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O'Reilly on the Open Source Industry
Idmat writes "Tim's latest opus, "The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors," starts with Sherlock Holmes ruminating on "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and winds up explaining why open source is good for businesses even if it isn't always good for software vendors."
starts with Sherlock Holmes ruminating on "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and winds up explaining why open source is good for businesses even if it isn't always good for software vendors
Does he explain how software companies that go out of business leave their clients in the lurch?
I have been pwned because my
I still don't get it why people think they can make money from developing open source products. The software is free, hence no money. You can make money from extra services such as support, or by providing open source software as vlaue added items to hardware. But not from the software itself.
Mark me flame bait...
Well, it seems pretty easy why Linux companies die. All the big Linux companies were during the dot.com . Well we all know how that turned out. Simply enough, if they created a product, somebody could come in and make a better gpl version of it. The incentive and the money wasn't there. No money = no company.
Well, in the case of todays Linux companies, le'ts see who they are.... IBM, SuSE (big in Germany),and Red Hat (it IS linux.. heh). Those are your big players (along with a few other distros). IBM makes its money by being a glue contractor.
"You need X done? We can use Linux (so you can put more money behind the hardware instead of software. Your performance will be 30% more without cost of software."
Then you have 2 major distros. They sell conveinance and/or commercial apps. Red Hat wont sell commercial stuff (yet).
Overall, this "insight" on this article is idiotic. The article is soo much more than "Why dont Open Source Companies make money?" It covers topics of governments and why ours ISNT using linux wholesale (MS marketing/lobbying). Bad Slashdot reporting. That's all. Go read the article.
doesnt this sound a little contradictory? How can something that is good for buisness be bad for software vendors, which, last time i checked, software venders were a pretty large buisness. I'm not saything that I dont agree with what the author has to see, I just think the article could have been worded a bit differently.
Try building a large complex product like, say certain commercial RDBM systems, across a dozen different Unix OSes and you quickly come to appreciate the commonality of things like GNU make. Open Source is useful for proprietary software vendors since it can help them develop their proprietry software products. A reasonable thing is to have them contribute back: patches to get the thing to compile on oddball platform xyz for example. If folks who tried to sell GNU make had a tough time (is Cygnus still in business?) it is not for lack of value of the product. The product does not lend itself to the over hyped marketing strategies that prove popular for other proprietery things like DB2 or Oracle.
When i see things like this beta of a Gamecube emulator I'm sure that linux companies still have a great potential.
Has anyone compared the probability for survival of an open source project to the probability of survival for a closed source project? I suspect that the results might be interesting.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I don't know about you, but I make a living using open source software. I contribute a little bit, but I leverage open source a lot.
So how can anyone say that open source is bad for business? I happen to be a business of one person, focusing on open source software consulting. My expenses are low and the value I provide is high.
And I'm quite profitable, thank you very much.
How many others here can claim that? I bet that thousands can.
If anyone claims that Open Source is doing anything but improving business and the economy, send them my way. I'll show them my piece of the world. And I'm far from being alone.
But it looks like some people in one particular software business wants to shut down my business. I'll fight that to the end.
Apache Worm in the Wild
Posted by michael on Friday June 28, @01:00PM
from the patchy-server dept.
codewolf writes "It has been reported to bugtraq by Domas Mituzas that a worm that exploits the Apache chunk bug has been found in the wild. Information on the worm can be found here. More information on the Apache bug can be found here, and patches can either be made by modifying your config file or upgrading your Apache version."
( Read More... | 40 of 60 comments )
Yes, I know that Wal-Mart shows up on Netcraft as running Microsoft IIS, but curiously, the operating system is Linux. So, it appears to be a case of the fairly common Apache hack, in which the Apache source is modified to output IIS as the server string. Mike Prettejohn of Netcraft assures me that the method used to find out the underlying operating system is less susceptible to modification in this way than the Web server signature.
Could this be an indicator of the future of Open Source? It seems to me that while IT departments are going to be pushing open solutions more and more, the management is going to be worried about the effect that would have on customers and users. Which could be significant, with Microsoft spending vast sums on FUD, and adding a 'Works best (or only works) with an MS-approved client/server' warning to their products. (Which we will likely see more and more of as the march to Palladium continues.) In the future, we will see more open source system masquerading outright as proprietary ones.
The second reason I foresee this happening is that the history of Open Source is replete with examples of projects such as GNU, Linux, Lindows, and XFree86, all started with the intention of replacing a proprietary product with an open one.
Frankly, the fact that there are less companies developing open products doesn't worry me, because it's much easier to start building a clone while you are small enough to fly under radar. It's only when the product is approaching a usable status that a company is needed for promotion, protection, etc. and it is then that they will spring up around the product.
Last I checked, most Open Source developers had day-jobs unrelated to their open projects.
"In my values, freedom is more important than 'serving users' in a mere practical sense." -- RMS
Software license terminology is always confusing. I recommend looking at this explanation and nice diagram that shows catagories of software.
:-)
I've always wondered though, is software "open source" if you can look at the source code by not modify it? The word "open" is a little unclear in exactly what it implies. I guess that case is more of teasing-type proprietary software... You can look but don't touch!
If O'Reilly really wonders why all open source vendors disappeared, then they should just open source all their books and provide then contents in electronic form and they will see what happens.
This is also called the infamous "we don't have anything more to sell" surprise.
Only happens once, 'cos after that you are out of business.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
O'Reilly publisher is heavily publishing books on micro$oft's dotnet. =)
It seems to me, the author nailed it when he mentions software is a means to an end and not an end in itself. Once everybody realises this, it'll be pretty clear free software is a 'success', even though vendors profit statements wont suggest that.
They don't matter, the user community does.
My photolog
--vendors are missing out of *some* cash, I don't know how much, but I know I would just as soon order my cheap disks from them rather than the clone companies. If they offered them that is. and they don't, they want cash large for their disks.
A lot of people don't download ISO's, they are on a modem, it's silly to do that and won't work half the time anyway and takes eons and millenia. And cd-r's are cheap. If I saw the factory linux industrystandards in the store at 10$ I think this would work as well, but 60$ for linux distro at the store or up, folks will just usually go a few more bucks and get the "darkside" latest xp-loding operating system that they heard of and been using. And 30$online is cute, but it's still the same, folks will go to the clone vendors more, especially with the bewildering array of different distros and how fast there are so many changes. there's at least one new version of this or that a week.
IMO, once a year is a better distro release, and it should be around 10 bucks for the no support no manual versions. next step up 20$ you get the manual. Next step up can be around 40$, you get one month support, then on from there for business/server releases.
I bet the big comapnies are losing millions by not doing it like this or something similar.
Already used by mod points - sorry - but that hit the nail on the head perfectly. To go further, it would benefit society overall, even if it did hurt them and some other publishing houses. The greater good would be served though.
creation science book
More to the point, the companies or organizations which make OS software their primary focus have an incentive to make software which *needs* support and/or service/training, etc. If your package was understandable to everyone, with good online help (1996 man pages don't cut it for most people), tutorials, good FAQs, etc., why would anyone pay you for support? *Most* people are only going to pay for what they need, nothing more.
creation science book
doesnt this sound a little contradictory? How can something that is good for buisness be bad for software vendors, which, last time i checked, software venders were a pretty large buisness.
... it certainly did wonders for ours.
Think back to the time of the Robber Barrons in Germany, who built castles along the Rhein and charged tolls every few miles to merchant ships.
Destroying the Robber Barrons business was bad for the Robber Barrons, but immensly good for trade, and hence virtually every other business, in the region.
Microsoft is analogous to the Robber Barrons along the Rhein in several respects: they charge a toll (tax), they deliberately break compatability (block your movement up the river for a time), they move the target every few months (each trip up the river terms and conditions for passage changed), costing you time and money to get your stuff working after a fashion (again), and so forth. Getting rid of this parasite does wonders for your business
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Or you try to apply a "Linux" filter to everything around you.
Tim is advocating that Man should have the right to do what man wants with software.
They were consistently profitable, and then were bought out by Red Hat. The former CTO of Cygnus is the CTO of Red Hat today, and makes a similar point to the one you did at this article.
It's good to see that the positive economic ripple effect of open source is and is going to continue to happen, despite the resistance of closed source companies like MS claiming they are bringing the new economy in and FUD against open source.
I have no doubt that future research in this area will produce such information that weighs heavy against closed source.
The author writes: "I have been talking with . Long story short, other speaker called this morning and said he can't do the talk. I got the impression he was in deep doo doo with his bosses. He asked me to take him off the Web site quickly, along with any reference in the description to . He said the talk can in no way appear to represent agency." As a person who is a government employee, I can tell you that it is drilled into us that we can **not** use our governmental title or agency name in anything we do publically **unless** we are offically sanctioned to "act as an agent" of that governmental body. I suspect the governmental employee above was going to speak as "a private person" (without use of his title and agency name). However, his title and agency name appeared on the agenda and he was obligated to withdraw to avoid the **appearance** of representing his governmental agency in some sort of official capacity. There is nothing sinister about it as the article seemed to imply. It happens all the time.
...was bought by Red Hat. As far as I know, they were never unprofitable, allthough in the early days they did get a few friendly development contracts with the FSF to stay in business. These days, it seem like most of Red Hats "wins" (and profit) come from the part of the company that used to be Cygnus.
Cygnus never seriously tried to sell GNU products, instead they sold support. In fact, their original name was Cygnus Support.
At one time they did have some "boxed products", GNUpro and even a Cygwin 1.0 box (which I'm the proud owner of). However, the real money came from support and development contracts.
... was not started with the intention of replacing a proprietary product with a free one. Rather, the intention was to learn i386 assembler.
XFree86 was (I believe) started as an alternative to the non-free PC X servers, but X itself was started as a project to research networked windowing systems.
GNU and Lindows was intended to replace Unix and MS Windows.
[ Yes, I know I'm picking nits ]
While I suspect you are right that most free software developers have unrelated day jobs (or are students), I suspect most free software is created by people whose day job are related to the software. Most of the really big free software projects (gcc, gdb, gnome, kde, apache, samba, linux) have many full time developers.
Open source software packages are great for end users, and overall save a huge amount of money for them, but there is no business model in producing software that can be freely duplicated and distributed.
Now whether or not you think there should be a business case for software is a slightly different argument, but I personally am a bit tired of hearing the mantra here that one can definitely make money writing and producing GPL'ed software. Supporting it, maybe. Pressing and selling disks and manuals, maybe. But the writing of the software itself is not something that's going to make money.
Microsoft, for all their pomp and swagger, has a good reason to fear the GPL. The majority of their revenues come from selling licenses to the software that that they produce. They are not the only ones either. Anyone who produces shrink-wrapped software is in the same boat.
Just ask anyone who has released a fully funtional version of a shareware package how often they get paid by people who download their package. The conversion rate is miniscule. How many of you just hit "I agree" on the winzip nag screen? The paying demand for their product will drop to almost zero should they release their product out to the world.
OSS is potentially great for the economy as a whole, and decreases costs of doing business in the general marketplace, but creating it is not a great way to make money.
What exactly is bullshit in his statement? You are agreeing with him. (and how did he troll, exactly?)
O'Reilly hit the nail on the head. Microsoft has been deliberately generating confusion between their interests and their customers'. O'Reilly rightly draws a distinction between software vendors and users.
However, I think a further distinction needs to be drawn: software vendor/system owner/user. What O'Reilly calls users are really government agencies and corporations - not users in the Stallmanish sense. I think the current trend is shifting power from the software vendor to the system owner (agency/corp/isp) but not to the end user.
In fact, Free Software provides a rich array of tools for system owners to restrict and monitor the actual users. Is a clerk at Burlington Coat Factory in any way empowered by the fact that his terminal runs Linux? Does he even know it runs Linux? I guess not.
The irony is that Free Software is far more useful to technically sophisticated organizations than to normal human beings. AOL apparently convinced many AOL users that Usenet was part of AOL. Likewise, there seems to be an increasing role for these intermediary "spoon feeders" who will hide the complexity of Free Software from customers/employees/students and present them with a shiny, smooth, tamperproof interface, with all the confusing names, licenses and versions ground off.
I am very glad that the power of the software vendors is waning; however we must be alert to the new forms of power being wielded against the actual users.
I don't beleive that there is no demand in PostgeSQL and Python. I just think that our demand should be stdied better.
"There are none so blind as those who are blinded
by irrational zealotry."
If I had to choose between zealots who insist all code should be GPLed and zealots who insist the GPL doesn't have a place in this world, I'd choose the GPL.
Later, Seeker
Just kidding. the real reason they don't want to give the supporting information for free. They specially obfuscated the installation process of JBoss, for example they move from version to version the location of deployment directory and they break Tomcat. They did everything to push users to open documentation. Which documentation? Commercially available documentation
That the business model of JBoss.
Although, my boss did not buy their busness model. We decided to develop with Sun's reference implementation of EJB and recommend our customers to buy the real EJB server.
the "main" function from this beta Gamecube emulator:
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
fprintf(stderr,"%s version %d\n",argv[0],VERSION_NUMBER);
wait(15);
fprintf(stderr,"Error: file ngcfirm.zip not found in ~/.cubix/ directory.\n");
fprintf(stderr,"You need the Nintendo® GameCube original firmware to run this emulator.\n");
exit(0);
}
Suffice to say, its VERY beta. There don't seem to be any trojans in the source code, but I didn't bother to look at the configure script. Anyone who has compiled this app should probably see what that config script does.
They took a US$300M investor mandate to spend on market leadership. In return, RH have put it in the bank to draw cash-level interest. Any 8 year old kid could do that. Where's the expenditure on market lead?
- They've shut down every single acquisition they've made. Why?
- Because of the MCI-style financial non-strategy of acquiring a company periodically to take their revenue and make the books look better.
- ...Or perhaps to bail Greylock out of a jam.
- Am I implying they're cooking their books? No, I'm _telling_ you they are!
- All followed up by quiet layoffs _every_ quarter to stem the bleeding bottom line.
- ...And the silent shutdown of many products.
Don't peek under the dress...you might find a skeleton! But as long as the skeleton is solid, who cares? You can hire new meat later.Well, here is the skeleton: Their strong engineering process...Not. A bunch of 'patch it till it compiles' strategy to get the next load out the door while taking a break from the latest religious flamewar or cloud-talk about what cool product should be shipping. Meanhile, rpm remains a bankrupt deadend.
Notice how the version number changes each quarter.
Meanwhile management spend their time figuring out ways subverting the GPL when not clawing their way over each others careers.
n/m