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The Riches of Open Source
Daniel Dvorkin writes "This BusinessWeek article argues convincingly that Linus Torvalds has more resources at his disposal than Bill Gates. Not only is it a nice overview of Why Open Source Really Matters pitched to a non-technical audience, but it makes a solid argument in favor of OSS in general and Linux in particular, from a solidly capitalist perspective."
Finally someone ther has enough sense and not just a MBA degree.
Seriously if common sense would prevail in IT industry over marketing hype and FUD, ...Oh the possibilities.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
But there is a huge difference.
Linus can ASK the world to do something, but if they don't like the way he's thinking, they won't do it. Linus controls the world as long as the world likes the orders. So in a sense he's just a way to focus the desires of the majority of developers.
Gates on the other hand can ORDER everyone in his employ to jump around and shout "I'm a little idiot!" and they'll have to do it wether they like it or not. Thats a huge difference. Gates has the world as his playground.
Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
The article mentions Linux all the time, and Linus, but it wouldn't be usable as an entirely free operating system without the free software from GNU.
:-)
Now, let the flaming and zealot-naming begin, but what I'm saying is just true.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Being disorganized can actually leverage that knowledge more effectively than a command-and-control hierarchy. ... you would assume we were talking about terrorists.
I can't wait until the GPL is held in that politically charged light.
T.
This space for rent.
If this is true then one must wonder why Linus doesn't utilize more of these available resources. Why does he instead have a relatively small group of hackers working on only a kernel? Why, with all his resources, is he not developing, embracing and extending a plethora of other operating system components and applications?
The fact is that while open source does offer the potential of having a very vast number of developers owrking on a project or multiple projects, the reality is that few developers actually participate. Combine this with the fact that they are driven to participate based on their interest or itch and we end up with a fine kernel, a few great apps and an abundance of mp3 players.
The potential is there for Linus to have more resources than Bill Gates but, the reality is that Linus has no where near the resources of Bill Gates.
The altruism of open source is very noble. What will put the fire in the belly of Linux's white knights if they win their crusade and Microsoft does crumble?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I think that Linus would rather have the money to be honest. Nevertheless I don't think the article is completely correct in showcasing the Linux vs Bill super smackdown.
Money vs Altruism
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While having the 'community' of open sourcers behind him is certainly exceedingly important, the open source community is fractured across a variety of fronts, frequently cannot integrate (merge those fronts against a common foe), and lacks a true core focus comitted to solving specific problems. When it does do these things, it does so slowly and without focus. One can blame Microsoft for a wide variety of things, but they can repurpose the company on a dime to release a brand new product (note I didn't say original) within a years time and make it acceptable and commercially viable.
The Linux community - particularly the open source community has simply not the structure and organization to do this.
Geek Fervor
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The author talks about how there is a cause to create an alternative to Windows. That's fine - but at the same time, it cost most - lots and lots of money, lots and lots of marketing to make people switch. The one thing that really helps open source sometimes is that the alternatives are of such crap quality that people will endure the lack of support and documentation of an open source product just to get something of good reliability (something the commercial vendors just lack these days).
Creative Chaos
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Chaos is a good thing. Good things can come from random brainstorming - however many times a good idea can simply be neglected in an open source environment where it would have thrived in a commercial environment. There's something to be said for having the time, energy, and resources to actually take an idea that sounds great but would take enormous resources and focussed manpower to pull off.
So while I think its great that open source can do some serious damage to the monopoly of Microsoft and push us forward - I would be quick to note that it isn't really the open source community that's making the types of advances that we really need with respect to getting people to USE the fruit of our labors. Sun, IBM, RedHat, etc. are utilizing the greatness of open source to actually make a difference to the average consumer. And after all - isn't that the point?
Do you honestly believe that? Look, I would LOVE to see MS adopt a more open model, but that is because I know how much it would benefit me, and the rest of the tech community, not because I believe for a minute that it would actually be better for Microsoft. Do you really think they would have 90% market share with open source products? Of course not. They got where they are by not sharing the pie with anyone. If they opened up, others would take what they have done and run with it. People would release 100% compatible versions of Windows, Office, IIS, etc that were more secure with less bug fixes, and Microsoft would have to work harder, spend more money in development and QA, and still end up with less of the market, thus less money. For that matter why would anyone buy XP if Windows NT 4 was still under active development by an open source community that made it just as modern and up to date? Would all this be good for the rest of the world? Yes. Would it make MS "loads more money"? Absolutely not.
SCO.com uses Linux
Good article overall, in fact pretty damn amazing coming from mainstream press. But I did notice one disturbing thing:
And while Torvalds and Linux have recently faced legal issues about whether Linux might have some proprietary code embedded in it, that distraction is dwarfed by the time and energy Gates has devoted to battling the U.S. Justice Dept.
Now, all of us here are aware that the 2 cases are pretty much polar opposites. The former is the little guy being picked on by a big, greedy coporation. The latter is the little guys (us, represented by the govenment) picking on the big, greedy coporation.
Most of the non-tech people I know are aware that MS's name had been dragged through the mud as a result of the DOJ case, and have a lot less respect for MS now that the law has found them guilty. Regardless of the merits of the case, or the result, the fact is the general public often thinks of MS as the bad guys simply because of a court decision.
I really, really hope this doesn't happen to Linux, but articles that even mention the 2 situations in the same paragraph (without explanation) blur the issue. How long until my Mom asks me about Linux, the "Operating System written by thieves"?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The free market, BTW, does the same thing. The free market (with lots of little independent companies that buy sell and trade goods) creates a mutually profitable self organizing system where people exchange ideas and grow prosperous together.
I was turned off by this article because it assumes the world is simply the case of a monopolist verse a revolutionary leader.
The monopolist rules by capital he has aquired through the years. The revolutionary rules by charisma and his ability to get others to toe the line by coersion of their creative talents.
I seriously dislike the way that Gates has been actively seeking to destroy the free market. However there are still a few vestiges of the free market left. As long as there are still a few remaining outcrops of the free market, Gates will continue to be stronger than Linus, because Gates will be able to buy or re-engineer the creations of the free market.
BTW, I don't fall for the argument of wonderfullness of altruism. Gates uses altruism to destroy his enemies. Gates altruistically "gave" the world ie to destroy a serious rival Netscape. Altruism in business is generally a sign of ulterior motives.
Of course, in this world where the U.S. government makes no effective effort to address monopolies, the free market breaks down, and most of us are left in a world where we have no choice but to follow the revolutionaries.
I dislike the article as it makes the world sound as if we are having to choose between the world of Gates where one man owns all the world's resources, and that of Linus where no one is ever paid but everything is free (ie, people get what they can take).
The truth is that both ideas are ultimately feeding on the free market as the source of their power. Dammit, I want to live in a world with out these friggin' overlords and uber men around every corner. A free market with small companies still looks like the best of all worlds to me.
However, I think the challenge for open source is that often times several different groups are writing competing code for competing projects will little consideration of the massive duplication (witness many distributions of Linux, many of which are functionally identical) in efforts. The successful projects in the open source world are projects that can agree on standards, organize factions of programmers, and distribute to a wide audience.
At first, this seems like a terrible waste of effort - except that by working in parallel, different ideas can be tried. The more ideas that get tried, the more quickly the bad ideas can be weeded out, and the more rapid the progress.
I, too, once upon a time agreed with you. But, I've seen the light. Even though I'm quite set on using Linux, I appreciate the BSDs as contributionary cousins, and though I use KDE as my desktop, I've written plenty of software using GTK.
Parallel is OK! Really! Over time, the winning ideas will accumulate and gain steam (Konqueror, Mozilla, Open Office, Apache, Perl/PHP/Python, My/PostgreSQL, etc) while the others provide valuable lessons. (EG: The thousands of dead projects on SourceForge)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That will be true when Bill is willing to GPL his software. Until then, Bill is relegated to software that is free (as in do whatever you want with it), as opposed to Free (as in RMS).
So I'd say that the bulk of what is referred to as Open Source is quite inaccessible to Bill. And as for benefits to Bill through competition, no way. Bill doesn't benefit by making windows better - he benefits by selling more copies of windows. If linux were not around, he could sell more copies of windows with less effort put into improvements.
I think Bill would be hard-pressed to find anything about the Open/Free/free software movement that he likes.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The article makes the same mistake that most articles of this kind make: it assumes that everyone who uses linux gets the sourcecode, that everyone who gets the sourcecode looks at the sourcecode, and that everybody who looks at the sourcecode contributes to it. This leads to the conclusion that Linus has an army of millions at his disposal, which is simply not true.
No offense, but Bill Gates has 40,000 FULL TIME EMPLOYEES. Thats 40,000 people doing what he says 8 hrs/day on demand. Linus might have 100,000 contributors, but less than 1% are active regularly and even less than that are full time devotees.
If Linus had anywhere near the resources that Billy has, then Linux would be a Desktop competitor.
Monopolies do not come about by government inaction. They come about precisely because of government action: priviledges granted by the government to various corporations. Microsoft's "monopoly", if you can call it that, only exists because of government-granted patents and copyrights. Without these, there is no MS monopoly.
The only way for the free market to function optimally is for the government to retract itself from the market entirely, and cease any tampering with the free market.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I just wanted to say that free markets are about freedoms and not about markets. When you have true freedoms, then the markets will tend to take care of themselves as people use tohse freedoms to their benefit and advantage.
Microsoft is not about free markets because it is not about freedom. In fact they assume on faith, that the right to restrict what other people copy at their disposal, copyrights, is a fundamental inherent right. It is not. In the future I have no doubt that copyrights will be lumped in with the right of the government to choose your speech, and the right of government to choose your religion, or even the right to own slaves (another false 'property' right). In the meantime, we just half to fight it out. Microsoft will not sit arround passively while people who exercise their freedoms cut into revenues. All hell will surely break loose.
You say this yet go on to act like Linux isn't a free market. The definition of a free market is "An economic market in which supply and demand are not regulated or are regulated with only minor restrictions."
Linux isn't regulated, you can go several places to buy Linux distros as you see fit. There is no restriction of who can and can't sell Linux. There aren't any restrictions on who can and can't modify Linux to fill demand. No restrictions on who can create the supply to whatever demands exist at all.
Compare that with Windows. You can only buy it from Microsoft. You cannot resell it, you cannot modify it. You can't go anywhere else for Windows. If you want something in the OS Windows can't or doesn't deliver you can't supply that yourself without completely dumping Windows. Demands go unfullfilled because of the restrictions of copyright, only Microsoft can fill that demand in your OS.
Which one is the free market? Copyright grants a limited monopoly on distribution, forsaking control of distribution fosters competition among vendors. I don't agree with the article's assertion that it's alturism, I think it's exactly what you're saying only replace Microsoft with Linux. Linux benefits from the fruits of a free market, Microsoft has to slog on under the terms of a monopoly.
Wow. This is simplistic as hell but making choices makes people smarter. Think about it. You have to engage in critical thinking within the context of your needs before choosing a solution and you are forced to question.
-_-
Not to be overly negative, but... Bill Gates pays people to work for him. When there's some ugly, tedious piece of code that has to be written in order to complete some piece of functionality, it gets written. When there's a necessary piece of documentation that needs to be finished, Bill doesn't hope for volunteers. In some commercial settings, advantage: Bill.
Communism is foremost an economic system. Government is just an implementation detail. Actually, one of the major goals of communism is to get rid of all governments. The number one principal of communism is that resources be shared by the entire society, not owned by individuals or groups of individuals. I know in reality it didn't work out that way, but at least it is what it is supposed to be. Communism has been greatly vilified in the anti-communism countries, therefore people like you are automatically disgusted when OSS is compared to communism. If you had really studied what communism is, which I was forced to do since I used to live in a communist country, you will understand that communism is a good ideal that failed miserably during its implementation. That's why I doubt the ideals of OSS can work very long or on a larger scale in the real world.
If this is true, there may be many reasons, perhaps working in concert (different people may have different and multiple reasons, making the effect much stronger). For example, the fact that the developer can see the OS code may make him far more confident in working on code above it... because he can really understand what's going on underneath (and fix it if there's a problem). Having the entire OS's code means that he can experiment with anything... and even if today he doesn't want to experiment with something, using OSS/FS means that he'll be more prepared for that time when he does. From a security point-of-view, he can analyze and fix anything, and knowing that others can do that too might raise his confidence in the results. By improving OSS/FS, he gains respect in the technical community that he wouldn't get simply by writing closed code (even if they're both paid for, everyone can see EXACTLY what you did in the open code).
I'm sure there are others.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
In other words, it's a low down dirty shame that some open BSD didn't get all the attention Linux has, back before Windows took over. However, there weren't enough programmers doing nothing at the time, and the internet wasn't as useful as it is today; Linux is simply the project that came around when the resources were available, and there we have it. I don't really care today if I'm running Linux or *BSD or whatever, I run whatever seems to be able to best do the job, and I really don't feel like being an advocate for any in particular. (As a person who believes in multifunctional tools, though, I am in favor of linux and netbsd.) My point is simply that it would have been nice if Microsoft had taken longer to get their shit together than the open source community.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If Linus Torvalds has more resources at his disposal than Bill Gates, then what when we add Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, Don Knuth, Damian Conway, Guido van Rossum, Norman Hardy, Bruce Schneier, Ian Murdock, Martin Michlmayr, Nicholas Weaver, Ken Thompson, Robert Thau, Theo de Raadt, Robert Malda, et cetera? Amazing. Truly amazing.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The most obvious one: If Linux has so many more resources, than why doesn't it have all the features of Windows already? Flame me all you want, but it doesn't.
The flip side of that is if Microsoft has all this money why doesn't Windows have all the features of Linux? No need to flame you.
Even though Linus has "the millions who use Linux and continue to tinker with it", in reality there are very few contributors (definitely not millions). Windows also has a larger installed base and thus a larger possible base of testers. How does that factor in?
Well, do your Windows "testers" even know how to use Linux?
Your other points are good, but here's mine:
-If capitalism is such a good model for society and promotes competition then why doesn't Windows have more competition besides Linux? Linux isn't even trying to make money yet. Its still ramping up.
-But you're right. BillG doesn't care about the people Microsoft lays off. He got his money, like most CEOs, so it doesn't matter what happens to his company or its 80,000+ employees. Those pawns can always find another job workin for the man.
Its so frustrating to watch people act like their intelligent, like they're some sort of God, while they lay waste to so many honest hard-working American's lives. They're just playing the game of monopoly, or is it the game of life. They're still human, just like everyone else. But where's their compassion? Why can't MCSEs and engineers and physicists find work? Because capitalists are greedy.
With Linux everyone gets to share, its recommended that we share. Sharing is a good thing. Can Microsoft say the same? Or do we need to sign their EULA first?
And its not just Microsoft, its every large corporation, even IBM. They answer to their shareholders, they answer to their metrics. And they make many people very unhappy when they lose their mortgage or have to go back to school to get certified for another career that will be ruined by venture capitalists, the stock market, and our media system just like every other career has been in our history.
Is this really progress? Does money really innovate? Even while BillG is swimming through it in his money bin?
No, it turns people into slave, doing jobs they would rather not do so the rest of us can live our blissfully ignorant lives ignoring the janitors until their jobs are automated out from underneath them and they starve in the streets. That's my perspective of capitalism.
Please show me how wrong I am.
I was refering to South America, where some countries pretty much completely deregulated utility industries, and havoc ensued.
It sounds like Rothbard, from your description, is describing laws that marketize environmental protection. This has failed before, and it will fail in the future. Who files a tort, when the victim and his relatives are all dead? And, who sets the value of compensation for polluted air?
Also, sending out a link to a page that refers to "Liberal petulance" in the first paragraph isn't a great way to endorse free market pollution controls to someone who expressed a fairly liberal position.
I just resent the fact that the Republicans tells me how great free markets are, while at the same time telling me that we have to reduce our dependance on foreign oil. Hello?
Education is the silver bullet.
and how much of his wealth did he give away before the anti-trust trials, which dragged him kicking and screaming into the public spotlight?
he's gotten WAY more visibly "generous" since recognizing how politically important it is to be viewed as a nice guy by the rabble. i still can't stomach that picture of gates personally administering polio vaccine to an african child, with that big, fake goony smile spread across is face for the cameras.
And, BTW, from where did that excess come?
exactly - from predatory business practices that crush competition and extort huge sums of money from businesses - large, medium, and small - across the globe.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I work in corporate IT, and I really prefer dealing with MS. Their people are knowledgable, very helpful, and just want to see things work. Im sure you can pick anecdotes which are bad, but in almost ten years, I have had nothing but positive encounters. Im sure that is going to make people angry to hear (because it isnt anti-MS), but its true. MS is #1 for a reason, and it isnt because they are 'forcing' corporations to use their stuff.
I don't work in corporate IT. Most of my computing experience has been from the residential end of things... home users for the most part, and my own experience at home. I've only had to contact Microsoft twice regarding computing issues, once for myself and once for a customer. Both were bad experiences. The technicians were not knowledgeable, helpful, and while they may have certainly wanted things to work (probably so I'd stop asking these hard questions), they didn't aid me.
A customer had a Compaq desktop system. The hard drive had a restore partition, and the restore CD queried the partition for the restore data. The hard drive died, and Compaq wants to charge for a set of restore cd's (understandably so), and the customer was unwilling to pay for them. I installed a new hard drive, and installed WinXP, using a retail CD. His key (the one pasted on the front of the case) is a OEM key. Hence, I can't install XP using his key, and he can't authenticate XP using my retail key. Nor can I can change to his OEM key when the time to authenticate comes around. A little research yields that there's a simple text file ($ROOT_CDROM$\I386\SETUPP.INI) on the XP cd that determines how the CD acts, and what keys it'll accept. Change that file, and you've got a retail copy of XP that'll accept an OEM key. Simple, right? I contacted Microsoft regarding the problem, twice. The first time, I was told it was a problem that Microsoft could not resolve, and because it was a Compaq OEM key, I would need to contact Compaq. Compaq, obviously, turned me right back to Microsoft. The next tech at Microsoft explained the retail/OEM key problem to me, and told me that I would need to find an OEM cd. Nothing about altering the text file.
My second experience concerned their dial-up service. It requires that you install MSN Explorer. The first time MSN Explorer runs, it asks for your Passport ID. Upon verification, it creates a computer generated username and password, grabs an access number, and creates a dial-up connection. When you start up MSN explorer, it dials in first using that computer generated login info, then allows you to sign in with your Passport ID. Since I was dual-booting with Linux at the time, I wanted to set up 'net access under Linux. It took me two hours on the phone with MSN Tech Support to find out that they "weren't authorized to give me that information, and I should try using the on-line help chat." I hopped back over to the MSN help chat online, and spent the next six hours being told "MSN does not use a computer generated login to dial-up. It only uses your Passport ID." At the end of the conversation, I let it slip that I was attempting to use MSN under Linux. The tech simply stated "We don't support Linux," and refused to continue, irregardless of the fact that I had an account issue (I needed that computer generated password). After giving up on that route, I used a cracking utility to pull the generated password on the dial-up account, and proceeded to finish setting up 'net access under Linux.
In both cases, Microsoft's support was unwilling and/or unable to provide me with the solution I needed. Under my experience with Linux, most of my problems have been solved within a couple days simply by browsing the web for the information I needed, posting to a web board, or firing off an email or two to a local Linux user's group. Some were solved within a few hours.
You talk of wanting a free market without overlording monopolies, but also without having to follow revolutionaries that tear down the free market. Now, leaving aside the problem that this isn't an accurate portrayal of what's going on, I want to address a different problem I have with your point: How do you answer the problem that in some situations, a free market CAUSES a monopoly to emerge? These are what are called "natural monopolies". They occur when there is a very strong 'network effect' in which everyone making the same uniform choice is a feature that has great value. For example, your city's waterworks will be cheaper if only one organization provides all the water supply to the whole city. It isn't practical for there to be three or four competing water suppliers, each with their own pipes under the streets, each with their own road crews to do maintenence of those pipes, just so that you can pick a different water supplier than your neighbor. So even the pure capitalists have to accept that this is a case in which a monopoly is going to occur ANYWAY, like it or not, and therefore it's better to have it be a governmental voting decision rather than let it be up to every person in the city to decide differently. There are numerous things like this - such as electrical companies, cable companies, (land line) phone companies, and so on. Let's look at what split up the Ma Bell monopoly - government intervention. The reason you can pick a different service provider is because government rules FORCE whichever company built the phone cable outside your house to lease the use of that line to competitors at a fixed market rate, like it or not.
Anyway, I submit to you that, although it's to a lesser extent than something physically routed through a city, computer operating systems are also a natural monopoly. It takes special effort to make competing OS'es use compatable data files. That's effort that companies don't want to put forth since it helps their competitors. So you have the situation where if your co-worker used Windows to write a program, you have to use it too to run it. And thus a strong network effect is born, where there is great value in everybody using the same system. Microsoft happened to become the monopoly, but if it wasn't them it would have been someone else. This situation does NOT lead to multiple companies competing on equal footing.
A free market, without government intervention to enforce fair play, doesn't *stay* a free market for long.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
When this article mentioned "motivation", I couldn't help but harken back to that old saw-horse of behavioral theory -- Maslow's Hierarchy of Need.
...
People work on Open Source because the gratification that comes as a result of their labor to produce robust, functional software will actually satisfy a "higher" need than material comfort and economic security (such as MS provides in salary). It's pretty hokey, when you boil it down -- but people want to do something useful with their energy and talent, something that appeals to our better nature.
While this _can_ be done while making a buck at the same time, it's just harder to balance. Plus -- not to sound like Newsweek, but -- with the ever-increasing impact of technology on society, it's reassuring to know that what we are building isn't strictly the result of the motiation towards commercial profit.
Restating the obvious, maybe
This is one of the most hilarious posts i've read for a while, but at the same time, it's very insightful! Think about how many of us freeloaders there are? I'm one of them. It's quite a challenge to turn freeloaders into programmers/donators/documenters/anything...
Berto
Whether such principles as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" are good or bad is something that will be hotly debated by the Slashdot crowd. To my mind the one unargueable lesson in ALL the past implementations of Communism is that a powerful government doesn't just wither away. Instead, it opposes enemies, and if it can't get enough it manufactures new ones, both external and internal. That's why government isn't just an implementation detail. The big difference between charity, non-profit organization, and just plain sharing on one side and the various -isms on the other is that one set is voluntary and allows opting out if the prices approach martyrdom (or even discomfort), while the other set is manditory and assumes a government able to enforce that mandate.
Who is John Cabal?
While I must admit that I love all the open-sourced projects to improve on old commerical engines(Quake, Doom, etc.), their success seems limited at this point because of two key factors involved in a game's success:
1. Game content & design. This part is usually the tough one for an open-source game, since content has taken up a larger chunk of time for the developer year by year, and since people volunteering to make content want to make content they enjoy, there is a tremendous amount of friction involved from the start to find people who want to make what YOU want to make(hint: it's better to go the other way and make the team first, then discuss the game). In the case of modified engines, the use of old content holds back the game and intoduces lots of nagging compatibility issues.
2. Ease-of-use, ease-of-development. Since a game in open-source is make because a developer feels like it, he's probably going to stop as soon as he's satisfied, and because games are so varied, his work isn't guaranteed to be picked up like with other open-source projects - instead, you end up with hundreds upon hundreds of partially-done projects lying around. Of course, this isn't good enough for players - commercial games get to a finished, playable state, for the most part.
There is an intangible factor too: The game market is biased towards making sequels, as opposed to "version 2.0s." Truthfully, most game sequels(and remakes, etc.) really *are* version 2.0s, but the good ones change something enough(the story, some basic gameplay feature) so as to render it different, too, if only slightly.
I think the development paradigm will shift at some point, but not immediately.