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5th Anniversary of Open Source
Augustus De Morgan writes "Five years ago today a brainstorming session in Palo Alto led to the adoption and promotion of the "open source" label. (You can find references to the label much earlier, however.) For some, it was a dark divergence from the free software movement; for others, the beginning of the adoption of key software principles into mainstream. Here's a growing set of resources and stories about the history of free and open source software, and a lament about the decline of altruism in the open source community."
Today is also the five year anniversary of the peak of the AOL stock price. Coincidence? I think not.
Altruism is important, but ultimately people make most decisions on an economic basis. And people develop Open Source software for the recognition and geek-chic fame they get, for the opportunity to be the key player in a project when perhaps they are more of a cog in their day job (and it can be a great way to up your perceived value to saavy employers). The fact that economic decisions are behind a lot of the success of Open Source software (do you think IBM supports Linux out of altruism?) doesn't make it less of a good or diminish the positive value it provides to the community. So there.
5 -- Number of companies in the entire world that have actually profitted off of "selling" software at no cost
4 -- Number of companies other than Microsoft that are still buying ads on Slashdot
3 -- Average ratio of troll to non-troll posts for the average Slashdotter
2 -- Number of projects on SourceForge that actually compile
1 -- Number of *BSD projects that are still alive. It's called Mac OS X.
Don't forget *nix either!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Taking the welfare of others may be a problem when one can not secure their own.
I've heard some people suggest programming is not a real occupation ie. hobby programmers are all we need, and others have reportly suggested programmers should wait tables to make a living while continuing to code in their free time.
I've noticed that funded open source projects do best, while unfunded projects usually don't usually become a force in their market. This goes for open-source and proprietory software equally.
altruism and open source should not be seen as the same thing. Some projects are started because the programmer had an alruistic motives, but unless that/those developer(s) have some source of funding/resources, it becomes very difficult to spend the 3+ hours it takes sometimes to get a decent size project of the ground.
Ask yourself can you, are you, spending that about of time serving the needs of others outside your family in anyway? Without anything in return?
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
If the recent Linux World Expo in new York is any example then the revolution is over and the Stallman's of the world have long since lost.
Reading Stallman's writings I come away with a sense that the ultimate over riding goal of the free software movement wasn't to see the code, or even to be able to share it with one another. It was to create a space in the software world where community could exist. Or to paraphrase Babylon 5...
The Gnu project was our last best hope for not being co-opted by business...
It failed.
Wandering the booths at expo it was astonishing to see a nearly endless series of suits all groping for the flavor of the week to sell to. The actual, "community", relegated to a small corner of the show floor off the beaten paths where they wouldn't scare financial analysts.
.I work for Microsoft. I have no problem with there being proprietary software, OSes, Apps, services etc etc. What does bother me is the wholesale co-option of our public spaces into corporate agendas. Such is the fate of Linux. Go to work for Redhat, or any other "open source company", and you will find you have to sign the same non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements as anywhere else in the industry. You will find you must censor yourself on public forums and avoid giving away the trade secrets of the new product.
It's not so much that I question the goal of making a buck, or even the observation that open source produces better software. What I question is the end result. Once again the best and brightest of the hacker community are locked up in the same corporate structures and goals that destroyed the AI lab community and Linux's agenda is being set in corporate boardrooms.
I have always thought of free software as being analogous to the Boston Commons. A small refuge away from the bottom line values of the rest of America. With the change of goals that open source represents it's as if we have invited the land developers into the commons. Sure a multiplex and a Starbucks are nice. But I miss the park.
A better analogy would be, do we DESIGN our own cloths, automobiles. And, as a matter of fact my mom has made lots of cloths. She used to run the sewing machines a lot. Now she knits. Man she knits up a storm. Every night I sleep under these incredibly warm afghans lovingly made while she watched TV. Most of those cloths and patterns were, however, purchased plans, kits, etc.
Anyway, It's not at all inconceivable that a group of Ford engineers, in their spare time, make a 'dream design' automobile THAT THEY SHARE WITH ANYONE WHO WANTS A COPY. Say they work by day to earn a living, but are unhappy with the 'cost reducing' and shipping lousy products because of a n agressive marketing deadline. So they get together at Billy's Bar and Brainstorm and dream up the ultimate street rod, draw up plans most any shade tree mechanic can follow and publish it in Hot Rod, sell plans for mostly cost of reproduction. Sure, why not.
DO I Make my own recipies? Sure, I like to experiment in the kitches. They are usually derivities of someone elses (someone better at it than me!). There's plenty of 'do it yourself' people around.
To me it's all a matter of being independant. The thing that scares me the most is becoming dependant on some greedy a$$hole, with no alternative but to pay what they demand or die. They do want to enslave you, and freedom is a constant struggle, because there has always been greedy, domineering, petty tirants, in business and government, just like there have always been obsequious sheep ready to follow them to the slaughterhouse.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Whilst I don't make my own clothes, I expect to be able to darn my socks when holes develop; I expect that changing my shirt won't cause my pants to fall down; I expect to be able to by a hat from one company and shoes from another and be able to wear them at the same time; I expect to be able to turn up my trousers if the legs are too long; I expect to be able to dye a t-shirt if I get bored with the colour; I expect to be able to give my old clothes to second hand stores without having to provide proof that I own the clothes; and I expect not to have the Federation Against Clothing Theft strip searching me on a monthly basis to check whether I own the clothes that I am wearing.
Moore's law has allowed, for what may be one of the first times in history, the de-insdustrialization of a major economic product: Computer software. When I started 30+ years ago, computer access was for the dedicated geek (this I know... :-) ). A DEC PDP-8 cost 10 grand. Its 2.5 Mbyte RK05 was an additional 9 grand.
Today, just about anyone can afford a crappy little out-of-date 400+MHz, 256Mbyte, 20+gig system, which can make a single individual developer economically productive.
Coupled with The Internet, such people can virtually gather together to be economically more productive.
This has caught all sorts of people by surprise, and those who are accustomed to simply "managing" or "owning" the means of production have been caught flat-footed by this sea-change in the possession of economic productivity. (I think this is why the OSS/libre software movement is critically important for the developing world, and why I wish that I had enough savings to stop working for money today in order to make a real contribution...)
One of the points (in my opinion) that we must remember is that there are people and/or organizations what want to return to the days when the few could control the resources required for economic productivity of the many.
FYI, I am using agricultural societies (exemplified by feudalism, as observed in places like Europe) and industrial society as basis for this thinking.
I am not a communist, but I will refuse to ever allow someone else to take away my freedom to code, and additionally, to team up with others of like mind to satisfy our needs for information systems productivity.
On this "anniversary" of Open Source, we should be thinking about what has been accomplished and what needs to be done next. For instance, while the OS community has proven the value of providing open implementations, it is now time to start protecting and defending the community's right and ability to create those implmenations in the future. The best way to do this is to start pursuing "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents."
In recent years there has been an explosion of patents and patent applications by companies that seek to monopolize the exploitation of ideas and methods in software. With every patent granted, the scope of future OS projects is limited just a little bit more. Without going into flame wars about the patent system, I can say that there is something useful that we can do today to protect OS in the future.
A patent can be prevented if one can prove "prior art" exists that describes the method that the filer wishes to patent and, the USPTO accepts "Internet Publications" as prior art, using the "posted date" on messages as the date of priority. Thus, if people with good ideas document those ideas on the Web, from the instant that the description of a method is posted, then all future patents on that method are blocked forever unless the inventor can prove that they came up with the idea before the posting on the web. Thus, by adopting a discipline of identifying and posting ideas that others might try to patent, we can establish a collection of "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents" that block others from monopolizing the methods in the future.
It would also be useful for those in the OS community to become active in reviewing new patent applications as they are published by the USPTO every Thursday, and use the established procedures for "third party filing of prior art" to ensure that patent examiners don't issue patents on ideas that should remain Open.
Open Source isn't enough. We need Open Ideas to enable the Open Source of the future.
bob wyman
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