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Linux Corporate Influence: Boon or Bane?
Mark Tobenkin writes "Are corporations exploiting the Open Source community? The Linux Public Broadcasting Network has video interviews with Ian Murdock (of Progeny and Debian fame), Martin Roesch (author of Snort), Jeremey White (CEO of CodeWeavers), Bradley Kuhn (FSF), Mike Balma (Linux Business Strategist for HP) and others on the evolving OSS business models. The interviews center around whether integration with proprietary products endangers the Open Source effort or increases consumers' freedom to choose."
Get Adobe and Macromedia to port to Linux and I think you'll see a major increase in usage.
The question is, "Is that really the goal?"
Do you want lots of users or lots of contributors?
Do you want to be the virus target by virtue of numbers?
If you do, then get some of the larger applications to port. If not, then why worry?
No Zen is good zen
And the answer is.. "Yes".
Thank you, please proceed to the next /. discussion.
It is a good analogy if you think about people controlling the kinds of language that can be used. There aren't many real-world examples of people doing this with 'human language'... except for the Academie Francaise. This part of the French government controls which words are 'officially' to be used in France, and has been very aggressive about keeping English terms (such as email and computer) out of the language. It is against the law to use the word 'email' in France.
But my point is that if language is controlled too tightly it really can be as oppressive as many of us think of proprietary software as being. Sure, for most people the lock-in is transparent (like it was in 1984) -- but is there, and it controls the way people communicate, and who they can communicate certain kinds of things with.
Maybe partying will help...
I was thinking about how difficult the SCO mess is to explain to a layperson -- it's front page news for nerds, but it doesn't sound very sexy to everyone else.
Here's my idea for a story you can use in case someone asks you at the water cooler. It's not a perfect analogy to OSS, but then, what is?
Imagine that there's a group of amusement park enthusiasts who love scary, innovative rides. The big 6.28 Flags parks around just don't cut it -- they're far away, admission is expensive, and the rides are boring and dangerous. So the fans decide to move to a new town, Penguina, and build their own park.
The Penguinans just love good rides, and they know how to make them. They work together to build a communal park that's scary as hell. Everyone chips in to come up with a new ride design, or build a ride. And each ride is open to everyone around, for no charge.
Eventually, word of the up-and-coming Penguina Park gets around. Lots of new residents move in each year to help build it up. Even more numerous are the tourists who just come to have fun -- more fun than they ever had at 6.28 Flags.
Eventually, the park gets the attention of ride vendors, big companies like UBM2 and startups like Red Beret. These companies can't buy out the park, since the Penguina residents agreed to never let that happen. But they can invest in the park ("this ride was sponsored by UBM2") and sell related merchandise, such as park maps, guided tours and seat cushions. Eventually Penguina Park gets so popular that everyone from government employees to Star Trek helmsmen go there for the biggest thrills they can have with their clothes on.
Then one day, Vomit Unlimited, a fading rollercoaster company with some good rides to its legacy, comes along and says to the Penguina community: "Guys, there's a ride in your park that's based on one of our designs. We didn't say it could be a part of your little hostel."
"Oops," rejoin the Penguina residents. "OK, tell us which ride and we'll take it out."
"I can't tell you that, it's a secret," says the Vomit Unlimited rep. "But I can't let you keep riding it for free, either. I've got no choice but to claim ownership of the whole park. Oh, don't worry, you can still use the rides. You'll just have to pay us $299 each to get in."
Naturally, the Penguina residents find this absurd. So do the corporations -- volunteer work is one thing, but they're not about to surrender their investments. UBM2 dismisses Vomit Unlimited. Vomit Unlimited sues.
"Oh, come on," entreat the Penguinans. "You can't win against UBM2. Just tell us which ride is yours."
"I'm afraid it's not that simple," croaks the rep. "You see, there's actually a whole series of rides that we own across the park. Infrastructure, too, so the park won't run at all if you take out our property. Now, buy your tickets, kids, since we'll be charging $699 soon." Scrawny guards with Vomit Unlimited logos (brown-green puddles with chunks of Chef Boyardee) begin to take positions around the park entrances, threatening to poke the eyes of any trespassers.
The amusement park trade journals laugh at the shop, but the mainstream papers take it seriously, leading people to wonder if there's a serious problem with the communal Penguina system.
Blood vessels breach. UBM2 sues Vomit Unlimited. Red Beret takes aim. But Vomit keeps spewing warnings to everyone who rides, from the government on down.
How will the craziness end?? Stay tuned!
I mean, c'mon, this is America -- aren't exploitation and cooperation the same thing?
experimental audiovideo minimalism: Rebuild All Your Ruins
It's no different than when your favorite local band gets a big record deal.
At first you're ecstatic because now you'll hear them on the radio, see them in big venues, etc. Then you start to get annoyed at all the new fans who only know the songs off their "big" album and not their older, infinitely better stuff.
Finally they stop playing their old stuff totally and you decide they've "sold out" just because they're more popular than they used to be.
All's true that is mistrusted
It is against the law to use the word 'email' in France
Yeah, don't say this word in front of a cop!
Now, seriously, it is NOT illegal to say "e-mail" (everyone does). However it should not appear on official documents (such as laws, etc).
I don't know how we came to use "ordinateur" instead of computer, but "computer" would really sound ugly in French (as it contains two ugly words).
Let's say that I want to build something, and I want to sell it for profit. I can either take a lot of time and duplicate work that has already been done many, many times, or I can use something that I am legally allowed to, as long as I respect the license that it is available to me through, and I am good to go. I may make modifications to code, but if I provide this code to the people that I distribute the product to (and to the developers who wrote the original code, if they want it), all is good.
If I were creating something like what I've described, I wouldn't be making my money with the software. I'd be making it with the hardware, the "thing" that someone would be buying. A thing where Linux would either not be important to the customer or would simply be a nice attribute, not the defining characteristic that sells the product. What the product's end results or operations are is what would sell this hypothetical product.
I believe that what should make my product sell above what others could do similar is the quality of the craftsmanship. Linux is a part of that, but my own labor for what I have personally created, be it something electronic, something furniture-wise (depending on what this device does), and the like is where I show my stuff.
No one is forced to buy my product. They could develop one themselves, or they could buy one from someone else, but the quality of my product should set it apart.
If Linksys et al. had been playing good with the GPL in their embedded wireless routers, I would say that they would be the model of how this should work. Unfortunately they haven't been. Their own pieces of the puzzle are their interface drivers and their user-configuration stuff, as far as software is concerned, and their hardware is obviously all theirs. This is valid. Not releasing the GPLed code that they've modified is where I have a beef with them.
It's great to be wonderfully idealistic like Richard Stallman, but paying rent makes more more pragmatic. If I work to develop something, it's mine unless I choose to give it away. The stuff that I use from someone else isn't mine. So, I respect their choice on distributing it via GPL, thank them for their contribution to computing, and go on from there.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I interviewed a sales guy today and the focus is marketing two experienced NT/Netware admins. They'll support the systems they're used to handling but they're going to learn Samba and Mars_NWE and start whacking those systems where appropriate.
...
a nic i386
I've been 'exploiting' an Open Source OS - just placed a php/postgres developer, and my ill gotten gains from his work are what is going to feed the marketing weasel. Am I an evil corporate scumbag? I wore a t-shirt, jean shorts, and sandals to work today, and nobody said shit about it because I'M THE COMPANY PRESIDENT!!! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh! I am a slashdot.heretic - see below:
[panic] ~> uname -a
FreeBSD panic.slashdot.net 4.8-STABLE FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE #13: Fri Aug 1 14:39:01 CDT 2003 puzzled@panic.slashdot.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/p
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Of course it doesn't.
No matter how something gets used, there is nothing that is going to take away your ability to use the open source/free software. Just because Microsoft makes Office available, doesn't take away your ability to use Open Office, etc. Of course, it's only the GPL people that are worried about this, becuase they live in an entirely different world than everyone else... If this was about BSD/MIT software, there wouldn't even be a discussion.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Windows has been the de facto virus target, but that doesn't seem to have increased code quality..."
Are you sure about that?
Few things to think about:
1.) Everybody hates Microsoft
2.) As a result of point 1, the media likes making a BFD over every little thing.
3.) Despite the media coverage mentioned in point 2, if the code wasn't getting better, then the increase in exploits would be geometric. We wouldn't have this big worm here, we'd have 10 of them.
Perception plays a much better part of this equation than the actual numbers do.
"Derp de derp."
[Dan Frye, director of IBM's Linux Technology Center in New York]
"Sun is a formidable company and we would welcome them as a competitor. But we'll spend little time worrying about Sun as long as they continue to misunderstand what Linux is about."
Methinks IBM has figured something out. I do not know what, but it is substantial. It's not as simple as "Open Source Rules" and it's certainly not just open source. The closest I can get is symbiosis defined as mutual parasitism. Both benefit from what should be an antagonistic relationship.
Don't forget that companies that want to use Linux extensively will have to hire Linux experts to build and maintain their systems.
Who knows the most about Linux? - members of the open source community that support it. So, in effect, they will be supporting the community by providing jobs for its contributers.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
IBM is - they made back the billion they invested in linux development, within the first year of their involvement, in terms of increased mainframe and iSeries sales, increased whole systems sales, and increased service provision contracts, as well as more systems integration projects. Once people got the idea that Big Blue's big iron could run more than just legacy stuff, and save hundreds of thousands compared to running a server farm full of NT/2K/Sun/etc, they came flocking!
That said, I do wonder now why IBM have just laid off a bunch of people from Global Services... putting an extra squeeze on costs maybe?
No, IBM has figured out that Software Patents trump Copyrights. All the Open Source copyright-based licensing in the world can do is kill copyright-based software houses.
But IBM has amazing amounts of software patent rights (absurd as they are), and is currently telling the german government how to vote in the EU, so that they exist there too (see 1st september vote details on swpat.ffii.org )
IBM is all for open source, until 10 minutes after it's killed off the old copyright-monopoly holders. Then it'll be patents all the way.
This week I've written an article about how several 'old-school' Linux users are experiencing the commercialization of Linux. You can find it at http://sepans.gotdns.org/forum?act=ST&f=20&t=3 41
The link should be this Sorry, previous link was broken :(
My company needed to make use of GNU's Tar utility. We have a program that needed to pack and unpack tar files at will. To avoid packaging the software with tar.exe we wanted to see if we could integrate Tar into our software. The question was if we did this, would we just have to provide the altered tar code, or would it make the entire program open source. This is what I think they are talking about when they mention exploitation. I can see why this sort of activity would be frowned upon by the OSS community. A letter of inquiry to GNU received a rather interesting response. In a very long reply, we were told that they couldn't tell us whether or not we'd need to make everything open source or not since we were not the kind of people they were making software for. They could not spend their donars money letting us know if that was okay or not ( even though the reply took much longer than a simple 'yes it's okay' or 'no it's not' ) but if we were willing to pay them for their efforts they could provide an answer.
One could state it like that, and I think it's a valid comparison. But how about those people who are starting to get the feeling that those who prefer to speak in private, are slowly becoming too much influence? Is that a threat to the "freedom of speace"? Or is the number of speakers simply growing, and has it become impossible to hear all voices? I think the later, but a dear friend of mine, who has been in the oss scene for a very long time feels he opposit. See the article I wrote about it for more details.
Here's my take on this; I'll admit up front that I'm not an expert, and these opinions are just opinions.
First of all, there are loads of distros out there. So if one or two distros go really corporate, paying less attention to home users and hobbyists, who cares? Want intellectual freedom and a progressive stance? Use Slackware or Debian instead. You can download them for free. You might have to do a little more RTFM'ing, and have to learn how to build your own firewalls, etc, but isn't the acquisition of knowledge supposed to be good for you? Besides, a home-grown firewall tends to be a little tighter than the "one size fits all" approach taken by corporate providers.
Then there's another thing to consider: corporate Linux providers are doing research and improving their products. Any changes they make to GPL'ed tools have to be released to the rest of us, so they're going to be contributing. Overall, this will be good for the community.
Finally, the more Linux is adopted by Big Business(tm), the more likely it is we'll be able to use Linux both at home and at work. And, THAT is a Good Thing.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
How about another angle... Without the corporate world Linux has no motivation to become wildly scalable because most kernel geeks don't have 24-way systems in their basements?
Reading a few other posts above it's pretty clear to me that every one (individual or business) that partakes in OSS in some way gives back.
It's really difficult to maintain a parsitic relationship with OSS, but very natural to gravitate towards a symbiotic one.
If company X adopts LAMP for their apps, then it's a sure bet someone will be using newsgroups/irc/etc for support. Their question becomes archived, and others using google benefit.
If company Y finds a bug and submits it it will probably get fixed. Others unknowingly benefit.
My point is that unless you are simply a gifted Linux architect (aren't we all!?!?) you will eventually need to stand on someone else's shoulders in some way. When you do, it is almost a given that you become the shoulders for someone else.
Let's not belittle companies who adopt OSS for it's benefits just because they haven't figured out the sociology of the movement. Let's welcome them and be glad their not using closed alternatives.