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Corporations Getting Into The Open Source Spirit
Anonymous writes "Some bastions of capitalism are getting into the open-source spirit -- not only using the software, but contributing code fixes and other mods, according to an article in today's Computerworld."
The most surprising thing in an article like this is the fact that it is getting written at all. It used to be that only MS would get this kind of rah-rah journalism, but the tide seems to be turning.
Now, stuff like this seems to be showing up all the time. I wonder what single thing tripped off this new trend.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Back in the 70's, IBM came out with their VM meta-OS. Its origins were in academia, not in IBM's shops, and in all the installations that I saw, it always came with full source. They actively encouraged customers to submit not just bug reports, but fixes, which were then sent out to other customers.
;-). I emailed the fix to the Amdahl support people, they thanked me, and it was in their next set of patches.
In one place that I worked around 1980, there was a big IMB mainframe, and one day we brought in some Amdahl people to demo their unix that ran on VM. One question was whether source was available. Their answer was "The source isn't an option; you get it whether you want it or not." Within a couple of weeks, I'd made a small fix to the kernel's clock routine (needed because the turkeys who ran our VM had screwed up their clock in a way that Amdahl's people hadn't conceived of
Closed source was to a great extent an invention of Microsoft. Before them, it was obvious to even the stupidest manager that it was a good idea to make source available to any programmers who could understand it. That way, you got bug fixes rather than bug reports.
It's actually a bit strange that we now have management that doesn't understand this. What are they teaching them in business schools these days?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This got me wondering.
Bug fixes and other contributions to open source software are in and of themselves valuable, but creating them will always be an expense to companies. With the exception of major enhancements or improvements very few will be marketable, or generate any other revenue stream for the company.
"Goodwill" however, is a recognized asset for companies. An asset that can be appraised, and entered on the balance sheet raising the company's value.
I wonder whether the open source movement could benefit from this aspect of contribution to the community, encouraging companies to create a verifyable and appraisable track record of contributions, and supporting their efforts to create genuine bankable value based on goodwill.
Just a thought.
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
I've been working with a lot of vendors on projects, IBM, BEA, ATG, TIBCO, etc.
You always find bugs in the products you use. Most of the time you have to develop a fix yourself, because the vendor's release schedule will not enable you to wait for the official fix. It's just good vendor relations to send the fix to the vendor.
I did that exactly for the same reason Merrill Lynch does that, to get better software.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill bugs
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Perhaps the problem with this particular form of ignorance is that many really care nothing about freedom and choice and thus promoting the things that provide them. Instead they are the vandals that break just to break. Yes comrade, let us take up arms and uhh... why are we doing this? *BANG* Never question mindless violence my comrade, who is next with these "questions?"
Please take the politics and personal agendas out of everything you do, especially software. Many are tired of seeing everything laced with your crap.
No. An attacker can already find out, (It is not hard usually.) and this way people can directly contribute to those projects in use in their area.
And they can also check to see if it would be making errors that would affect them. And fix them. This is an advantage.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
So businesses and govornments are going to use software that anyone can see the source code for. Does anyone else see this as a security risk?
Of course knowing exactly what software a government agency uses poses a potential security risk. At the same time this gives people who are monitoring security risks a list of the contacts that it makes a lot of sense to notify when a vulnerability in that code comes up.
As a comparison point, when code red, nimda, and slammer came out, was there any kind of list of agencies or businesses that should be notified of that fact? I suspect that well over 90% of the agencies and businesses were made aware of the existence of the problem by their own systems responding unusually.
-Rusty
You never know...
You're misinterpreting goodwill, which, IIRC, is defined as the difference between the book value of a company's assets and the price paid for it in an acquisition. It's often interpreted (at least by me) as a function of the value of the brand associated with the acquired company.
i.e. Amazon's actual assets are probably miniscule compared to its stock price, but the value of the marketable name is substantial.
Also note that you'd have to be able to associate a value for the contribution in question, which, since the code is released to the world for free, is pretty close to nil. As such, it's a stone cold expense.
Unless, of course, you're trying to build positive karma within the OSS community, which is certianly possible, but probably shouldn't show up on a balance sheet.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
What is this supposed to mean? Open source is more compatible with communism? That sounds like a subtle insult to me.
There is absolutely nothing spectacular about corporations dealing with open source software.
...that just keeps gaining momentum. Linux/open source gets some press, some "hip" factor, PHBs start to look at the hip new thing (I can just hear some manager asking his newly minted MSCE, "Say, what would it take to switch to this Linux thing I read about in businessweek?"), the more the PHBs look at it, the more press it gets...
It's cool, but at the same time, a lot of the people writing about it clearly don't understand it -- the mutilated description of the GPL in the recent Businessweek article bears witness to that. Then at the same time (in that article, and elsewhere) there's the continued use of phrases like "a ragtag band of software geeks", which I don't consider pejorative or anything, but it begins to get a little old.
I think this will be a Good Thing. As long as the "trend" lasts long enough for people to figure out how to use it(Linux, etc); if they just abandon it the first time they're prompted to fsck their filesystem, it could stop rolling. But hopefully by that time the this-could-be-more-user-friendly-dept. will have worked some more magic...
philcrissman.com.
Companies like Microsoft are greatly overcharging for their products, perhaps not for the initial sale, but for the upgrades and on-going development. Or do you really think that the incremental improvements in your Office XP upgrade are really worth several hundred dollars to you compared to the version of Office you already paid for? And why would you want to pay for improvements that often are largely based on user feedback anyway, rather than representing actual R&D work by the software company?
Those are market inefficiencies with the commercial software model that open source software corrects. Sure, the open source model isn't perfect either, in that not everybody who benefits pays exactly for what they are getting, but it seems to all average out statistically well enough for open source software to be competitive.
One thing I notice is that participating with the Open Source community changes the way I look at corporations. It's another benifit I was surprised that wasn't mentioned in the article. Some people, myself included, see corporations in a much better light when I notice they are contribuiting to Linux development or any open source project.
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
The downside is, Zimmerman's employers didn't have much commercial success during the recession.
Finding God in a Dog
This casual reference by the Submitter can be used to illustrate a fundamental bias within the community of Open Source users. (I'd argue that most Open Source contributors wouldn't take this view.)
How is it that Open Source and Capitalism are commonly viewed as being diametrically opposed?
Two Points:
Companies that utilize Open Source in order to more rapidly or cheaply deliver whatever service or product they sell on the market will win out in a competition against peers that develop a product with purely in-house tools. This is because an enormous expenditure of resources would be required to exceed the quality and speed of an active open source community project. --Doing away with that cost will help a company to cut prices below what a competitor can sustain.-- A fine strategy therefore, would be for a Company to promote those Open Source groups with whom they share a common interest. If a company depends on computing power to achieve success, it could benefit from helping the Mosix group deliver exceptional clustering software, for instance.
Open Source uses a reward system that is very similar to Capitalism. The strength of capitalism is in the nearly 1:1 ratio of talent to reward, as well as the constant feedback-loop the market presents to new products. Open Source rewards contributors with status; the best programmers are richly compensated in this regard. In many ways status is better than money. (Arguably, a primary attribute of money is the proxy action it has on status.) Additionally, Open Source has it's own feedback-loop in that a single programmer searching for available status, has an incentive to review other people's code in the hopes of improving it. This action multiplied thousands of times over the life of a project is an efficient and dependable machine for improvement.
The "bastion of capitalism" fits very nicely with Open Source, which is why Linux is winning the war in IT departments all over the world. The Open Source yin-and-yang of Status and Peer-Review is a close approximation of Capitalism's Money and Markets.
As a contributor, I can tell you that just as Companies need things to cost less, Programmers need things to make better. Open Source and Capitalism are becoming the best buds, and only an Open Source parasite or a Corporate nobody would fail to see the natural symbioses of the two.
Anyone who has used the code licensed under 'viral' (read GPL) open-source licenses cannot close their source code. If they can't close it and it is useful to them, they might as well distribute it and contribute to the open-source movement. By posting a story like this, and putting it in such a newsworthy fashion as indicated above seems to imply that open-source is the domain of pinko-Commie bastards, into which bastions of capitalism are finally entering. Don't forget, capitalism and open-source are independent concepts. Business models of software companies can be plotted on a two-dimensional plane with 'code freedom' and 'price' as the two axes.
I still don't understand how a software-only company can make a decent profit if its main software products are free of charge. I understand the advantages of open software (better documentation for development/bug fixing), but if I have a small software company, how am I gonna benefit from the products that I (don't) sell ? how the bills are gonna paid, how the developers are gonna paid ?
Please don't see this as a troll, but there is a limit to what should be free of charge and what should not. Don't forget that the economic benefit is one of the strongest motives for research. And if I have a revolutionary idea, why shouldn't I get something for it ?
At the same time OSS is a double-benefit for a corporation which incorporates it. Not only do they not have to spend the money on the very high fees MS charges, but the money they do spend is directly on training and development of their local staff (instead of it being shipped off to Redmond, where it may or may not be used to develop a product which the corporation in question may use). This will help keep staff loyal because they will feel apprciated, and gaurantees that development is being done on applications that the corporation actually uses.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
That's really oversimplified. There are many applications that don't lend well to open source development.
For example, much of the value of Apple computers is in OS X and the core iApps. If Apple opened the sources to the iApps, Microsoft can bundle the same iApps with Windows. So why "switch"? On the other hand, Windows is not likely to "steal" the Darwin kernel (and if they really wanted to they can get BSD themselves), so it's not a problem for Apple to open source it.
NVidia maintains its market position by superior hardware and drivers. Giving away the sources to the drivers aids the competition.
Pro Tools Free is a good example of a powerful and artificially limited software, given away for free. Giving it away for free lets a lot of people learn to use it, which is great. Opening its sources would make it trivial to bypass any such artificial limitations (in this case, number of editing tracks, IIRC), hurting the more expensive actual product that you're supposed to buy after outgrowing the freebie. Like Apple, Digidesign really wants to sell you hardware, so opening the sources can make it easier to run Pro Tools Free with somebody else's hardware.
Would you like to propose alternative business models for these companies?
There's nothing wrong with capitalism. And anyways, open source makes A LOT of sense from a business point of view for MANY companies.
It seems very ironic that people insist on putting down capitalism, the only system fostering the kind of freedoms required for such open exchange of ideas and freedom of association.