has a vision (hallucination?) of a full OO operationg system.
"If cars were free and never wore out, would we all drive model Ts?"
2) FUD doesn't just come for MS.
I still smile at a graduate stating that Java 1.0 would completely replace Windows, there would be no more pointer crashes because Java didn't have any. etc. This sort of things go on a lot more than many OS advocates like to admit.
On the other hand, market share indicates that a lot of other people have made the same choice so the product is at least adequate and goes someway towards doing what it says it does. This is a catch 22 situation but that's the way things are. OS is not from a single vendor so a single good experience doesn't necessarily translate into confidence in all OS projects. And a single bad experience can make OS look like a lottery.
3) The idea that we can just pull up the source code and debug an OS application just doesn't wash with many managers. In fact, it can have the reverse effect: obviously the advocate needs a reality check.
Open Source itself doesn't guarantee code quality despite what many say.
4) The cost of ownership is a lot more that the Operating system and Office applications. There is a pool of workers out there that can use MS Office productively but would have a problem with anything radically different. (OS should just copy?)
Using Linux because it is free and then having to buy WebSphere isn't necessarily cheaper than just going MS (for example). Some commercial tools are excellent, and these alone could save the cost of the platform.
5) Once a software market matures, the software becomes a commodity. Then logical price is then (close to) zero and OS will be the norm and there will be far fewer developer than now.
However currently most developers need to be paid. That means investment and risk is undertaken by software companies, and investments must be re-couped. OS can mean other companies can enter the same market place without the same upfront investment (and commitment). Companies should have the right to protect that investment.
GPL has a obvious implications here.
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
... Do Linux companies go out and market to the kids? Do they get them hooked early? Windows and MacOS do. Apple's biggest acheivement is maintaining such a high % of education sales. After a kid grows up knowing so much about Windows, learning linux is a big hassle.
I grew up on on MacOS, and for the most part, you might as well consider it windows for all the differences between it and Linux. I have now changed to be exclusively a Windows user. I am "the network guy" at my company. I want to bring our website in house, and have bought into the hype that linux would be a much better choice than Win2k.
Now I'm at an impasse. How much would I have to re-learn on the linux side in order to do this. I'll have to know how to set up a box that is hardware compatible. I'll have to choose a distro. I'll have to learn a shell and its commands. I'll want to install a windows manager. I'll have to learn where to go for help, and what do do in the event of hardware failure. I'll have to learn apache for the webserving. I'll have to learn how to assign permissions for visitors...
That's a lot of work, or at least it seems that way to me, when I know how to do all of these things, with relative proficiency, with Win2k. Maybe with some effort I could get the linux box running everything, but I'd be very uncomfortable, worrying about a failure of some sort, and having the company website down while I try to muddle through some fixes that would probably take me 1/10th of the time on a windows box.
You want the reason I don't think open source is viable? It's because the companies and individuals backing it aren't being the drug dealers. They don't have gobs of money for advertising and marketting to get people hooked on it. They're not, as others have pointed out, spending the priority money on the graphics artists, sound technicians, and UI specialists.
Technical acheivement is all well and good, but without the marketting to get people, especially the kids, comfortable with it, it's a big hassle.
More and more standards are incorporating proprietary technology, which sometimes requires development groups to pay a bunch of up-front money. For example, some of the H.323 codecs are proprietary and require substantial (but non-discriminatory) licensing fees. This certainly handicaps open-source (especially GPL) implementations in a variety of areas for a couple of reasons: (1) small informal development groups will not have the funds for up-front licensing, and (2) per-unit licensing requires control of distribution of the software.
I work for a very large embedded software company and recently we had to choose between OpenSSL and an equivalent package from a small startup company. While we are advocates of open source in principle, we found it very difficult to justify using the software for anything other than personal use. The bottom line is that the open source software, though it had been around far longer, was just plain inferior to the professionally written software. The most notible areas were the following:
- terrible or non-existant documentation
- inconsistent coding style and naming conventions
- poorly designed APIs
- non-generic and incomplete solutions
- no support... and this has been a big one!
- just plain bad, unmaintainable code
Yes we have to pay the company for anything we want them to do, but atleast we know it will get done. And afterall, we're trying to make money off this stuff, so we don't mind paying for it initially. Now this is quite different from when I'm hacking on my Linux box at home just trying to get my pet-project to work. Of course, in this case, I certainly don't want to have to pay anything for the software, and I live with the benifits and the consequences of that.
I hope there will always be both commercial and open source versions available of all software in the future.
This is from their employees, if you have any hard fact showing they lie, show them or shut up.
It's a matter of public record that Cygnus was a money-losing business. Take a look at the Red Hat quarterly statement after the acquisition. The so-called lameness filter insists that it contains too many "junk characters", so I can't give you the table here. Search down for "3. BUSINESS COMBINATION (CONTINUED)". Cygnus lost $1.5M in fiscal 1996, $2.9M in 1997, and $5.8M in 1998. Its losses were nearly doubling every year. It was headed for yet another record loss when it was bought in 1999.
As he said, they have been around forever. That is an indication (not a proof) of profitability. If you have seen anything indicating otherwise, show them, otherwise it is just fud.
"Since 1994" is hardly "forever." It's seven years. Cygnus was around longer than that and they were bleeding money like a stuck pig. As I suspected, you can't support claims of their profitability.
A rule of thumb you might find helpful: When software companies are profitable, they don't remain private. There's no good reason not to take the IPO route and make the big bucks if you're profitable.
Big layoffs and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
If you're bucking for a (+1, Funny), you're out of luck....
Tim
One big fear that won't be addressed until its too late is that "free as in beer" == "free as in freedom". In my experience people generally do not pay for what they can download/compile for free. If enough commercial products are eliminated from the marketplace because of competition from open-source (hence "free") software then there will be less money flowing from the consumer community into the developer community. There will be less jobs. There will be less pure software r&d money spent because of the increased risk of non-profitability. This means less money flowing from the business community into the developer community as well. Companies that make their money selling hardware will pick up some percentage of that slack but there's no incentive to pick up all of it. Big business has no loyalty to anyone but their shareholders.
in addition, if you've written a good, useful program *that seems documentable* (ie is not filled with so many bugs and/or shortcomings that producing documentation would be a real chore), documentation will be more likely to spontaneously happen.
remember this: refactoring someone else's spaghetti code is similar to trying to document a project in which the lead keeps all the plans in her head and only gives micro-direction. if i'm going to write docs for your project, then i don't want to have to essentially rewrite the whole thing to understand it. i don't want to go line-by-line through the code. if there's no need for me to even look at the code - and there really shouldn't be in a release-level project - that's even better.
well the ol' ms office is okay for microsoft. speach recognition software is better. easier for folks.
in the first case, open source is a good idea, since no matter what happens, you have control over a crucial part of your business. you may reach a point where it's costly to maintain your business (if the project dies), but you can then either (a) move with documentation to another solution or (b) maintain it yourself, or hire someone to do so.
in the second case, go ahead and use closed-source software if you want to. it's a known quantity, with more business and legal precedent. you could also go the OSS way... this is the area that's really being examined. the first and third areas are much more cut-and-dry.
in the third case, use OSS again if you can - since it doesn't matter much, and it will get the job done, and it's generally cheap, easily tested, etc. ...
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I do security consulting for a living. Many of my clients are Federal Government agencies. Most of them will not allow the use of Open Source software to be used for their systems. Now, their definition of Open Source is really the definition for Freeware. They want to pay someone for all their software so they have someone to support it, or someone to sue if it doesn't work. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince many of them that proprietary code does not equal better code, or even less bugs. Microsoft is the perfect example of proprietary code that is full of bugs.
One of their arguements is that Open Source code is more likely to have security flaws than proprietary code. I claim that there is no real difference for initial releases, and that Open Source code tends to get stronger over time. In addition, if an Agency is buying code, someone in that company could try to implant a flaw specific to that agency's systems. If the agency simply downloads the Open Source code, nobody has to even know they are using it, and thus cannot be specifically targeted.
Perhaps someday I will be able to convince them.
For users, Open Source is a good thing hands down, no disadvantages whatsoever if properly embraced and implemented.
For ethical software businesses (ie. those who treat software as a service), Open Source is a good thing because it has the potential to help drive unethical software businesses out of the market, making more room for them instead.
For unethical software businesses (ie. those who treat software as a product), Open Source is a worst nightmare because it takes greed and throws it right out the window (and the massive profit margins with it)
And don't believe any of that BS about "nobody has made a profitable businesses around OSS." It's being done every day from big names like Redhat and Cygnus to thousands of freelance consultants who install free software for their clients and custom tailor it to their needs, releasing the changes back to the community.
I am also doing the same type of report at UIUC, so thank you for asking this question for me.
I found Free For All by Peter Wayner helpful on both sides-- 99% of the book is pro open-source, but on page 169 it has a tidbit of anti-open source-- what about the programs that have little to do with the community, like air-traffic control programs.
Second is something my teacher put me onto, using the microsoft stance on intellectual property/making the leap yourself, use anti-fileshaing/copyright protection examples of how loss of intellectual property will cause the loss of variety (no more pop artists that are only in it for the $$, although some people would gladly perform out of the joy of it, most wouldn't) and people wouldn't create software for free(*COUGH*)
You could also do the lack of support for open-source software. Hope this helps you with your paper
If people can connect to one another even the smallest of voices will grow loud.
--Serial Experiments Lain
I used to think this. I used to be an intense vim junkie. I loved it, and was good at it. But then I figured that so many folks using emacs must have some reason for doing so. So I started to teach myself. It's taken some time, but now I realise just why emacs is so popular.
First of all, the C major mode is incredibly useful when writing code. Parentheses balancing, syntax colouring--all these are little clues about what one is doing, and what one may be doing wrong. Yes, I know that vim has syntax modes--and they're nice--but they're not quite so powerful.
Then there is the CVS interface. Whenever I've compiled my code, and it works, I check in every buffer with a simple C-c v v. This pops up a window in which I write my changes. I type C-c C-c, and the new version is sent to the SourceForge server, to be permanently stored for me, and I'm returned to my buffer. If the version is the same as the previous one, vc simply tells me that it is, without popping up the comment window. Then I C-x k RET and kill that buffer, going to the next one, which I C-c v v in. This continues until I've checked everything in.
Remember that compile? I type M-x compile, then hit RET to accept the default make -k. What this does is pop up a window in which make is run on my source, without stopping for errors. I type C-x ` while it is compiling, and emacs finds the first error, determines the file and line number which offended, then opens the file and sets the point to that line. I can then correct the error and type C-x ` to go to the next one. BTW, the compile is still runnning. For a large project, this compile may take twenty minutes--instead of those twenty minutes being downtime, they are productive, in which I find and fix every error as it is discovered--while I'm fixing an error, non-erroneous source is compiled anyway. This is Useful with a Capital U.
Did I mention that I run my programme from the command line
As my project grows and the need to debug grows with it, I hope to soon take advantage of the gdb mode of emacs--integrated debugging, with all my source a quick check away.
Believe it or not, there really is a reason that folks use emacs. I didn't believe it, but now I know. Much of this simply would not be as pleasant with vi. I used to be great at the :w, :!! method of compiling--but it lacks much. Vi excels at certain tasks--e.g. editing config files, where its . command and quick regexp searches (slightly faster to access than in emacs) are invaluable. But emacs excels at what it does--and what it does vi simply cannot do.
Yet. The latest version of vim, I am told, are extensible with python. Python, incidentally, has been called Lisp with newbie-friendly syntax. I don't think that I need to spell out the obvious conclusion, but I will. In ten years, vi will be emacs:-)
If all programmes were as well-tuned for what they do as is emacs, I would be a truly happy man indeed. Imagine how nice it would be. Yes, there'd be a learning curve. But do you remember learning to write? Practicing line after line after line after line for days? Then practicing circle after circle after circle for days? Then practicing your Bs, then your Ds &c until finally you had mastered the art? If you fence, do you remember the long sequence of drills you had to go through to teach your arms and legs how to act, before ever you crossed blades with an opponent?
Maybe, just maybe, a product which has been around in one form or another for 25 years, and which is now at its 21st version, has something to offer us. Maybe we should focus on its lessons and its mistakes, integrating the lessons and avoiding the mistakes in our own products.
Just a thought.
You're talking about a different industry---remember, open-source software companies are best understood as professional services companies.
Most privately held professional services companies roll a loss forward every year in order to minimize their tax burden. Occasionally, if they're positioning themselves to be sold, they will make a token profit. They create a loss or minimal profit on paper by cashing out bonuses, paying bills in advance, deferring billing for their services until the next fiscal year, etc.
It is more relevant that during the period you describe, Cygnus' revenues grew from $12.5M in 1996 to $17.5M in 1997, and to $22.2M in 1998.
As an aside, I suspect that most open-source software companies are being funded with the expectation that they will perform like proprietary software companies---and that the management the VCs install in these companies probably all come from proprietary software backgrounds instead of professional services backgrounds. That's a recipe for failure in the grand dotcom style.
Again, your rule of thumb does not necessarily hold in the case of services businesses---most professional services companies are not valued at significantly more than their revenues, so even if Cygnus were highly profitable, it would only have been valued at $20 million or so by a sane market. That's enough to make some of the principals fairly rich and give the rank and file a nice windfall, but hardly "the big bucks"---I'd bet the yearly salary and bonus for a typical member of upper management at Cygnus would have been substantially larger than the yearly interest on say, two million dollars.
foog
Hi, foog.
If accounting practices in services businesses are as you describe, and such companies usually post a paper loss, then it seems difficult to determine whether they are actually profitable or not.
As you note, growing revenues would seem to be a useful heuristic in this case. However, what about the ratio of loss to revenue? In the years in question, revenues grew about 20-30% annually, while losses grew about 100% annually. Maybe it's just my software company background speaking, but it seems like that can't be good. If the two tracked each other upward and their ratio remained relatively constant, I could see that as a positive sign for a services business. However, I can't see how it could be a good situation if, with constant rates of change in revenues and losses, the company would face a loss the size of its revenues within one to two years.
Any idea what would cause this disparity in the rate of increase of loss and revenue? It seems to me it might well indicate an actual rather than a paper loss.
Tim
Any idea what would cause this disparity in the rate of increase of loss and revenue? It seems to me it might well indicate an actual rather than a paper loss.
I'd guess they were expanding more and more aggressively to increase revenues and headcount in order to be better positioned to sell the company. Almost all their expense had to be their payroll. Hiring people has a lot of up-front costs.
Note that Cygnus succeeded in executing their exit strategy, and sold to Red Hat in January 2000 for over 12 million shares of Red Hat common stock. Although this acquisition was reported as being valued at $674 million, six months later Red Hat was trading at around $20/share. That's still about $240 million for a professional services company with $22 million in revenues. Today that stock is worth a more realistic but still very high $48 million.
On this basis, I rank Cygnus as a successful "open source" company.
foog
Sorry, my friend, I think you're reaching. First you said that the annually doubling losses of Cygnus were the result of services bookkeeping practices. I checked and found out that an ever-increasing ratio of loss to revenue is not on anyone's playbook, professional services or otherwise.
Then it was that their spiraling losses were to expand their operations. But at the rate they were "expanding", they'd have been in chapter eleven within eighteen months without new funding.
Finally, you said that they were a success because they managed to get bought out during the Linux bubble. That's like saying VA Linux was a success because Larry Augustin got rich off it. Cygnus is now part of another unprofitable open source software company, Red Hat, which seems like a more accurate measure of their success.
The fact is that Cygnus was not profitable. Profitability has a specific meaning, and losing more and more money every year doesn't fit it, even if some of the people at Cygnus managed to make personal fortunes from a bubble-era rescue mission.
Tim
Sorry, my friend, I think you're reaching. First you said that the annually doubling losses of Cygnus were the result of services bookkeeping practices.
I said that the fact that they posted a loss could have been the result of bookkeeping practices in privately held services companies.
I checked and found out that an ever-increasing ratio of loss to revenue is not on anyone's playbook, professional services or otherwise.
Well, yes, there is that. Furthermore, you could have just pointed out that their losses were rather high.
Then it was that their spiraling losses were to expand their operations. But at the rate they were "expanding", they'd have been in chapter eleven within eighteen months without new funding.
That would seem to follow, wouldn't it? However, Cygnus was in business for about 10 years---I speculate they'd shifted gears to get-big-fast for the dotcom era. There are other ways that investors and potential buyers expect a company to grow that can wreck havoc with a professional services company's margins. I'd bet Cygnus was adding management layers and headcount to show capacity. Further speculation is probably pointless, since we all know what happened, but I imagine they would have had massive layoffs and some serious restructuring in the last year or so if they hadn't sold.
I think a better way to frame your argument is that not only could Cygnus not afford to internally fund (that is, without a paying client) significant R&D on free software projects, but, based on their losses in the years preceding their acquisition by Red Hat, after nearly ten years in business, they couldn't internally fund the expansion necessary to sell the company in 1999.
Finally, you said that they were a success because they managed to get bought out during the Linux bubble. That's like saying VA Linux was a success because Larry Augustin got rich off it. Cygnus is now part of another unprofitable open source software company, Red Hat, which seems like a more accurate measure of their success.
Red Hat is scraping the edge of profitability now---wasn't it big news a while back when they posted a loss that rounded down to zero per share? The optimist in me thinks they'll eventually be a modestly profitable, stable $100 million dollar company. About half of their revenues come from their professional services, by the way. Of course, the optimist in me thinks that Amazon will someday be profitable, too.
Doesn't VA Linux build computers or something?
The fact is that Cygnus was not profitable. Profitability has a specific meaning, and losing more and more money every year doesn't fit it, even if some of the people at Cygnus managed to make personal fortunes from a bubble-era rescue mission.
The fact is that we only have data on Cygnus for fiscal 1996 through fiscal 1998. I have not disputed the fact that they posted losses during that time.
foog