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Perens Discredits Mundie's Attack On GPL
SaxMan101 writes "CNET has an editorial from Bruce Perens that quite handily dismantles Mundies attack on the GPL and the Liberty Alliance. He takes the time to make YA strong argument for free software which he backs up with real numbers. Well said, worth the read."
yet another?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
> Bruce Perens touts the money saved by not buying
> MS software, but completely ignores the much more
> significant expenditures on people to administer
> all this software.
What a tired sick argument! I'd have to say that the average UNIX administrator is much better trained than the average Window's administrator. The average UNIX admin can do his job from a ssh terminal anywhere there is an internet connection; the Windows admin usually has to drive down to the server room and get ready to reboot multiple times. Been there done that.
Not to mention the army of techs needed to support the desktop users of Windows. Frankly, Windows just requires more support. Been there done that.
> Does it cost more to administer sendmail than
> Exchange? Apache vs. IIS? Is in-house
> development with VB cheaper to get the same
> results as Java on Linux?
Development costs of VB compares with Java though I'd say Java costs a bit more initially. Over the long run though, Java code gets reused more as it is based on objects; VB code usually is a mangled mess of sphagetti (sp?) code, procedural and pseudo-object code. Been there seen that.
Face it - Closed Source Software is not a panacea!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
(3) is not a problem if the people do not distribute the software. It is fine to modify and use GPL'ed code internally. The GPL only covers the rules for distributing the software. So basically, unless you plan to sell the product, this isn't a problem. Note that (2) in the original list is too narrowly defined; even if credit is given, our goals with the GPL (of increasing the free software code base) are not met when someone takes the code and makes a non-free derivation.
(4) If TCP/IP were replaced tomorrow with a new open protocol for which only a GPL'ed implementation existed, people could still write and market a non-free implementation. They just wouldn't be allowed to take my GPL'ed work and use it in a way I don't approve of.
But my real response to (4) is that, as a hardened free software advocate, I could care less whether or not people have a non-free implementation of any protocol.
(5) If companies want to release non-free code that is their prerogative. Eventually, I believe, the free implementations are going to surpass the proprietary implementations in quality, and make the proprietary model unviable. If they want to continue to make non-free products at that point, that is their prerogative.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
With all due respect, I do not feel this was the best piece of argument ever put forward.
As far as the taxes issue, something that taxes do, in many cases, is aggregate a small incremental cost in a lot of areas into something that can be very meaningful. This is something that Perens wholly ignores. There are lots of places taxes will be lost:
a) Taxes on all the individual workers at companies that manufacture commercial software and in corporations world wide who install/maintain that software
b) Sales taxes on purchased software
c) Taxes on infrastructure for selling software all together
As a result money IS lost to the economy. Tax money recovered to the individual will either find its way back into our pockets (unlikely), or we will be taxed at an incrementally higher rate to make up for it. Many recessions are caused by the reduction in consumer spending, to which erasing all money spent on software would be an economic equivalent. Let's face it, the service economy around software will never be as robust as license sales, for the simple fact that end users will be unable to hire service people (it will be too difficult for companies to support the mass amount of end users for open source software). Tax money recovered by corporations WILL have extra money, but they'd rather pay for software that off the shelf worked than dedicate manpower to it (which is a lot more costly in the long run)... and the second that you have an advantage provided to someone who offers a better off the shelf package than another, you're right back to forcing people to develop proprietary software. Why would I open source the one thing that gives my distro an advantage over yours?
As for the $1.9 B number... If you're going to give that number credit, then you probably also believe that number for world wide piracy. Both suffer from the same fallacy. If people were ACTUALLY willing to pay $1.9 Billion for the development, then they would have done so. They didn't. QED. The fact that it exists is because, in the exact same way that taxes have the ability to aggregate amounts of money so small that they would not amount to anything on their own, open source aggregates developer time. Its economic viability does not factor into it at all.
I almost don't want to get into the Liberty argument, since that's a mess unto itself. Some central authority needs to sign all these certificates. MS has stepped forward, though it easily could have been anyone else. I actually thought that Verisign would be the one to step forward, since they have such a large infrastructure for signatures and all. I'm all for multiple offerings, but it looks like the Liberty Alliance is going after the wrong thing all together. Perens is wrong here, MS is claiming they're providing the infrastructure, that's all.
All in all, it's not a very good representation of Open Source argument when Perens engages in the exact same strawman attacking that he claims Mundie is guilty of.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That US$1.9B is software that was released for the general public to use, and it does indeed have a lot of users. But I don't have a user count right now, all I have is the theoretical cost of production. The true benefit may be larger than I said. Given the amount of business around Linux, I doubt it's smaller.
In economic terms, the users will derive utility from the software. They will carry out some economic activity, for example operate a business, using that software, and will gain an economic benefit because of what they didn't pay for it. This benefit may well be greater than US$1.9B, since we have a lot of users these days. Again, the software didn't just go into /dev/null, it is now part of the economy. Engineers are familiar with thermodynamics, there are some parallels here, aren't there?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.