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."

Comments

A synthesis of the capitalism/socialism dialectic?

[TheNarrator]

So the great debate has always been between people like Walker who want capital -- in this instance software -- to be free.

Walker's fresh, earnest face tells all: He's an idealist. He believes in sharing his software innovations with others. "I'm not comfortable with selling the things I do and making money from them," Walker says during a stopover at his parents' home in New Hampshire.

and capitalists like Birnbaum who think that the market, communicating via the price system to capitalists must dictate the most productive uses of capital by transfering the power over that capital based on who makes the most productive use of it. Productive meaning, the gap between the price of the inputs vs the price of the outputs of their business activity, otherwise known as profits.

Walker has an unlikely soul mate. Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, 37, is managing director for computing at brokerage giant Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Div. He's so buttoned-down that he wears a suit on Casual Friday. You would think this cog in the capitalist machine would have nothing in common with young Walker.

So with open source every one has free capital. Those who can make the most productive use of it make money off of it. But the capital is denied to noone, and both are at a much more equal starting point in terms of access to capital then they would be in the case of the capital to start a chemical factory. That's because the resources are not scare so who gets access to them is not a point of political contention.

Unfortunately this has little application to the world of physical goods because duplicating a chemical plant has far more dis-utility to those who have to perform the work than duplicating a piece of software. Therefore, people choose to work for the most productive utilizer of capital.

Re:Art

[kin_korn_karn]

Good software has nothing to do with the art of coding. Software is made good in the design.

OSS has no designers, no wannabes with the title Business Analyst drawing UML diagrams and trying to decide what entities to model with the system. That makes it quick to code, but usually stretches the development cycle out longer because you don't have a roadmap of what you break when you change your piece.

The million monkeys analogy applies very well to OSS. A bunch of geeks that love to code will come up with a bunch of code they love, and if it works together, that's a bonus, and if it's designed well, it's a pure coincidence. I'm sick to fuck of hearing people talk about coding as art when software is damn near the least artistic thing on the planet if it's done right.

Re:Hrmph.

[Rojo^]

What was untrue? This is my opinion, and if you want to refute anything I've said, I'm willing to listen. Like I said, I run Windows on my desktop machine.

The web page icon I was referring to is the graphic that appears in the Address field that never changes from the blue 'e' in IE. This was a weak example of how MS products don't adhere to standards, I admit, but I wasn't trying to impress anyone. I was simply spouting off my opinion quickly before I had to go to lunch.