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Open Source Limitations?
_aargh writes "This ZDNet article by John Carroll makes the claim that open source is flawed because there isn't a way for programmers to earn money by developing open source software. It annoyed me so much that I wrote this response to it on the O'Reilly Network."
It looks like people still don't get want the free software movement is all about: free as in free speach, not free as in free beer.
if an open source programmer toils day and night "for fun", is it fair that someone takes all that work and sells it as if it were his own...like any Linux distro?
Open source is great for people out of work, or screwing around. It sucks if you have 3 kids and a wife, and need insurance, and all the other perks a job offers.
Whine all you want about it, but precious few people make money from open source, and I don't see those folks sharing all that much.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
By "public investment," do you mean from governments? In that case, your idea is flawed on several levels. First, the results, the open source software, would not be free as in beer. They would have been paid for with money seized from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying for the software anyway, whether you want to use it or not.
Pick an average-sized government department in one of the major economies. Odds are, that department is currently spending a few million bucks a year for software licensing. Now, as a small experiment, imagine if just that department switched to OSS.
You'd likely see a drastic reduction in licensing fees. (90% sounds about right to me, but in reality I'm just making that number up.)
This isn't new expenditure... that department _already_ is spending that money. They are also already spending money on i.t. support.
Take some given amount, say, 25% of the difference, and hire a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems that may be unique to your department... and, for fun, contribute whatever they come up with back to the community. Couldn't hurt.
Yes, it is "public funding", and if those words make you cringe, well, so be it. It isn't by a long shot the same thing as calling for a department of software development, and it isn't the same thing as 'seizing' new money for OSS development. It's just one small way that some programmers might get remuneration for their work, and the commons of OSS could expand.
oops. metaphorical corollary, not metaphysical corollary... That would be getting into a whole different realm of incentives, I think. :-)
No, since it obviously isn't a fatal flaw, because Open Source/Software Libre programmers do feed their families. If it was a 'fatal flaw' then there wouldn't be Open Source/Free Software.
Possibly just as I do (minus the family bit). My company sells complete systems (hardware+software+support+training). And I write a fair bit of Software Libre on my own too.
NIST, Don Libes, expect. Reality sometimes works like that.
Your anti-government rhetoric is worn out. Try living in the real world for a while.
This is the second pro-Microsoft(implicit) article written by John Carrol for ZDNet. The first was a flame article about Nokia's testimony against Microsoft in the trial.
.Net" developer. It seems his employers weren't as keen on a MS only solution as he was.
Anyone who has ever spent any wasted hours on the ZDNet talkbacks will recognise John Carrol as one of those wierd posters who would spend hours posting responses in threads very similar to these two articles (and not always shorter either). Always very, very staunchly pro-Microsoft in any situation irrespective of what the article in question was about. Once there was an article about the trial and someone posted the obvious reference about MS using shady tactics to kill off a competitor and that this formed a big hurdle to anyone developing for Win32 because if the product was good, MS would either buy it out or kill the company. JC responded with comments about how MS made better standards than the w3c or ECMA and that anyone could build off these standards.
Basically his line has always been that:
a)Microsoft is a great company
b)MS technology is the most advanced and the best
c)MIcrosoft's technology benefit's everyone
d)MS' business model is superior
So, he does seem to be a bit obsessed. (Here's a link to his trial RFC letter: John Carrol vs. the world)
My only question I would ever have for him is why is he so worried about Microsoft going down the drain if they are in fact as superior as he claims that he has to post repeated articles about it on trash mags like ZDNet? What is also interesting about him is that he used to be a "Windows" distributed software developer and he is now a "Java and
It was Plato, not Aristotle who had the tri-partite theory of the soul. Also, the part you refer to as "Honor" was more often referred to as "Spirit", though a soldier's courage was a typical example of the spirt-part taking the lead. Also, Plato thought the soul was only in balance when Reason led the way. I'm not sure he ever speculated on what % of people were controlled primarily by appetite, but 80% would be a sorely pessimistic estimate. (Not saying that it couldn't be true!) Also, while I agree it is sad that John Carroll can't seem to imagine someone caring for things other than personal gain, it seems to me that the more relevant criticism of his article is how sorely he has misunderstood Free software and open source software, constantly misusing the terms and making false assumptions about all such software being zero-cost.
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
Real "Open Source" is SOURCE not LICENSE.
Open Source has nothing to do with giving anything away for free.
GNU is Open Source. Not all Open Source is GNU. Some Open Source is not GNU. GNU is one of several Open Source licenses.
GNU insists that whoever has the program has essentially the same rights as for a work for hire, except that these rights keep passing on.