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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."
Perens is dismantling Mundies FUD in a calm, businesslike way. Let's hope that the debate on MS FUD stays this calm and reasonable
It's obvious that Mundie sees the world through Windows-colored glasses. Software must be sold to get the money to make more software. How else could a software company work? If you can't license it, you can't gouge^H^H^H^H^Hcollect your due earnings. Oh, and the whole thing about people not working with Microsoft...if that's not a monopolist talking I don't know what is.
Anyway, rant off now. It's good to see someone who can rationally tear down his arguement, and it's even better to see it on a fairly commonplace site like CNet. I think more and more people are realizing the snowjob Microsoft keeps trying to pull, and in the end that will be the thing that ends the monopoly.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
GPL, Apache, BSD, all these licences .
Who is the GPL bad for ?
Only 2 kinds of people, thats it TWO and ONLY two
1.Those that make a copeting product with a GPL available substitute, (SQL, Linux, etc) and stand to lose money from cometition (i.e. MS)
2.Those that would like to steal code repackage it and sell it without giving either credit or code back to whence it came.
Thats it PERIOD.
All this viral liscence crap and Craig Dumbdie spewing trash means nothing, the big boys the ones that count know. IBM, Copmaq, the people from a high line backing know this is all MS horeshit.
I love the people that complain about hte license ONLY because the see $$$ signs and want to take it reroll it and sell it without contributing a damm thing back, those are the ones that make me laugh, go write the fucking code yourself.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I'm not sure how the numbers balance out, but these concerns far outweigh the price of buying the software. If Mr. Perens is going to dip his toe in TCO waters, he'd be better be sure he can jump all the way in and not get himself drowned.
What's a sig?
I recently read an article in either Inc. or BusinessWeek about the effect Lou Gerstner had on IBM. Among other things, the article praised him for moving IBM agressively to becoming a service-based company.
I don't think Microsoft has anything to compare with this (yet), and fears those who are already in the arena.
The way Microsoft is fighting this war is to attempt to discredit open source as an approach, while (and I'm guessing on this) preparing its own service division.
It's classic. Throw out a load of FUD about the competition, while readying your own competing product. Depend on clueless PHBs to swallow your line, and watch the cash roll in.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
For all the discussions about Linux taking over the world, or Microsoft obliterating the competition, etc., it's fun to just sit back and watch how several breakout OSes and technologies (Linux, OSX, MP3s, etc.) slowly and naturally build in popularity and find a solid niche in our lives. I guess it all comes down to "natural selection". :-)
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Is this an acronym I'm clueless about, or a typo? Honestly I just can't figure it out from the context, nor can I see it as a reasonable typo.
If you drill down a bit you find this letter from a programmer that complains about Open Source. While I found it both sad and funny, it does shed light on how Microsoft and other commercial software vendors view the movement.
To summarize: OSS is a bad thing because if free software is available no one will want to pay for software, which will drive programmers out of work. OSS is good in that it establishes competition for Microsoft, but that competition is better done through litigation or other commercial software.
Applying this point of view to Microsoft is humorous, of course, considering what they did with IE.
I actually don't think the developer has a point, though. Open source software has created far more jobs than it took. Linux, Apache, and other free platforms and development tools have meant, in my experience, that corporations are financially able to deploy systems that would otherwise have been prohibitive. The spread of such tools has also increased the number of people who are exposed to them - how many people would be running personal Unix systems if they had to have commercial systems? These people are able to get jobs in IT they would otherwise not be qualified for, or perhaps even know about.
In any case, Perens' response likening software development and protective measures against open source competition to buggy whips (actually ice, in his analogy) is only half the story.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Intelligent citizens, industry professionals and academics will read, understand, and probably agree with this article.
This is also the sort of writing that could really color the public debate if average Joe Citizen had any reason to value the opinion of Bruce Perens over Craig Mundie.
But why should they?
What does the average person know about Perens? What do they know about the Open Source Initiative? Correct me if I'm wrong, but probably very little. What does the average person know about MicroSoft? That they build the software that runs on every computer that they sit behind every day.
There's a bit of a credibility gap.
Craig Mundie could conceivably be any employee with the MicroSoft backing, and he would get press and general public recognition that Perens doesn't.
Pro-Open Source writers are often honest and, while not unbiased or impartial, are at least driven more by a cooperative and edifying spirit than a monopolistic one. If the general public had more reason to trust them, the articles they write would more effectively influence public opinion.
Think about how can this community help people like Perens while he's busy trying to help us.
Rob Carlson
You expect a debate on MS FUD to stay calm and reasonable? On Slashdot?
Best Slashdot Co
The cost of IT personel/sys. admins. is going to be the same whether they are administering open-source or MS software. A business is going to pay only as much as it is willing for IT people, regardless of the software it's running.
In terms of company tech support, considering that MS charges what, $135/hr, you probably end up saving money on support costs as well by switching to OSS, though you prolly could have the same kind of savings switching to a different set of proprietary software as well.
my pet machine
I find it sorta funny that Mundie would actually state something along the lines of, "There is this notion that people should have a choice."
How I find that funny is that in the past he has proclaimed how "Un-American" the GPL and OSS is. Of course, I believe that he never claims that MS is a for American standards of freedom, choice. A number of his statements are the sort of thing that one would expect from a dictatorship or the "American idea" of what the old Soviet Block was and may actually have been.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I'm pleased to see such a good piece of anti-FUD work aimed at managers.
:
...
The articles explains clearly that the key point in GPL is
But this is not to say that the main benefit of Linux and other GPL software is lower-cost. Control is the main benefit--cost is secondary.
This quote is the most important : GPL gives you _control_ on the library you've choosen to link with your project. The library is not subject to stock prices or whatever non-IT reason. If you don't want the new features : don't upgrade, you don't like the new direction : fork the developement tree
Isn't open-source essentially a communist-notion? I'm not saying that would be a bad thing. But it seems that Microsoft is saying they should be able to make money selling operating systems, web services, etc: a capitalist argument. The open source argument is for everybody to put their resources in a single pot, and by polling resources a better product can be had for all: sounds like communism to me. That plan makes sense to me, but Americans do live in a capitalist society. If open-source is a communist notion, can the United States really stand against the capitalists? Communism doesn't seem to work for governments, largely because of corruption (- obviously open to argument). Does the abstract nature of software and it's ability to be copied indefinitely eliminate the flaws that made communism fail as a mode of government for countries? Is there any point where the usefulness of open-source software ends and the market for commercial software begins? Or would commercial software be obsolete in the presence of the "new world order"?
While all the points he makes are true, and the economic beneifits of free software are obvious, that is not the primary moral justification for software being free. Repeat after me, "When software is free, the world is a better place."
Now, it stands to reason, that part of the world being a better place is certainly the economic benefit that free software provides to reduce operating costs. In fact, one could argue that if there were no such effect, free software wouldn't be too great a thing -- who'd want it if it had no value (rather like some excuses for programs I've seen)? And they'd be right. These are open source arguments, though, and miss the fact that freeing software not only results in lowered operating costs for businesses that use it, but it changes the every environment in which they operate.
There are two primary schools of economic thought: planned economies and free markets. Politically, you have the statists on one side and the libertarians and anarchists on the other. Proponents from both sides argue that "their" way serves to distribute scarce resources in the most effective way, and that's what we want, no? -- effective distribution of scarce resources.
Well, yeah, but that doesn't make the scarcity go away, does it? Oh sure, the technological advancements that lead to efficiency improvements do eventually trickle down to everyone so that certain scarcities are less visible, but that's just a kludge. Think water. Most cities have methods for distributing drinking water to the point that, although the amount of water available may remain the same, it hardly seems locally scarce, even though it may have come from far away.
Free software serves to reduce the scarcity of good code out there. It provides value without relying on scarcity as the source of that value. It is a threat only to those who seek to leverage their possession of a scarce resource for maximum value. Now, if that resource is naturally scarce, fine: once sold, it is gone. But if the resource is artificially scarce, you can manufacture more of it for no cost, and charge whatever the market will bear, for pure profit (until you saturate the market, that is, but time-limited use licenses take care of that "problem" -- Microsoft's latest licensing strategy). It gives the owner incredible power over society as a whole (until society revolts).
But it costs money to produce code! People can't afford to give it away!! Well, if they depend on making it scarce for their livelyhood, no, but that is a bootstrapping problem: you make something artificially scarce in order to deal with real scarcities in your life. You'd have to do this less if there were less scarcities to worry about (imagine if we had solar-powered food-generation machines). And indeed, some have managed to give code away. RMS has done this exclusively, though by living a rather austere lifestyle. His choice. Others give code away when they can afford to. Each such contribution changes our environment for the better. For hackers who breathe code, this is, of course, a godsend (RMS, an atheist, might not like that choice of wording -- "GPLsend" then). Perhaps that's why we like the GPL so much, even those of use that produce restrictively-licensed code for a living.
So, you don't need economic arguments to defend the GPL. It is as good and wonderful for the world as are the lack of patents on fire, wheels, and language. The only people who will criticize it are those that profit from the misery that scarcity brings.
You could've hired me.
Perens calls open source "a crown jewel of capitalism." That may be true, but open source is a crown jewel of freedom. And freedom is the bottom line here. Make no mistake about that.
He (mundie) said: "Rather than form a federation with Microsoft and work with what we had already created, there was this notion that the world should be offered an alternative."
Words of monopolistic wisdom, from the horses mouth.
Ra7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
I used the words "compare" and "(yet)", not "not competing".
I didn't know that Microsoft has hired someone from IBM GS, but this would seem to add support to my theory.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Commerce has thrived in a "commons" since the first public squares were constructed, and the GPL's share-and-share-alike system creates a commons for software.
GPL software would not be classified as a "commons" good, but rather as a "pure public" good. The term commons refers to goods that are non-excludable, but are rivalrous in consumption. GPL software is not only non-excludable, but also non-rivalrous in consumption. My use of a particular piece of GPL software does not diminish your ability to use it, or raise its price (it may even lower it!). Commons are, to economists, one of the WORST ways to allocate goods. Refer to Garrett Hardin's classic paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968). Hurray for pure public goods!
What Mundie doesn't understand (or chooses to ignore) is how wealth is created. Simply passing wealth back and forth between companies doesn't create wealth. Paying taxes doesn't create wealth. Government spending doesn't create wealth.
:-)
Wealth is created by increasing efficiency. If I pay you $10/hour to build widgets worth $3 a piece, and you can build 4 widgets per hour, then I make $2/hour profit. If you figure out how to increase you efficiency and make 6 widgets per hour instead of 4, my profit has now increased to $8/hour. This can then be reflected in increased wages for you, fewer work hours, or a cheaper product. Regardless, net wealth of the economy has been increased, since more output is produced from the same input.
Where does the GPL work into this? Because one GPL application has effectively infinite supply, it drastically reduces input costs of production and therefore leads to a very high net increase in the entire economy's wealth. Commercial software necessarily leads to less wealth increase, because it has an artificial cost added to increase the producer's personal wealth at the cost of the whole economy's net wealth.
Mundie's argument is that the artificial cost is necessary for software to get produced, because there will otherwise be no incentive for the producers to produce software. The thing he ignores, though, is that obviously the software does get produced. If OS software gets produced, then it is out there. It has increased the net wealth of the economy. That increase will never go away (unlike the commercial company, which could go out of business). If OS is not enough incentive for the software to get produced, or OS doesn't lead to a solution that is sufficient, then the demand for a commercial version will be high enough that commercial development will be supportable. There is room for both.
Microsoft, of course, is just beginning to realize that the software they make is quite compatible with OS development, and there is no way they can compete with the efficiency of an OS product. Therefore, Mundie is arguing that we will all be better off if the economy's net wealth is held down in favor of MS's personal wealth gain. I just don't buy it
On the other hand, he's absolutely right that there may not be as high a demand for software developers in the future. So what. So, a few programmers may have to change careers. They're smart people (and yes, I am one), and shouldn't have too much of a problem finding work. Yes, it sucks for a few, but where would we be today if we always held back progress in favor of old, established industries. Not to be cliche, but I'm sure the development of the automobile sucked for the buggy whip manufacturers, too. Personally, I'll risk my long term personal stability for the chance of great wealth increases for both myself and the economy as a whole.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
I don't think that's what Perens meant. Recouped costs aren't going toward "paying for" GPL software, they are going back into the company's general budget. I can't even guess at how much money we save annually at my workplace by running Linux on all our servers. That money goes into marketing and product development (e.g. it pays my salary).
Even if Microsoft manages to make as much money on services as they do now on selling software, they'll have to increase their workforce to provide the services as well as create the SW that runs it. Which means it'll be a lot less profitable. For Microsoft, this may not be a problem, but lots of smaller software houses will be up shit creek.
I'm not sure I understand. Don't most businesses deal with this already? To continue using my workplace as an example, we've been growing our customer base at an astonishing rate, putting out new products nearly every year, and we still only have four tech support people (one of which just hired). Over time we've become more and more a "services" company and indeed it is our goal to move completely away from software sales and into services. This isn't an outrageous idea. The money that flows in at an increasing rate every day is one piece of proof that our business model is sound. The comments we receive from customers daily telling us how much ass we kick are more proof. Without Linux and GPL, we couldn't have done this.
For now, that will work because the amount of open-source SW is limited. But soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time. So I don't see the ... larger development staff than any one company could support... happening in general. Only for the few Good Causes (in programmer community opinion) will an ample (free) workforce be available.
Apparently you aren't a programmer (or at least not the type of programmer who typically works on free software). The GPL and other licenses like it live on because the really good programmers (the ones you would gladly pay for their services) are also the ones who love doing their job so much that when they get home at night, they do it some more, for free (possibly to the detriment of their spouses). Because they want to. And the number of such people is growing. Quickly. To be really cheesy and quote the IBM commercial, why does Linux (or GPL, Bruce Perens, etc.) work for peanuts?
Because he loves the game.
> Somebody has to pay for the time and effort.
> RMS is a fraud -- we all know it. He left MIT
> to do GNU but was fortunate that the director
> of the AI lab allowed him to comtinue to use
> its facilities (publicly-funded - so you and I
> paid for it).
Umm, the AI lab already had their computers. We might have paid for them to set up, but we probably didn't pay much extra for RMS to work there. Same with most people. If you already have a computer, you don't need to pay for it.
> He needed money: so sold GNU
> EMACS at $150 a pop and funded himself from "a
> software distribution business" (his words).
> Sounds like Bill et al to me.
EXCEPT that under the GNU anyone can do that. This is the old 'free software' confusion. Free software doesn't have to be given away. If I wanted to sell copies of GNU Emacs, I could do, as long as the people I sold it to had permission to sell it on themselves.
The normal cry here is: "but! You can't really make money selling free software, because since you can't stop others distributing it, those other people can give it away for nothing and you'll lose the money you made." Yep, that's right. But then, even if you were making commercial software they'd still be no guarantee you'd make money doing it. And a competitor might well try and push you out by giving an equivalent product away (Internet Explorer anyone?).
There can still be commercialisation and competition in free software. Witness the Linux boxed distros. The only difference is that the scarce resource involved isn't the software.
> And why is is all Microsoft versus Linux? What
> about the rest of us trying to earn an honest
> living out of selling our software?
You have every right to do that. Only a few people believe that *ALL* software should be OS, and even then, it's "should be" (ie, it would be nice if the authors chose it to be), not "should be forced to be".
It's only forced to be if you base it on other free software - and that's only because, were there no free software, you would have probably had to pay a big-ass licensing fee to get at the source code you based it on, if you were even allowed to see the source in the first place.
> Why should I expose all my genius to have every
> half-wit so the he/she can copy it, corrupt it,
> and persuade his boss to give him a raise for
> it?
Well, you said your software was for Linux, so calling the people who might have written the kernel 'half-wits' is a shade hypocritical..
> DOn't I deserve more than a mindless "credit"
> in the source code -- (and half of you take
> those out as well, in my experience).
Of course you do. Go persuade your boss to give you a raise based on your product, just like the other guy did. If he could do so and you can't, then, well, he's obviously improved the product and deserves his raise.
> No, no, no and no again. You're wrong-headed,
> misguided, foolish and economically illiterate.
The capitalist economy is fully operational on free software. It's just that you have to find something other than the software to be scarce. Think you're such a hot programmer? Sell the service of making custom alterations to it. Grab distributions, test them for hours to ensure industrial standard and then sell them with proven certifications. Sell support. Write about the software then sell the book. It's all there.
I can't believe Mundie's complaint about the GPL is that it will pull money out of the public sector. He should be arguing the other way around: In the long run, the GPL puts money into the public sector, and that's why it's bad.
Peren's argument distracts us from the real problem by pointing out how much money business saves in the short-run.
What is the real problem? There are at least two: First, by discouraging entry into the software market, the GPL reduces the number of competitors. This means less consumer choice, not more. That's because most consumers have the ability and the resources to evaluate and choose programs, but most don't have the ability and resources to evaluate and choose programmers. Free Software is devestating to the diverse "middle ground" of software that sells in the $20-$100 range. When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.
The other problem is that when GPL projects fail to keep pace with technology, there is the danger that people will make arguments that the government needs to step in and take over the project. This is the secret hearts desire of the Free Software movement, which is just socialism with a hi-tech veneer. Already, there are too many government workers writing software who should instead be using a diverse array of packages from different vendors, linked together by open standards (open standards are law, but executables are *not*. That's a critical distinction that Lessig fails to make, but we aren't here to talk about Lessig).
Perens is right in the short-run: Socialism always does well in the beginning because it lives off the fat of the land that has been stored up. In the long-run though, it drags the economy down.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...can anyone point to some *real* TCO numbers? As in, biased neither toward Linux or Windows?
Lendrick
While you're correct in saying that software has to be paid for, you're being too narrow in looking for the money.
Examples, in house development. Companies have their own stables of programmers building the tools they need/want for competitive advantage. What if they devoted 60-70% of those resources to working on Open Source projects that get them closer to their goal? Remember, if you don't distribute an OS project then you don't have to distribute the improved code. So, if three different companies working for different things all contributed towards the development of the base utilities then they all get a return far in proportion to the initial investment.
Second, schools. These institutions get money from grants, endowments, and tuition. They have a bunch of students and professors working there. Why not utilize Open Source to keep costs down and contribute back to that community? Again, return versus investment.
Finally, the Open Source people aren't trying to keep you from making a living selling software. The main complaint most of us have (or well to be honest at least I have) with MS is that they use their position to fight illegally. If it were just a matter of "may the best code win" then I think everyone would be perfectly willing to just roll up their sleeves and duke it out.
Remember, software isn't the beginning and ending of economics. For most people and companies software is just a means to an end. (Point of Sale systems in stores, Web Servers for e-businesses, accounting systems, etc.) For the average production company software is only an overhead cost driving up the overall cost of their products. And if you look at the Fortune 500, Microsoft is pretty far down the list.
The lessons of history have shown the following: companies are always trying to decrease their costs, monopolies tend to get broken up, and everyone hates bullies.
(Btw - the difference between software, and IP, versus physical things is that sharing the one doesn't decrease the value to the current owner. Two people can use the same software at the same time and both derive the same benefit, thus doubling the return. It's tough for two people to share the same airplane and fly in different directions.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I have been gently pressing the organizers of the 'world conference' about getting the original copy of Mundie's speech, but so far I have been unable to get it. They claimed, at first, to be transcribing the speech, and that it would be available at the media part of the site, but so far it hasn't appeared.
I really want to see the original source, as I believe that it's quite likely that Mundie's reported words are not particularly accurate, and they are surely quoted out of contest. I'm most interested, of course, because I think that the original text is, if anything, more strident and open for redicule.
I've got an email log of my conversations with the World Conference orgranzers that I'd be willing to share with anybody, on request, just send an email. Perhaps with a few more people asking we can get the transcript.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Bruce Perens claims that:
"Mundie uses a textbook tactic of manipulation: start with some reasonable talk, and lead the audience to an unreasonable conclusion."
Then he goes on to make the following claim:
"A partial count of the software available in just one noncommercial Linux system released two years ago shows that it would have cost about $1.9 billion to develop the same software the way Microsoft does it... If open source was economically unviable, development would have ceased long before there was $1.9 billion worth of it."
Pot, meet Kettle. It might have cost $1.9 Billion the way Microsoft does it, but open source development is not built the way Microsoft does it. Open source development often relies on time and effort provided essentially by donation. As such, the $1.9 Billion he's using to imply economic viability never existed. Nobody paid $1.9 Billion to develop open source software, so that particular test never occured.
His statements are a perfect example of false logic. Strip down his arguments in the article, and you see that he IS another soapbox idiot. I trust him about as much as I do the people he is lambasting.
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.
Frankly, I think that the CS degree should move to the Engineering department, and become a true software engineering degree. The CIS degree belongs in the business department. [I'm one of the latter.]
But I've never understood the random ways that schools go about producing the CS people. Not that they're bad, it just seems to have no real standard.
Software Engineering ought to be more like ENGINEERING! Not just throw code at the compiler until it sticks.
I have faith, mostly, in the structural engineers, and the chemical engineers, and the electrical engineers. But software engineers?
Here's an appropriate poke with a sharp stick...
A DESIGN PARABLE
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two
of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box
with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you
think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he
said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for
it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I
would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and
quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow
white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as
the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it
would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the
initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay,
it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next
week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the
danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just
turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles.
What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the
subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand
more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can
also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster
that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the
future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few
years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to
the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize
this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The
specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into
toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage,
links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs,
hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet
classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because
it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry
classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved
without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create
the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook
yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the
kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast
than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has
revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of
breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived
requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with
multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get
cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required,
too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the
food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users
won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical
interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see
a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message
'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be
out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down
a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in
the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware
platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of
memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If
you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports
multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will
be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had
foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a
four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all
lived happily ever after.
Now that all the CS people hate me...I'll slink into the shadows.
Cheers!
Thermodynamcis probably makes such a device impossible, but imagine if it existed. Widespread deployment would end the hunger problem, yes? (and I know that an argument can be put forth that world-wide hunger is due more to politics and inefficiencies of distribution, than scarcity of production, but work with me here).
Now imagine that such machines were patented, and licensed on a month to month basis, rather than sold. Would that be moral?
To the extent that the investment necessary to design such a device was recouped and then some (after all, the inventor of such a thing would deserve wealth, by any standard), yes. They could even try to profit indefinitely as they tried to keep the design secret. But, once reverse engineered, beyond a reasonable exploitive monopoly period, the "gravy train" should end: no one should profit indefinately by restraining others from duplicating what they do.
I suggest that the situation with software is similar.
It boils down to the following paradox: Profit from scarcity that causes misery may be wrong, but such profit is necessary to mitigate one's own miseries, hence the justification for making things artificially scarce. However, this does little to aleviate the scarcity to begin with. Something needs to break the profit stream in order that the root problem can be addressed. Historically, we have resorted to violence to do this in the case of scarce natural resources (water, oil), and often make the hoarder worse off than if he had shared to begin with, usually as a form of punishment. Of course, you can't steal software, only copy it, so that kind of punishment is not possible. The U.S. tried limited patents and copyrights, to provide the necessary balance between rewarding innovation, and social progress, but the terms have become absurd on both. Do we have to resort once again, to violence to restore a more reasonable balance? I hope not.
You could've hired me.
Have you considered being a technical writer or something? There are many ways that anyone can help.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It is most definitely a valid point that the TCP/IP stack was BSD and as a result it is more than ubiquitous. IPX, offerings from DEC, and other attempts all pretty much pale beside IP. However, there was not a GPL-ed TCP/IP implementation to compete with, so saying the BSD *won* is not entirely fair. You are implying a comparison that did not exist.
I would never wish to live in a society where the wishes of people who take my code are more important than mine.
Well, two issues. Companies already release code under the GPL, even existing companies like IBM and Sun, let alone Red Hat and VA. Saying that an owner of work would not release under the GPL because it "would not allow them to incorporate improvements" is not accurate. There is *nothing* stopping them from doing so.
The misinformation that companies can't use GPL'ed code when they have been doing so for years needs to stop.
FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Marketing tactic. If your product is not competing strongly, or even not existent, you let on how something awful is about to befall your competitor.
PHB: Pointy-Haired Boss. It's a reference to the cartoon Dilbert.
TCO: Total Cost of Ownership. Corporate-speak. Said of IT components. Recognition that an upfront price tag is not the whole story. There are other costs in the long run: hardware and software, maintenance, support, staff, licensing, etc.
In the future, you might try the Jargon File.
Steven Levy's book Hackers shows that the attitudes Bill Gates and his friends were set a long, long time ago. They never likes the idea of "giving" away any software, none at all. Their mantra was "if you use it, you should pay ME for it." All that time has done is increase their size as a business (most likely by insisting on "don't applaud, throw money instead") and being the driving force behind organizations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
As is their right in our society.
You, of course, have the right of choice -- choice that lets you choose to use software vended by someone other than Microsoft.
The anti-trust trial was about Microsoft trying to eliminate sources of software other than itself, in the areas which Microsoft chose to "compete," and the US Department of Justice taking exception to that elimination of competition and choice. We had a charge, an answer, discovery, a trial, a verdict, and an appeal...and at the end of the day we have a company that has been declared guilty (in a Court of Equity) of anti-competitive actions.
Bill continues to show that his grade of "F" in sandbox remains a fair and valid one by refusing to understand why his actions are in violation of statute, and why his actions are harming society.
And who here would be the wiser if you were in his place?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Communism and capitalism are different economic systems, but what they have in common is that they are meant to be applied to systems of physical goods. Physical goods are limited in quantity; e.g. if you sell me a car, you no longer have the car yourself.
Software, like any information, is different. I can sell you a copy of a program I wrote while still having my own copy. To my knowledge, neither the communist nor the capitalist model address goods that can be replicated at zero (or near-zero) cost.
Capitalism uses money to reward production and allow consumption. Communism asks people to produce what they can and consume what they need. Free/Open Source Software allows people to produce however much they want and consume whatever they like. (Pity it only works with bits.)
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
This is an interesting point. On a parallel, I used to work for a large hospital system where the CIO decided that we should replace all of our aging Novel servers with NT boxes. We ended up with something like four times as many servers to accomplish only about 1.5 times the work. But the really interesting expenses were in automation. Because of the lack of robust scripting ability in NT (at the time) and lack of knowledge among most of the staff, the company chose to purchase an unbelievably expensive automation package and then spent even more money on training people to use the automation package. The funny thing about it was that the automation package was more complex, less capable, more error-prone and more difficult to debug than scripting. One of the more technically aware members of our staff elected to be a renegade and purchased a reasonably inexpensive third party add-on for the servers that provided the same capabilities as Unix shell scripting. (Similar to CYGWIN) He had all of his processes fully automated and running before the rest of the staff had completed training. And his automation solutions could be maintained by the same people responsible for our Unix systems, so nobody could complain about creating something unsupportable. He was a really bright guy -- a clear thinker.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Free markets are about bottom-up decentralized control of production. The distinction has little to do with making money.
Microsoft is all about top down control of software research and production.
Free Software is all about localized, bottom-up control software research and production.
When a commune goes bad, you can leave - unless it is one of those really nasty cults. Microsoft is so big, that you can't get away from them. They is why they can get away with ever more oppressive licensing terms.
There are advantages to centralized production. It is nice when Microsoft drives standardization of PC hardware. But participation needs to be voluntary. Microsoft is becoming like a cult - it becomes harder and harder for its members to leave.
Perhaps I should link to the number of israeli soldiers (about equivelent to the amount of israeli dead) that refuse to fight against the palestinians because of the abuses and attroticities percieved by them on the front lines of this battle.
This will be my new sig perhaps one day.
How many soldiers does it take to stop a war?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I suggest that you look at my paper Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!. It has that kind of information, grouped into categories such as market share, total cost of ownership (TCO), reliability, and so on.
For example, Microsoft absolutely owns the desktop client market, that's true. But it certainly doesn't own other markets - Apache is still the most common web browser, for example, and sendmail is the most popular mail transfer agent (MTA). See my paper for the details.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is so dependent on the assumptions that you really have to do your own. However, it's clear that many people do find that GNU/Linux systems have a lower TCO than Microsoft's systems in their environment.
Please note that Perens himself claims that the $1.9 billion estimate was only if the software had been developed the same way as Microsoft's. Perens does not claim that $1.9 billion was spent. Check the linked-to paper, I think it spells things out clearly. One caveat: I wrote the analysis tool used in the paper. However, the tool simply implements a well-known and widely respected estimation model that has been openly documented; it's certainly not biased to give open source software bigger results.
I think Perens' article was well-written.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Actually, the whole reason for IP is that sharing IP does decrease its economic value, but only for the owner of the IP. Obviously, if everyone already has a copy of package X which I wrote, then I'm not going to be able to sell it. However, if I can control the distribution of package X, then I have a chance to make money on it.
It would also be valid to counter-argue that the uncontrolled distribution of package X would increase its *overall* economic value. Perhaps that value would be so great, that my objections to its distribution would be petty. But think about that a second: IP laws don't guarantee the larger good first. The guarantee the individual rights first, *THEN* the larger good.
Your argument about the airplanes is obviously true in the physical sense. But when it comes to the bottom line, it doesn't hold up. Supply and demand are real phenomenon in a market economy and IP law simply gives people an economic reason to develop new IP.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
This is a major uphill battle. Microsoft is in bed with the entertainment industry to push through copy protection legislation that could kill open source operating systems like Linux and they continue to use FUD to poison the open source well.
;-)
Let's make no mistake about the seriousness of our situation. Microsoft alone has enough funding to cause major problems but add to that the entertainment industry's intellectual property pirating concerns and the unfortunate fact that our politicians can be bought makes the situation very grim.
We need to fight back NOW. An article here and there is not going to be enough. We have got to organize and get the word out to the common people in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. One of the worst mistakes that we can make is to come off looking like a group of fanatics. We must make them see that this issue is their issue and not just the concerns of a group of geeks and nerds. Personally, I'm proud to bee a geek but that's beside the point.
It would be a big boost to the effort if we could get our position aired on television. One story on CNN is worth hundreds on a tech related web page. But this may not be easy to do since CNN is owned by some of the very people who want to shove copy protection into every piece of hardware and software. They have a vested interest in seeing that we can't get our message out.
I am open to any reasonable suggestions about what course of action we should take. Any suggestions out there?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Sorry to irritate you. I'm silly enough to respond to you, too. I doubt Mundie would take the trouble.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I didn't say it did. I said that the money gets spent for your business.
If the GPL way of development costs the end-user as much as the MS way, this might indeed result in a net loss of software development. But I doubt that's the case.
soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time
Yes. More of them will be paid to work on GPL collaborations because they are advantageous to their employers. A good many of us do make salaries to do this. Yes, I know that more people wish they did. Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So sure... the equation works - most of the way. However, if Micro$oft gets the money, it does not go back into the economy. It goes into Micso$oft.
/
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/printer/4526
I know it's not quite that black & white. I'm just making a point.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Remember this: open source is complementary to commercial software. A very few people like RMS believe all software should be Free with a capital letter (that bugs the hell out of me), but they are in the minority. The rest of us write open source code because we want to contribute to the community.
As an example, point me to good examples of companies that have gone under because an open source product stole their market. Now realise this: the open source movement would be nowhere near as big as it is today if it weren't for the fact that Microsoft has total control of the market. Can anybody see Linux really growing at such a rate if say Windows, BeOs and Mac OS X shared the market equally in thirds, and apps could be ported between each in a matter of hours? Nope, didn't think so. Open source exists because the market has been distorted for so long that something new had to happen, and it did.
Finally, know this: open source software competes with a TINY TINY part of the whole software market. Where's the open source competitor to Oracle, Sage, the software that runs our electricity grids, our gas pipes, manages corporations payroll databases. Hmm, I don't see them. Wonder why?
It's because open source competes in markets where there is total control of the market. The desktop is really the only area of computing I can think of (at the moment) where this applies. Don't worry - ten years from now we'll all still be programmers, in fact the profession will probably have expanded enormously, because programmers will be spending their time writing new code, instead of working their way around Microsofts bugs, or writing hacky little utilities to make up for the lack of a feature we were promised five years ago.
We'll all be earning money, and hopefully contributing at the same time. Relax! It's gonna be fun! :)
But there are german open source developers as well.
Why does it have to be money. Mundie said that open source is not viable because people will not be willing to make investments into it, so there wont be any innovation etc etc. That 1.9 billion figure proves that people are making investments into open source, no matter if they are investments of money or effort. Since software is a very labor intensive industry investments of labor are as usefull as ones of money. So where is the false logic? If you are going to call someone an idiot make sure you have thought your argument trough.
Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system.
No. Windows Admins DO script. A lot. You know why? Because it's easy and helps reduce the repetitive buttonclicking. ABN Amro Bank for example build a complete system just with a set of scripts to maintain the complete WAN of windows2000 servers (8000 of them) and workstations (tens of thousands). Central maintainance of all the systems on the wan, software push/installations/configurations, done central by admins using simple scripts.
The days that a group of admins walked around to perform a lot of tasks on every windows desktop box are over. A few years already. Windows2000 server lets you control via VBscript everything on the system and domain. Because of COM and the system objects build in, usable from VBScript. Every Windows2000 admin not using scripts is not worth being called an 'admin' and should be fired.
I hope next time you get your facts straight so your articles about the subject of this thread are more near the truth. Ah well...
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
It's called a signed bill of sale...
Not much different than a receipt, when you get accused of shoplifting.
Should put the matter to rest!
Cheers!
What you're comparing this to is this:
The inventor creates an idea, and a rough sketch or prototype in implimenting it.
The engineer takes that rough design, and works it into a real product that has real design parameters that works with the way it has to be manufactured etc.
Inventor = Computer Scientist.
Engineer = Software Engineer.
I don't think that's quite what you had in mind.
The end result, is that we need far fewer CS people and many more SE's. (Perhaps that's what we need now anyhow...)
For every inventor, there need to be many implimentors (engineers). We only need a few inventors - too many, and nothing gets done!
In general I like your points about the generality of CS as compared to SE. I just don't think that most current CS people fit into the inventor niche, and wonder where we're going to stick 'em.
Cheers!
In order to teach CS as engineering it needs to be a subject that can be taught as engineering. Which it is not. Draw a corollary between building a bridge and builind a software system. The comparison is illuminating as to why CS is just that "science" and not engineering.
Indeed in my opinion, it is more like art than science even. But that's another story.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
VNC can be very easily tunneled over SSH. I do this with several servers and I get desktops on my home machine from work this way. What you do is configure the machine with VNC not to accept connections from VNC's normal port range and (if using it on Windows) configure VNC to allow Loopback connections. By default, a VNC machine won't "connect to itself" but you need it to for this to work. And yes, the server in question will have to be running sshd as well the VNC server.
If your using the Cygwin port of ssh to windows then run the following on the client machine:
ssh -L 590x:localhost:5900 -l username @servermachine
Then start up your vnc client and connect to localhost:1. Easy peasy.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The argument applies today to any media that can take on digital form. Once you amortize the design cost, you can make copies for free. The question is: can you come up with a scheme to amortize the design cost without a per-unit revenue capture? It happens to be true for many kinds of software, because software enables other sorts of sales. Maybe this doesn't work for music or movies, I don't know. Regarding patents, that's a whole different argument - I think most patents are not justly awarded.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Boy, am I glad he cleared that up. I was worried that goons from the Boy Scouts of America were going to show up and, I dunno, tie knots in my computer or something.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Oh good! I'm happy to have the chance to argue with a real economist.
Bruce: In contrast, once you have amortized the cost of creating a piece of software, there is essentially no marginal cost associated with creating another copy.
Daytrip: This is not exactly true. True enough that each physical product associated with software has a marginal cost of zero, however more goes into any specific software product than just the cd's and the packaging. There also significant marketing costs, research costs, and support costs associated with each purchased item.
OK. Let's examine the three factors you pointed out: marketing, support, and research.
We do marketing communications differently. We rely on the software being on hand for the user to try. It's either on their system or downloadable via the internet, so that the customer can see if it solves their problem. This doesn't have a significant cost for us.
I don't think you have addressed strategic marketing rather than marketing communications. We do that differently as well.
Support can take place via the usual pay-for-service model (although there are alternatives). Support is not coupled to the product purchase in our model.
That leaves us with research. But that's a cost that can be amortized in the cost of creating the product. Yes, for a business it's an ongoing cost, but that's not how we pay for it.
Bruce: Can we amortise the creation cost of software without a direct revenue capture per unit sold? The answer seems to be yes for a lot of people.
Daytrip: While I certainly agree with this point, most firms (the ones without an idealogical agenda, but simply those in the business of making money) maximize profit.
But you are only considering businesses that sell software. What about most businesses, which use software as a means to carry out some other activity? Many do employ their own programmers, because off-the-shelf often won't do. Consider Apache in this light. It was created by people who had to serve web pages for some business that most often wasn't software development.
Daytrip: Moreover, the viral nature of the GPL further prevents any corportation from truly maximizing profits once they use GPL'ed software, even though these corporations (with the taxes they pay) actually supported the development of those products.
Again, you are only considering this from the perspective of a business that sells software. For other sorts of businesses, software would otherwise be make-or-buy, and there may well be savings due to collaboration with other businesses, ease of customization, etc.
Bruce: if you want to consider me as selling out the software development profession, I'm doing it for the customer.
Daytrip: I object to this argument in particular. Naiively, the best model for consumers is for everyone to produce software for free, and provide support for free and give everything away for free. While this, in the short run, would be quite advantageous for consumers, after a while, all corporate profits (and earnings) would run dry, killing the industry.
Again, you aren't considering the role of the customer in developing their own Open Source. You are only considering this from the perspective of a business that produces software for its income. But there are many customers who produce their own software for their own use. These are the people who carry out Open Source development.
The result of my argument if taken farther than it will perhaps ever go would be that proprietary software development might dry up. But it could be possible that nobody would miss it. Business as a whole would not dry up, and efficiency could improve.
Daytrip: Moreover, if all industries were to do this, and consumers were only to pay for the natural resources involved in making a product, this would essentially de-value labor and make fixed resources the only tenable currency
You are postulating that the Open Source model applies to the entire economy, then disproving that. This is of course taking my argument to the point of absurdity. But my argument doesn't apply to the entire economy, as I've made clear. It is a very specialized exception for commodities that: 1) can have their design cost amortized some way other than by per-unit-sale revenue capture and 2) have essentially no marginal cost to duplicate. There are science-fictional scenarios where this might someday be more than just software, but I don't think they will be true for a long time.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Several years ago when I was an intern in a state govt agency, I was given administrator duties on their Windows NT domain. I immediately sought out command-line tools for all my administrative needs (the NT reskit) and proceeded to create batch file scripts for everything from scanning machine configs to pushing out updates, turning services on and off, etc. It greatly simplified standardizing everyone's configs. I was even able to use it to automate the creation of a machine config database, including hardware! Sure, it took a few weeks to really get to power-user level with batch files, but it was well worth it, and amazing what could be accomplished without buying fancy third-party admin tools.
I'm not dogging you, but I believe that this approach is why we have such crappy software.
When we think..."Oh, software is so...ahhh...touchy-feely - it's like art! [eyes roll back in head - head detaches from body and floats dreamily by...]
Sure, there are some very elegant constructs in programming. And these constructs are by artists. But the design and implimentation of a program doesn't and shouldn't be approached like art.
Watch how some great engineers solve problems. I'd say that the result is artistic. But the approach to solving the problems and the result is not art like. It structured, methodical, and calculated. That doesn't mean that I can't look at the end result, and say wow, that's elegant.
The result may be art, but the process of getting there WASN'T!
Lastly, I believe that if we built MORE software the same way we build bridges, we'd get much better software. We'd also find that it was lots less expensive in the long run.
[Rant off]
Cheers!
I agree with you 100%, I am not _endorsing_ the software as art approach, I just think it's the reality. The problem is that there are so many ways of skinning the proverbial cat in software. The constraints that exist in the engineering disciplines remove the art from the "structural elements". In software we don't even have the strucutral elements (well we do have some, for example we all know how to open a socket and there ain't much art in how they get used) so it is all art (and not just the cladding on the outside of a bridge pylon or the colour of a suspoension cable).
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Linux admins script a fix and don't touch it again, they just re-run the script. Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system.
All this serves to show is that there are a fair number of so called "Windows admins" who don't really know what they are doing.
It's the same here at FedEx, Bruce.
One of the projects for which I do Unix administration has both Solaris and NT servers (Linux is coming, shhhhh, don't tell anybody).
When we want to shut it all down for a software load, first we call the NT administrators and they take between 1 and 1.5 hours shutting down the software on the NT servers. Several people are involved in this.
Then one of us spends 10 minutes shutting down all the software on the Solaris servers.
Then they go physically load software on each Windows NT box by hand, while I push a patch out automatically to all the Unix boxen.
Then I start the software on the Unix servers back up for about 10 minutes.
Then they reboot all the NT servers and log back into them (because crucial pieces require it be logged in) for half an hour to an hour.
The cost for all that extra time and manpower absolutely, positively gets paid by you every time you ship a package.
If those NT servers were converted to Unix or Linux, my team could support them with our existing manpower, and all those other guys could go work for UPS or something.