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."

Comments

I'd rather use Photoshop than the Gimp

[bons]

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?

Logical OR

[mandolin]

The interviews center around whether integration with proprietary products endangers the Open Source effort or increases consumers' freedom to choose."

And the answer is.. "Yes".

Thank you, please proceed to the next /. discussion.

Re:Think of OSS as language

[worm eater]

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.

Here's another analogy

[Kappelmeister]

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!

Re:Here's another analogy

[spamchang]

You forget to mention that Vomit Unlimited, the fading company, is publicly owned, and its takeover bid of the park is motivated by greedy CEOs looking to inflate their stock and dump it at higher prices.

Meanwhile, a few amusement park visitors, cowed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt, pay the $699 admissions fee and enjoy the same rides that they previously enjoyed for free.

What about Apple?

[f-matic]

Didn't see them mentioned yet, but they seem like a perfect example of a proprietary business model drawing from the OSS movement. But I don't think the either/or question really captures what's going on in these situations. Seems to me in Apple's case (which is fairly similar to others discussed in the videos), they're obviously exploiting the OSS movement (albeit in a fairly clever and media-massaged kinda way) -- just look at Safari, which adds value to their operating system and draws extensively from the open source technologies developed in Konqueror -- and makes them more money. But at the same time they're contributing code back to OSS and adding value back to the OSS.

I mean, c'mon, this is America -- aren't exploitation and cooperation the same thing?

It's like your favorite band getting big.

[Theatetus]

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.

Re:Think of OSS as language

[chgros]

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).

I interviewed a salesman today: open source focus

[puzzled]

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.

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/pa nic i386

Not even an issue...

[evilviper]

[...] whether integration with proprietary products endangers the Open Source effort or increases consumers' freedom to choose."

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.

Re:2-faced approach is more appropriate

[Tony-A]

[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.

Re:asdasd

[Sciamachy]

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?

Had a problem with this at my company.

[NYTrojan]

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.

Corporate Influence harmless.

[crazyphilman]

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.