Slashdot Mirror
The Coming "Open Monopoly"
Ramsed writes: "On cnet Petr Hrebejk and Tim Boudreau wrote an
article claiming that the current Microsoft Monopoly will be replaced by an 'Open Monopoly'; a monopoly of Open Source. They are explaining why big companies like IBM support this.
In their view, it's inevitable this 'Open Monopoly' will win in the end, and that apart from the current monopolist, everyone will be better of, because of lower barriers for participation, software better targeted at its users and lower development costs. Profit should be made with support and consultancy."
Update: 10/28 13:42 GMT by J : Little-known fact -- for important stories, slashdot sometimes runs
duplicates
to see who's still awake on a weekend. Nice work to those of you who caught it. See you next week. *sigh*
I kind of dislike the phrase "open-source monopoly", and I don't believe that the total infastructure for the internet (or any other platform) will be totally open source. ALthough the use of OSS will continue to expand, I hope it can co-exist with commercial closed source also. I can't believe all companies will adopt OSS or just fall by the wayside.
"UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus."
i hope Jim Allchin's out looking for a new job.
Cause this article makes him sound like the worst sort of MS mouthpiece available. And a chump to boot.
The sad thing of it is, though, he likely makes a bazillion times more money than I do and has more job security than God. And he is where he is, because he is willing to make such statements on behalf of The Company. I have no doubt he probably believes those things he is quoted as saying, deep down in his heart. So the only conclusion is what? That he's saying something obviously braindead that CIO's out there will hear and believe? It may be. Or not.
go, Consumer!
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
Looks like the same monopoly we read about just a couple of days ago on /.
Nice work to those of you who caught it.
... let us see and vote on the submission queue and we will catch it even earlier next time.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
In the open source fields that are almost no monopoly, witch is good. Think about it, there's two or more for everything :
OS : BSD, LINUX, HURD?
DESKTOP: Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment
Browser: mozila, konqueror, lynkx?
Text Editor: vi, emacs
Office suite: Star Office, Koffice, gnome-office
If everyone turned into open source tomorrow we wouldn't end up in a monopoly, people would have choices.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Look, I don't care how much you guys believe in capitalism, Adam Smith, and market forces. As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them.
I'm just wondering how in hell the "Open Monopoly" intends to survive laws like the SSSCA (they WILL try again). I hardly think sitting around and patting yourselves on the back is a good way to bring Linux or whatever to market dominance. I'm all in favor of Linux winning out here, but we are not living in some perfect, pure capitalist economist's vision, where the best product wins out every time.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
" Update: 10/28 13:42 GMT by J: Little-known fact -- for important stories, slashdot sometimes runs duplicates to see who's still awake on a weekend. Nice work to those of you who caught it. See you next week. *sigh* "
So what you are essentially saying is: it isn't a bug; it's a feature?
Strange.
I thought this was for the benefit of those people who only read Slash Dot on the weekends. You know, those people who have it banned at work (with a lot of other sites) during the week.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You know, every time I type a little too quickly I hit a lameness filter... Every time I have a lot to say, lameness filter. Every time slashdot gets a little slow and I click submit more than once, lameness filter.
;-), and would give some slashdotters a chance to create mirrors of slow sites as well.
All the annoyance the users must go through to prevent spam, crap flooding, trolls, and duplicate submissions, and there's nothing for the Admins.
What do you say we have the VERY well trusted users (those past the karma cap, etc) moderate the front page stories before they are posted. This would end dups, dead links, speelling problems
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Given that the people most likely to participate in an open-source project are also users of the application being worked on, what would happen if the customers for a software product actually participated in its design and creation?
Umm, I for one would not want to pay a large corp. for the privilege of using software I helped to create, and watch the money go to them. Exactly what would I be paying for?
Perhaps I misunderstand, as this would work in a corporate environment, where staff helped out, but surely not for a commercial product?
I think open-source is great and all, but if your programmers are all coding away, and the code is released freely, revenue and profit is generated by service contracts and support, then a) how are your coders paid? Surely not the salaries and recognition of the present day. Will coding be reduced to a more mundane role? Lots of CS grads these days. Hell I don't even have to be a CS grad to throw something up on the net b) what about your competition? They will be able to put out a duplicate or improved product lickety-split.
-- By the way , these questions are not intended to address the morality of OSS ( I don't want to get into that), but the financial aspects, which are what will take down MS, as only a viable business solution ala IBM will be able to provide the infrastructure to maintain that sort of venture.--
mod away
What kind of software do you write? Every programmer I know of writes software for bussinesses and not for a software company. There can be no opensource replacement for customized software solutions, website development and database apps for the enterprise. If you work for Borland or Microsoft then I can understand your concern. The programmers who actually work for software companies make up only a small portion of the overall job market for coders. I am more bothered by the huge over saturuation of the IT job market by the dot-com fall-out and H1 Visa's. THey have taken all the jobs away. Unless you have a mseters degree in computer science its impossible to get any IT job outside of help desk. The only way I can show an employer that I can code is by opensource. I don't believe opensource = socialism. It equals freedom much like artists sometime work for free to show off there work. They do it because they like it and want to make a difference. Also if a monopoly owns a whole market then its not truly capitalism. Capitalism means competition. Buying laws to prevent competition equals a dictatorship more then a free market. I believe more jobs will be created if Microsoft is ever replaced by open standards. I doubt this will happen anytime soon but who knows. When netscape introduced the www the IT market exploded. Java was customized to bring servlets and applets, html became a hot langauge, intranet apps replaced costly client server apps and enabled mobility, xml is coming out. The list goes on and on. When something is new in the IT market the demand for coders goes up. I support this new open monopoly then the old "do as the license agreement says" one we have to suffer through today. Maybe new innovations will prop up as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
I can see it now...
:-)
Geek1: "You've landed on Redhat ave, with 3 houses, that'll be $280"
Geek2: "Howabout I give you BSD street and $25?"
Of course the purple ones nobody wants will be named after places in Redmond
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
The "open", standards-based web exists largely because Microsoft allows it to exist. With over 90% of desktops under their control, and over 90% of the browser market under its control, Microsoft could at any time move off to a "extended" web (an online service using proprietary protocols), and in fact, we see that already happening.
Recently Microsoft has begun shipping XP, IE6, a new Windows Media Player, and the client libs for .Net.
They have also begun to shun non-IE clients at their web sites.
Why they are doing this should be obvious - soon, MSN sites will start to accesss client code available only on MS platforms. This will truly allow MS to extend what they have embraced.
Of course, can you blame them? HTTP and HTML are useful protocols that have become outdated. The stateless, text-oriented model was extremely useful to get early adoption, but at this point there is no doubt that users of every type of platform are ready to move on to more advanced protocols that offer greater functionality. This is why many websites use SSL now as a way of creating a session of any kind. Unfortunately the HTTP-NG protocol has been shelved - it would have provided a great deal of new functionality that could have moved the web in to the next generation.
So Microsoft is going to get there on their own. You will soon see them exploiting the client libs shipped to 90% of the desktop users out there to radically enhance the browsing experience.
The standards-based web will soon be relegated to a second-class experience, and its our collective fault for not moving more rapidly to create open standards that provide for a better user experience, and get the tools out there to support them.
As long as Linux still requires knowledge of console commands (and not just any command-prompt commands, but Unix commands), it is going to be very hard for 90% of computer users out there to use Linux.
I don't think the mainstream is very interested in editing their operating system.
Does this *really* have something to do with Mandrake that I'm not catching? Why does is it under the Mandrake topic??
The growth of Linux and Apache mainly has to do with the fact that it can be employed more cost effectively in these limited low-end applications than even NT. By cost, I don't mean just the licensing costs, I mean the total setup and upkeep cost: installation, support, actually arranging the licensing, acquiring the necessary hardware, and so on. Linux and Apache get the job done sufficiently well at a minimal of cost.
This argument misses the point and fails to address the real question. Does it make financial sense to invest in the development of Open Source Software? In other words, do the benefits of Open Source software really exceed the costs? Merely "adding" to your own welfare is insufficient, if it costs you more. The answer is quite simply no when it comes to most software development.
Let's take the case of the Word processor. Why would a very major companany like, say, General Motors want to spend ALL (or even PART) of the total 30 million dollars and 3 years of development time that it takes to develop a full featured Word processor? It is extremely unlikely that they would increase their workers productivity enough to justify this on a cost vs benefit basis [Especially in light of more real world elements of finance and economics. e.g., Opportunity Cost.]. Proprietary software companies on the other hand, that enjoy intellectual property protections, get LEVERAGE when they make similar efforts. That is to say, that they enjoy not only their own savings but a slice of everyone else's savings (which is where the real money is). Furthermore, companies that are setup purely for the development of software are in many ways in a superior position to develop software more economically.
To put it bluntly, this kind of Open Source development depends on charitable actions (in a corporate sense, the only real justification for this is that it promotes the company's image) and/or on the rare project where the benefits accrued IN HOUSE are greater than the development cost. None of the above is enough to make the Open Source a major development ENGINE of wide varieties of software. This is especially true for the relatively less-visible but still highly costly applications. e.g., MRP systems, powerful photo editors like photoshop, etc.
What's more, Open Source software is going to, and does presently, fall victim to the 80/20 rule. That is to say, Open Source can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. Even the better regarded Open Source projects are perpetually in this state. It's the remaining 80% of the effort that it the hard hill to climb. Many would argue that not a single Open Source project has yet demonstrated itself capable of the last 80%: seemless installation, tight integration, good UIs, etc.
Many people less fanatical boosters of Open Source have taken the few words of apparent fear from Microsoft's management as proof that the whole of Microsoft is, and should be, afraid of Open Source. This is just grasping for straws. The fact of the matter is that Open Source can put a significant dent on MS' profitability, and thus provoke such words, without being a threat to the whole of Microsoft, never mind having the potential to go the next step and exceed MS. Open Source software hurts MS by marginalizing some of their highly profitable enterprises, namely: Linux vs NT, Apache vs IIS, etc. Besides the fact that this is almost exclusively confined to servers, the areas where Open Source is taking a bite out of MS is mostly on the lower-end stuff. The kind of stuff that IT will install in a pinch. You need web server to serve some internal documents? Simple, run Apache and Linux. You don't need anything more and you can do it with less of hassle than NT. Although the likes of Apache and Linux will likely continue to succeed in a similar vein, this is hardly proof of Open Source's self-proclaimed greatness.
For things that are useful to a broad spectrum of people, open source just makes sense. For some things it doesn't.
I posted a more detailed response to some of the issues brought up in the earlier conversation on Slashdot and this one here if anyone's interested.
(wow, slashdotted twice...I feel special :-)
-Tim Boudreau
I've won games of Monopoly by snapping up those properties and throwing houses and hotels on them ASAP. Everytime someone passes go, they have to negotiate a minefield that could cost them a hell of a lot more than nine bucks. This income subsidizes buying at least one property from the other color groups so they can't turn around and do it to me. Come to think of it, parallels would be easy to draw between this behaivor and Microsofts.....
Umm, they were kidding. Most people get it even if they don't write "nudge nudge, wink wink."
Profit should be made with support and consultancy.
It's not for you or anyone else to say how or how not profit should be made. The market will decide for itself, as ever. Even now, Microsoft et al are making money... how are Red Hat doing?