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

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.

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...