Slashdot Mirror
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').
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