Responses to ADTI Paper

Everyone and their brother has something to say about the silly and incoherent ADTI paper released yesterday. It doesn't even seem worth the effort to me - it's so internally inconsistent that I can't imagine it convincing anyone of anything. Nevertheless, David Skoll of Roaring Penguin has a good rebuttal, and Newsforge ^? pointed out that the MITRE study that's been kicking around for so long is now public, and took a look at the differences between the two. Update: 06/11 18:43 GMT by M : Another rebuttal, by John Viega and Bob Fleck of Secure Software.

Comments

Re:Bias on bias

[Dark Nexus]

Well, a bit of both of what you suggested. But I should note that I never said it doesn't already exist. My comments were directed at the views expressed in the rebuttal, NOT towards the current state of software.

When I said balance is necessary, I mostly meant that there be both open source and closed source programs out there. With regards to this, my point was that the author of the rebuttal, at times, seems to be advocating 100% GPL'd software. That's NOT balance.

As for a blend of the extremes as you called them, some balance there in the form of more software being released somewhere in the middle, such as the licsencing scheme used by BitMover for BitKeeper (described in this interview) would be nice.

With this point, I think more balance would be achieved through a more co-operative existance between open and closed source. Of course, I can't expect we'll ever see Microsoft being part of such an initiative.

Raise your hand if you write off-the-shelf s/w

[sab39]

If you ever get the opportunity, try asking for a show of hands at a computer convention of any kind, for all the people who work writing off-the-shelf software. Last I heard, the number was typically well below 20%.

The rest work in a variety of areas, ranging from custom embedded systems (where the license of your code matters not one iota because the code can't be changed once the device is manufactured, and it's only useful to the one device anyway) to custom software such as web application development or "enterprise" business logic (where the license of the code matters not one iota because it's never released, and only useful to the one company anyway).

So at worst, if all off-the-shelf software were eliminated, the software industry would shrink by 20%.

More likely, companies with large software requirements (like needing 100,000 installations of an office suite) will channel some of the money they're not spending on licenses and employ some programmers to answer the question of "where do we get bugfixes from if there's no company to turn to?". Once you reach a certain size, employing a few full-time programmers is actually cheaper than paying the ludicrous license costs of OTS software these days. Or they could pay a company like Red Hat or IBM or Sun for "support" (ie, to employ some programmers to prioritize this set of bugs/features over all others).

You've said that "100% open source isn't truely viable" but not backed it up in any way. David Skoll at least backed his point of view up by pointing to great software produced entirely without business models being in the picture. Who is more credible, the one who makes a (admittedly lightweight) argument to back up his point of view, or the one who simply calls the other a zealot with no argument?

It's hard to argue against someone calling for "balance". But sometimes "balance" simply isn't necessary or desirable. Just ask the Catholic Church what kind of reception their "balanced" approach to sex abuse is getting. Sure, that's a reductio-ad-absurdum. But since your whole argument seems to be "balance is necessary!", it suffices to point out a single counterexample...

Stuart.

In Reference to David Skoll's Piece

[__aavonx8281]

Email I sent to David Skoll & Response:

I would like to comment on this papers addressing of 'documentation' of open source versus proprietary software. I would like to point out that when I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, there was no documentation at all provided. I had to blindly figure out how to use the product, and eventually had to invest over $200 in outside books and materials (or alternatively I could have paid $1000 for training classes). I purchased Mandrake 8.2 and got a huge book of documentation. I also found online documentation for all of the packages included (apache, sendmail, php, etc.) that was absolutely free. I think open source documentation is some of the best in the world, with code examples and tutorials available all over the internet. Closed source software, by contrast, since it is proprietary, sports very few code examples or complete documentation. Try finding an active server pages version of PHP Nuke for example... Just my $.02. Thank you for your time.

Thanks for your letter; you're not the only person to comment on the lack of documentation for MS software. I was unaware of the documentation situation because I've never actually used MS software to any great extent. A few years back, I briefly (4 months) developed under Windows and became totally frustrated, not by the lack of documentation, but by the fact that a lot of it was inaccurate.

Regards,

David.

Re:Microsoft sponsored

[nathanm]

From this Wired article:

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

Need any more proof?

But isn't using the GPL or free software risky?

[Fizzlewhiff]

What are the consequences of contributing to a project that comes under fire for patent or copyright infringement? Aren't the major contributors of BNETD kind of going through that now?

If I am a large corporation and I adopt some GPL software for my business and later someone finds that some code in that project was obtained without authorization and now the owner of that code is looking for blood and sees that I have quite a bit of it to give don't I put myself at risk? I may not have been responsible for inserting that code into the project, it could have happened before I joined the project but I improved on it and helped distribute it on my company's website. That could really screw up my business by costing me time and money. Forget backdoors and trojans. I think the real potential enemy of free software is stolen code.

I have a prediction for the future. At some point we will see some proprietary code slip into a free software project and really challenge the system. If I were Ximian I would be very mindful of what people are submitting to the Mono project.