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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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
Thats like going to Landover Baptist looking for arguments for atheism.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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.
Do hot-cakes really sell that good?
Are there any public companies that are in the hot-cake business?
What are their ticker symbols?
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.
"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*?
You are confusing open source with collaborative development. There is no reason why a closed source project cannot be collaboratively developed in a distributed fashion (i.e., only approved license holders given access to code), and why open source projects cannot be built in relative isolation. I believe Qt is an example of the latter.
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...
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)
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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.
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)
There are also many of us who do code for free, and take our payment from the fact that we see people using, and getting things done with the software we wrote. I work all day plugging away at a M$ Machine to feed webpages to an M$ Web Server. I go home and try to create and contrubute to things that are not so encumbered.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Actually I do spend time with my family and have other activites in my life...I code as a hobby...call it my contribution to society.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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
If he had posted a math problem and asked for answers, that would be another story.
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.
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.
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)?
I make donations to various organizations throughout the year(the Radio Station I listen to in Boston, MA WAAF 107.3, is very active in promoting charities so they regularly make me aware of where my contributions are needed) when I have the good fortune to have the monetary ability to do so...usually during the summer, I tend to have more cash then don't have to run the heat then...
I have infact made many contributions to the Fire Department, I greatly respect what they do...I live near Worcester, MA and know people that were affected by the Wharehouse fire there 2 Years ago.
Of course you probably wouldn't know anything about that...My Girlfriend also has friends that worked in the Twin Towers...so that hit close to home as well...perhaps next time before you spout off, get a clue what your taking about...another reason why I hate AC's.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Yes, this is true.
People will have more money left to alcohol and other drugs. This can be a big burden for the society.
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.
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.
...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).
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.
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
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."
This is entirely untrue. Enterprise rollouts of software almost always require a support contract, no matter how good the code is to begin with. In addition, customizations can be contracted as well. For example, RMS made money for years selling improvements to emacs. The improvements were open-source, but a company paid for them because the company wanted them. They paid the original developer to do it so that
a) it would be rolled back into the main distribution (this saves the company maintenance costs)
and
b) they know that the original developer has the best knowledge of the source code.
Engineering and the Ultimate
...IIS is a lot more powerful in what its capabilities are.
As was so wonderfully illustrated with the recent worms.
...ponder...
There's a tremendous amount of potential.
Excuse me, Senator, but I would prefer "Open Source/Free Software GNU/Party"
And no, I have not.
Can your IM do this?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Yes, but I don't see that happening on a large scale.
**********
It doesn't need to. Free software keeps people from needlessly re-inventing the wheel. They have access to everyone's code, so more time can be spent on doing new things rather than re-doing what other companies have done. This means that there will be fewer programmers, but I think that's good. Programming is a side task - it is only there to support the primary task. That means, the fewer people who are needed to do it, the better it is. So, it doesn't need to keep every current programmer employed, it just needs to continually spit out as much software as people need.
*************
But the average end-user doesn't care about enterprise software
*************
The end-user was not the case that the previous post was making, either. The previous poster was talking about enterprise software, where looking through manuals and code takes too much time. The end-user does not need to be able to just pick up the phone and have someone there. They can talk to others. They can read the manual. Or they can buy the boxed product.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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">)
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
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 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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
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!
Maybe Microsoft claims that open source is unamerican, but clearly they don't really believe it. I know someone personally who works on MS Office, and according to him, perl (which is open source last time I checked) is used at Microsoft to write the equivilent of a "makefile" to build Office -- Visual Studio just can't handle such a large project.
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.
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
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
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!
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.).
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.
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.
Actually the average user dosn't. Since by the time they have worked out how to use the "help" system most of what it will tell them is by then obvious.
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...
How are you going to run it in the first place, when the sys admin can't find out how to get it to work?
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
But the average end-user doesn't care about enterprise software
Really, they don't care that they might be sent home (without pay) because the tool they need to do their job isn't available.
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.
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.
Which the GPL explicitally supplies. (Though this might be an argument against the BSD licence.)
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses.
Which is something which only applies to a tiny minority of organisations in the first place.
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system.
Note that here not only does the origanisation in question derive no revenue from selling software software is in fact a cost to them. The difference is that using proprietary software they pay for systems analysis and software, using open source they pay for systems analysis only. Further with the latter they are more likely to get something which does the job properly, since anything can be customised.
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.
This is more likely a senario with proprietary software.
No-one else has the skills to pick it up so the project dies.
Unless you want to make out that Linus is some kind of super man plenty of people will have the skills.
Again more likely with a commercial company going bankrupt. Since then it would be harder for anyone to get their hands on an "asset" and learn to understand an obscure coding style.
A superb rebuttal of "open source", using Linux as an example.
> 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.
...but not anti-free software. He is very happy with the BSDL type licenses.
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.
... 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.
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
Personally, I find the Brand X programs much harder to configure and use. Perhaps, though, the fact that some people have bad experiences with various pieces of software can be considered a downside also. Though for every q**** horror story I can give you an Exchange horror story. *shrug* I find this argument kind of weak I suppose.
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 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.
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
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