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The Linux Uprising
ballpoint writes "Business Week is featuring a list of articles under the header 'The Linux Uprising' including topics like 'Red Flags for Red Hat' and 'A Bad, Sad Hollywood Ending?' touching everything dear to the Slashdot community. A good read to align yourself with what mainstream businesspeople are fed."
I think it's pretty funny how everybody is trying to make this whole topic into a "underdog is always the good guy" Rebel Alliance versus Evil Empire thing. I think once mainstream people understand that big businesses use linux, lots of it's out-of-the-way appeal will be lessened.
I like the Bruce Perens interview, Programmers are like Artists, where he explains the motivation behind open source from a developer's viewpoint. Imagine you're a talented painter, but the only way to make a living at it was to work on a corporate art assembly line, where each artist is responsible for a few specific brush strokes in a particular color (which is actually how "starving artist" paintings are done). Of course you'd be working on your own canvases in your spare time, and giving them away if that were the only way to be seen.
Mildly off topic I know, but it's strange when events like open-software gaining acceptance in the marketplace are called 'uprisings'(as though open-source programmers are so terribly disenfranchised) while real uprisings, like the 'L.A. riots' that happened in part to bring about social change for increasingly disenfranchised and marginalized groups have less grand language applied to them (e.g. 'riot').
Java chips? Though thats kind of cheating, since it's just making a Virtual Machine concrete.
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Why don't things evolve?
I keep thinking about the space shuttle, and open-source, and Microsoft; also of tiny winged dinosaurs recently found in the Mongolian Highlands. All these controversies and discoveries start me thinking -- but mostly the dinosaurs. Why did those little dinosaurs sprout wings? What was the point? Don't they know that was a greater wind resistance drag, making it even harder to escape predators? Why did the space shuttle, built in 80's never upgrade? One could talk of the government and the fact that they never, ever, upgrade unless it's tanks or grenades. But the space shuttle, with it's aging tape-to-tape flight computers, and it's spray on foam insulation, and it's glued on tiles -- why evolve to serve this niche, then never evolve? Was it laziness, stupidity, or some perceived fecundity that we've reached the promised land?
I can feel there is a tipping-point here, some wisdom I'm about to understand, and yet it eludes me. Back to Microsoft. Why couldn't Novell evolve? Did they think that a different password for everything was better than one password to rule them all? Why continue to chew the prehistoric cud whilst the meteor streaks across the sky - moocow!. Now it's Microsoft, you might argue, that is starting to run a little slower, a little more gamely, who sees the big game cats bearing down in their proverbial rear view mirrors. Will they evolve? Can they evolve? What will they become?
And so open-source sits too at the precipice, but its penultimate creative spark blew apart at its evolution, splitting into various organisms wading the primordial ooze. Fascinating stuff: evolve now or later, but why not right at the beginning? Evolve on the starting line! It's a pretty awesome strain of thinking. Keep trying to get it right on the starting line -- holding back some DNA -- shooting off ideas that might work. Hyper, hyper-parasitosis. I believe it's the way of informational beings. Even WOPR decided that there might be a better way.
So why can't Microsoft evolve? I believe they can, but it must happen while, and before, the energy required to evolve is still greater than the remaining energy it has to sustain life. Can they evolve a hybrid, become open-source (you heard it here first!), jump from the abyss, sprout wings, and fly?
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
It is amazing that with such astounding real world examples of the cost benefits of open source (not counting all of the other benefits), Microsoft and Sun can still find ways to convince suits that the cost of Linux/open office/etc training outweigh the license and support savings made by dropping Microsoft or Sun. Reports and estimations of rapidly gaining Linux market share always bolster my hopes, but sometimes I just can't see it.
No, they don't! Evidence: Napster, Kazaa, et al. Casual piracy in the workplace. Mix-tapes. etc.
I'm waiting to hear how many people at the Redmond campus have been busted for using Napster or Kazaa. It's simply too much to expect of the 10,000 people Microsoft employs that all 10,000 are above photocopying magazine articles, giving tapes or CDR's to friends, downloading TV or Movie shows off the internet, or lifting the odd bit of code from someone else's project to insert into their own. Heck, even the British government has done such. I wonder what St. Mundie has in his closet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A good read to align yourself with what mainstream businesspeople are fed.
in this case, who cares? as little as two years ago the media saw linux as some fly buzzing around bothering the big horses microsoft and sun. now its seen as a more significant player as a viable alternative to the giant expensive software companies.
The computer realm may never be the same. Imagine the havoc in the energy business if some newcomer started giving away gasoline. Linux is bringing on a convulsion of that magnitude in tech.
sure, *i* think linux is the greatest thing, and *you* think linux is the greatest thing, but that isnt going to make our boss think linux is a greatest thing. it takes zealous writers who like to think theyre on the cutting edge to write stories which put linux in all its glory. we can then go to our boss and say "look at this.. BUSINESS WEEK even thinks so!".
two years ago, the business world saw linux as a toy. rehat and ibm have invested alot of money into linux, giving it exposure to more mature audiences than slashdot. now that linux has been out and about for businesses to play with, they realise that "this linux thing is really great". the industry finally sees linux as a threat and is willing to give it the attention it deserves
It will be hard to replace the 50% to 80% gross margins of the software business with the 20% or less gross margins typical for software-service companies.
20% gross margin? Christ, there are businesses that would KILL for 20% margins. What is so special about Microsoft (and that's who we're talking about) that they can make 80% profit margins??
In my economics classes I learned that in perfect competition, profits are driven to zero in the long run. Why is the software industry so messed up??
I was not aware that the FSF was against selling software for profit. Somebody should tell RMS so he'll stop saying he has nothing against selling software. And so the GNU project will stop selling its software.
I also didn't know Redhat isn't allowed to sell Linux. Does that mean I can get my $40 back from that copy of 6.0 I bought in '99?
I guess business week will hire fact checkers as soon as cnn.com hires proofreaders...and MS hires QA analysts (call me flamebait, but I couldn't resist the urge).
I don't think that's so hard.
Software isn't perfect. It's practically guaranteed that somebody, somewhere, is right now cursing some piece of softare. Maybe it's buggy, perhaps it's missing a feature they want. Maybe it costs so much they can't afford it. Maybe it's obsolete.
If all software in the world was under the (L)GPL, we could stil make money, by eliminating imperfection. Let's say I need some cash. OK, so I go bug hunting. A quick bugzilla query... what features have the most votes? Hmm, this one is pretty popular. It's a lot of work, and the maintainers are busy with other stuff. It's not got done. There are 200 votes. I think it'll take me a month. If each one of those people who voted chips in £5, that's £1000 for a months work, not bad at all.
They won't all pay of course, but if you state that you need £1000 for the feature, then the people who really want it will pledge money for it, and the ones who thought it'd be neat but don't care enough to pay will just wait it out. Eventually it'll get there.
Because, the model we use currently is actually very inefficient. Companies attempt to predict what all their customers want, and then write the code, and then sell it. What if really their customers wanted something different? Your shafted. Worse, because the culture is that you don't pay for bugfixes, new features are constantly introduced, with little thought given to whether they are actually useful or not.
So, freelance work on free software is more efficient. The example I gave above is less likely than a business saying "I need the software to do X, how much will it cost" - it's more efficient for them, because they only pay for what they need, and it's more efficient for us, because everybodies contributions are lumped together and we can all co-operate.
I call it the bounty hunter model, you hunt for bounty. Maybe a company wants you to port their apps to Linux using WineLib. Maybe a film company needs a new feature in the Gimp. Maybe an ISP is concerned about the security in the networking stacks and wants an audit.
And for new projects? Well, that's what volunteers are for :)
Whatever. Basically the 80% of people that work in software services becomes 100%. I think it's workable.
if you read the cringely article about sun from a few days back, the articles here concerning Sun with Scott McNealy do a decent job of responding to some of Cringely's challenges.
if you want to get a pretty decent picture of what Sun is going to do for their long term strategy regarding linux and the potential downfall of big-iron mainframe UNIX (think GNU/Linux on Polyserve), I think they're looking at sidestepping it altogether.
They're going straight for Linux on the desktop with the Mad Hatter project -- McNealy makes a lot of sense on this, although it might just be the kool-aide.
mike
I agree with this post.
;)
Regardless of how you code (freelance, just-for-fun, whatever), you have to pay the electric bill or your computer won't run and you can't program (or eat).
It isn't about economics class where they say that long-term, profit goes to zero. That isn't a problem because that means that you are still making money. It's just the same amount of money that it takes to pay your bills. Coding for free starts you out AT zero but you still have costs (electricity, food, if not housing, etc.)
A company giving its software to OSS basically means that they don't hope to make money directly from the sale of that software. This means that they either hope to make money off the support/training for that software or that the company's main business is not selling software.
For example, someone once posted on here about Boeing giving away code to OSS. Boeing is in business to make competitively priced airplanes and things, not software. Giving the software and source) away doesn't impact their revenue (they would have developed the software in-house anyway) UNLESS it enables a competitor to compete better with them.
OSS basically turns the computer industry into a service industry instead of a product industry. You don't sell the software, you sell the services that go along with that software (support, training, etc.)
Of course, nothing prevents anyone else from also selling services to go along with that software (I could, theoretically, also sell my services to support RedHat's distribution - as could IBM, Intel, or any other big player). The model also assumes that programmers will be able to make a living because the majority of companies will want to do in-house modifications/customizations of software they find in the OSS archives. I would be willing to see the percentage of companies that use software today (any software) who actually have salaried programmers on their payroll (or even who would want to).
Programming will become service based contract work in these models. Even if a company hired programmers to write something from scratch, as soon as it is released into the OSS archive, there is no reason to keep the programmers on the payroll unless you will need constant modification of the product. In any case, you can just keep shopping around and if others start supporting that software, you can simply terminate the contract with the original author(s) and hire the cheaper support folks.
As a programmer (and one who does contract work), OSS doesn't give me a "warm fuzzy" when I think about how steady my paychecks will appear in my mailbox. It may keep me on my toes to be as up-to-date as I can on certain technologies and to keep my costs as low as possible to constantly compete over any job scrap that comes along, but it doesn't give me any indication of how well I'll be doing financially down the road (and definitely not around retirement time).
With a company that writes/sells software, at least you have some degree of security in that as long as the company puts out good software, you'll probably have a job. In the service-programming model, you will have to compete more and more and more among a larger and larger programmer community and fight for every dollar you can get. Unless, of course, this model perpetuates the "techno-elite" atmosphere where the gulf between programmers and users gets even wider (and the entry into the techno-elite caste becomes harder and harder) - which I think it doesn't. I keep having this vision of seeing people on every street corner holding cardboard signs with hand written messages saying "Will program for electricity/food".
the author says:
Since when is there a ban on selling linux ? With explanations like this, why won't businesses get scared ?
You know, on PBS, back in the very early 1990's, about maybe 1991 or 92, there was a special called The Machine That Changed The World. It was about the personal computer.
In one of the interviews, someone said something insightful. It was approximately like this: "The establishment never sees the next paradigm shift comming. They always miss it. So they hire someone to tell them. And then when they are told, they don't believe them until it is too late."
I think this also strikes a chord even with articles about Microsoft of late. I think, unlike most establishment, they are good at looking to the future instead of being stuck in their ways. But they are still sufficiently stuck in their ways that something will bite them. I think it may very well be the whole open source model of development.
Shifting gears slightly...
The reality is that ones and zeros are now cheap to copy and send all over the planet. Business models that were built on scarcity can't stand this. I'm not advocating music or software piracy or that artists or developers shouldn't get paid. I'm just pointing out the fact. The technology is here. You can't ignore it. Patterns of ones and zeros can be instantaneously sent all over the planet. Get used to it.
When the printing press appeared, it caused big problems to the establishment that relied on scarcity of information. It was now cheap to reproduce information and circulate it. People were more informed. Other people didn't like this. But they got used to it. It was a mere reality of technology. They could try to stop it, control it, control how people used it, require a license for photocopiers in soviet russia, etc. But like standing on the beach trying to stop the incomming tide, they failed.
You, sir, happened to see how Linux would affect the Unix business several years before it was apparent to most people. Sun still seems to be in denial. IBM has said Linux is the future, even over AIX.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.