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Shared Source vs. Open Source
leonbrooks writes "Microsoft are fond of touting Shared Source as being "as good as" Open Source, with a view to muddying the waters as much as possible, and so keeping as many people away from the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) (particularly Software Libré AKA "Free Software") as they can.
This new article analysing the differences arrives just in time for Microsoft's Australia-wide series of "Competitive Hour" misinformation sessions on Open Source, and includes a handy list of potentially showstopper questions.
We'd like your help in putting these and other questions to the speaker during such misinformation sessions, with the dual aim of opening the eyes of many of the audience, and reporting back to us what was said so that we can refine the questions to close whatever loopholes are employed in evading these important issues."
why don't they just give it an open source license?
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but it tastes like crap on a bun, it's probably a bad licensing scheme.
"...I'll need guns" --Chow Yun-Fat in 'Replacement Killers'
I work on a scientific project that is supossedly an "open source" project. In reality, it is really shared source. What it comes down to is users from the community reporting bugs and even submitting patches that are never incorporated into the code. The "czar" of the project often refuses to apply these fixes or doesn't do so in a timely manner. It just doesn't work and is just about as pointless as not having the source at all...
It appears that Microsoft's famously successful Embrace and Extend strategy can apply to concepts as well as technologies. Expect to see Shared Source (i.e., Open Source with proprietary extensions for improved performance on Windows only) heavily promoted as a new Windows development tool.
While this is a very informative article, I get a very 'preaching to the choir' felling about it. The bias seeps through and undermines the effectiveness of the article. I think the best advocacy of open source software could be realized through: 1. case studies of successful industry/governemnt deployment of oss. 2. summary of development/use of open source superstars like apache, postgres, etc. of course, its always fun to pick at ms, but the idea is to change minds, not appear dogmatic.
Unfortunately, the "picking up your marbles" article uses nonstandard terminology and thus may end up confusing many readers. For example, it seems to equate "Free Software" with copylefting licenses (like the GPL), and "Open Source" with non-copylefting licenses (like the BSD license). That's extremely confusing; the standard definitions for both Open Source and Free Software include both the GPL and the BSD licenses. Also, "Shared Source" is still proprietary; trying to claim it isn't just confuses things. Proprietary software comes in at least two varieties: secret source, and "shared source". Licenses are confusing enough without using nonstandard, inconsistent terminology. Hopefully, the article will get updated - it makes interesting points, and the shifting terminology is unfortunate. For the moment, I would recommend Bero's article instead if you're looking for an article opposing "shared source".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"Can I provide this fix to others? If not, why not?"
I'd recommend losing the bit about the Borg on that site unless it's a page meant only for geeks and techies -- name-calling cheapens the rest of your arguments. It doesn't matter that they started it. </FourthGradeTeacher>
Just point out the uselessness of Shared Source and the piles of responses to Microsoft FUD.
woof.
That document was poorly written, I was expecting a business quality doco. The linux community needs to realise that if they want to be taken seriously in big business, they have to act in a mature business like manner.
For example: Stop refering to closed source companies as being evil. Treat them all the same - did you know that there are more closed source software companies that just Microsoft? Such as Lotus, IBM, Apple (surely not Apple???) and most of these guys have borrowed code from BSD, Apple even got praised for it, rather than berated. (Which I still can't believe to this day)
Imagine if MS had taken almost all of BSD and started selling it, because they couldn't be arsed to develop their own OS.
Marketing and reason seem diametrically opposed to my mind.. can you imagine slander campaigns similar to election ads?
"Do you want your enterprise code written at 4am by a community of hackers?!"
I doubt any such marketing campaign could convince people who already appreciate the benefits of OSS.
I think the main danger is providing management with misinformation, making a tech's job harder justifying OSS. Most people wouldn't blink as long as the name "Windows" was mentioned.
Once OSS becomes more of a household name (and it is) M$ will have a much harder time suppressing it.
I have a deep respect for many of those who coined the term "Open Source", especially Bruce Perens.
But, I think we're about to find out that "Open Source" was a mistake.
Microsoft will clearly claim that their "shared source" encompasses all the benefits of open source, and for those who do not allready understand what Open Source is all about (which is to say, most people), it will be a compelling argument.
We can go "uh, no, you see, it is about, free, and I mean free as in speech, not beer, uh, if you know what I mean". And they don't. And they won't read this paper. When they can see the source, the source is open enough to them. What more could you ask?
I attended one of ESR's talks, and while it took me a long time to realize, ESR's top selling point ("you can always take development in-house"), is not a simple pragmatic argument. It is an argument based on freedom.
The top selling argument for Open Source, for Linux and for all the rest of it, is, and will remain, an argument of freedom. Not only freedom for individuals, but freedom for corporations too!
It is about politics. It is about creating a society where freedom benefits everyone, individuals and corporations alike, the whole society.
I realize, of course that "Free Software" is not a good term either, but for those of us who speak a Real Language[tm], the term "Open Source" should be abandoned, and terms like "Software Libré" or "Fri programvare" should be used instead.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
it won't take a media campaign from MS
there are a number of threats to OSS that will emerge as it becomes more pervasive. None of these would kill Open Source as a movement , but they will compel the community too temper some of their absolutism.
There WILL be a widespread virus that attacks some popular OSS platform / architecture. The community's reaction to this event could determine the viability of OS across all domains.
There WILL be a test of the GPL that effectively modifies its tenets , perhaps fundamentally changing the character and popular interpretation of the license. This will bring a reality check to the more strident elements of the OSS community , but could encourage OSS realists to adapt more commercially viable licenses.
You know, I read a lot of this nonsense on Slashdot. The vast majority of the board leaps all over anything that potentially infringes privacy, but then turns its nose up at postings from Anonymous Cowards.
Are you also in favour of losing the right to an anonymous vote? You would like all authorities to know your voting record? There is nothing wrong with anonymity. I posted for months as an AC because I didn't want to create yet another web account on something. Gradually, as I found I used this site more I decided to create an account.
Frankly, I find this anti-AC thing to be farcical. It isn't any form of moral highground to insist an opinion be identified with an individual. Instead it represents a regression - you should argue the point, not the personality.
Cheers,
Ian
It is not free as in "you are free to make my day". It is free as in "this software code has been freed from any restrictions, to the point that no man or woman may hide it or stop it from living its life to the fullest".
Law of nature? Law of freed information!
Question 1: Does any software actually exist which has gone through a full life cycle as shared source and not demonstrated major problems e.g. with respect to security, monopoly law, cost effectiveness?
Point 2: Open source is critical to proving that software is secure in a concrete case: security of one's private machine and data. If Microsoft is only sharing source, how can it be known (without resorting to blind trust of unknown coders/governments) that the source you saw is the source that made it into the final product?
Point 3: Microsoft's shared source campaign seems defined partly in terms of an attack against open source software. How does this reconcile with open source software being highly promoted by the security experts of the majority of major companies, server operators, and governments. Is it such a good idea to distance itself from such amazingly beneficial, successful, and satisfying projects? If Microsoft believes it to be critical to do so, then would Microsoft be open to funding a free (free of cost, anonymous, with results posted publically, and run by a third party) online facility to scan software (source and object code) for violations of liscense agreements (like GPL etc.) to guarantee that no GPL code is in Windows? (After all if it is then all of Windows legally must be GPL'd..)
This article looked pretty good until I hit this part:
I'm beginning to hate the GPL guys just because they have to shit on every other open source developer because they don't agree with politics of their GPL manifesto.BSD is more free; at first glance and every glance. That somebody can pervert that freedom is one of the costs of being free. Us BSD'ers are not the enemy -- look further up the list not further down.
"(My apologies to those 5 people in the country who actually know how to make free software work to help the people, not destroy the economy.)"
Hmmm... IBM comes to mind as the first of those 5 people (did you mean companies ?) who have made opensource work. Over a billion in sales just last year from free software. Sounds oddly like capitalism to me.
" Why would I trust "free" software from a vendor while at the same time pay them to support that software?"
This argument can be applied to our Government. Would you trust a closed Government to handle your needs for you? Isn't that what Communism was all about? At least in part I should say.
"Seems to me that they WANT the software to be low quality or hard to use so they can charge me more to support it."
Are you saying software like Microsoft's IIS was high quality software? That's scrapping the bottom of the barrel according to the Garner report (SP?) They even told people to abandon IIS and find another web server. Never thought that would have come from their lips.
"Plus, now I have to hire a 150,000 a year linux geek. No thanks."
But of course. You want to hire 10 MCSE's to manage a network that one *NIX geek can handle in his/her sleep.
"Freakin' communists."
Not really but it's clear you have no idea how the OSS idea works. It's like fire. If used properly it can warm your house and cook your food, or burn the whole place down. Learn to use it wisely. (just an opinion)
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I think the best route is to keep hammering on the differences. Consider our targets for conversion - it's not MS, and it's not governments here - it's potential users of Shared Source, ie companies. And, though you believe they may bess less compelling, companies only care about pragmatic arguments - they could care less about freedom in the abstract, only in the immediate. You don't have to use the "free as in speech vs. beer" argument. Just explain why seeing the source is useless if you can't touch it. I think most people of even moderate intelligence can understand that.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Are people free to view the Microsoft source, or is there an EULA type agreement that any person with access to Microsoft Source is not allowed to work on Open Source or Microsoft competitive products. I would think that this would be a very restrictive license term that would get in the way.
Say the anti-competitive period is 5 years. This means that anyone who sees the code is contaminiated and restricted from what they can work on. Possibly a career limiting exposure.
Of course there could be no such terms attached to the source. Anyone have insight?
The one question that really shows the difference between "open source" and "shared source", obviously has to be "Can I create my own fork"?
Disagreements with the original author about the direction a software package should go, or the apparent abandonment of some software, are two of the many good reasons for creating a fork. This approach allows for competition, and may the best version win. It may piss off the original author, but it allows for improved evolution of the software.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
From my seminal paper, written in 1999 (BEFORE the dotcom collapse):
The High Priests of the Bazaar
This paper presents a case against the open source movement and explains why the open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved. There are several arguments against the OS (open source) model.
Open Source Doesn't Make Economic Sense For Most
The open source organization has presented a few cases that supposedly explain why OS works economically. However, if you examine the cases objectively you will find that the cases are flimsy and non-specific and do not address any specific concerns. They attempt to bolster their case by pointing out a few "successes", among which Caldera and Red Hat are displayed as shining examples.
The real economic question of the OS model is how is money made, and who is making the money. Who is being rewarded financially for the enormous development effort? The open source initiative claims that there are at least four different models that allow someone to reap rewards. Oddly, it is not mentioned that it is not necessarily the people who did the development work that gain financially.
The four primary business cases mentioned by OS proponents are "Selling Support", "Loss Leader", "Widget Frosting" and "Accessorizing."
The first case proposes that money can be made via selling support for the free software product. This is by far the strongest case and is proven to work, for a few small companies. The two companies that are shown as positive examples of this business model are Red Hat and Caldera, who distribute and support the Linux operating system. What is never mentioned is that neither of these two companies has contributed significantly in relative terms to the Linux development process. Its important to note that using this business model, the people that make the money are usually not the ones who have invested in the development process. So much for the strongest case.
The second case is based on the idea that you give away a product as open source so you can make money selling a closed source program. This also can work, but it should be noted that the money is being made off the closed source product and not off of the open source. An example of this model would be Netscape, who gives away the source code of their client browser so the OS community can do development, but keeps their "cash cow" products completely closed. Obviously, this case may only work if you have a software product that lends itself to this sort of "give away the razor and make money on the blades" system. The truth is that the vast majority of software is monolithic. So much for the loss leader case.
The third case, "Widget Frosting", sounds completely practical. The premise that hardware makers produce open source software so that the OS development community will work for free to produce better drivers and interface tools for their hardware products. It sounds great on the surface, especially for the company that produces the hardware: they get free drivers and do not have to pay for expensive developers. The OS community wins by getting presumably stable drivers and tools. What is not mentioned is the reason hardware makers usually don't do this is because they do not want to reveal trade secrets regarding their hardware design. Production of efficient drivers requires an intimate knowledge of the hardware the driver is for. It is almost always the case that it is in the hardware developers' best interest to keep their hardware secrets close to home. This also brings up the question of why isn't hardware "open"? So much for the frosting case.
The final case, "Accessorizing", is similar to the first, but throws in the idea of selling books and complete systems with the open source software, and other accessories as well. It is obvious that selling books qualifies as support, and that it really belongs in the first case. The idea of selling computer systems, T-Shirts, dolls, again begs the question: "Who is making the money?" As with the first case, it is not necessarily the people who have done the development work. Additionally, the question of how much money can be made selling books, t-shirts, mugs, etc, is never answered. O'Reilly Associates is frequently used as an example to be a company who has made money using this case. The reader should notice that O'Reilly Associates are not the people doing the development work. Indeed, it is never asked why all the O'Reilly books are not available for free or at least at manufacturing cost? This also brings up the question of why isn't book production "open"? Perhaps they are waiting to see if they could sell enough O'Reilly T-Shirts to pay their bills. So much for the accessories.
Open Source Does Not Necessarily Produce Better Software
The open source proponents frequently state that OS necessarily produces better software. This statement is made without any evidence. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. GCC is a standard compiler produced by the GNU organization. It lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features. The reason behind is illustrates the largest weakness in the OS plan. It is very hard to convince qualified engineers that they should do such boring and unglamorous work without any sort of financial reward. The idea of throwing large quantities of people at the source does not work in this case, since there are not large quantities of qualified individuals available.
Open Source Did Not Make the Internet Successful
Another statement made by the OS community is that somehow open source was responsible for the success of the Internet. The reason behind this is probably a result of the confusion between what is open source and what is an open protocol. It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols. This does not equate to open source, for the two are quite different. The vast majority of the machines on the Internet run on closed source operating systems running mostly closed source software, which communicate using open protocols.
Where Does Open Source Work?
Open source does work in certain cases. A good example of where it may work well is Netscape. The act of giving away the source to the OS community so they can work for free and produce a product that helps the sales of their server software was a stroke of genius and proved very profitable for the relatively few at Netscape. But is this truly making money off of open source? Isn't the money is made off of the closed source software?
Another example of where it does work is the aforementioned Red Hat. Red Hat has been successful making money off of the work of thousands of others who have contributed to the Linux operating system and the associated GNU programs that have shipped with the Linux distributions. The question is: do those who work at Red Hat deserve to be rewarded, or do the people who do the actual development work deserve to be rewarded? Should the money go to the few, or to the many? It seems that the High Priests of the Bazaar believe the former.
THIS DOCUMENT CAN BE RECOPIED AND REDISTRIBUTED WITHOUT RESTRICTION, HOWEVER ADDITIONS/MODIFICATIONS/CORRECTIONS SHOULD BE LABELED AS SUCH WHERE THEY OCCUR.
Another thing I would like to point out, and which I will include in an updated version of the paper, is the fact that by contributing to Open Source you are decreasing the financial value of software. The reason for this is because you have eliminated the artificial scarcity of the product. This only serves to lessen the financia value of the product, which leads to lower compensation for those that produce software.
Music and book publishers create scarcity via the copyright mechanism, the software industry should be no different.
For those of you who have bit hit hard by the recent economic downturn in the software world may want to consider this before giving away your efforts to the corporations for free.
It does not involve profit from software sales.
It is about business.
Software was originally written by companies to make that company better able to do its primary business. An automobile manufacturer uses software to make and sell automobiles. A retail store uses software to assist selling merchandise.
All the "business cases mentioned by OS proponents are" about how to make money selling software.
But what if most software was developed internally?
- What if the programmers shared with programmers from other companies to ask for help?
- What if it was easier to maintain the software publicly than to pass around copies every time you had an issue?
- What if it meant you received fixes for things you had not encountered yet?
- What if it meant you received fixes for things you had not NOTICED yet? (Like that bug that affects payroll.)
This is the world of GPL open source applications.
- We need an application.
- We download a database program.
- We build our application.
- We realize the database is missing a feature.
- We add the feature.
- While programming, we notice a bug.
- We fix the bug.
- Our application does exactly what we want, and we send our changes back to maintainers of the program.
- ?Profit? There is no profit from the software sale. The only benefit is that the company has the application that allows it to compete better.
The programmers may have been a consultant, so maybe they profited. Or an employee, who got paid. Or a student, who gained experience and a line on an rather empty resume. Or a hobbyist, who had fun.It would be nice if the company sent a few dollars to the program maintainers or mirrored the site, but it cannot be required. I doubt there is money there. The program maintainers COULD sell their services to help with implementation. But so could anybody else. This is where your four business models fit.
But none of this is necessary to make open source a good investment for a company. Even if the company is the only source for improvements for years, eventually someone else may start to use the software (such as the company your former programmers join. Programmers hate solving the same issue twice.) And if they use it, they will add value. (If you fork the code, you lose the benefits of what everybody else is doing. If there is any development progress, you quickly lose the ability to apply your patches to the maintained version.)
Open source is about programming to support business models that are not based on selling intangibles like software. That is why companies that are completely based on selling software will do anything to destroy it. That is why companies that have trouble selling software packages are embracing it. That is why every non-software company should be embracing GPL open source software whenever they can. And they outnumber the software companies.
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About the financial value of software, there is none. Software's value is what it does to help you. Hopefully it helps your primary business make money. (Even if it is just the extra alertness from walking and getting coffee every time you need to reboot.)
Imagine if information transfer was free, because there is no method to record it so it has to be person to person, or because something like the internet removes the cost of the transfer. With the personal method, I can tell you an idea, or sing you a song, for free. With the internet, I can send you a million word idea, or send you a recording of an opera, for free. Words went from spoken to written to printing-pressed to websites over a very long period, but music and 2D video have only had about a century between the ability to record and the ability to freely transfer. The companies that were created to deal with the difficulty in distribution are complaining loudly now that they are obsolete.
You can put artificial constraints around software, music, and other intangibles, but this is not good for society. The whole patent system was created to make sharing easier. Today was built on yesterday, and tomorrow will be built on today, if we remember what we did today. Most examples of creativity, whether software, music, or doodles, is thrown away after a very short period. The example of creativity with music is the performance. Recording it allows me to share it with others. If I do not record it, it is lost forever. If I record it and bury it in the backyard, it is useless. Only by sharing can others improve on my work. This goes double for software: you probably cannot improve my songs; you can probably improve my programs.
Ideas are free for those who can hear them. Stop trying to silence them to increase the scarcity so you can increase your compensation. The world that requires no new software is a world without progress.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.