Open Source And The Obligation To Recycle

Lisa writes "Tim O'Reilly has a piece called "Open Source and the Obligation to Recycle" in his weblog, where he urges every company whose products are "obsolete" to consider making them available under an open source license, or putting them in the public domain, thereby enriching the soil of our collective commons. (Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog disagrees, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)""

Comments

Not necessarily a good idea

[MJArrison]

Although I agree that on the surface it would be great to open source, and free up all products that are no longer supported. But wouldn't this cause a trend of people not buying commercial software, and just waiting for them to go out of business so they could get it for free?

Re:Not necessarily a good idea

[nomadic]

Here's an even worse example; movie and recording companies have been known to destroy some works when the copyright ran out rather than let the public have them.

Xenix! :)

[int-21]

This sounds Cool, Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of 1981 Xenix ;)

Also on the topic of recycling....
Why do companies throw out perfectly serviceable (but older)
equipment, instead of donating it to OSS projects? (Linux,*bsd, etc...)
Resulting in a tax break (charity donation), and better hardware support for the rarer machines. (since in most cases lack of support is because the maintainer doesn't have a machine to develop on...)

Fun and profit for former employees

[YeOldeGnurd]

When software dies, it often leaves behind engineers who knew the software well as well as customers who feel screwed by the software's lack of life support.

At the very least, opening the source of dead software allows these former employees to consult for the former customers without the intermediary corporate leaders and their marketing department.

Even if a product as a whole was not viable, there may be components that could be packaged up as valuable contributions to the OSS community. And there are definitely engineers (like me) with enough time on their hands and the strong desire to see something of value come from the ashes of old dead projects.

Re:Silly counter-argument

[Cato the Elder]

You are definetely taking the remark out of context...of course, so did the original poster.

I highly recommend you read the post, as it's fairly well written. At the risk of creating a strawman, BrettGlass argues that making failed software free will tend to hurt for-profit development in the same area, since they will still have to charge for their products. He asserts that it would be even worse if the orphaned code was relicensed under the GPL.

I have to disagree with him on the degree of harm that would be caused to commercial development efforts by this. The market has already shown a tendancy to go with commercially supported solutions. Now, as far as a brand-new product that just got dropped, yes, that could have a chilling effect on the market for a while. But that's not the kind of orphaned code the article talked about most. Besides, if the product could cause your companies death, don't you think you'd try to raise the money to buy the code?

I agree with him about releasing the code under the GPL, however. Doing that would prevent any commercial company from incorperating any of the code in there projects. At the same time, there would be no existing community of GPL-developers willing to work on the project and familiar with the codebase.

Assets

[geekoid]

software is an asset, if I company just gave it away, its value would decline.
Right or wrong, That is how it would be seen in the financial and business world. That also happens to be the world you need to look good in to survive.
If a company goes chapter 11, that asset is delegated by the courts.
Plus, what happen if someone releases a crappy product, has no sales, then someone come along, puts in 2 week worth of work, and creats a product thats in demand? The company would look bad, and you don't want to look bad to the market.

Are these reason pretty stupid since that compnay wouldn't be making money from the product anyways? yes, but what dpoes that have to do with business?

Old versions should be opened, too

[darrick]

I would think that older versions should be given away. Maybe a major version older (selling 3.2, give away 2.x) or 2 minor versions (selling 3.2, give away 3.0) something like that.

I'd love to be able to grab a copy of Windows 95 for my kid's machine. Maybe download it from Microsoft's site as an ISO image (I lost my 95 CD).

Re:My favorite candidate

[MisterBlister]

IIRC, you're right, WordPerfect was 100% assembly. It was a company policy (snickered at by some, while others thought it was quite nice) to use 100% assembly on all products at that time, even when everyone else doing similiar products (apps, not games) was using C or Pascal for 99% of their coding.

There's a lot of instances where people clamor for the source to some old product when the source would be next to useless. The biggest example is old games, particularly those on older systems like the C64 or Amiga. These games were virtually all written in low-level assembler against CPUs and/or specialized coprocessors we don't use anymore and it would be more work to reverse engineer them than to just write them from scratch against modern APIs like DirectX or SDL.

Re:IP issues as well...

[Drakin]

You can actually buy copies of Quake, usually in a package with Quake I, II and some flavour of III. Haven't seen doom, but have seen Doom II around still.

It's already being done

[tshoppa]

For much historically-interesting software, hobbyist-type licenses are available. (No, it's not always open source, and it's not always public-domain, but it's a start.)

See for example the massive collection of PDP-10 (the architecture that the Arpanet and early TCP/IP stuff was done on, and certainly the source of much of the hacker culture) software at

The PDP-10 Software Archive

or the large number of historically interesting OS's and tools (including many early Unix releases) that you can run on

Bob Supnik's SIMH computer history simulation project

That said, these only scratch the surface of vitally interesting stuff that needs to be preserved, so anything to further similar projects is 100% goodness.

Re:My favorite candidate

[RGRistroph]

I would be happy to have the source in assembly. Wouldn't bother me at all. If that's what made it so fast on DOS, it would be worth the effort to make it work on other platforms.

The source code to these old programs is not "next to useless" at all. It would no doubt require some concerted, expert effort to bring it to modern processors and OS's, but you don't have to "reverse engineer" it. After all, this is what the original authors worked from, and it can be pretty messy, but that is not the same as decompiling a binary and working from that.

And finally, I probably would not be interested in a version ported to "modern APIs like DirectX or SDL." I might tolerate something written for X with straight xlib calls (that might be almost as painful), or the GTK or Athena widget set. But I would prefer a console program that can output postscript files to be previewed in another program. (The print preview in WP 5 for DOS is ok.)

If you have the opportunity, find an old 486 or early pentium and load up DRDOS and WP 5. Look at how fast it takes it to fully load a large document, and do a print-preview to see the "graphics" capabilities. Then load up OpenOffice on a 2 GHz linux box with your stop watch running.

Re:Silly counter-argument

[dublin]

MS didn't give IE away they just made it part of the windows tax.

That's NOT what they said under oath in court: For those of you doing the Internet long enough to remember, you may recall that MS wasn't up to writing a browser of their own to challenge Netscape: So instead, they decided to buy one (or actually, steal one, as you'll see in a moment.)

The only thing that was even close to being a Netscape competitor in those days was the original NCSA Mosaic code, which was spun off for commercialization by UIUC(.edu) as a company called Spyglass. Spyglass tried unsuccessfully for a while to land big buyers in hopes of competing with Netscape, but their code wasn't nearly so good as the Mozilla crowds' (back before Mozillla meant open source...) Finally, they landed the biggest fish of them all, Microsoft: They struck a deal with Microsoft to be the Microsoft browser: with backing and volume like that, they couldn't lose! Spyglass poured millions into develpoment and features that Microsoft wanted in the product - they knew they'd get their money back because the contract with Microsoft guaranteed them a percentage cut of every copy sold.

But Microsoft NEVER SOLD A BROWSER! Instead, it simply became "part of the operating system" (avoiding having to pay Spyglass was one of the biggest reasons BillG wanted to claim this.)

There was, of course, a law suit about this, which Microsoft won by swearing that since IE was an integral part of the OS, and not something that was even possible to buy separately, they owed Spyglass nothing for the millions of copies of their code that they distributed: Since they had'nt sold any IE they owed no royalties! Microsoft won leaving Spyglass with nothing for all its hard work and destitute to the point that they finally had to sell out to OpenTV in the hopes of becoming a niche browser for set-top boxes...

Re:Companies destroying their own IP

[denzo]

There may have been some movie companies that purposefully destroyed film, but most film has been destroyed by neglect or events such as fire. It would be hard to come up with a figure of how many movies have been lost forever, but it's certainly in the hundreds, and is increasing every day. There are films literally sitting in archives rotting away as we speak, with no real effort to restore them, except with bigger movies that still have profit potential.

Just think about how bad of shape just the Star Wars movies were when they digitally remastered them. The Special Edition VHS tapes have a little documentary at the beginning comparing the visual quality of the movie from the original print and the digital remaster, and the difference was astounding. The 1977 prints were horribly faded and would have been lost in just another couple of decades. And this is just from 25 years ago.

Also consider the other types of property destroyed on purpose, such as unused scenes (Charlie Chaplin is known to have ordered outtakes to be destroyed) or movie sets and designs. Stanley Kubrick had the Discovery models destroyed for fear that it would be reused in future movies.

A lot of movies have been lost by accidents or other means (such as acts of war). The biggest problem is that there is only one original copy of a movie with no real backup archives of it, mostly because of space consideration (keeping warehouse space does cost money, and that cost just increases the more movies a company makes). On a sad note, I saw on CNN the other night a piece about a documentary series about New York, which has some episodes about the World Trade Center. The man who was in charge of the series said that they had the only known footage of the construction of the World Trade Center, since the New York Port Authority's own archive of the construction was located within one of the towers.

Why does Glass resort to caps??

[abe ferlman]

Suddenly, the market climate changes dramatically. A product similar to mine is available to consumers for free! Ironically, the failure of my competitor is likely to kill my company, too -- EVEN IF MY PRODUCT IS SUPERIOR.

I'm surprised that Brett's caps didn't trigger the lameness filter (I don't know if it will as I'm typing this.) Anyway, the reason he types in all caps is that he wants you to consider his conclusion rather than the logical conclusion of his argument. He implies that the best products will be less popular, hence reducing the quality of software in general. That's not correct. The correct conclusion is:

Now:
Firms charge users the value their software adds.

Recycle-world:
firms charge users the difference in value created between their product and the best free alternatives.