How to Misunderstand Open Source

Sam Hiser writes "This article intends to clear up some misconceptions about open source software development practices. It can help developers, IT and business managers transition from a closed development environment to an open one characterized by shorter time-to-market and lower costs. The author, Tom Adelstein -- an experienced CPA, code developer, project manager and consultant -- makes clear the notion that Open Source Software bears a mark of professionalism."

Comments

See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[eddy]

See also ESR's Prudential Interview.

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that does indeed show that ESR has a huge misunderstanding of Open Source. There are so many errors and misconceptions in that interview it's worrying that he is regarded as some sort of official spokesman for Open Source.

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[nickos]

This is good too. The last paragraph reads:

"We're rapidly heading for a world where computers are as common as pens or soccer balls -- and computer skills are as common as basic literacy or ball-kicking ability. And in that world, with or without an organized free software movement, I doubt that even 1/10 of 1% of all the people who "know how to program" will be able to get full-time jobs creating computer software."

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[JerryP]

I don't know if I buy the "pens and soccer balls" analogy. I'd guess computers will be more like cars:

The vast majority knows how to operate one.

Many people know how to do basic repair and maintenance, using off-the-shelf parts.

A rather large group of people who are dedicated to the subject (with or without formal training) are able to do more complex tasks like customizing and advanced repairs.

Some people who invested a substantial amount of effort in their own education (either formal or informal) are able to design and assemble one from scratch.

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[varslot]

I'd be more likely to get a full time job creating software than playing football, though;)

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

ESR practically invented the idea of "Open Source" -- if there's flaws, it's in the concept and not the explanation. See also "Free Software".

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

He most certainly did not. Capitalise on it for his own personal gain and ego boost? Yes. Invent it? No way.

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

And in that world, with or without an organized free software movement, I doubt that even 1/10 of 1% of all the people who "know how to program" will be able to get full-time jobs creating computer software.

And that's full 100% hogwash.

If he had said that number of people who "know how to program" is going to decline that might be true -- since the need for people to be able to program (and here I'm referring not just controlling devices that may contain CPUs in general, but to actual software development) is not going to rise, and may well decline. But claiming programmers aren't needed... that's just a (common) fallacy.

Is it just that terminology is getting mixed (using computers == programming), or is there some other clue mismatch? Assuming that all problems will finally be solved; programs write themselves? That's been "10 years from now on" since I first started programming (22 years ago), and will likely to ever remain so. And I very much doubt need for programmers is going to significantly decline in near to medium term.

Re:See also ESR's Prudential Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The term had been used for quite some time beforehand to refer to software where the source code was available to all. You can search the Google Usenet archive for some references, for example this from '93.

a pretty good article

[wa1ter]

that basically anybody can read and understand. I doubt it will ever be read by anybody that " suffers from hysterical propaganda" though thus reducing it's effectiveness a bit.

Still, a good thing to use as a starting point if you ever want to do a speech on Open Source Software development.

Re:a pretty good article

[Anonymous Coward]

The author suffered from enough hysterical propaganda himself. It was almost a perfectly reasoned argument until he said "if we developed under a closed-source model" and pulled the classical project lifecycle model out of his ass, claiming this was somehow tied to the closed-source development model.

Lifecycle models and open/closed source models are 100% unrelated. Both closed- and open-source developers are moving away from the inefficiencies of that model, where appropriate. But where it is appropriate, both sides use it - the specifications document he hates so much is entirely equivalent to the IETF RFCs.

Yet another moron applying double standards while complaining about the double standards of others.

Re:a pretty good article

[apdt]

the specifications document he hates so much is entirely equivalent to the IETF RFCs.

The point is that the RFC's already exist, whereas your proprietary specification doesn't. Writing a specification when the bulk of the work has been already done is inefficient.

Re:a pretty good article

[dalslad]

I have to say this is a pretty good article. Most of the critical comments and flames about the author are speculative.

I don't think this article was written with the open source community as the intended audience. I read the article more than once and I think he's pretty clear about wanting to acquaint developers in closed shops with open source methods.

He seems to be talking to development shops and saying, this methodology frees you up to collaborate.

I wonder if he's doing Open Source a disservice since many of the readers he'll reach will be more experienced with Open Source as a cultural phenomenon.

Still, no one creates marketing collateral for Linux and Open Source - at least to my knowledge. So, this is a good read for people wanting to know more.

The letter from the CIO explains a lot to me. He's got a fairly good handle on some open source concepts as to coding, etc. He's just confused about some concepts and the "ad hoc" stuff sort of pissed me off. Not that the CIO said it, but that so many people believe it.

The stuff about grammar and spelling indicates that this guy has a background in non-US English. I don't know if it's a second language but most of the critical comments about his spelling were wrong.

I like the fact that the writer wrote in a slower mode that most technical people do. It didn't have to look up every word and re-read every sentence to understand what he was saying.

His example of a closed source development environment looks like a COBOL oriented IBM shop. I worked in those for a decade. That's pretty much the way they looked.

Overall, I still consider it a good read and I wouldn't speculate about his motives. As far as his trying to promote himself, he doesn't have to do that. I've seen his writing since 1999. A quick look at Google says this guy writes a lot. 4200+ hits.

Having never met the man, I would rather take him as genuine than to judge him harshly, but then it's easier to judge him harshly than took at the message.

I tend to be skeptical. I don't like Microsoft because they tried to bust me. But, I also see past my anger and I believe open source works for the common good.

I hope I'm right about the guy. I feel I'm right about the article.

Re:a pretty good article

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the open source model collect user requirements? ... on second thought.

Is the open source model based on user requirements?

Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a medium-sized group of developers that is financed by one of the leading academic institutions in the East Coast.

We have 6 developers, employ 18 project managers, and approx 25 sales/accounting folks. We find that our developers are used more efficiently by proofing any submitted code from our open source projects. The role of the project managers is to ensure communication with the other contributors all across the globe, streamline client requirements, and create documentation.

A ratio of 1:3 between developers and project managers is ideal. It took us about three years to determine a formula that worked within our company. We find it extremely important that our developers are free to code and code only. The project managers will do all the tedious work surround programming, such as documentation, attend meetings, debugging, research, and even participating in social activities.

We generate a revenue stream of over $20 million (AUS) last year and were able to clear a handsome profit.

Which is nice.

Re:Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is nice
Heh, you get the Fast Show in oz then?

Re:Our process

[gomiam]

...The project managers will do all the tedious work surround programming, such as documentation, attend meetings, debugging, research, and even participating in social activities.

At last! Now my manager goes to those social events&quot, I can really get to play^H^H^H^Hcode freely :-)

Re: Our process

[popeyethesailor]

Same here, but we have monkeys.

We have 17 monkeys for each programmer, a total of around 142 monkeys and 5 programmers.

We made 1.7 billion Iraqi dinars last year.

Re:Our process

[selderrr]

The project managers will do all the tedious work ... (snip)

You are so lucky te be able to create a structure like that. My guess is that 99% of the development units around the world have the same programmers vs. managers ratio, but have a net result of managers dumping work & shit on the developers' head. A slashdot poll would no doubt result in 99% of us calling managers 'crap' and only 1% (or less) calling them 'useful for levelling the workload'

On the other hand : work without managers is a waste too, since you'll get the clients in your neck, which is even a bigger pain.

Re:Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you get them every time.

Which is nice.

Re:Our process

[1iar_parad0x]

The reason most project managers don't do this is because they have the title "manager". They feel they're supposed to manage. Unfortunately, they try to manage the programmer, not the project. They also don't understand the development process. Frankly, the problems lies with upper management who've never written a line of code. Maybe the project managers should be given the titles of sales consultant or customer handler. Heck, the best project managers I've seen refer to themselves as "fecal matter" handlers. Okay it's been sanitized for the kiddies.

Business majors don't want to think of themselves as equal with the people who develop the product. Heck, they certainly don't want to be seen as doing some programmer's busy work. Why we all know that programming is "blue collar" work anyway. It probably doesn't help that the average programmer really can't relate to the issues of sales either.

Re:Our process

[transient]

YHBT. HAND.

Re: Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

The pet store was selling them for 5 cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead. Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.

I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs.

I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't all go bad.

I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn't improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.

I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.

I like monkeys

Re:Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoooooooooooooosssssssh!!!!!

Re:Our process

[jolshefsky]

You are so lucky te be able to create a structure like that. My guess is that 99% of the development units around the world have the same programmers vs. managers ratio, but have a net result of managers dumping work & shit on the developers' head. A slashdot poll would no doubt result in 99% of us calling managers 'crap' and only 1% (or less) calling them 'useful for levelling the workload'

I propose we have a meeting to discuss creating a task force to explore this issue. Ultimately, I'd like to see a survey distributed to all the developers to determine how useful they think management really is. selderrr, could you head this up?

If a problem exists, we'll have a "Management Fair" to create a more positive work environment.

(It's remarkable how familiar and how alien that stuff sounds now that I've been laid off for a couple weeks. )

Re: Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the funniest damn thing I've ever read in over what
five years of my lurking on /. somebody with points, mod this up.

Re:Our process

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand : work without managers is a waste too, since you'll get the clients in your neck, which is even a bigger pain.

The managers are supposed to handle the clients? Then why I am I stuck dealing directly with the clients when I'm just a developer?

Re:Our process

[Phil1]

The reason most project managers don't do this is because they have the title "manager".

Managers managing things? Whatever next?

They feel they're supposed to manage.

Correct. They are. Get over it.

Unfortunately, they try to manage the programmer, not the project.

OK, I give up - who is this "they" you speak of? Not all project managers try to "manage programmers". Neither do they all have an elevated sense of their own value. Collaboration doesn't start and finish in the programming domain, and a mutually respectful relationship has benefits that go far beyond writing good code. Any *good* project manager knows that.

Programmers wouldn't get very far if they had to manage clients, accounts, gather functional requirements and deal with internal and external politics. Likewise a project manager wouldn't get very far without someone to design and build the system. It has to be a team effort, and if it isn't where you work then maybe you should look for work elsewhere...?

Re: Our process

[Devro]

Here's another vote to mod this baby up! (my first post in years of lurking too).

With all due respect, how many of these are needed

[Space cowboy]

It seems we get a fairly regular drip-feed of "No look, this is what it REALLY is" articles in the computer press, and yet people still don't "get it".

What's wrong with what's happening here ? Is the coverage in the wrong area ("preaching to the converted") ? Is the message simply being disbelieved ("TANSTAAFL") ? Is the lobbying by the closed-source community simply better (all those expense accounts...).

I think all of these articles make good points (all that I can remember reading, anyway), but unless they start to make a difference, they're just hot air :-(

I suppose there's always the argument that you need lots of fresh meat at the sharp end before the grinder (mainstream press) starts to notice any difference. If it's simply that it's a slow process, then by all means chaps, carry on :-)

Simon

Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Non commercial software = less unneccessary and non-core expenditure for businesses = more money for research and development, capital investment, salaries and wages, and marketing = better economy = better for the people.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[tgt]

I thought the only way anything could be better for all people, is that it's better for each and every individual. Rather than arguing whether or not open source is better for economy and such, shall we look at ourselves instead and ask whether open source is good for us ?

I'm a software developer, I do commercial development for living. How is open source ideology better for ME ?

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

It lets you leverage existing work, and get paid to provide something more useful to the client. It lets you provide more value for money (which may not be what you want to do, of course...).

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[aastanna]

That really depends who you work for. I do development for a living as well, but mine is based on specialized business knowledge developing custom applications and processes. Open source software is very useful in this context because it allows stable components to be aquired at no cost (for example a C++ XML parser, or a cross platform wrapper on things like sockets/pipes/threads). This allows more time and money to go into the business logic.

If, on the other hand, you develop shrink wrap software for the mass market then open source can be detrimental. You now have no-cost compitition. However if that's what you're doing I don't see any reason your job shouldn't be outsourced to India or China.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[I8TheWorm]

I have to say that, although I don't agree with the parent of your thread, I also don't agree that corporations will redistribute their savings. Rather, they'll all pay their exec's a larger bonus for saving so much money, and they'll all buy a 3rd/4th house and a 5th Mercedes.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[JamesOfTheDesert]

I 'm a software developer, I do commercial development for living. How is open source ideology better for ME ?

Welcome to the club. :)

OSS has allowed me to play with programs, languages, and IDEs that I could never touch if I had to pay for them.

Releasing OSS has given me experience and feedback that I could not get if somebody had to shell out for my time, while dictating what I was doing.

I'm a better software designer thanks to OSS, and this translates into better jobs (i.e. $$$).

I'm more productive and happier because I can use completely free and open language, such as Ruby. (Thanks, matz!)

Even if you only code in VB 6 on some flavor of Windows, you owe it to yourself as a developer to go poke around other languages and environemnts, and OSS is one big playground.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

...since it'll make sense for companies which use software to have relevant expertise in-house

I think you found the real problem here. Companies are concerned with Total Cost of Ownership. If they use open source software then they are likely to need a software developer in house. This would likely raise the TCO and make it more expensive than closed source software.

When you license closed source software you are paying for a small portion of the actual cost associated with maintaining and supporting that software. And since you licensed the software you don't need a software developer on staff to support it.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, the beauty of slashdot, where people who don't understand economics talk about it anyways.

From an economics perspective, each proprietary software program is a monopoly - only one company is able to fix problems and release new versions. Monopolies are good only for the company holding the monopoly, not for everyone else.

It's not about monopolies at all, unless a company is FORCED to choose a specific product/service. Companies know and take into account all costs of software, including how much support is going to cost. It's not about being locked into a specific company, it's about choosing the product which best fits.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Bas_Wijnen]

Your parent said better for the people, not all people. Better for the people means that using some kind of average, the total comes out higher.

Personally I prefer measures where the people with the lowest score count for more than the people with a higher score. That is a question of ethics, though.

Just because you get it worse (if you do, which I doubt), doesn't mean the people get it worse. If all the users get better software, and all developers would make a bit less money (which is unlikely), then I would definitely consider that an improvement for the people.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[AntiOrganic]

That's a shame then, because I'm sure at least one of their competitors, who will also be reaping the benefits of free software, will reinvest the money into other areas of their company, which will grow, while the other company which hands the savings to its executives will not, and will lose in the long run.

It's funny how capitalism rewards selflessness like that.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[bizcoach]

Companies are concerned with Total Cost of Ownership.

First and foremost, they're concerned about maximizing profit. (Some think short-term, some think long-term, but almost all are concerned about profit.)

In order to achieve this objective, they look at various aspects of their operations. One of the quantities to look at is TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). There are several other major issues, such as e.g. capital expenditure and several types of risk.

Even if it is possibly true that open source might result in higher Total Cost of Ownership (the MS-funded studies which claim this make highly unrealistic assumptions of huge training costs, however even though the studies are bogus the claim might possibly still be true), I'm sure that Open Source / Free Software is still better for businesses. My main argument is that the risks (e.g. related to the possibility of the software not quite meeting the needs) are much smaller than with proprietary software.

If they use open source software then they are likely to need a software developer in house. This would likely raise the TCO

No. They don't need an in-house software developer, as there's always the option of buying whatever support they need from a specialized supprt company, e.g. a company like Red Hat. If having in-house software developers means a higher TCO, businesses will choose this option only if there are sufficiently big business benefits which justify the higher costs. I'm thinking of business benefits along the following lines:

With Open Source / Free Software, there are additional possibilities for adapting software to the specific needs of a company and even a single working group. If such adaption is likely to give a company a significant advantage over the competition, the company will not mind the higher TCO. (TCO comparisons are adequate only when comparing software options which give the same benefit.) It is acceptable for the option "Free Software plus in-house programmers" to cost more if this option gives important business benefits which are not available when you don't have in-house competence to modify the software that you're using.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there are new possibilities to make money doing open source developement. I'm hoping sites like sourcesupport take off so I can work exclusively on open source projects and quit my commercial programming job.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Politburo]

However if that's what you're doing I don't see any reason your job shouldn't be outsourced to India or China.

Why is that? What makes your job so special that it shouldn't also be outsourced? Are you implying the Indians or Chinese couldn't do what you do? But of course they could make software for a mass audience, because that is somehow 'easy'.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[bizcoach]

AC wrote: ah, the beauty of slashdot, where people who don't understand economics talk about it anyways. [...] It's not about monopolies at all, unless a company is FORCED to choose a specific product/service.

Does AC's remark about "people who don't understand economics" refer to himself? Anyway, I'm firmly convinced that I understand what I'm talking about. Anyone who believes my point to be bogus should please post a reasonably precise definition of "monopoly" (any of the definitions used in economics textbooks will be acceptable to me), and I will explain why it applies to the issue under discussion.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[hatrisc]

he was simply making a joke based on the recent mass of outsourcing to... china and india.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. Now if you could just port our current imperialist system over to this capitalism thing, everything would be swell.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[fitten]

Interestingly enough, I think OSS will eventually drive the market on people who are programmers by trade to be an elitist group (even more than now). People go into computers for a variety of reasons, one of them is because they think they can make money at it. Since OSS will drive down the wages that one can get in the field, fewer people will enter because they can't make money at it anymore. This will, in turn, make it so that there will be fewer paid programmers, who all make low wages but will require a lot of knowledge to keep the advantage they have so that they can get more jobs. This leads to paid programmers by trade being a smaller group of people who have higher qualifications to enter. Of course, there will still be the tinkerers who do it for fun but really don't have the time to invest in really writing software and the folks who installed Linux and maybe looked at some C code once or twice who now go around thinking they are l337 h4x0rz.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this definition of a monopoly which is in my eyes a common understanding : A market in which there is only one seller.

What I don't understand is how this is transferable to OSS where anyone can develop and sell derivative work. The only way I see this happening is when the competence needed to develop the product is scarce.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Even if you only code in VB 6 on some flavor of Windows

You arrogant prick! I've seen plenty of superb applications coded in VB6 that you probably couldn't even grasp.

Even VB6 has basic OOP concepts like "interfaces" (abstract classes), "inheritance" and "polymorphism". WOW!

Ok. VB has its shortfalls as a language, but what lang doesn't?

Aw! Never mind - you can just jump on the "VB SUCKS" bandwaggon without ever having really used it, or even tried to understand it.

For fast, good UI development on Win32, VB5/6 still rules IMO - and it will continue for a long time - despite VB.NET.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[fitten]

Funny... I didn't read his comment as any sort of put down.

All he did was use an example of a language only available on one platform (a popular language and platform at that) and say you should look at other stuff sometimes. And I agree with him. Looking at how other languages/systems handle things may give you ideas on how to do them better in whatever language/system of your choice. I happen to agree with him. I'm confident that my knowledge/experience with assembly on various platforms helps me write better C code, for example.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[bizcoach]

I found this definition of a monopoly which is in my eyes a common understanding : A market in which there is only one seller.

I think this definition is ok if "seller" is clarified to mean "someone able to sell" and not "someone who currently sells".

What I don't understand is how this is transferable to OSS where anyone can develop and sell derivative work.

You're completely right, as soon as a program is made Open Source Software, it is not a monopoly anymore. (That exactly was the point that I made, and over which the other AC attacked me.)

The only way I see this happening is when the competence needed to develop the product is scarce.

You have a valid point here... if there are only a few people with the right skills, one could imagine a single company trying to achieve a monopoly, e.g. by hiring all of them.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[JamesOfTheDesert]

You arrogant prick!

I'm not arrogant.

I've seen plenty of superb applications coded in VB6 that you probably couldn't even grasp.

Obviously you must know all about me ..:)

I picked VB6 on Windows because it seemed like a fair example of a non-OSS language + platform. (Even vb.net has an ISO standard beneath in it in the CLR.)

Aw! Never mind - you can just jump on the "VB SUCKS" bandwaggon without ever having really used it, or even tried to understand it.

Tried to understand it? I've co-written a bok about it. But you can believe what you want about me.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[aastanna]

The comment was about open source software, and the point was if you are writing software for a company, and the product is competing with open source software, then the knowledge required to create the system is probably something that can be taught in a CS course (like my examples of a XML parser or wrapper class), or is a art form like GUI design.

Getting a little off topic, Chinese or Indians couldn't do what I do because they would actually need to be here to do it. I program, but programming skills are presupposed and that's not the value I bring to my job. Without getting into details, the value of my work is insight into and understanding of a very complicated system of business logic that has nothing to do with computer science. Also, being able to speak on a daily basis with the users of what I help to create improves the quality of my work.

I'm sure any competant programmer from China or India with good communication skills could come here and learn my job just fine, but at least then they would be paid first-world wages.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[tgt]

Good catch, I added all and this changed the meaning. But are you saying that open source is for some reason good for some abstract people (who are by the way my direct competitors) but I unlikely do get worse ? That's a cool concept. :)

I'm actually fed up with theories that come around every once in a while and are said to change the world (and the one under discussion is even likely to get me worse :). My favourite quote by Mr. Aldous Huxley says: " There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self".

Personally I prefer measures where the people with the lowest score count for more than the people with a higher score. That is a question of ethics, though.

Nope, it's not a matter of ethics. If you are saying that anyone with no pity to the poor is a fascist pig (or, sort of), I don't agree. This is the way capitalist society works. One has to work harder to become richer and consume more, and this in itself is the main driving matter. If everyone is equal (or the gap is closing), everything stops. BTW I live in Russia. :)

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[tgt]

OSS allows you to play with commercial products ? It must be some sort of the pardon. :) Also, pirated software is still in wide use, no ?

Seriously, if it works for you - great, but I still have no time nor desire to look into someone else's open source and would definetely prefer that I never had a reason to do so.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Bas_Wijnen]

Personally I prefer measures where the people with the lowest score count for more than the people with a higher score. That is a question of ethics, though.

Nope, it's not a matter of ethics. If you are saying that anyone with no pity to the poor is a fascist pig (or, sort of), I don't agree. This is the way capitalist society works.

No, I was not speaking of fascism. I was saying that I don't really like a measurement system where the "score" for how good it is in a country consists of simply adding up the income of all people in it. This is indeed how it is done in capitalist society. But as you may have noticed, I don't really like that either ;-)

I would prefer something like summing the squared inverse incomes (that's \sum(1/income^2), and the lowest score is the best. It's just an example of using mostly the lower incomes to determine if a country is "good", there are many other possibilities.

I'm saying that in my view, ethically, you need to have several rich people in your country to compensate for one poor person. Example: Saudi Arabia is quite a wealthy nation if you look at the gross national product. However, almost all of the money goes to the royal family, and lots of people are poor. In my view, the country shouldn't score very high. Therefore, gross national product is in this case (IMO) not a good measure.

One has to work harder to become richer and consume more, and this in itself is the main driving matter.

It is indeed in capitalist society, or at least "they" want it to be. Personally, I'm not after consuming as much as I can in life. I'd rather have happiness. I need some consumption for that, but not the maximum.

But you are making exactly the statement which I hoped to have proven wrong in my previous post ;-) You are saying that by working harder you will get richer. This is how many people believe capitalist society should work, but in fact it doesn't. A few people get rich because they work hard. A few more (I think) get rich because they were somehow smart enough to have other people give them their money.

But most people just stay as they are, poor or rich, without very much work. All the people get a bit richer, which means there's inflation, but the rich usually get more richer than the poor, which means the difference increases. This is not because they work harder, but simply because they have the money to control where the rest of the money goes.

Someone born in an average family in Africa can work much harder than I do here in the Netherlands, but they probably will not make more money. Which shows that capitalism fails if the idea is to give people what they deserve. On the other hand, if the idea is to distract the poor from what's really happening, it's doing quite a good job. Lots of people don't realize all this :-(

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[tgt]

I'm saying that in my view, ethically, you need to have several rich people in your country to compensate for one poor person.

This is to say that their "happiness" will compensate his "despair" by mere numbers ? It depends on how you measure happiness. Push it one step further and now two men may kill the third and get happier owning his posessions. Although such philosophy may be true on large scale of society, this is not highly ethical from moral point of view. But everyone has to make decisions like that for his/her own anyway.

This is how many people believe capitalist society should work, but in fact it doesn't. A few people get rich because they work hard. A few more (I think) get rich because they were somehow smart enough to have other people give them their money.

Fully agree. In this context, returning to the open source topic, I'd say that OSS movement is all about outsmarting others and collecting money, not about working harder or better.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[Bas_Wijnen]

This is to say that their "happiness" will compensate his "despair" by mere numbers ?

Of course if you're measuring something, you try to put everything into some number, and compare that, yes.

Push it one step further and now two men may kill the third and get happier owning his posessions.

Ah, the classical argument against this compensation :-) This is exactly why I'm saying that this person being killed should be counted for more than the ones being made happy (the dead person is obviously the "poorest" in this situation). If you do that, then such a killing would result in a lower score for the three of them together.

However, if half the country would be very happy when the killing takes place, then some people argue that it should be done, and it's called a death penalty (assuming that half the country doesn't like people being killed for nothing).

I'd say that OSS movement is all about outsmarting others and collecting money

Hmm, I was thinking of RIAA tactics of suing loads of people and settling with them. I don't really want to be compared with that when I write software ;-)

But anyway, you may have a point for some people at least. Personally, I write free software because I want to live in a good world, and with free software I hope to help build it. I don't get money for most of my software, and I don't mind. That's not what it's about for me. Well, as long as I have some income, that is.

Re:Open Source is good for the economy

[tgt]

If you do that, then such a killing would result in a lower score for the three of them together.

I basically agree, but you are stepping on very thin ice here. In order for this to work you must have a sheet with prices for everything, including human life, expressed in common units, ex. dollars. I know that a system for such an evaluation exists and it's the code of laws, but then it's not ethical at all. Theoretically they should be trying to optimize the sum of the game for the whole society, but in practice...

I don't really want to be compared with that when I write software

:) I wasn't talking about suing actually. I was talking about evangelists, gurus and consultants that make big $$ talking about how cool OSS is on the the one hand, and regular programmers on the other (I'm a regular programmer, although I'd sure want to think about myself as of a good one). Do former benefit from OSS ? Oh yes, they do ! Do latter benefit ? Not sure, or at least I know ONE that doesn't :)

Beer

[gxv]

Still a lot of companies thinks: "If it's free it cannot be woth much".
This is basically free as a beer/free as a speech paradox: They have to understand that it's not about price but it's about values.
But even if they do - it hes to be 10 times better than MS Crap to beat their MS Marketing.

Re:Beer

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"But even if they do - it hes to be 10 times better than MS Crap to beat their MS Marketing.
"

But thats becoming increasingly hard. Stuff like Windows 2003 really DoesNotSuck(tm), so beating it becomes a matter of price, not just features like it used to be. The only thing we'll always have is the freedom -- The ability to have total control over your enviroment.

Re:Beer

[tds67]

They have to understand that it's not about price but it's about values.

I'm sure Kenneth Lay, Martha Stewart and Hilary Rosen would understand.

Re:Beer

[1iar_parad0x]

Well, there's also a steep learning curve and it's hard to find competent IT people to manage *nix solutions. I've been developing and administrating with OSS 3 solid years (plus 2 years of mixed Windows and OSS). Plus, add the fact that the HR people don't know how to fill positions properly. Oh, you've only had 10 years with Unix; sorry we're looking for someone with Red Hat experience.

However, try to find a competent Unix Sys Admin. You know, somebody who understands firewalls enough to code a rule set by hand or can automate their work with cron and Perl. Heck, I'm technically a programmer, yet I still do a better job at that than most MCSEs. Most good Unix Sys Admins look like wizards to the uninitiated.

Re:Beer

[Anonymous Coward]

>>it's hard to find competent IT people to manage *nix solutions.

No it isn't!

In the US and EU, in the last 18 months, nix admins - or, in fact, any other kind of sysadmins (except maybe mainframe MVS or VM guys) are a dime a dozen!

>>I've been developing and administrating with OSS 3 solid years (plus 2 years of mixed Windows and OSS).

Well, whoopy doooo! A whole 5 years (being generous) experience of small systems admin and you think you've got the industry all figured - how sweet!!

>>Plus, add the fact that the HR people don't know how to fill positions properly.

Suggest you go to your head of HR and tell him/her that.

>>Oh, you've only had 10 years with Unix; sorry we're looking for someone with Red Hat experience.

That's not usually HR's fault - it's your dumb IT manager being too lazy to specify the job description properly.

>>However, try to find a competent Unix Sys Admin. You know, somebody who understands firewalls enough to code a rule set by hand or can automate their work with cron and Perl.

Aw fuck! That's baby stuff - do you really think that hacking a few shell scripts, chron jobs and some perl - or coding a few firewall rules in vi is some kinda magic? Geeezuuus!

>>Heck, I'm technically a programmer

Says who?

>>yet I still do a better job at that than most MCSEs.

Well, we'll have to take your word for that Superhero(tm).

>>Most good Unix Sys Admins look like wizards to the uninitiated.

No, most nix sysadmins look like creepy, lonely loosers, who don't wash too often and have no friends.

Mod me a troll, but that's life folks!

Re:Beer

[1iar_parad0x]

I know I'm wasting my time replying to this...

You are right about being able to find competent system administrators. Since you know where to look for them and what to ask, you probably could find a couple hundred people. However, the meat market and HR people wouldn't know where to look and they get far too many resumes full of bovine excrement to be able to wade through them all. Secondly, you find lots of idiots that still make lots of money in IT. That's because IT is a service. IT isn't hard. Relativity and decidability are hard. Most of the "real world" stuff isn't. Heck, most of the bright people I know are too smart for their own good. I've seen too many PhD washouts (math/physics/chemistry, etc) who end up in IT not because they were too stupid, but because they thought they could hide in the hole of academia and not have to deal with people. Unfortunately, they find out in some ways academia is worse than business. Actually, it's not always the brightest who end up being successful in academics either.

(Note: most of these people have MS degrees and in my opinion aren't quite the same as "dropouts")

They don't know how to deal with people and bureaucracies. People skills have their place. Really.

So if you're a good sys admin who's a little fed up with the industry and you vent some steam, I do understand. However, if you're just a troll....

Re:Beer

[hchaos]

Still a lot of companies thinks: "If it's free it cannot be woth much".
This is basically free as a beer/free as a speech paradox: They have to understand that it's not about price but it's about values.

It's about values for them, too. Specifically, the value of their stock. Unless, of course, you can convince the shareholders that open source values are more important than profit.

A lot of people never think about it, but corporate management is ethically and morally required to act in the interest of the shareholders, so doing something just because a large movement of developers who don't own much stock believe strongly that it is morally right is, for them, morally wrong.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't RTFA, did we?

Non commercial software == more profits for businesses == better economy == better for the people

Here's why:

Let's say you start your own company, and obviously, you need to profile your business on the web. You can either pay $$$ for commercial software on the server, or you can install free, open-source programs. This way you save money.
This way you get better economy, and this way it's better for the people.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[comet69]

i dont know where everyone gets the idea that you need profits to have a good economy... profits don't mean shit besides bigger salaries for greedy sons of bitches. people will never learn for this fuckin sin is going to ruin mankind.. imagine the world as an entire opensource community... oh what a wonderful place it would be.. think about it for real.. money is bullshit. and sorry for the lame vagueness and reasoning, but its true..

we don't need it.. its just nature's way.. we grow up, and strive to be better than your fellow man.. go to college for the primary reason of graduating, getting a good job that pays you lots of money.. and for what??

its surely nothing passionate... how many people do you know who are passionate about their job? not many thats for sure.. they are passionate about that check they get at the end of the week.. life shouldnt be worrying about money all the time.. which 95% of the world does..

Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

We felt we got a free puppy too. The management of our shop actually concluded that Redhat Linux (EE) was more expensive to install and maintain in the short term than Windows 2000/XP. We haven't used it long enough to study any long term effects.

The reasons?

1) Installing software correctly (apache, mysql, sybase) is a time thief. Installation is sooooo much more straightforward in Windows.

2) Propagating changes in configuration (and new versions) is a hell in Linux, especially Sybase and Oracle products.

3) Less documentation (usually) from commercial vendors.

4) Worse support (usually) from commercial vendors.

We're hoping to see long term effects in stability. The problem is that NONE our eight Windows 2000 servers has ever crashed...

That said, Linux is so much cooler.

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

how about your helpdesk?

how do they feel about cleaning viruses off 5000 desktops that your exchange server help propagate?

so it takes 5 days to setup a linux server, and only one hour to setup a microsoft server.

so what.

if it prevents hundreds upon hundreds of hours of stupid work, isn't worth it?

Re:Not free

[fuzzybunny]

Good points, well stated, mod parent up pls.

Let me give a counterpoint to this. I'm putting together an incident response team for a major bank here--we deal with vulnerabilities, security-related system outages, and investigations. I also have a fairly wide background in architecture design and implementation, and systems engineering and administration. So, having gotten that out of the way, a few statements. Flame away, but these are generalizations, based on opinion and experience:

Windows boxes are usually a lot more straightforward up front. This is a fact. No amount of whingeing about webmin, apt-get/ports and whatnot will change this (although FreeBSD ports just rock.) To install, you put a CD into a drive and click some buttons.

The real problems are twofold. First, as complexity rises (we're talking 30,000+ workstations here plus god-knows-how-many Windows servers) your ability to keep an overview of things like patch deployment, user rights, software versions, etc. becomes a nightmarish time-sucker. MS have made some steps in the right direction with things like SUS; nonetheless, I've always found software update implementations as well as user rights tracking, among many things, to be horrendously kludgey in pure Windows environments. I realize that a lot of this is usually due to crappy procedures; nonetheless, the common answer to something like a fucked-up desktop PC is to have it collected and re-installed. Great.

The second is, and I'm sorry to say this, security. It is absolutely true that I cannot just "jump in" and fix code in, say, a Linux kernel, when a hole is discovered. Just based on experience, though, I have yet to see a single worm hit a Solaris (yes yes I know, open source) or Linux environment with anything approaching the ferocity of what we've seen in the Windows world.

The last point I keep making is one that everyone knows, but management do an ostrich (stick yer head in the sand, pretend nothing's happening) anyway; that is, in a complicated IT environment (managers, listen up) you simply do not get around hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money. It is illusory to assume that simply because your software installs at the push of a button, your IT is stable and reliable.

Re:Not free

[clifyt]

I agree with this sentiment.

At my institution, I have had to maintain a Windows environment as well. I have 5 Windows machines and other than hardware crashes (HD failing, a fan burning out and the thing dying as it overheats because my people who claimed to have done maintenance haven't taken the time to blow the sucker out...that sort of thing).

I know how to get a decent Windows install and I know how to do it right. I can also hire students to work for me without having to pay a grad student $15 an hour who barely understands the Unix environment (sadly, 15 years ago when I was just entering the university environment, most of the geek kids DID know unix and were comfortable with it...if only so they could compile their own MUDS).

Past that, we are slowly migrating towards open solutions. One of my webservers uses Apache instead of IIS, they ALL use PHP / Perl. The GNU Tools are installed to that I can to things fast and efficient for myself. MySQL has taken the place on our database server from our SQL Server.

Its as much as I can do in the current environment I am in...I'd LOVE to be able to go with a pure Linux / BSD / OS X whatever unix based solution instead of Windows, but sometimes you do whats the best for your situation and realize the free puppy is a more of a problem than its worth sometimes. At home and my side business, I'll take the stray dog in...he guards my home and the bit of food and a warm blanket I give him is more than a fair trade.

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to disagree with you. An experienced Linux admin is able to install the common stuff (such as apache, mysql, etc) easily, and it is pretty straight forward. Furthermore, news groups provide tons more help for any given opensource application. To state an example, I know first hand that installing and getting QMail to work properly is much more intuitive than trying to install and configure Exchange with all its hundreds of configureation options hidden everywhere.

If you are finding that supporting a linux box takes more work than a windows box, then it may be because your admin is not too familiar with Linux. Here once a linux box is up and running, we rarely ever touch them again outside of checking logs to make sure everything is running smoothly. I don't want to even begin to calculate how much its cost in manhours to support our numerous windows boxes for just the patching of secuirty issues alone.

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

>>how do they feel about cleaning viruses off 5000 desktops that your exchange server help propagate?

Clearly you believe anything you read/hear and don't have enough life experience to filter out the noise.

Re:Not free

[mosschops]

(sadly, 15 years ago when I was just entering the university environment, most of the geek kids DID know unix and were comfortable with it...if only so they could compile their own MUDS)

Heh, I'm one of them - I did eventually move from MUDs to doing something a bit more constructive...

At home and my side business, I'll take the stray dog in...he guards my home and the bit of food and a warm blanket I give him is more than a fair trade.

Exactly how I see it too, with Linux being much more of a part of my home setup. I'll continue to watch for other areas to suggest/introduce Linux, but I'm not confident enough to push just yet.

Nice unbiased post btw - a refreshing change for /. :-)

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

in a complicated IT environment (managers, listen up) you simply do not get around hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money

I think that's naive.

Fact is, most companies these days are run by accountants to whom the bottom line is all that matters.

You get around "hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money" by a thing called "Outsourcing". Ok, the results of outsourcing can vary from 'barly acceptable' to 'utter catastrophe' - but hell - look at the bottom line !!

Re:Not free

[bruns]

That is, until you get infected with a virus/trojan/the latest script kiddie exploit.

If you want a pretty GUI to make changes to the system, get webmin.

Propigating changes in Linux is simple. You edit the config file, send the process HUP or restart it using the initscripts.

Re:Not free

[mosschops]

I would love it if there was some way to save all the configuration from one machine into a file, and then be able to load that file on another machine (at least for the same distro) and have it configure everything the same way at once. And i'm not talking about doing this manually, I want a program to find all the config files, take the options, put it into an xml doc or something, and then be able to reload it.

For the most part you just need to save and restore the /etc branch to give the same system settings. Doing this between distributions or major version changes probably isn't a good idea though. It'd also rely on the same package set being installed, and nothing having changed that breaks backwards compatability (no problem usually). I'm not aware of anything that attempts to do this automatically, but it's only a couple of commands at a basic level.

If I'm upgrading I tend to just back-up /etc and manually merge the config changes into a new distribution. Only takes me about 15 mins, and means I know everything that was changed.

Transferring a Windows configuration between machines usually takes a couple of days. Reinstalling all the apps, and trying to restore settings exported from my old registry is much more hassle. I still have exported .reg files from my last installation, in case there's anything I still need! :-)

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

For our 30 Windows environment, upgrading takes about 1 hour with the proper tools, i.e. networked ghost, scripts, etc.

For our 10 Linux environment, it takes much longer because a lot of low level stuff ALWAYS happends (libc clashes, rpm dependency problems, etc)

This area should be the top 1 priority, not optimizing the kernel.

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. What if this happens to you windows 2000 servers?

Re:Not free

[scrytch]

Reasonable and balanced discussion on slashdot? Stop the presses! Ok ok ... one point I would like to add to this "install is easy/hard under windows" is that software in *nix environments often doesn't require any kind of "workstation install" at all. Licensed software is almost always through a license server, preferences and settings are created in $HOME the first time the app is run, and so forth.

That said, there's nothing quite like the manageability of a well run windows domain, with update status available in a single window, and one-click "bring up to date with the latest policy" managebility. Just that when things go wrong, one typically needs to go reinstalling the whole damn OS, and because of the large amount of local state kept on these windows boxen, productivity is invariably lost. Contrast to the situation I had in an all-unix environment (Solaris) where we would routinely reinstall the entire OS on employees' machines overnight (and let me tell you, jumpstart is so much nicer than the windows equivalent) and they wouldn't even know it had happened.

Re:Not free

[mosschops]

For our 30 Windows environment, upgrading takes about 1 hour with the proper tools, i.e. networked ghost, scripts, etc.

For our 10 Linux environment, it takes much longer because a lot of low level stuff ALWAYS happends (libc clashes, rpm dependency problems, etc)

You're comparing two completely different processes. On the Windows side you're rolling out pre-prepared images using commercial software and hand-written scripts. On the Linux side it sounds like you're doing some manual updates to an existing setup, and using mis-matched packages too.

Installing a fresh Linux distribution and up2date/apt-get patching it would take under an hour. You then have a partition you can image to other machines (even using dd if ya like!). Making the same scripting effort as you did with Windows could easily roll this out over a network too. It depends entirely what you need for your situation.

It wasn't exactly a fair setup comparison anyway! Perhaps you're more skilled on the Windows side, and still adapting to the different methods for Linux upgrades/roll-outs?

Re:Not free

[Felinoid]

You get around "hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money" by a thing called "Outsourcing". Ok, the results of outsourcing can vary from 'barly acceptable' to 'utter catastrophe' - but hell - look at the bottom line !!

Once someone cracks into your costummer database, you get sued or suffer major down time you'll realise how "cheap" getting around "hiring a bunch of really smart people" really is.

But by then your having to lay off the accounting department becouse your costummer base has dried up.

Re:Not free

[tbannist]

It's not always as easy as it could be. I wanted to upgrade the version of PHP on one of our servers. When I went to compile it, I found out it was incompatible with the version of Apache 2 that we were running. So I started upgrading Apache as well, but the new version of apache wouldn't compile and didn't give any clear indication of why not. After a lot of tinkering and trying to figure out why it couldn't find the Kerberos files, it turns out the version of mod_ssl was incompatible with the version of openssl that was installed, so I had to upgrade openssl as well.

So what should have been a simple upgrade cascaded into multiple upgrades. I've had the same experience when trying to replace an rpm program with a customized version, except in that case I needed to install about 10 other programs to compile the one I wanted.

These are not uncommon experiences when upgrading.

Re:Not free

[madcow_ucsb]

I don't see how that's really a problem.

Yes, companies are driven by the bottom line. They exist to make money (although I fail to see why that's a bad thing...)

Anyway, ok, suppose they outsource. They'll pay the new IT guys less than before and their IT quality might get better (hey, it could happen), stay the same, or get worse. Then it's just a question of how the IT quality affects efficiency and sales.

If there's a negative effect on profits from outsourcing, then the suits will do something about it, since it's hurting their (and the stockholders') bottom line.

If there's *not* a negative effect on profits, then the new IT situation has just shown itself to be at least as good as before, no matter how it has been implemented.

That's something many people here don't seem to get: you could pay some guy to spout smoke signals to communicate with other sites. Productivity will probably go down, but the only IT cost is for a minimum wage worker, some wood, and a blanket. Weigh that against a higher productivity (but expensive) setup with satellites and frame relays and MIT PhDs and whatnot. Which is better? It depends completely on the situation.

It's all tradeoffs - the cost of implmenting a good IT infrastructure versus the losses of not having one. It's the PHBs' jobs to find the sweet spot and where that spot is today may or may not be what it is tomorrow.

Re:Not free

[PugMajere]

This is the perfect explanation of why compiling for yourself is generally a mistake.

Use a packaged version of things whenever possible. The package maintainers should have diagnosed and documented the critical incompatibilities (such as those listed above) and you don't have to deal with them.

Re:Not free

[aminorex]

I really don't get it. Installation is
vastly more straightforward in Linux.
How do you update an existing app on
500 boxes? When you're done, how many
of those boxes did you have to re-image?

I had a little cron script do it automagically. I don't even want to think
about doing it for an all windows network.

I frankly don't see the point in commercial
vendors anymore, but then everything I do
is now covered by openware. Obviously if
that were not the case, my world could be
qualitatively different.

Re:Not free

[MoneyT]

Only if you're cleaning those 5000 desktops day in and day out. Here's an example of where it isn't more adventageous. At a school I work at, they have a lab of roughly 1000 computers. Each computer in the lab is completely locked down in the sense that users can not save files localy (except temp files for programs) so the machines are as clean as they can possibly be. Another machine is kept by the administrators and is tweaked and updated every day to try to get that much better performance or space or whatever out of it (limited tech budget means we have to make these things last). That master computer is used to create an image for the other thousand computers. On the off chance we are hit with a virus, all the computers are wiped and reimmaged with the latest immage. This allows for all the computers to be updated at once, and allows for not only a clean system in terms of viruses, but a clean system overall because all the temp and cache files that were taking up space are gone. All the little quirks that OSs build up over time are gone and we have fresh systems that we know work. The whole process takes about 3 hours and is completely automated. Before we go home for the night, we hit update and in the morning everything is fine. This method is not particularly an interruption because every time we want to update software across the board, we only hav eto do one update and then clean immage the machines again.

So yes, for us, the 4 days and 23 hours we saved is well worth it.

Re:Not free

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. This is a perfect example of an often glossed over problem in open source software. Versioning.

It's all well and good to be able to see and modify code. It's all well and good to be able to have different options for the same piece of software. It's all well and good to have a patching regime for each piece of software you've got. BUT... in the absence of strong versioning scheme, dependency tracking is hell. Package managers are just a stop gap measure for a flaw in the development process unfortunately. A "simple" update can cause a cascade of updates. Worse yet when an updated package introduces a breaking change for other packages.

Don't get me wrong, this is not an open source specific problem but it is exacerbated by variation of open source software available. My point is that advocates and evangelists, like the one in this article, always ignore issues with versioning when waxing lyrical about open source. IMHO, versioning issues pretty much destroy the "anyone can modify source code" benefit that is so often expounded. Software engineers have known for years that breaking encapsulation is a "bad think" but all of a sudden it's being rewritten as a good thing.

Re:Not free

[sjames]

Fact is, most companies these days are run by accountants to whom the bottom line is all that matters.

The problem is, accountants are not actually qualified to make that call. Accountants excell in detail work. They excel in knowing where every penny went, and where every penny will come from. That is their job and most do it well.

The bottom line is a different sort of complexity. Sometimes spending more up front will result in spending less over 1, 3, or 5 years. Sometimes the up-front money simply isn't there. Sometimes given two projects, one of them stands to save a lot more if IT gets the additional up-front money and the other chooses pay-me-later.

Sometimes costs or savings are even more or less emergant properties of the decision, and thus well beyond typical financial calculations. Sometimes future costs cannot be reliably estimated at all. Who can say what the license will cost next year? The vendor may or may not know, but they won't likely tell you or legally commit to that price even if they will tell you what they expect to do.

A good example of that is the cost of vendor lock-in. That cost will depend on how bent on monopoly the vendor is, and how successful the vendor is in getting enough people locked in to move from the market expansion phase to the raking in the big bucks phase. That, in turn, depends on what everyone else does. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a financial calculation to provide that answer except in retrospect.

All of that said, many companies nevertheless DO let the accountants run the show. They only stay in business because of sheer financial bulk (inertia) and maintaining a high barrier to entry so that their only competition is equally incompetant. Many of those companies would go down in flames if the market was truly free and had low barriers to entry (in other words, the ideal capitalist situation).

Take outsourcing. Sure, the line item for outsourced IT is smaller than the line item for support staff would have been.

Unfortunatly there's not a line item for such things as employees twiddling their thumbs while IT fails to make their workstation functional, employees getting pissed off and exhausted after wasting half a day on a simple problem and then failing to be productive for the other half of the day (or perhaps being actively anti-productive by making expensive mistakes). The costs for license tracking (compliance) probably do have a line item, but under general administration or legal rather than IT.

The big unknown is the cost of reduced accountability. That is the cost of having an outsourced IT department that is more concerned about their profitability than they are about yours. That is, as long as you don't actually go out of business, and maintaining their contract at least appears to be $1 cheaper than ripping everything out by the roots and starting over, they're happy. If they're a large operation, it's worse. They only care if MOST customers don't fold under the weight of incompetant IT or leave because of the enormous cost of IT failures. If you're not one of their top ten customers, good luck! Those factors are business decisions, not accounting decisions. Accountants are not trained to deal with that.

Open Source is good for the economy

[bizcoach]

Non commercial software = less profits for businesses = worse economy = worse for the people.

That is nonsense.

First of all, open source software doesn't have to be non-commercial. For details, see the Free Software Business Strategy Guide.

However it is true that many open source projects are non-commercial in nature. The resulting software is still quite often suitable for business use.

From an economics perspective, each proprietary software program is a monopoly - only one company is able to fix problems and release new versions. Monopolies are good only for the company holding the monopoly, not for everyone else.

Therefore, if proprietary software goes out of fashion, this will be bad for precisely those businesses whose main stream of revenue is from software licensing. This will however be good news for all other companies.

Whether this will mean less or more jobs for programmers is hard to say in advance. There will be fewer jobs at specialized software companies and there will be more jobs at companies which use software, since it'll make sense for companies which use software to have relevant expertise in-house.

Here it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...Open Source Software bears a mark of professionalism."

Because professionalism is.... And that's what I expect.

For those of you who don't understand the above, visit The Office.

here's one misconception

[jeffy124]

that we're all hobbyists and only do OSS in our spare time (the description often made in news articles).

Not necessarily the case, especially with the more major OSS products. Companies of various sizes have staff writing and contributing OSS code as their full-time job, and many university students also contribute as part of research projects. Even CmdrTaco could fall under the category of a small-company contributer for his work on Slashcode.

The hobbyist argument is often made in FUD from MS to try and say that "we have professionals working for us, who does OSS have?" We should answer with somehting like "Redhat, IBM, Sun, Novell, ..." and so on.....

Re:here's one misconception

[gnu-generation-one]

"that we're all hobbyists and only do OSS in our spare time (the description often made in news articles)."

You must be one of those foreign people working in the middle of the night... Commies I tell ya! ;-)

Re:here's one misconception

[10am-bedtime]

apparently you know what joe blow knows. nice to meet you, joe!

Re:here's one misconception

[Anonymous Coward]

>>While this sounds nice to us, to joe blow, it sounds like a bunch of nerds making the things from their parents' basements.

And the reality differs from Joe's perception in what way, exactly?

>>Perhaps saying it is a collaboration of software companies and prefessional developers would sound better

"prefessional" developers would sound better? Well I doubt it!

Anyhoo, having worked for one of these big bad software companies for a long time, I can tell you (believe or not) that they are simply exploiting unworldly nerds for their code goodness - just like army ants stroke and milk meek little aphids.

>>but I guess programmers arn't the best at marketing. But then again, what the hell do I know?

Erm... "what the hell do you know"?

Well, you did ask :)

Re:here's one misconception

[Wire Tap]

Even CmdrTaco could fall under the category of a small-company contributer for his work on Slashcode.

So I guess that means Cowboy Neal would fall under the category of a huge mega-corporation?

*runs*

Re:here's one misconception

[Anonymous Coward]

The hobbyist argument is often made in FUD from MS to try and say that "we have professionals working for us, who does OSS have?" We should answer with somehting like "Redhat, IBM, Sun, Novell, ..."

Who is the "We" you are referring to? Some idealistic "community"? Programming is hard work and Support Engineering is even harder. Nobody in the West will do this for free and if they try, they're going to be totally crushed by The Establishment which, like musicians and artists, generally considers them dead weight. For the lucky few who can find jobs working for ".orgs" (actual or effectively), you live or die at the whim of your current stream of "donations" (explicit or implicit), so you might not want to spend too much time trying to destroy the commercial programming business you may soon need to find a new job in.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[smittyoneeach]

Parent and previous replies piont to the fact that the whole dialogue is purely religious.
Pick your belief system, preach it fanatically, and use fatwahs/subpoenas on anyone that disagrees.
Under no circumstances should you consider this question dispassionately.
Furthermore, it is completely impossible to blend open/proprietary software schemes in a business model. Can't be done. Give it up.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[I Be Hatin']

think about it for real.. money is bullshit

Tell that to your landlord next time you try to pay your rent in bullshit.

we don't need it.. its just nature's way.. we grow up, and strive to be better than your fellow man.. go to college for the primary reason of graduating, getting a good job that pays you lots of money.. and for what??

To pay bills with? WTF... are you still living in mommy and daddy's basement or something? Real people have real bills (rent/mortgage, food, etc.) that have to be paid with real money. That's why we work: to have the money to have things in life. When you grow up, you'll understand that.

How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[A coward on a mouse]

Copied my post on the same topic at OSNews...

I'm reasonably certain that this comment will be poorly received here (at Slashdot as well as OSNews), but I just can't keep it to myself, so oh well.

Truly, the author does a good job of dispelling one piece of FUD kicking around regarding open source software, specifically the belief that most open source software is written by wild-eyed loners without any concept of planning or design.

Other than that, the article is, umm, not so good. Nearly everything he says about closed source processes describes "big company" closed source processes. I work for a small closed source shop and his description of the open source development process is very *very* close to our process. It sounds as if his only closed source experience was with IBM, which is quite possibly the most extreme example of a process-bound company one could imagine.

Since analogies and similes are so popular on this thread, I would suggest that he what he is saying is like saying that vehicles made in Japan are more responsive than those made in America, using as examples a Japanese sports car and an American diesel locomotive.

Anybody who has worked in or with a smaller, more nimble closed source shop will see his description of the "closed source process" as bullshit. Many of these people will conclude that the author is a crank and proceed to ignore the good point he does make about the professionalism of many open source projects and companies.

The same applies to the stuff about standards. Closed source shops can and do adhere to open standards; I know we make every effort to do so in my shop. Many many open standards were originally developed by closed source shops cooperating to facilitate communication between closed source products and to offer the market choices in how to combine them. I know this is hard for some open source zealots to believe, but many closed source shops know that offering products based on open standards can help improve adoption of new technologies; when the tide comes in, all boats rise, ours and the competition's both.

Don't get me wrong, I think open source software is a Good Thing; I use it daily (Mozilla, OpenBSD, Knoppix, blah blah blah) and push it whenever I get the chance. I just don't think this article is about what the author says it's about and I don't think it will appear convincing to anybody that isn't already convinced.

PS - It also doesn't help that in an article about professionalism in the open source world he flubs "stock in trade" and "give way" in the opening sections.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[FatAlb3rt]

I work in a lab of 23 people for a government contractor. The author's description of a closed source envirnoment is VERY much like ours.

The name of the game here is process. Don't get me wrong, process is good, but when it gets in the way of logical decision making, process is bad. And management's knee-jerk reaction any time there's a problem ... add another step to the process. [rant mode elevating] Only half our lab are actually developers - 1 mgr, 4 sys admin types, 3 leads, and 2 process nazis. I've seen my coding time over the last 3 years go from around 50% to about 25% due to process "improvements". The rest of my time is spent in meetings, reviews, and documentation. You want that bug fixed? Well, you're looking at a month turnaround minimum. Yeah, it was a one-liner or two-liner, but we've got to cost the anomaly report, potential revisions and reviews for the requirements doc, the design doc, hand code over to CM, wait a week for them to build it and admin to configure, retest (sorry, that's full testing, we don't trust regression), test report, and acceptance meeting - each meeting has a three-day lead in which the documents must be released for review prior to the meeting. Any action items must be completed prior to moving to the next step in the process. Oh yeah, don't forget to do the paperwork associated with the original anomaly report...gotta get concurrence from the originator that your fix is legitimate. Oh, they're on vacation? Ok, hunt someone else down, explain the problem, show how to duplicate it, and if you're lucky they'll give you a thumbs up. Otherwise, give them time to look at it... Gotta get that CMM level 3, ya know.

When's 5:00?

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[PaschalNee]

I agree with your comment. What the author calls the 'closed development model' is actually the waterfall model. He does not seem to understand that many close source companies (big and small - don't knock us big companies) use open standards and agile/eXtreme (non waterfall) development models.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[D-Cypell]

I hope you have filled in your 'Slashdot reading request form'...

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I can see that kind of thing could get overbearing especially if you don't have fun coworkers. But how else are you going to get software where all the features are actually fully tested and documented, both in the user and developer documentation? That's professionalism and IMHO there's all too little good documentation or proper testing in the open source world. Even the most well documented OSS projects suffer from badly documented new features -- by the time a feature is well documented it's no longer on the cutting edge.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[FatAlb3rt]

I don't disagree that documentation, testing, and a development process are good. What I am against is a new set of templates for our documentation every 18 months (usually just reformatting, but why touch the entire document just to bring it up to the latest and greatest standard?), or that we should implement a 50-line prologue at the top of each file that describes everything under the sun but then attempt to conform to guidelines that limit the size of each function to 100 lines of code?! Why can I not assume at least a fundamental understanding of our software when writing code? How much value added are all these extra steps? Document the high level functionality of the software, inside the code do the same so you don't /have/ to refer to external docs. Comment general behavior inline, and go into detailed explanation inline with any odd algorthims.

There's a happy medium to be found in the documentation world. I just think our group has drifted too far in the process direction. Bring back some accountability and responsibility to the developers.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[geoffspear]

Your problem has nothing to do with open source vs. closed source. Management style has very little to do with the license that software is made available under.

I'd bet that working for SCO when they were distributing GPL'ed software was just as bad as it was after they decided that they owned every piece of software ever written and had no reason to have anything to do with open source.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[Lodragandraoidh]

If you are a 'small' company, then you are probably not doing any significant business to begin with. Additionally, if your development process is so close to the open source model, then why mince words? If something looks, feels, smells and tastes like another - then they must be the same thing.

Finally, most of the software we use, both generic and for special projects comes from the 'big boys' because the perception of management is that big = good. From firsthand experience, I have seen that this is not the case - in most cases.

The challenge for agile development wizards is to hammer that message home to the people who make the decisions - and the teams that implement them.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[CrayzyJ]

I couldn't agree with you more. His statement:

"In a closed development shop, once we completed the user interviews, a software engineer would begin writing specifications. Once he or she completed writing the document, it would sit on someone's desk for approval for weeks and maybe months. The document would then make its way to a project manager who would fit it into his schedule and translate those specifications into tasks."

is a made-up scenerio that MAY exist in some software houses but certainly not all. Dude swings the pendulum too far in the other direction and is now spreading misconceptions about closed source development.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[aminorex]

> documentation, testing, and a development process are good.

No they are not. Meeting enterprise goals
is good. At best, documentation, testing,
and development process are useful.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[Cyno]

use open standards and agile/eXtreme (non waterfall) development models.

Not to mention all those cool sounding words. Was that from the tenth edition of the newspeak dictionary?

I just love the competition OSS gives to all those closed-source developement models, specially the big companies. It makes them rewrite their dictionary almost every year now. :)

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I also agree with the original poster in this thread: I work for a big company, and we are very effective using a closed, proprietary model of development.

I disagree with PaschalNee, however: you *can* be effective and responsive in a waterfall model of development.

I think the key to getting software that works out the door in a reasonable timeframe and cost is purely a matter of people who care about what they do, and an organization that enables good communications between the various roles in the staff.

It has nothing to do with open vs. closed, or waterfall vs. iterative.

Re:How to Misunderstand Closed Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, I really hate to unit test my code, to get qa to test it also, and especially ensure that there is decent end user documentation on it.

That's why I do open source, no readable docs needed, no unit testing, just compile/link/check in to cvs.

That's the way to go.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

open source is great for the little guy

open source = more small startups = more small businesses (which we all know really drives the economy)

closed source = large corporate greed = mega monopolies = we all work for some huge ass company = we all become just a number. (whether we are ruled by large government or ruled by large corporations, the result is the same, we shop at walmart, eat at taco bells, and have lost are freedom)

Re:I RTFAed..

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be a common misconception that you have to compile open source software manually, and that you have to be a skilled 1337 programmer to do it.

Ever heard of rpm? apt-get? swup?

RedHat offers a complete server, just burn the ISOs and install. If you think that's too difficult, then fine. It's your money.

profits and money

[bizcoach]

i dont know where everyone gets the idea that you need profits to have a good economy

Whether we like this or not, it's a fact. Without hope of profits there is no reason to invest.

money is bullshit

I agree with those who call the love of money the "root of all evil". However, for as long as not everyone obeys the command to "obey your neighbor as yourself", the use of money in some form is necessary.

Re:profits and money

[Anonymous Coward]

>> "obey your neighbor as yourself"

Wow! That's a new one!

When I went to Sunday School it went...

"Love thy neighbor as thyself"

I'd never obey my neighbor - he's a jerk. Borrowed my hammer drill and broke the sonofabitch.

Who the fuck modded parent "Insightful" ???

Re:profits and money

[bizcoach]

I'd never obey my neighbor - he's a jerk

You're totally right... "obey your neighbor" is not a good principle to live by. I wanted to write "love your neighbor as yourself". Next time I post, I'll re-read what I wrote before submitting!

Re:profits and money

[Bas_Wijnen]

i dont know where everyone gets the idea that you need profits to have a good economy

Whether we like this or not, it's a fact. Without hope of profits there is no reason to invest.

From "dict economy":
the system of production and distribution and consumption

Money is not needed to have an economy. Many people consider it a good way to distribute resources among people, with the idea that the ones who do more or more important work should have access to more resources.

That is how things work in a capitalist economy. This is, however, not the only possible economy, as you suggest. And in fact IMO it's not a good one, too. What this theory overlooks is that money is equivalent to resources, and it can buy (virtually) anything, including power. Especially it can buy the power to get more money, which makes other people poorer.

This results in a system where the rich always get richer, until the poor realize that it isn't such a good idea and start a revolution. At this moment, governments all over the world are trying to prevent that by giving some money to the unemployed, etc. However, the rich are still getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer (I'm not sure about absolute values, but they're nonsense anyway, it's all about relative values), so I expect a revolution at some point in the future. All the govenments do is put it off for a while.

Of course this is not very nice, because a revolution is such a waste of resources. If people would just live together happily, things would be so much better. I really think the free software movement should be an example for a perfect lifestyle.

Re:profits and money

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to write "love your neighbor as yourself".

I don't think many of my neighbours would appreciate me loving them in the same way I "love myself" either. Although there is one women who might be in for a bit of mutual self-loving but I don't think the wife would approve of that, either.

Re:profits and money

[gl4ss]

**Whether we like this or not, it's a fact. Without hope of profits there is no reason to invest.**

well.. there ARE other reasons to put money into something than excepting that you'll get the same money back(+25%) in straight cash.

lot's of 'businesses' are started that way.. by a community because they need some services(grocery stores.. banks.. whatever). and these are excepted to turn in 0% of profit(they do profit the people who put it together tho, by providing them with services). this is out of fashion model though..

well.. maybe it should be said instead that money isn't always the 'profit' wanted.

Re:profits and money

[budgenator]

This results in a system where the rich always get richer, until the poor realize that it isn't such a good idea and start a revolution.

You're describing a system of feudalism more than captialism; one where artificial barriers to entry are errected to exclude competion. Now a days instead of a Duke or Earl owning all of the land and trying to make us all serf's, we have coperatations.

Example if the stock brokerage sets high intial investment standards to keep people out of the market; people can always form investment clubs to pool their money to overcome those barriers. There will always be ways arround those barriers, and business plans dependant upon artificial barriers will always be vulnerable. Artificialy expensive software resulted in open source competion, Artificialy high intial investment resulted in stock-market clubs. The revolution you warn of has been going on for a long time now, and occasionaly it has been bloody.

The biggest misunderstandings

[Mr_Silver]

This article intends to clear up some misconceptions about open source software development practices

The biggest misconception is that Apache is indicative of all Open Source projects and that Microsoft is indicative of all Propriatory software providers. The fact is that every project is different, you can't lump them all together in one neat package and say "this is how all these work".

The second biggest is that if you don't like a feature or bit of functionality within an open application you can just literally "jump in" and hack the code. This completely ignores the fact that even if you can code, most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[Anonymous Conrad]

The biggest misconception is that Apache is indicative of all Open Source projects

Is that a problem? I'd say apache was one of the top-tier open source projects where it's produced something really good.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[fruey]

most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it

Oh the irony... because the more insanely complex it is, the more likely it is to be either badly coded, or badly commented. I was looking at a popular webmail component recently, and saw that the variables weren't particularly well named, there were nowhere near enough comments, and certainly not enough good introduction in the header of each file to explain what it did.

However, take a look at some other less esoteric works like Postfix, and you'll see that documentation, comments, and introductions to the files are *much* easier to follow.

The bigger an open source project, the wider the audience, the more likely it is to have worked out some process which makes it better commented because of the sheer amount of collaboration. A few pet projects that have become big have done so in a disorganised manner. Indeed apart from the original dev clique, for these it is no help that the source is open because it's impossible to read. Those that are outstanding follow better coding practices - and hence are unlikely to be as "insanely complex" as you posit.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[battjt]

The process for an application change in the proprietary world and open world is the same:

1. request the change
2. wait (possibly send money)
3. test
4. deploy

The problem with the proprietary model is there is only one organization that is capable of modifying the application for you, then they set the price instead of a fair market price.

Joe

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

The second biggest is that if you don't like a feature or bit of functionality within an open application you can just literally "jump in" and hack the code. This completely ignores the fact that even if you can code, most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it.

It took me a day to tweak the colours of the gnome pager independently of my colour scheme, and that included learning to download code using CVS, and relearning X resources. I've just modified the Active Desktop Borders code in kwin to act the way I've liked. I just downloaded the code last night. Unfortunately I'm not sure the version I downloaded is the exact right version, or that the compilation flags will match, so this may not yet work. But finding the place in code to modify and modifying it was trivial. The code is modular.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that Apache was originally based on EMWAC code, which was funded by (!) Microsoft.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

You are in partly in error. There are insanely complex applications that are insanely complex because they need to be, not because they are poorly built. Some things are just gnarly whether you like it or not.

I'm fairly convinced that these kinds of products are never going to be superceded by OSS because they require many years (even decades) or dogged dedication and can't be supported by the starving programmer model typified by OSS. Also many OSS zealots gravitate towards projects with high levels of "sex appeal", which many of these kinds of projects just don't have. Dirty, nasty boring work that stretches on endlessly but can generate vast amounts of revenue to the company with the correct business model.

Good luck in catching them.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, they just set the price, and magically everyone agrees to buy it? Wow, I thought there was competition between companies.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings

[battjt]

No. There is not realistic competition to an application provider for a feature change. I think VMWare should have a built in VNCserver. Who can I pay for that feature other than VMWare?

Joe

How to Misunderstand Open Source

[wrinkledshirt]

How to misunderstand open source?!?

That's an easy one.

Just listen to what Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates or Darl McBride have to say on the matter.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Same goes for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Closed source. Both are equally misunderstood and both have merits and drawbacks.

Professionalism???

[vacuum_tuber]

"...makes clear the notion that Open Source Software bears a mark of professionalism."

Oh. That must explain why so much of OSS is broken and has documentation that is incomplete and often actually erroneous, not to mention the almost endless nested dependencies that often break on install, making the install of the top-level item incomplete and hosed.

"Professionalism" my ass.

I detest closed software but professionalism is precisely what is lacking in OSS. The prevailing rule seems to be, "Close is good enough!"

Re:Professionalism???

[The One KEA]

That may be true for small projects with a limited set of users and a relatively low profile. Could you say the same thing for projects like Mozilla, KDE, GnuCash, OpenOffice, Scribus, KDevelop or even the kernel itself?

Re:Professionalism???

[Anonymous Coward]

And you think Closed source software houses are any better? Many of them require you to have a support engineer come on site to install the software; that's how they resolve the dependencies, buggy installers, etc.

Re:Professionalism???

[autechre]

If your package management system is broken, don't blame the authors of unrelated software. Debian (and from what I hear FreeBSD and Gentoo) get it right. People bitch and complain about tons of dependencies, while all I did was type "apt-get install gnucash". And yes, that was in "unstable". Anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla? A nice ncurses prompt set it all up for me.

Alternatives are one of the greatest strengths of Open Source software. Instead of complaining about the ones that don't work, use the ones that do.

Re:Professionalism???

[Anonymous Coward]

The prevailing rule seems to be, "Close is good enough!"

That seems to be the prevailing rule for the entire industry, be it open source, closed source, or internal "no one would care if this were open or closed source."

Part of it is probably due to how immature the industry is, and how rapidly things change. Of course, it could be true that close really *is* good enough, at least for a lot of things.

P.S. You complain about poor documentation and difficult installation in open source, but I've run across the exact same problems in the closed source world. Ever try to set up and run Great Plains Dynamics (a large accounting package)? Nightmare. Ever read any documentation from Cisco, be it Cisco Press, or online? You'd be amazed at the number of example configurations in their documents that ommit a critical line, or have incorrect IP addresses.

Re:Professionalism???

[vacuum_tuber]

The One KEA wrote:

That may be true for small projects with a limited set of users and a relatively low profile. Could you say the same thing for projects like Mozilla, KDE, GnuCash, OpenOffice, Scribus, KDevelop or even the kernel itself?

The Linux kernel is widely and highly regarded, and stories of Linux systems running without crash or reboot for 6 months, a year, even more, are common.

Mozilla? I turned to it when eBay dicked with their formats and brain-dead MSIE refused to save as HTML. Mozilla was able to save such pages (hey, if the browser can render the page, how can it claim not to be able to save the components it used to render it??), but only once. On the second save it would invariably crash. I had to close it and relaunch it for each save.

Those others I haven't used. I have done several Linux installs on very standard IBM brand PCs that failed to identify the graphic chipset and ended up giving me critical windows with both top and bottom off the screen. I also found the pop-up bar at the bottom amusing, because by default it came up behind open windows.

The nested dependency thing is something I had the displeasure to experience recently, trying to install SpamAssassin on an AIX system. It required several other things. I used CPAN, which was amazing and frightening -- amazing because I hadn't realized that so much work had been done to automate such things, and frightening because I had no idea what all it was installing on my system. It eventually crapped out several levels down, and the whole install failed, leaving God only knows what incomplete garbage lying around.

Some months ago I walked in on a friend who was straining over an IBM Intellistation and the O'Reilly Linux book complete with CD. The network stuff wouldn't configure following the explicit examples given in the book. Several days later, after countless hours on the Internet, he dug out the correct information from some obscure corner of the Net.

Sendmail was obviously written by malicious alien visitors. Try configuring it without using the shorthand m4 macros. IBM distributed sendmail in AIX 4.3.3 with sample m4 files and instructions, but not the m4 macro processor. I finally found one but couldn't get it to work according to examples in the sendmail documentation. Then I looked for sample sendmail configs on the Internet, and ran into one of those "What's wrong with this picture?" things -- there weren't any.

The Apache Web server distributed by IBM in AIX 4.3.3 conveniently has its "deny" by IP address feature completely broken. There's no question that Apache is a kickass piece of software, but jeez, a significant feature completely nonfunctional...

Being a serious hater of vi (which was obviously first written by someone who had never seen an editor UI before), I installed the Joe editor. It promptly destroyed the standard vt100 terminfo or termcap file used by the major app I run and still can't run right without its own special termcap in the user's home directory.

Have you ever seen the matrix of Linux drivers for Adaptec SCSI HBAs? It's a nightmare of a bad joke. There's a different driver for just about every combination of Linux point version and Adaptec card model. One guy has pretty much had to devote his life to just that one little corner of Linux. That's sick.

I follow the rs6kpreplinux list, where one person on the entire planet has done the work to provide for running Linux on RS/6000 43P 7043-140 machines. I still haven't tried the stuff because I'm waiting for the list to stop carrying mostly "I tried xxx and it didn't work" messages. "Oh," says the author, "Maybe I forgot to include the zzzz module in the kernel patches, let me go check..."

Virtually every Microsoft product on the shelves of stores in shrinkwrap is broken out of the box, requiring hours of downloading "service packs" and other doo-dads that are sometimes nearly impossible to find.

Re:Professionalism???

[YellowYahoo]

That goes to the old rule that the last 10% is 90% of the work.

Having worked in a large commercial development environment, that really is true, and on two fronts: the code/bug/release cycle AND the "nice little feature" portion. Those little details about helpful, specific error messages, and input field order turn out to be critical for adoption, but feel like an indordinate waste of time on the development side.

So, most developers would rather code a whole new window manager/file system/project than tweak innumerable minor "usability" problems. This is exacerbated since developers tend to get used to using their software the way it was designed and/or works, which tends to blind the developer to easier or better ways to interact with the software.

On top of that, the OSS model by virtue of "pick your distribution" necessatates an inordinate amount of QA for "retail level" install/run capability.

And while it's fine to say that it's free, so just install it and fix it, you can't also then complain that it doesn't get adopted en masse. And unfortunately, if it doesn't get adopted, it's in danger of getting relegated to obscurity.

Re:Professionalism???

[poot_rootbeer]

professionalism is precisely what is lacking in OSS. The prevailing rule seems to be, "Close is good enough!"

And this is different from proprietary software somehow...?

Re:Professionalism???

[MoneyT]

And thus is the other problem with the OSS community. Someonw writes some code, and people point out where it needs to be improved, and the author says "Shut up and write your own damn code if you think you can do better"

The OSS community does not take constructive critisism (or critisism of any sort) very well. And even if the point is good, it's lost in a wave of blind hatred for one who would dare insult your baby.

Most people aren't critisising software just for the hell of it. They want to see it get better, and they're giving you ideas. You don't have to take those ideas, but they don't have to like or praise your software either. The reason they tell you instead of coding it themselves is because in terms of total resources, it's less to tell you and have you code it.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[lilo_booter]

... I've probably been trolled here, but it was the early and confused modding of others that prompted me to respond to this. Personally, I would have just modded this down if there was an option for 'misinformed' or 'just plain wrong'.

Consumers don't buy software; people aren't paid to write software for the sake of writing software.

Consumers buy services and products; people are employed to provide services and products.

Software is a means to these ends, but it is not the end.

Open source provides the ability for companies to focus on the products and services they wish to sell, and employ people who specialise in those areas, rather than having or paying a bottom heavy and expensive zoo full of code monkeys. Think of all those things you need to do take a product to market - product design, research and development, support infrastructure, documentation, advertising etc etc.

You might want to rephrase your comment and say 'worse for programmers'.

But even then, if you're a company that relies on open source and is profiting from it, you would do well to remember that it's only going to work if those open source projects are maintained and supported... solution? You fund the open source projects - you don't employ people specifically, they're free to be funded by many companies and they're free to walk away too, while still leaving the option for others to take over and compete.

Sounds like a good thing for the economy (and even for programmers) if you asked me...

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[account_deleted]

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That's disgusting

[johannesg]

So your programmers "just code" and your managers are "free to participate in social activities".

Don't you think your programmers might want to do something social once in a while? You know, just like real people?

Re:That's disgusting

[Chicane-UK]

Oh god.. most hilarious post I have read all day. Though probably for all the wrong reasons.

You make out like the parents management are keeping his coders locked under their desks in cages, and only letting them out once a week so they can hose down the cage and put some fresh newspaper in.

I think he means like customer facing social events, such as negotiating contracts etc - not going down to the local bar for a few frames of pool and a jug of beer!!

Re:That's disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't personify programmers. It only makes it harder for you to shoot them when they fall out of their chairs through exhaustion.

Re:That's disgusting

[calethix]

"Don't you think your programmers might want to do something social once in a while? You know, just like real people?"

Back in you cubicle dog! Don't make me break out the whip.

Re:That's disgusting

[110010001000]

Negotiating contracts is a "social event"??? No, I think the grandparent post meant what he said. The managers go play golf and such.

Misconceptions

[sql*kitten]

From the article:

His organization has started transitioning from a closed model to a standards based model

Anyone who starts from the premise that closed-source precludes the use of open standards won't have much of value to say on the matter. I cite Sun as a key example - an almost entirely closed-source company that has one more than almost anyone else to drive open standards.

Slashdot needs to start evaluating articles on quality and not just on how well they conform to the approved "open source is good" party line.

Re:Misconceptions

[Watcher]

I was going to say "You must be new around here", but then I saw your user number. I'd love to see them evaluate articles based upon quality, but more often than not they seem to be evaluated based upon how well they speak for the "party line" around here.

Misconceptions...

[BJZQ8]

I was at a conference yesterday where I heard several misconceptions about Linux...first off, the main presenter told everyone that Linux was "open for the world" and "anybody could get in and see your code." I thought that was just wonderful. He didn't want to hear it, but my contention would be that's like looking at a house, but the realtor/builder says "you can't inspect the foundation though...just trust us!" Wheras Linux is more like a house that you can inspect, take apart, rebuild whatever way you like. Of course, though, Microsoft products are "more mature" and "suited to a professional environment." Sheesh. All of the other attendees nodded their bobble heads in agreement.

Re:Misconceptions...

[Anml4ixoye]

I think that is one of the better analogies I have heard to date.

Software is a *lot* like a house. And open source gives you the ability to open it up, modify it and rebuild it anyway you want if you know how to do it. For example, in my house I can easily change a light bulb, or replace the lock, or even build a bookshelf or deck, but would need help to add on an extra room. The same goes with open source. I can go in an change small things, but can't change larger things without help.

Closed source still allows you to change light bulbs, etc, but you don't have a choice - if you want to add on a deck, or a porch, or a room, you have to pay your original contractor to build it. You can't go out, buy a manual, and try it on your own (for the most part).

Re:Misconceptions...

[Pfhreakaz0id]

Interesting thing is, as a guy who owns an old house, the new houses are going to more and more of a "closed" model. Slab foundations where all the plumbing is buried in concrete. Good luck adding onto the plumbing without hiring a "propietary" plumber.

Re:Misconceptions...

[jesterzog]

Of course, though, Microsoft products are "more mature" and "suited to a professional environment." Sheesh.

Did he give any specific reasons why closed source was more mature? I'm curious if it was the standard reasons given such as having a company guarantee it, or if he actually talked about it in detail.

Re:Misconceptions...

[BJZQ8]

No...like most people whose views have little or no basis in reality, he was long on rhetoric and short on facts. He was complaining about having to get a separate Microsoft license for everyone to be able to upload to an FTP site...which raised the question about why didn't they just run the WWW and FTP site in question on Linux and Apache...that produced the response about Linux being "open to the world" so "everyone can see your code." I could tell he was not dealing in reality at that point...so I decided not to cast my pearls before swine and kept my mouth shut. As I said, everybody else there, whose systems ran 95% Microsoft and 5% Novell (I was the only Linuxer) all shook their heads in agreement. Yep. Gotta stay away from that evil OPEN software...after all, everyone could see our code!

Re:I RTFAed..

[minus9]

Or - Setup.exe

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[account_deleted]

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Professionalism is the key

[BeProf]

I'd like to preface my remarks by saying that I believe that Open Source is probably the best way of structuring a software development culture out there now. It's not perfect, but it is pretty darn good.

Note: I prefer to call it a culture rather than a model. I hear development model and I think of things like Structured, OOP, eXtreme Programming, Patterns, etc. Environment would be a better term, but then people think we're talking about IDEs. So, culture it is.

That having been said, I think that the real key to making good software isn't the development culture you live in, it's the professionalism of the developers in the culture. A good development culture, like OSS helps, but it's not, in and of itself, enough.

I mean, we've all seen it, right? Good developers working in a bad environment (usually one foisted on them by the PHBs upstairs) creating great software. And I'm sure we've all seen bad developers churn out, pure, unadulterated open source crap.

To sumarize:
- Closed source developement does not necesarily mean bad software.
- Open source development does not necesarily mean good software.

Spill chucker works...

[Anonymous Coward]

...need grandma chicken.

has started giving weigh

Re:Spill chucker works...

[Anonymous Coward]

...need grandma chicken.

has started giving weigh

May bee these wood reed bitter Oz:

"has started giving whey"

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Infinite93]

I think the poster is looking at it from a larger view. More of uptopian communist view. Rather than working to acquire more of something than other people have (what is money essentially, but score keeping), everyone works to provide what is required and only takes what they need. The landlord in that enviroment is just someone who makes certain the building is taken care of. In return, they draw from society the items and services they require to live. Money can be simply a way of making certain everyone pulls their weight. (negative balance indicates need to contribute more, positive balance indicates contiribution in excess of usage) Instead we use it and 'wealth' to keep score and point out how much further up the ladder we are than everyone else. ---Not necessarily my philosophy, just a few thoughts.

Back-asswards

[richie2000]

Misunderstand Open Source? Bah. I want to understand Miss Open Source.

(I bet you thought that link would be to something else. ;-)

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[B'Trey]

Some people are passionate about the money. Most are passionate about the things the money can but - whether that's a roof over your head and food in your belly, a new computer with a 3GHz 64bit processor or a new Lamborghini.

It's the work we do that drives the economy and the nation. Something has to motivate us to do that work, and as you pointed out it almost certainly isn't going to be passion for the job itself. So if you take away profit, exactly why am I going to drag myself out of bed in the morning and go to work?

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Following that logic:

Electric light = less profit for candlemakers = worse economy = worse for people

Refrigerators = less profit for ice sellers = worse economy = worse for people

The real thing is that OSS is a DIFFERENT economy.
If it hurts your current job it's a "bad" shift. If it facillitates a business opportunity for some unemployed shmuck it's "good" in his book!

Maybe nitpicking, but....

[Smiling_Jack]

I'd take this guy a bit more seriously if he had bothered to spellcheck his bloody article.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem with capitalistic america today. You are BRIBED. "If we are rich, then *you* will also live in wellfare and luxury". The problem is that in order to be rich, somebody must be poor. 90% of the wealth of the world is owned by 100 people. 90% of the people of the world are poor. The americans are bribed not to protest but live happily as servants in the luxurious hotel called United States of America. Unfortunatelly, Edgar Allan Poe, Steibeck, Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, were americans too.

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[Dhalka226]

What's wrong with what's happening here ?

I think the article had it just about right: people simply don't understand open-source. It used to be that unless they researched themselves, or were personally involved, that they probably knew nothing about it. But now, as companies such as Microsoft are beginning to see products such as Linux as increasing threats on their market share, the average consumer is hearing something--and it's coming from Microsoft. Needless to say, that's not going to be positive! And when even open-source's most respected people step up and say something, they get responses like, "Linus who?"

And the bottom line is, the average consumer just doesn't care. The common conceptions have become that OS crashes are to be expected and put up with. They don't see why they should they take on the admittedly somewhat steep learning curve of a transition from Windows to Linux even if they do understand the stability difference.

Another problem is support. It's nice and true that in open-source, you can often contact the developer directly. But any response you get is often at the developer's leisure and time-permitting. Many don't deal with support issues at all aside from, say, putting together a manual/FAQ. Community input is great, it's something I've always enjoyed, but it's not the end-all be-all, especially for the novice user.

So, what exactly is wrong with these sorts of articles? Yes, a lot of it is preaching to the choir. More of it is that people are not given a convincing reason to switch. The biggest problem is likely that it just doesn't reach enough people; not nearly as many as MS or other companies bent on keeping open-source down can. And open-source is fighting the uphill battle here. MS can just roll rocks down as we climb. The only real risks MS takes is letting us reach the summit.

An example

[gillbates]

The firm I work for was re-evaluating proprietary terminal emulation software. Knowing that I could get the source for x3270 from the web, I downloaded a copy, thinking that I could port it to Windows in short order.

And then I looked at the source. The first problem was that a port would require me to port not just the software, but the libraries used as well. And even then, I'd still have to figure out the build process - there are literally hundreds of files.

Yes, I suppose if I was paid minimum wage, and had until next year, I could get it done. But we need the software now. Even if we could wait, it would probably cost my firm as much to port it as we'd save in license fees.

I believe that complexity is the number one reason why OSS isn't used more often.

Re:An example

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be easier to buy a closed-source product, and port it over, assembler-instruction by assembler-instruction?

Re:An example

[fruey]

Bad example. OSS is more prevalent in the Linux / FreeBSD world, where the kernel itself follows the same model. Porting to Windows is another kettle of fish. The source being open means that you can port if you want to, but you could have run it on a linux server very quickly indeed, and then used something like PuTTY to allow everyone to use it from a central point. Sure, it's complex because it's not Windows, but those people who go for Linux reap benefits of cost of licences to offset the time lost getting to know it

Things really will be different when a critical mass of IT geeks know Linux well enough for it to really take hold of the corporate world. Windows popularity is so important to MS because once it loses market share it also loses the argument 'but windows is well known and easy to use' - because sooner or later Linux will be easier to use just because more people know it well...

Webmin is just as easy as some of the Win32 GUI config tools. Exchange is not easy, I've seen people pick up Postfix (with webmin) very much more quickly. Samba is not so bad either, compared to a proper Active Directory setup... and so on and so on.

The problem I've faced the most often is lack of knowledge. "What happens if you leave, who will know how to run your server"... etc... what most of those people asking that question FAIL to realise is that a high percentage of Windows 2000 setups are badly misconfigured and hopelessly insecure because people don't know what they're doing any more than they would with Linux. But, because the desktop environment is familiar to the boss, and so the ignorant techie can click about and show him stuff he recognises, well they think that it's properly configured. This is often the true misconception when it comes to OSS .vs. Windows.

Re:An example

[arkanes]

How far do you think you'd get porting a proprietary terminal emulation package?

In any case, while I'm not familiar with that package (there are terminal emulators that run on windows, you know), projects with file counts in the hundreds are far from uncommon, and knowing how to familiarize yourself with the build system is a key part of being a programmer. You sound like someone whining about not being able to code because it's "too hard".

Porting an application to a totally different platform is rarely a trivial exercise. If you were expecting it to be, then it's no wonder that you didn't get what you wanted. OSS isn't some magic potion you can drink to get your software for free, and THAT is probably the most damaging preconception people have.

Re:An example

[TiggsPanther]

Well, for one thing you were able to look at the source and see whether it was viable to port to Windows or not.
OK, in this case it wasn't possible. But you were able to find out at (I assume) no more financial cost that the overheads on downloading the source code.

Besides, OSS not being used isn't necessarily indiative of whether it's being looked at. 'Cos the thing about Open Source is that you don't necessarily have to pay/register/whatever for the "privelege" of seeing whether it fits your corproate setup.

I believe that complexity is the number one reason why OSS isn't used more often.

You may be right. but I think that a major aspect may be that many companies (like yours) are usually looking for a solution where they "need the software now".
In cases like this, OSS may not be a suitable solution as there may not be a product that's "polished" enough. But that's where commercial/proprietary software comes in. yes, it's often costly. But you're paying for the convinence of "getting the software now" as well as the extra support.

Tiggs

Re:An example

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know which way to moderate this, so I'll reply instead:

How far do you think you'd get porting a proprietary terminal emulation package?

Borderline -1 Troll.

In any case, he said he was *re-evaluating* his proprietary terminal emulation package, i.e. he's already got one that works on Windows.

OSS isn't some magic potion you can drink to get your software for free, and THAT is probably the most damaging preconception people have.

+1 Insightful. Agree completely.

Too pretentious

[Junks Jerzey]

That sums up open source in a nutshell, unfortunately. In reality, there's very little to say about it. Some open source software is great and everyone recognizes this (Apache, Python, Perl) and much more is crap. Ditto for commercial software. Lots of the so-called benefits of open source aren't really as amazing they seem. Ditto for commercial software. What it really comes down to is software that is truly better will stand out. This is why Perl and Python have become so entrenched. Other times it isn't at all clear why a commercial or open source product is better than its competition. This is the bottom line about Linux on the desktop. As much as many zealots want to push the superiority of Linux, it's hard to elucidate--even to other techies--why it's so much superior to alternatives (one side talks about security and the UNIX philosophy; the other side talks about fewer driver headaches and applications that work with much less fussing). When such arguments turn into "open vs. closed" then it comes across as a dodge, an empty way to win an argument.

Re:Too pretentious

[ShonFerg]

I think that hits on something that's apparent with Open Source. Open Source seems to be really good at creating the technical underpinnings of larger systems... things like programming languages, web servers, Operating Systems, and especially cross-platform libraries. There's really no one else out there who will spend the time to make their libraries cross-platform.

Still, I think Open Source developers shouldn't assume that releasing source code to the public is going to be a magic bullet, or even wise, for every single product. Certainly things like voting machines, commercial "do-it-all" software packages, etc. can benefit from this because of exactly what the parent described, the "you can inspect the foundation" effect.

Realistically, for better or worse, 95% of users will not actually care that the source code is available, would never want to look at it, and even if they were skilled programmers would not want to take the time to understand the (often written completely in C) incredibly large and complex systems that the projects implement.

I think Open Source projects could do more to encourage closed-source developers to adopt the standard libraries they create. For example, I think it's counter-productive to require users who make use of an un-modified code library to release any source code just because it simply makes calls to the base library. I know there are several different licenses out there, but I recently ran across one that would only allow me to use the library in a closed-source system if I dynamically linked it. Don't provisions like this do more harm than good if the goal is trying to encourage cross-platform development?

As for the article, I thought the author described very well the best-in-breed practices used in Open Source and how they could be applied, but the article didn't seem to be very much about Openness or Closdness... simply about processes that Open Source development (such as CVS) has created.

And how is an expensive puppy any better?

[Anonymous Coward]

That analogy seems apt to me as well.

I got a free puppy and it has been low maintainence, healthy and friendly for it's quite long life. (some sort of mutt)
Had I spent a lot of money for some special breed dog I would have had to pay a lot of money and STILL had to feed it. I've also had the experience that mutts are healthier... I guess that darwin guy wasn't a hack afterall.

You forgot to mention BSD is dying.

[pr0ntab]

n/t

(sarcasm, you nitwits)

"Chief programmer"

[Lumpish Scholar]

We find it extremely important that our developers are free to code and code only. The project managers will do all the tedious work surround programming, such as documentation, attend meetings, debugging, research ...

This is what Brooks, in The Mythical Man Month, called a "chief programmer" team. Coplien talks about a "mercenary analyst" who's similar to one of your project managers.

Fascinating, and potentially very, very cool.

You don't have a New Jersey office, do you? :-)

Re:Open Source Is Communism

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you are torn between the Open Source path as endorsed by Israel, and the lucrative opportunties offered to you by going the Microsoft Way.

It's the typical Jewish 'morals vs. money' dilemma.

Re:I RTFAed..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to see a method that did away with dependency hell and the havoc that causes (so far, I've yet to see a Linux derivative that was any better at this than Windows was with DLL stomping). Upgrading packages that break other packages and installing software that causes you to install X number of other packages so that it can run are *still* way too common.

What is this article?!?!

[GoofyBoy]

From what I understand before this article;

OpenSource is a philosphy of saying "Look at this neat-o code I/we created. You can use it, learn something from it or improve it but just follow this license (which generally keeps with the same philosphy.)"

From what the article says:

OpenSource is a process which is collaberative. And by its very professional and methodical nature, is better than ClosedSource.

I say that the later is a wrong definition of OpenSource. It doesn't address issues like "Free Speech" or "Free Beer" and talks about things like developement processes and takes a very narrow view of what "open" means.

Re:What is this article?!?!

[McDutchie]

OpenSource is a philosphy of saying "Look at this neat-o code I/we created. You can use it, learn something from it or improve it but just follow this license (which generally keeps with the same philosphy.)"

That's actually more like the definition of Free software.

Re:What is this article?!?!

[GoofyBoy]

But the strict definition of Free Software may not have the "follow this license" part. You can release your code in the public domain and it can be "Free Software".

Also, "Free Software" grants rights or freedoms, but says nothing about what you must do.

GPL and its childern do enforce the "must do's" part.

I was kinda thrown off by how the author-

[pr0ntab]

didn't like the free puppy allegory.
Because it's quite apt!

Linux is like a free puppy, they're wonderful: if you're a dog lover. You don't have to spend money or time on it if you don't want to, feeding it scraps and ignoring it. But that will make the dog "unruly".

But when pets are not allowed in the building, or you have no free time or can't afford a vet, an Aibo or Chia Pet is fine.

And for some tough jobs, nothing beats a border collie or german shepard...

Re:I was kinda thrown off by how the author-

[cybergrue]

The 'free puppy' allegory is correct, to a point, but breaks down when you consider how software is different then material object.
Yes, you still have to pay maintenance when you recieve a free puppy, but its roughly the same as if you bought it. The difference between puppies and software is that you can make unlimited copies of software. When considering open source, this is not a problem, but commercial venders would like you to think of there software as puppies, in that you should buy each one seperately. Even the maintenance analagy does nto work correctly, as the open source puppy would come with instructions, and if it ever got sick you could take it to any vet. The closed source puppy, you would have to take to a specific vet of the previous owners choosing.

Re:I was kinda thrown off by how the author-

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying if you don't have the time/skills to deal with Linux you should get an etcha-sketch?

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately Linux and Apache (unarguably the two most important open source projects) have done more damage to Sun and the like than Microsoft. Take a look sometime on Netcraft and see how many people run SunONE on Solaris compared to Apache on Linux or IIS on Windows. Of course I trust that survey less and less when I see that a domain parking server can swing the survey by one million sites.

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[Gordonjcp]

Monolithic kernels work just fine. Car engines are old technology - 110 years old - but we still use them. Why? Well, because the alternatives to the Otto cycle, like Wankel rotaries, tend to be expensive or fragile, or inefficient. With plain ordinary car engines we have a nice compromise between simplicity and reliability and efficiency.

Since the Linux kernel uses modules, that mitigates a lot of the problems of a "true" monolithic kernel. It actually gives you the benefits of a monolithic kernel (close coupling, compact, no communications overhead) with the benefits of a microkernel (modular, low memory footprint, bits can be replaced while running).

Re:Open source is IN

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but give em a chance.

Kernighan and Ritchie were dorks until they started a band called ZZ TOP.

The message is complicated

[sjbe]

It seems we get a fairly regular drip-feed of "No look, this is what it REALLY is" articles in the computer press, and yet people still don't "get it".

What's wrong with what's happening here ? Is the coverage in the wrong area ("preaching to the converted") ? Is the message simply being disbelieved ("TANSTAAFL") ? Is the lobbying by the closed-source community simply better (all those expense accounts...).

They don't "get it" because the message is simultaneously complicated and unusual. Think about it. It's really hard to explain to a random business person how open source makes sense. ("Why would I give stuff away?...") More importantly the argument for open source is powerful, but it's not simple. When you are trying to convinve people, simplicity of the message matters.

This is something I've noticed with companies. As a rule of thumb the ones that can explain in a few words what they do, tend to do pretty well. Microsoft sells software, IBM sells computers & services, Wal*mart is a retailer, etc. When they try to get fancy it's much harder to communicate to investors and customers why they should care about you. All those fancy "exchanges" we saw during the dot com boom? Really tough message to get across.

While they have other advantages, message simplicity is one reason the RIAA is so effective in lobbying against filesharing. Their message (correct or not is beside the point) is summed up in one word, "theft". I haven't heard anyone make an equally coherent one word counter argument. Not for lack of trying trying either.

Open source to some degree suffers from the same problem. It's hard to explain concisely and coherently why it's good. Not for lack of trying mind you. Think about "free as in speach/free as in beer". That's an explanation that we almost always have to explain. Not good.

We make fun of them a lot but this is what marketing folks are (supposedly) good at. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to figure out how to get exactly the right message across in the most concise manner possible. And it's really, really hard to do well. It's an art form in some ways like making really tight reliable code. The really good stuff takes a lot of time and smarts to come up with, but is amazing to watch when it works.

Re:The message is complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if the RIAA's word for the opposition is "theft" perhaps our word for the opposition could be "slavery?"

A Nony Mouse

"bears the mark of professionalism"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, after "greased turkey," "stoned beaver," names like Xouvert, GIMP, GNOME, and more, not to mention the godawful attitude of the community you can witness for yourself right here at Slashdot, I see very little professionalism at all.

Re:"bears the mark of professionalism"

[sjames]

In full recognition of any humourous intent, I will answer seriously.

All projects open or not tend to operate under a quickly thought up development name. The less relevant the name is the better (for secrecy reasons in the proprietary world). Since these are meant to be internal only they are often silly or otherwise odd like greased turkey and stoned beaver.

Making sure the final product is well named is a job for Marketing, not the developers. Sometimes they suceed, sometimes the development name is much cooler and leaks out (which do you prefer, Etherlink III or Vortex, Boomerang, and Cyclone?).

What's wrong with Xouvert, GIMP and GNOME, besides GIMP being a bit ironic these days and not necessarily PC? (Which can actually help sell a product if done carefully BTW).

Re:"bears the mark of professionalism"

[Tukla]

besides GIMP being a bit ironic these days

Why is it ironic?

Re:"bears the mark of professionalism"

[sjames]

The gimp doesn't exactly limp along anymore now does it? dictionary

The hobbyist argument is made from the community

[bonch]

When someone complains or points out the flaws inherent in a piece of software or process, the coders start talking about how they do it for the love of it in their spare time, and that if someone thinks it should be improved, "code it or shut up."

Re:Open Source Is Communism

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus is the Meaning of Life.
Rejection of Him does not appear very meaningful, for all it's commonplace.
To all of the other preliminary, partial attempts in circulation: *yawn*.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[geoffspear]

Consumers don't buy software? Well there goes Microsoft's entire business model. I'm sure they'll realize that all of their revenues have been imaginary any day now.

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[sohp]

I suppose there's always the argument that you need lots of fresh meat at the sharp end before the grinder (mainstream press) starts to notice any difference. If it's simply that it's a slow process, then by all means chaps, carry on :-)

I was once told by a co-worker that at my employer, you had to say the same thing 7 different ways to 7 different groups before you would begin to be heard -- and this company was only 2000 people. Getting the message to the entire business community is orders of a magnitude more difficult. At the same time certain software companies are continually countering the facts about open source (and getting the attention of the mainstream press more easily), and inventing new distortions. Keep up the good work, Tom Adelstein, and all like-minded authors.

Unfairly biased the other way

[gumbright]

I have worked in "closed source development" shops all my professional life and have never encountered anything close to the extreme example presented in "If We Used a Closed Development Process". This is just hyperbole and discredits the article to a large extent. Fighting hyperbole with hyperbole is not effective. (again...the word of the day is HYPERBOLE)

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't expect to just tell Joe Random Developer "write this code for me" and then get a top-quailty piece of software for free. That's not how OSS works... if you have a special need you pay someone to fix it, or you fix it yourself.

The OSS community doesn't work for you like the people in your rather strange examples, but that doesn't mean you can't benefit from their work or that everything they do is crap.

I think a better analogy would be that your toilet is broken because of a known fault in your particular model. You consult an "Open Source" database of toilet fixing instructions where other people have already posted their solutions to this problem and then you fix your toilet yourself!

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[plinius]

You can't expect to just tell Joe Random Developer "write this code for me" and then get a top-quailty piece of software for free.

Well, the emails I've received for support on my open source code would surprise you then. I've gotten all sorts of idiots asking me to add this or that feature for free. The corporate users are the worst by far--they're arrogant on top of demanding.

Most people just don't understand why anyone would offer software for free, because indeed it is illogical.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you babbling about?

A solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ensure that spreadsheet software and Project do not install on your (developers) machine, but only work on managers machines.

Re:Our process (FINANCED)

[oldwarrior]

financed by one of the leading academic institutions - that's the real problem with making any money developing open source software - one HAS to be a (effective) government employee or be willing to work for nothing. Oh sure, there are some who will eek out a living on support of vertical market expertise - but that leaves little or no room for real, commercial competition and ergo, less innovation and more stagnation as budgets get centralized. See Soviet Union 1917-1990.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Bas_Wijnen]

Sounds like a good thing for the economy (and even for programmers) if you asked me...

Not for programmers working at Microsoft, or a similar company (does that exist? Well... anyway). They make money from the fact that people have no choice but to buy their product, and adjust their prices accordingly. They lose a lot of money when users can (easily) choose someone else. That, however, would be a big win for for people in general though.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[calethix]

First of all, non commercial software may mean less profits for businesses that develop software but not businesses in general. If a bank uses free non-commercial software then they make more profit. That's assuming the non-commercial software is of high quality and doesn't reduce productivity to a level that causes their profits to go down.

Second, open source doesn't necessarily mean free or non commercial. It's entirely possible for a company to produce something that's open source and sell it.

My university's administrative system is far from free but they ship all of the source with it so that it can be customized to fit each of their clients' unique requirements. This also means that my university hires programmers to make those customizations.

How again is that bad for the economy and people?

Re:Open Source Is Communism

[perly-king-69]

Troll?

WTF was trollish about that?

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[IANAAC]

Furthermore, it is completely impossible to blend open/proprietary software schemes in a business model. Can't be done. Give it up.

Sure it can. I've seen more than one company running Coldfusion MX on a Linux box w/Apache. I've also seen a company running JounryX (Timesheet management SW) on top of Postgres/Apache on Linux. To say that it can't be done is nonsense. Whether your company should combine the two is another matter.

Open Source is bad for the economy??

[Dynamic Ranger]

Non commercial software = less COST for buyers = increased buying power = better for the people = better economy.

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[Apreche]

The reason people still don't get it is because this is just an article. People aren't heavily influenced by what they read in the newspaper. Heck, most people don't read the whole newspaper, they just read the parts that interest them.

What OSS needs is marketing. Take a project like Mozilla Firebird. I guarantee if you turn http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why into a tv commercial and air it during the superbowl that IE will be sitting in the #2 seat the day after. But we can't get marketing because it costs money and by giving away most of the software for $0 the revenue is also $0.

The other problem is that people resist change simply because they don't want to have to go through the effort of changing or learning something new. Those people suck and I consider them worthless. Constantly change for the better. If changing something in your life will improve it in a significant way then do it. If not, then what's the point? Living the same unchanging boring life every day? I mean, sure it's just software so maybe I'm going a little far here. But when I switched to Firebird I was able to get an extra 30 minutes of sleep because my daily web checking took less time. That's a significant life change there.

So yeah. we need marketing not journalism.

Convince me to use Open Source

[HomerJayS]

Maybe I just don't get this whole Open Source model thing, but one major thing was not addressed in the atricle.

Suppose I am a for-profit business that offers some non-unique service. I need some software to provide my core business services to my customers.

I need the software and I need it now (so I can't just wait for 'someone else' to develop it and realease it into the wild). My only alternative is to commission (aka pay IT consultants to develop the software).

Since I am paying for the development costs (even code monkeys need to be fed), why should I develop the software under the GPL and release it to my competitors as soon as it is complete?

Would I not essentially be subsidizing my competitors businesses?

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[bizcoach]

Since I am paying for the development costs (even code monkeys need to be fed), why should I develop the software under the GPL and release it to my competitors as soon as it is complete?

In this situation, don't give it to them for free. You can still use the GPL, but you should distribute it only in exchange for a payment which is significantly higher than half your development costs. See the section on Expensive Free Software in the Free Software Business Strategy Guide.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[twobturtle]

It always surprises me when people equate the GPL with releasing the code to the public. I won't say that I completely understand the GPL, but it never says that GPL'd code must be posted on sourceforge. If I understand correctly, only those who receive the executable need to have access to the source.

Of course, the question becomes "why bother with the GPL?" At this point, its use becomes solely a matter of philosophy.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[HomerJayS]

You can still use the GPL, but you should distribute it only in exchange for a payment which is significantly higher than half your development costs

A high/prohibitive distro fee is not functionally different from a closed source solution (binary license fees with an optional expensive source license).

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

>Since I am paying for the development costs (even
>code monkeys need to be fed), why should I develop
>the software under the GPL and release it to my
>competitors as soon as it is complete?
>Would I not essentially be subsidizing my
>competitors businesses?

I could make an argument here about the benefits of the open development model, and how making some of your software a "commodity" can be good for business. But I won't, because neither open source nor any particular license is a one-size-fits-all solution.

The GPL may not make sense for every project or every business model -- but there are plenty of other licenses and code bases to chose from. For instance, building on BSD-ish licensed code may be a better option for you. Feed back to the community only what you don't mind your competitors adopting.

However, GPL code can still work for you, even with closed development. If you don't intend to distribute your software outside your organization (exactly where that line is drawn is a subject of some debate; consult somebody smarter than me), then you don't have to worry about releasing your code to the general public due to the GPL.

The "trigger" for the GPL's share-alike mechanism is distribution, not use. So you can still keep your code from your competitors, _and_ build upon existing GPL code at the same time. That means you need to pay fewer code monkeys to get the same end result.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[bizcoach]

A high/prohibitive distro fee is not functionally different from a closed source solution (binary license fees with an optional expensive source license).

No, there are big differences.

With the "closed source with expensive source license" approach it is possible that some of your competitors on the market for your primary (non-software) product are able to cut costs through using your relatively inexpensive binary-only distribution. The only way to justify this from a business perspective is if you manage to sell that binary-only license many times.

By contrast, the "expensive Free Software" approach that I suggest makes perfect sense even if you only make one sale; therefore there is no pressure to make sales; you are free to remain focused on your primary business.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[poot_rootbeer]

Well, if you need your business softare "now" and can't wait for someone else to develop it, chances are your competitors feel the same way. So they're not going to wait for you to develop a product and release the source -- they're going to start a concurrent development process, which may be either open or closed source.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[LarryRiedel]

Since I am paying for the development costs, why should I develop the software under the GPL and release it to my competitors as soon as it is complete? Would I not essentially be subsidizing my competitors businesses?

If you are paying someone in exchange for developing the software, you do not need to develop the software under the GPL. You can have all the rights to the software and have a GPL release. Your competitors cannot sell the software other than under the GPL.

You can continue to internally enhance the code, perhaps partly inspired by feedback from the "community" about the GPL version, and make subsequent releases which are not GPL. Nobody else can do that since they do not have the rights to the original source from which the GPL release came.

At least this seems to me to fit loosely into the "open source" model. It is contrary to the spirit of "Free Software", so I personally am not inclined to use MySQL, Qt, BerkeleyDB, etc.

Larry

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[Wateshay]

Is the fact that you have this software and your competitors don't going make you enough extra income to justify the cost of the software? If the answer to that is no, then go to your competitors and strike a deal. Since all of you need this software, and none of you wants to pay for the full cost of developing, for an organization that will develop the software (or at least the core of the software) in an open source manner. Then, all of the different companies in the market can invest smaller amounts of money into this organization in order to get everyone a better piece of software than anyone would have had developed on their own.

The other possible way to use open source is to make use of the open source libraries that exist to reduce the overall cost requirements of developing a proprietary piece of software (assuming the libraries are licensed LGPL or BSDishly).

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[qtp]

My only alternative is to commission (aka pay IT consultants to develop the software).

You hire them on a "work for hire" basis and the code is yours. You only need to distribute the source if you are distributing the application.

If you are intending to sell or distribute the software, and also intend to prevent your customers from also distributing that software, then perhaps Open Source is not for you.

The licenses do not govern the use or development of the software, but only the distribution of the software. If you don't like the requirements, you should base your project on something else.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

If you release it, you are subsidizing your competitor's business. But if you don't you're lumbering your own business with the sole support of a pack of greedy developers...

1. you needn't release it. Use GPL code libraries, customize the code, keep it to yourself and no-one else needs to see your code. It makes no sense to release it if you get a specific unique advantage from it, but you may find that you are making improvements in the open source hunks that you co-opted which are of general interest. By releasing any improvements you make to the (already publically available) open source components you stake a claim on that solution space, so that revison 2.x that fixes some bug you are worried about will still contain your improvement, instead of forcing you to re-integrate your improvement. You can still keep your advantageous stuff to yourself, provided you have maintained boundaries between it and the open source baseline.

2. if you choose to release your unique project code you could do so by agreeing to share the cost of updates with your competitors. There is no incentive to release while your product is unique, but if it is a commodity (i.e. a tax reporting program specific to your industry and the applicable regulations, or an industry-standard info interchange product) you might find that your industry leaders would co-sponsor development in return for a standard base and free access.

Apache Foundation is an example, as is Red Hat's Fedora project -- one is a foundation with many sponsors that produces a standard baseline product, the other is a project sponsored by one company that solicits the participation of interested parties in integraton and testing (and market research, to an extent).

The benefits of the software existing (or the benefit of testing and feedback) accrue to each sponsor without anyone bearing the sole responsibility for supporting the development cost. That's the main benefit of Open Source -- you get much of your work done for you by others who find a similar benefit in sharing the cost. The difference between Open Source and a private consortium is that it lowers the barrier to participation, in return for making the product a non-secret (and who thinks that a consortium's product will really remain secret?). You get the benefit of anyone who's interested contributing, not just the folks you thought to invite.

It won't get you a leg up on the competition, but it might stop you from getting behind.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

>Of course, the question becomes "why bother with
>the GPL?" At this point, its use becomes solely a
>matter of philosophy.

Not at all. In-house, "closed" GPL software development can make sense if you want to build upon GPL code, libraries or otherwise.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[nathanh]

Maybe I just don't get this whole Open Source model thing, but one major thing was not addressed in the atricle.

Suppose I am a for-profit business that offers some non-unique service. I need some software to provide my core business services to my customers.

I need the software and I need it now (so I can't just wait for 'someone else' to develop it and realease it into the wild). My only alternative is to commission (aka pay IT consultants to develop the software).

Since I am paying for the development costs (even code monkeys need to be fed), why should I develop the software under the GPL and release it to my competitors as soon as it is complete?

Would I not essentially be subsidizing my competitors businesses?

Yes. The flip-side is that they will also subsidize your business when they contribute back to the common code base. This is one reason why the GPL is more business friendly than BSD licenses.

The question becomes one of "is it in my best interest to compete in the closed-source market and possibly lose everything if my competitor's product is more popular, or should I work in the open-source market with my competitors and split the profits equally".

The follow-on question becomes "how can I make profit if the software can be copied freely". The obvious answer is to not use copyright as a tool to create profit but to make profit from services and value-additions just like almost every other industry.

Back to your specific example. You say that you need the software to offer a non-unique service. You say that the software doesn't exist in "the wild". You say that you must bear the development costs upfront. Why not talk to your competitors and collaborate on the development? Surely they are in the same situation and would benefit from the software.

Thought example. Assume you have 4 competitors. Each of you would only pay 20% of the development costs instead of 100%. OK, you've now lost your "competitive edge" of being the sole owner of the software but in the Real World your 4 competitors would have developed their own software. So the reality is that you would still be competing but with the gamble that perhaps your closed-source software wasn't as good as the similar product of one of your competitors. So you've paid 100% of the costs and risked it all instead of paying 20% and reducing your risks, all in the vague hope that your software will be the best and you will dominate the entire market. Even worse, your customers have to indirectly pay for your costs so they foot 100% of the development costs instead of the 20% that was possible with open source. The customers are the big losers from closed source: there is no code reuse and thus there are greatly increased costs.

Seems to me that collaboration via open source software is the sensible business approach.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[budgenator]

options;

1 Buy proprietary software that sort of almost does what you want and change business method to fit software, pay big money up front plus support contract.

2 Hire programers to write 5 million lines of code taking 2 years costing big money.

3 Hire programer to add a 10 thousand lines module to code in existing GPL'd project taking 8 weeks,
a keep module plus any fixes to base code and never be able to distribute it. Negaqtive Karma due to being stingy but legal.
b submit fixes to base code back to project, keep module and never distribute it. Karma nuetral and legal.
c submit everything back to the project and watch your competitors steam over your module being better than the module that they didn't release. Positive Karma

Besides if your competitors aren't using open source the chances are good they'd never see it. Open source is free, as in freedom of choise the above is pretty much your choises.

Re:Convince me to use Open Source

[alexpage]

If you want to build on GPL code in-house, you don't need to GPL your own code. Just refuse to accept the GPL, as is your right under the GPL, and then normal copyright law comes into play, so you can do what you want with the code so long as you don't distribute it in any way whatsoever.

What?

[autechre]

1) You have to install software correctly anyway. Microsoft's appearance of "easy installation" is a myth, because you still have to have the knowledge to set things up so that you don't get owned, and then you also have to go out and get 3rd party products to fix their design mistakes (such as anti-virus software, remote desktop, etc.). The most recent one I'm trying is this one:

http://www.pivx.com/qwikfix/

2) I actually think that this is almost offtopic, because the article was talking about Open Source software, and any problems in propagating new versions or configuration changes that I can image would only come from using commercial software on Linux. For software that stores its files in /etc, rsync-over-SSH certainly isn't "a hell", nor are private package repositories. If products are making your life hell, it's not the fault of Linux that you chose those commercial products over the many other available ones.

3) All I can tell you is that reading the documentation which came with a Netscreen sucked a whole lot more than the docs for iptables and ipf. Documentation is hard, of course, and many Open Source/Free projects lag behind here, but the large ones are often well documented. Just look at the user-annotated online docs for PHP as an example. As for commercial software on Linux, see #2.

4) Again, the article was talking about the use of Open Source software. If you're using proprietary software on Linux, you're going to run into the same old support problems. I'm sure commercial support is very good if you have a service contract with IBM for your IBM hardware, but I've found getting help with Open Source software (LUG mailing list, HOWTOs) to be easier than "official" commercial support.

Situations alters cases

[Felinoid]

A montra of a friend of mine years ago.

What you need and how you approch the problem will effect the results.
You list Apache as being a pain to set up correctly but here I do it often on my home computer from remote with little to no effort at all. It takes me a total of 30 seconds.

You mention the total lack of commertal documentation. I wonder why anyone is ever supprised or worse why so few ever bother to consider that a free product has Free documentation and would obveously be lacking in commertal documentation for a lack of NEED. Selling air isn't proffitable when free air is good and plenty.

4)Worse support(usually) from commercial venders.

But... Aren't they all for supporting Linux?
I read it on slashdot it must be true.

Yeah I've noticed. Was a time when you could pop on IRC and get help but that dosen't seam to be an option anymore.

Vareous messages board and you could e-mail the authors but in time critical situations you gotta get somebody on the phone.

I hate phone support myself so the slower e-mails never been a problem for me but that's situations alters cases. Won't work for you I suspect.

Open Source = good ... but

[mikefocke]

Professional means:
Coding to a standard; does open source have a reviewer who can compell every project/fix to adhere to the coding standards
UI to a standard; ditto
Documentation to a standard; ditto
Providing tests which go into a test suite that is used to assure no regression; ditto
Release management that assures that standard functionality, load, longevity, security and stress tests are run before the product goes out; ditto

The wornderful anarchy that is the open source movement is one of its strengths, but is the source of some significant weeknesses IMHO.

Proprietary development has its down side but at least there is someone who can enforce the standards and make sure that those things that are necessary for total product quality are there.

We use OSS a lot and it is wonderful for CS types who work full time in software development. But can I deploy it to a entire company or give it to my wife?

Re:Open Source = good ... but

[Little Brother]

Your first qualification for professional focuses on standards compliance. Looking at the track record, most OS projects seem to meet the ISO standards, while CS projects, especialy those marketed in Redmond, will often break the standard to make their version "better" and make sure that standards-based competitors don't have the non-standard "features". In that relm the track record of OS projects far surpasses CS software.

I am going to grant you the UI standard issue, OS projects do seem to have a problem there.

Documentation is far more standard in many OS projects than in CS projects. CS projects do their documentation however they whant they do not as often use the man and info format helpfiles that are standardized both in output format and access method.

Providing tests... I am just a bear of very little brain, I don't know what you mean here, clairification please?

As far as realease management, OS project release management generaly has three stages. Alpha software is the first stage, in this stage the software testers extensively test the software and often make fixes on the fly. The testerbase for alpha software is small and generaly fall within the heavy programmer demeographic, possibly even only the development. The second stage, beta software, (0.x) is relased for general use with the cavet that it is likly to still contain bugs. This allows potentualy hundreds of thousands of people to try more different combanations of commands and enviroment settings than a closed development team could ever reasonably replicate. This real-world test method reaches many different demographics who will use or misuse the software in many ways that the developers never considered or accounted for and thus would not have tested in a closed project. These users will submit their error reports and some of them will even submit codefixes. The final release product shoud therefore have been extensivly tested for standard functionality, load, etc. much more rigurously than an artificial testbed could ever impliment.

Oh, and yes, entire companies are running OS projects now. Oh, and I don't know your wife, but my mother has no problems with using OS projects.

Re:Open Source = good ... but

[ajaf]

If i take your post to evaluate closed source, professionalism doesn't exist.
And of course, you can deploy OS to a company or give it to your wife, mother, sister, sons. I do.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[BadmanX]

You can sum up whether Open Source is good for you very easily.

Are you selling goods or services? Open Source is your best friend, because it reduces your overhead.

Are you selling software itself? Open Source is your worst enemy, because it takes away your only revenue stream.

Make your decisions accordingly, but know that Open Source (or Free Software or whatever you want to call it) is not the panacea its proponents claim it is.

Re:I RTFAed..

[grahamlee]

apt-get does a little to resolve this; i.e. you still sometimes need to install shedloads of additional packages but it *should* DTRT and get the correct packages for you. There also exists apt-rpm for Red-Hat derived distros. Other than that, ports-based systems such as FreeBSD's, Gentoo's and Darwin's seem to do a good job; you run a makefile and they get the appropriate code, configure it in the optimal manner for your system, compile and install it all in one go. In a well-written ports system it's rare to require user intervention except when necessary.

Re:Open Source Is Communism

[perly-king-69]

Okay, it's OT (but a reply to a post nevertheless), but certainly not Trollish.

Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source is quaint... but like it or not people (even developers) have to eat.

Check out this article. Sort of sums it up whether you know it or not.

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[autechre]

I realize that this is a troll, mainly because all of your logic is flawed, but I'll respond to part of it.

There are plenty of auto repair shops that do shoddy work and charge you a ton of money. I'm lucky in that my father is a mechanic and knows plenty of reputable places.

On the other hand, a co-worker of mine fixed up an old bike of mine so that I could ride to work instead of drive. He did it because he loves working on bikes, and wouldn't take money. Of course he did a good job, because he enjoyed doing it.

People can be rewarded for their work in many ways. Sometimes those involve money directly, or indirectly ("help me move, there will be pizza and beer.") Sometimes you trade your area of expertise for theirs by exchanging work, and sometimes they are rewarded by the love of what they are doing.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

"You fund the open source projects "

hmmm... sounds like everyone spends some money for software that they use... almost like the "buy" the software they use... almost like the microsoft business model.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Medcoop]

Almost certainly parent is trolling or joking, but this is one of those arguments that comes up all the time and infuriates me everytime I hear it.

If companies don't spend their money on proprietary software, then they will spend their money on something else, or they will pay their employees more, or they will pay their shareholders more.

If they spend the money on something else, then that industry gets the money.

If they give their employees more, then they buy pretty shiny things, or new Dells or whatever.

If they pay their shareholders more, then Daddy gets a new Jag. RAWK!

The money doesn't just vanish off the face of the planet because people aren't buying software. It goes along different routes and into other interesting investments. Perhaps more valuable ones than upgrading your desktop to the newest standard crap.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[OldManAndTheC]

Non commercial software = less profits for businesses = worse economy = worse for the people.

Profit is not the only way to measure a successful economy, or a successful society.

Open source is a little like a community garden. If enough people pitch in to plant the garden, they can all enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Now imagine that instead of planting the garden themselves, the town council decides to bring in a capitalist to do the job. The capitalist buys the land, hires local people to plant the garden, and when it is finished he erects a gate at the front, and charges admission to anyone who wants to enjoy it. He makes back his investment and collects a profit on the fees. So under which scenario is the community better off? Either way they end up with a garden, the difference is that they only own it if they plant it themselves.

What has really happened is this: in the private investment model, the town does not want to assume the risk of the investment. They hand the risk off to a capitalist, who is happy to take it along with the promise of future profits.

In the public investment model, the risk is spread out over a wider base. Each person who takes the time to plant a tree in the garden risks wasting his time if the garden fails. But he also gets the possibility of enjoying the garden if it flowers.

So far, private investment has worked better because it is more efficient (some would argue though that much of the efficiency comes from externalizing costs). Open source provides a vehicle for public investment that is just as efficient and effective as the private model, if not more so.

To the extent that open source development exposes and removes inefficiencies in current software practices, it is good for the economy. The "profits" are enjoyed by everyone who uses open source software, and who leverages that software to create new products and services at a lower cost.

Can the economy function without profits? Surely it can. However, in order for investment to work without capitalists, public institutions must become risk takers, and the owners of those institutions (i.e. taxpayers) must decide that it is better for them to assume risk themselves than to hand it off to a capitalist middleman.

Will this ever happen? Probably not, because most people see risk as a negative, and would rather have someone else deal with it. Of course, in the end we all have to deal with risk whether we like it or not.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Good question. You might try looking for the answer(s) at places like: the Salvation Army, the local non-profit foodshelf, the Free Software Foundation, the ACLU, church soup kitchens, the Microsoft Foundation, the Red Cross, United Way, domestic violence centers, crisis hotlines, the volunteers in North Dakota walking around in the cold looking for Dru Sjodin or clues to her whereabouts, Jimmy Carter and the Habitat for Humanity, the Peace Corp, missionary groups that build hospitals and schools, etc etc. Can't imagine why those people drag themselves out of bed and go do all that stuff. For free. Pure insanity, probably. Or maybe an innate human desire to perform acts of compassion towards other humans. If that's actually different from insanity that is.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa there, big fellow!

You talk abou the economy like it consists of nothing but software development. In fact, most of it consists of businesses that have nothing to do with software development!

Now what are the effects of open software on businesses that have nothing to do with software devlopment but use software in the course of their business?

Gee, they have to pay less for software; like nothing! And rather than a yearly recurring cost (that most proprietary software imposes) if the software does what they need, they don't need to waste time upgrading and retraining on software that does the same thing the old stuff did.

So the scenario you present only applies to software development companies. For the entire rest of the economy, it goes like this:

Non-commercial software = less costs = more profit = better economy = better for the poeple

Haha

[xant]

Good one. Knowing how to program isn't a skill anyone can just acquire by being exposed to computers. After all, implementation hiding is one of the principles of interface design. So people exposed to the interfaces of software are being shielded from how it works internally, and they aren't going to absorb that knowledge. And even if they were exposed to the guts all day long, programming has a conceptual foundation in mathematics and needs a great deal of patience and practice--practice developing your memory to hold long logic chains mentally until they come to fruition in the software, practice knowing what patterns work and what don't, practice building disciplined habits.

That said, I've always argued that anyone can become a computer programmer. But the skills are not the sort of thing you pick up just by using a computer all your life. You have to seek out training beyond that.

I do agree with his point about the service model of software development. It's just not going to be anywhere near as hard as he claims it will be to get a job that way.

Could someone answer my questions?

[jolshefsky]

I thought, "great ... this will finally explain this 'open source' thingy completely." Unfortunately, I still have the same questions as when I started. I know it's kind of late in the game (i.e. this comment will probably get buried in the Slashdot world) but I thought I'd take a crack anyway.

1. Why is it called "open source?" To me, this means that the source code--the "source"--is available for review and use by anyone--hence, "open." The article seems to be comparing the waterfall model of software development with a colaborative model, calling the former "closed source" and the latter "open source."
2. I gather that there are some (most?) open-source projects have a licensing agreement that says that if you use the project as part of your own that you have to publish the source to the public. Is this true? I assume this is true in some cases, and if so, isn't it a pain to align all the licensing agreements (i.e. you can't use a project that requires published source code and a project that only provides binaries in your own project because the licensing conflicts, right?)
3. It seems that if the owner of a project publishes the source code for the project, they can't make money. Or, at least, they'll make less money ... especially if they create some clever way of doing things that people will immediately "borrow" as soon as they see how it's done. Does this have anything to do with "open source?"
4. If you're a programmer, how do you make a living making open source programs? It seems they're all given away for free, so "no money in, no money out," right?

Thanks.

Re:Could someone answer my questions?

[LemonYellow]

If this is a troll, I apologise for my naivete. Anyway, here are your answers:

1) The article suggests that open source methods are useful even in a closed environment. You're right; If the code isn't available then it isn't open source.

2) 'License alignment' can be a problem. The premise is that you only get to play the open source game if you play by the rules; If you want to use the products of others' hard work, you have to make your own code available. Projects which rely on closed binaries can't use code licensed under the (restrictive) GPL at all, but may be able to use code with less restrictive licenses (like the Lesser GPL.)

3) Plenty of companies make money from open source code, they just don't make it from keeping code secret. Usually the money is to be made by adding convenience (shrink-wrapped software with a nice installation routine, say) or services (such as support.) Of course, they don't have the same development costs as companies which are closed, as they can build on the work of others rather than starting from scratch.

4) Most programmers (AFAIK) work for companies where the end product isn't software. They are in-house programmers developing internal systems, or the company uses software to sell hardware, or the company uses software to sell support. Companies which go open-source will surely have a business plan which will take into account the loss of revenue in software sales. The money is to be made elsewhere.

Re:Could someone answer my questions?

[GoofyBoy]

1. Yes the article has it wrong. OpenSource is nothing to do with the development methology.

2. OpenSource isn't a legal license, but it does imply that whatever you do to the code, you share it the same way the original person intended to (as stated in the applicable license).

3. If the owner does something brilliant and he wants to make money, then he should have it closed sourced. That way he becomes the sole-provider of the product. Usually things are open sourced because they want people to see the code and be impressed/use it/improve on it/do something with it. Its quite a nice way of thinking about code and programming.

4. A programmer can get hired to do fixes, changes or customizations. It also looks nice on a resume if its a big well known project.

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain. ph p

Re:Could someone answer my questions?

[qtp]

1) correct.

Open Source does mean that the source code to the software is open for review and use by anyone who cares to honor the license.

2) Correct, sort of.

Some Open Source licenses require that you distribute the code to any programs that you distribute (key-word: distribute). If the software is licensed under the GPL, this means that if your changes are for internal use at your company only, then there is no requirement to distribute the developed code, but if you are going to distribute (give away or sell) the programs, then you must make the source code available to anyone who recieves a copy of the program from you.

Other Licenses are less restrictive, such as the BSD license. If you base your product on the BSD license, you may relicense your version of the program however you see fit, but under some instances you must acknowledge that some of the product is based on BSD licensed software and include a copy of the license with your product.

There are other Open Source licensing schemes, such as the Artistic License, which have thier own restrictions (or lack of them) on development and distribution. If you are truly interested, I suggest that you make use of Google and research the full range of Open Source licensing before you choose one in particular for the basis of a project, or before you base a product on software governed by one of these licenses.

3) Incorrect, mostly.

If your intention is to make your money from selling copies of programs, then perhaps you should not build your project on Open Source software. If your intention is to provide a service that requires this software, then there is no reason that you should not choose Open Source, as you can still restrict access to the source code by not distributing the software.

4) By building programs that specific institutions and individuals need for thier organisations, which is how most programmers make thier livings anyway. No-one will get to be the next Bill Gates, but at least the rest of us wont have to deal with software vendor reps or pay through the nose for a product that we are not permitted to fix.

Re:Could someone answer my questions?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a programmer, how do you make a living making open source programs? It seems they're all given away for free, so "no money in, no money out," right?

Software shouldn't be about money, it should be about love of the art. Like any good artist you can support your love by taking a job as a waiter or bag boy.

Or at least that's what we're told by open source zealots.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

"You fund the open source projects "

hmmm... sounds like everyone spends some money for software that they use... almost like the "buy" the software they use... almost like the microsoft business model.

The point is with open source you get network benefits; software grows better exponentially to the number of users/maintainers. If you use an open source program, not only can you fund programmers to maintain the package, but you also benefit from all other users' contributions. Now of course if a closed source shop is succesful they will also enjoy greater revenue, but their is less incentive to plow this back into development once they become succesful - in fact, the more succesful the product is, the less need there is to improve it, if it weren't good, people wouldn't buy it, would they? Contrast this to open source, where more users equals more itching, and thus, more scratching.

The way it is there is value-added (i.e. scratching an itch) development going on for closed software. Mostly by third parties, some of it very much free as in beer, some of it open source. But they just don't get access to the source code to the underlying product they're in essence fixing. (E.g. norton ghost, which is handy for cloning windows installations, has to do it's own NTFS filesystem because it usually runs from a boot floppy using PC-DOS. This has caused some file corruption. If you want to clone a linux installation, no props, any simple mini distribution will tar/cpio, gzip/bzip2, rsync and even netcat just fine with native fs support).

Free markets are about freedom

[argoff]

Open source will win over Microsoft in the marketplace for the same reasons that capitalisim won out over communisim. Because economies are not about markets, or social orginisation, but about freedom. When you have freedom then the markets tend to take care of themselves as people tend to use those freedoms to look out for their own best interest.

If you look at copyrights more like a government regulation on how people use and distribute information, and less like a free market property right - then the reason why GNU/Linux is taking off becomes obvious as well as the reason why it will win over Microsoft and other closed software inspite of their half-trillion market cap.

Re:Could someone answer my questions? (partial)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure more capable people will eventually answer, but I'll try to provide my answers to the first two questions at least.

1. You're correct, the article does seem to address the development model more than what "open source" is actually about. As you said, basically that means that if I get the program, I get the source, so I can inspect and change things.
2. A common misconception: you're probably referring to the "GPL" or (GNU) General Public License. In fact, I'm free to take GPL'd code, add to it, modify it etc., and never show anyone my changes, as long as I do not distribute the program. The GPL actually governs under which circumstances I can redistribute the code/program I received, i.e. only if I allow recipients access to my source code as well.

As to making money, most of it seems to boil down to "we don't sell products, we sell services/solutions!". Additionally, it is (IIRC) perfectly conforming with the GPL to sell your program for cash (see: Stallman and Emacs), it's just that it becomes difficult to force more than the first customer to pay up if they choose to redistribute for free...

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[plinius]

People can be rewarded for their work in many ways.

True, but programming is a serious undertaking. It's not like fixing a bike or even a car. To be done right it needs to be done by a person trained in engineering. The reason why Linux has fared well is that it is a copy of an existing engineered product, Unix.

Furthermore if I as a software engineer am going to code a serious project for no money, I at least have to have a paying job elsewhere. But why would I do what I do for money for free also? Think about it, it makes no sense.

If a person does type-of-work A for money, sure he will have no problem doing type-of-work B for free, because he is secure and sees no immediate threat to his livelihood. Unfortunately, work type B will have to be fairly easy for him to do it for free. And serious programming is NOT easy.

You should think these things through.

From the article

[mav[LAG]]

I wrote this article to help instill a sense of confidence about Open Source development in those who have not experienced it. I once did a rope course as part of a six-day seminar and felt a sense of terror in watching people repel a cliff. When my time came, I felt panic as I backed down the hill. After the first leap, the fear disappeared and I found repelling fun and nothing like I imagined. Trying anything new often provides us with a sense of anxiety.

He's right of course - repelling the cliff is the first thing to learn when rappelling :)

"Pure Linux" doesn't exist!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd LOVE to be able to go with a pure Linux / BSD / OS X whatever unix based solution instead of Windows

"Pure" Linux? I think that's part o' the problem. There's no ONE Linux. There's Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat/Fedora, Turbolinux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, MkLinux, Midori, and about 150 other distributions.

the free puppy is a more of a problem than its worth sometimes.

Yup!

I took in a stray cat once. It spent the night at my apartment, and then I notified the owner the next morning, and he came and picked it up. That cat left fleas like you could not believe, and even using a flea-bomber spray didn't solve the problem. I threw out my bedroom mattress; no help. Even when I switched to a different apartment in a different state, they were still managing to creep aboard and leaving bite marks on my legs. I finally realized that they were somehow surviving in my laundry bag, and once I threw that out, the flea problem was solved!

clear? this guy is joking or what?....

[1gor]

Well, maybe the author knows what is Open Source model, but he didn't make it clear at all from the arguments he used.

It seems that by Open Source he means Distributed Development. The model that he describes in a nutshell is distributed teams working arond CVS.

He confuses things further by saying that "Somehow and somewhere someone got the notion that Open Source development meant that everything had to use one of the many open source licenses".

C'mon! Open source means exactly that - source code that is open. The author keeps comparing his "open source" model with bureaucracy of some big stupid software house. You see, in the "proprietary" organisation somebody has to write specification from scratch and keep it on a desk for months, while smart "open source" developers find what was written on the net and go from there.

Why "proprietary" developers cannot use Google escapes me.

Basically, the article seems an attempt on self-promotion. Is it because "Open source" is a buzzword nowadays?

Manager commits?

[aminorex]

The article is mostly a description of
standard practice in the real world, with
one exception: He describes a process in
which repository commits are made by a
single cvs manager. That is insane. But
then, the guy is a CPA, so his bean-counting
fascism has to show somehow.

CVS doesn't really model the ideal OSS model.

[cduffy]

Per subject. In a CVS-based project, only trusted committers are permitted write access to the repository -- giving it out blindly is asking for someone to exploit pserver's many security holes -- and many operations (such as submission and merging of 3rd-party patches) need to be handled manually.

I far prefer Arch, as it is largely designed to model the development process used for Free Software. (BitKeeper's distributed functionality permits it to be used in a similar manner). Anonymous contributors can create their own private branch, held on their own computer, and commit to that branch or merge submissions from others into it; they then can request that the project maintainer merge from this private branch into his or her own (which is presumably used for cutting release builds).

The distributed development model has use in other situations as well -- it means a developer on a commercial product can create a private branch on his or her laptop and work offline while still keeping changes revision controlled; arch similarly makes it trivial for a company to maintain a branch for changesets (yes, *changesets*, not *file revisions*) which have succesfully passed their automated testing process or the QA department's scrutiny.

CVS does poorly at modeling such processes, and I think it unfortunate that its name has become synonymous with OSS development.

(And yes, I'm a bit biased. For that matter, I'm currently the sometimes-maintainer of a piece of software, cscvs, which among other things has the ability to build changesets from a CVS repository and import them into Arch).

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there are 2 things that change perception; volume of positive articles about OS, and, more importantly, time. It seems like many people around here are unreasonably impatient. World doesn't change fast; inertia rules. It'd be better to concentrate on fact that things ARE moving, even if not at lightning speed we'd like to. But at the same time, OS is gaining momentum, and if it takes few more years for "everyone" to get it, so be it.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[comet69]

hahah man.. you guys are hilarious...and totally misunderstood the whole point... i pay a shit load of bills every month just so ya know... which is part of the reason i started this whole convo.

and if you are so retarded, that you don't agree with what humanely said, then we obviously know where you will eventually end up..

the world is built up of nothing but kings and queens that have tons of money and will always be rich, and the people that are poor, definitely stay poor for quite the majority of their life...

why would they even invent something like the opensource community if they didn't have some of the same thoughts as I do regarding this matter? obviously they have no capitalistic views if they want to give software away for free, and share knowledge with everyone in the world.. money only exists because of greed.. and our natural instinct to kill.. its just a simple way for us to slowly kill our fellow man..

its kind of the same thing when it comes the free music community.. the RIAA suing the pants off of teenagers who download music becuz they can't pay their huge salaries due to the small decrease in cd sales... stop downloading music if you support the idea of striving to make money.. becuz you're just like them..

my views are far from communist, but living a world based around more culture, art, and passion, is what we should be striving for.. money is nothing.. and it will only fuck us in the very end.. its pointless.. its hard to convince those who have already been corrupted..

its already happened in so many aspects.. money and music is just couple examples..

it may be a little off subject, but think about the fact that the artists that the majority of world listens to, are nothing but brainwashing TNA video stars.. and have no talent, or passion for what they are doing.. then they end up bragging about their gold plated faucet for their sinks when MTV cribs comes to their house.. they dont think about the millions of people that are dying, struggling, and the huge amounts of other world issues that are getting resolved thanks to greedy fuckin piece of shit bastards, like most of you..

Seriously, Payment

[pnorthover]

It seems to me that the Open Source model relies on a stream of volunteers working for free. It's a good way to get programming practice, but, sooner or later, a person has to pay his bills. And if the executables are packaged and sold for money, do all the volunteers get a cut of the profits? Just wondering.

Re:Seriously, Payment

[plinius]

And if the executables are packaged and sold for money, do all the volunteers get a cut of the profits? Just wondering.

No! That's the insidious thing about open source. There is no way for those people who do the actual work to reap any benefits. Imagine an artist who is told by an art dealer "I'm going to make all the money and you will get nothing for your painting"... people would be outraged. But the propaganda of the open source movement says that this is not only good but the best way.

Clearly the open source movement is being run by scoundrels and thieves.

And not surprisingly, guess who is funding the Free Software Foundation? Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, etc...all companies that have shipped jobs to India lately.

Gee!

Re:Seriously, Payment

[Anonymous Coward]

People who write open source software usually benefit from the software. If I spot a problem in the linux kernel, and i offer a good sollution, it isn't going to bother me that I don't get paid for my fix. I use the OS, and now it has one less bug. Plenty of people do get paid for their open source work. Linus is driving around in a sports car, I think.

Re:Seriously, Payment

[plinius]

The paid ones are a tiny minority.

As for personal benefit from free code, I think many people are writing the code for other reasons entirely. To get attention, to prove oneself, to feel "cool", or just because they don't think they can sell the code to anyone--which for Linux is the rule, not the exception.

Yes

[KalvinB]

I occassionally get e-mails whining that I charge for access to much of my site (you're free to browse every file I have though). Many subscription sites get the same flak. What people don't realize is that it costs money (often lots of it) to run a web-site. Unless someone wants to donate several thousand to my site, it's going to remain a mostly subscription site.

It's the same way with OpenSource vs ClosedSource. I recognize that some things could just as well be free. As a result a lot of source code I write gets posted for free on my web-site for anyone to use. However I also recognize that free don't pay the bills so I keep some things to myself.

Namely complete projects. Many completed projects get their source code released but a couple are completely closed except for a few pieces (Ogg Vorbis with DirectSound class, for example). It would be possible (and possibly beneficial) to release parts of your code under your own custom license or the BSD license if you don't plan on licensing the technology.

Namely one that recognizes that it is intended for use in a single closed commerical product. Anyone else may use it for NON-commerical purposes as long as the source remains open. Otherwise they have to license it from you.

But, contrary to what some may say, Open Source is not the be all solution. But neither is closed source. Again, I would recommend going through your project to see what could opened and then have it out there while still working on it internally. Anything that isn't unqiue should be the first to consider opening up.

Open Source essentially reduces programmers to street performers with a very select few seeing any money (much less livable wages) from their efforts. Namely the people who organize the project.

There are a lot of people working on Linux and very few of them are getting any checks in the mail. Even fewer can live off the checks they do get.

Ben

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

" I occassionally get e-mails whining that I charge for access to much of my site (you're free to browse every file I have though). Many subscription sites get the same flak. What people don't realize is that it costs money (often lots of it) to run a web-site. Unless someone wants to donate several thousand to my site, it's going to remain a mostly subscription site."

Those emails (that flak) are one of the prices you pay in the current market to do what you do.

It does depend on what you are trying to accomplish with your site. What is the purpose of the site? Would it make sense for Amazon to be a subscription site? Can you make more money some other way with the extra viewers/visitors/readers you may get if the site were free? These are tradeoffs. You pays your money and you takes your picks!

A Nony Mouse

missing the mark

[jmcclure]

I think there's a distinction in the cited article that a lot of the people replying to this post may be missing. The author's definition of "Open Source" does not match what most of us would call "Open Source." Here's a quote from the article:

"Management can determine if they want to make an Open Source project available to the public or keep it private."

The author writes this article from the position that "Open Source" simply means writing software using standards-based, collaborative development methods...even if the source is never made available to the public or even the end user.

I think the author describes a lot of good practices for writing software, but what he describes has nothing to do with what most of us would consider "open source" (and certainly not with the official OSI definition). The practices described could easily be used (and are used) by corporations to develop proprietary closed-source software.

Re:missing the mark

[RedRocketRanger]

The author comes across as a salesman or manager who is trying to sell a product that he knows very little about. I was once told in an interview by a manager that the company uses "extreme programming" methods. Turned out that their version of paired programming involved them talking to each other about their problems when they got stuck.

Submitter works for SCO?

[A coward on a mouse]

"Sam Hiser writes"? Huh. More like "Sam Hiser cuts and pastes". The story submission is a direct rip-off of Eugenia Loli-Queru's story on OSNews.

To be fair to Sam, he may have noted this in his submission and the editor may have neglected to mention that Slashdot is trailing OSNews on this story. Either way, I think credit should be given to Eugenia and OSNews for writing the blurb if not for breaking the story.

Re:Submitter works for SCO?

[A coward on a mouse]

Sh*t. What a jerk I am. Sam submitted the same story to both sites. Pardon me while I bash my own head with a clipboard.....

Pie Iesu Domine
Donna eis requiem
[whack]

Pie Iesu Domine
Donna eis requiem
[whack]

There, that's better.

Red Flags

[evil_one666]

1) Talks in grandious terms about his expertise in managing a large open source project (http://leopard.sourceforge.net/) which on closer inspection seems to be empty and unused vapourware

2) homepage (http://www.consultingtimes.com/) is a very recently started blog whos purpose seems to be to establish the author as some kind of authority on Open Source

3) Seems at several points to be making sales pitches towards US local government.

4) The letter from the CIO just doesnt ring true...

conclusion: this seems to be a ropey attempt to establish credability in potential US local government clients by somebody not quite as into Open Source as he would like us (and his potential clients) to believe

Re:Haha

[renuncln]

I have always been of the opinion that even with training most people are not able to program. I think that as you stated this has a lot to do with the ability of people to be able to hold long logic chains in their heads. A large percentage of people are have a very hard time with the basics of logic. Anyways I believe that programming is an art form and the difference between it and most other arts is merely which side of the brain is used.

Re:The biggest misunderstandings? So wrong

[AdamInParadise]

That's so wrong. A few projects out there are out of the grasp of a single human, that's for sure (Mozilla, the Linux kernel, OpenOffice...). Many are not very well documented.

But the thing is that most projects are fairly small. I routinely hack, modify and fix open source projects for my own goals. At first I was it bit terrified by the idea of reading the code source of Postgresql or some graphic library, but after the first few sucessfull attempts, it gets pretty easy. Sure, understanding everything in a project takes time, but learning enough to actually meet your goal is usually a one or two days problem (YMMV).

Long story short, if you have a motivation or a bucket of money, it can done in a reasonable amount of time.

I still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really know a lot about OpenSource - I've never even looked at Linux. I figured it'd mostly be the Freeware that comes with the source code that you can download all over the place.

What this guy seems to be talking about is the development cycle rather than Open vs. Closed source development. And from my experience, it's generally better to take time at the start of the project to build up an idea of what you're going to do and how you're going to implement it before you actually start doing anything. A very strong but simple foundation is very important to any project.

I have worked on a project that went through a lot of different contractor's hands and it showed. It looked like it has been put together by a committee, and although the user interface mostly *looked* the same, behind the scenes everything was implemented differently. There wasn't even a standard naming convention for the files. This made it a whole lot harder to pick up, and after working on it for 10 months (10 months of banging my head against the desk was about as much punishment as I could take), I still didn't know it inside out - I would expect to know a structured program very well after a few months.

So, not only did I have to work out the name of the file that I needed to change, I would have to work out how that particular unit worked before I could even start working out how to start fixing the problem. Every single time.

And don't get me started on how saturated it was in extremely dodgy 3rd party freeware, shareware and cheapware components and how they used chars instead of varchars in the database(!)

This is how I would imagine OpenSource code would turn out.

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[MoneyT]

The other problem is that people resist change simply because they don't want to have to go through the effort of changing or learning something new. Those people suck and I consider them worthless. Constantly change for the better. If changing something in your life will improve it in a significant way then do it. If not, then what's the point? Living the same unchanging boring life every day? I mean, sure it's just software so maybe I'm going a little far here. But when I switched to Firebird I was able to get an extra 30 minutes of sleep because my daily web checking took less time. That's a significant life change there.


Elitist much? Change for the sake of change, espesialy in the business world and in terms of investments is not always a good idea.

Ok, you want Mozilla to become accepted that's great. But you need to explain why it's worth changing to? For example, I use both Mozilla and Safari on my computer, but I use safari primarily. Why? Because it was the one I started with, so I'm ost familiar with it, and because I see no discernable value (for me) if using Mozilla as a primary browser. Does Mozilla have it's parts that I like, yes, but it's not worht it to me to give up safari for mozilla. That's what matters, and what the OSS community tends to forget. It isn't about whether it's technicaly better, it's about whether it's better for ME, or for someone else.

Re:How can he possibly claim that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, sorely lacking quality control...unlike Windows with their closed shop who never let a single thing past them - oh wait i forgot that XP had like 15,000 known bugs in the release form. but at least they knew it was there and addressed about 100 of those in the first service pack! Oh wait, i forgot too that there is already a patch for the Debian *fiasco* too and that anyone using Linux should have patched their systems already.
Do you secretly work in M$ Marketing? Or are you just a stockholder?

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[swillden]

Whoooossshhhh

street performers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Open Source essentially reduces programmers to street performers with a very select few seeing any money (much less livable wages) from their efforts"

This is not a great analogy. Only those in the immediate vicinity of a street performer get any benefit from the performance. So, if another street performer does not happen to be near by during a performance, they get no benefit from the other performer's "work." Also, a street performance is ephemeral.

Now, as to a Free Software programmer/contributor, things do not shake out that way. Even if they do not get paid any money for their work, they do get the work of countless others to use without the obligation to pay for that work. So, one produces a "little code" but receives a "lot of code." This is a good bargain.

It is better than trying to code all of their needs on their own. They may also think it is better than charging for all of their work, but having to pay for all of everyone else's work.

I always seem to get the feeling that those opposed to Free Software see their income potential threatened. Those actually contributing seem to be happy enough with the equation. It smells of high proest syndrome to me.

Why don't you start a movement to outlaw all volunteer labour in all fields? It can't be good for the economy. It cartainly provides unfair competition to those trying to make a living in any particular field. Also, we will have to outlaw spectators at all amateur sporting events. Can't have them competing with the pros now can we. That can't be good for the economy either. While we are at it, we need to include music and other forms of art as well. Have we missed anything?

A Nony Mouse

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[fitten]

Now of course if a closed source shop is succesful they will also enjoy greater revenue, but their is less incentive to plow this back into development once they become succesful - in fact, the more succesful the product is, the less need there is to improve it, if it weren't good, people wouldn't buy it, would they? Contrast this to open source, where more users equals more itching, and thus, more scratching.

Itching/scratching means that there is something lacking that needs to be fixed/added. a) this implies that there is no single solution that will solve everyone's problem, b) you can never approach convergence on a solution because the more people there are that use the software, the more "itch" there is, which means that the software diverges from the solution. Commercial software has the opposite idea... that you can eventually solve all the problems (or at least a large subset of the details of the problem) with a single application, and c) since there will always be more itching/scratching that needs to be done, your OSS app will never solve your problem completely and is inherently less good because there is always the need to improve/fix it. Now... that means a few things... bloat, feature creep, and/or large numbers of variants (versions).

I guess the other problem you have to combat is actually getting money for your services. The nature of most people is to take what they can get for free. Basically what it forces seems to be the commoditization of programming labor. However, what it will turn out to be is that labor wages will drop to a point where few people can make a living on it, fewer people will choose to enter into the field, and most programming effort will take place after-hours by folks who have to maintain a "real" job to pay the bills and spend what off-time they want to spend maintaining your code. Because you can't make a living at programming, fewer people will want to try it. In the end, you'll have few full-time programmers (and those who do this will probably be paid low wages but will require lots of knowledge/experience to differentiate them from other programmers to the point of someone wanting to pay them for their services - but you can't afford schooling because you couldn't afford it), and more and more software being maintained as pet projects or hobbies by those who will fix your problem when they find the time to get around to it, because they can't afford to dedicate their time to the problems of the software and still put food on their family's table.

YES! Etcha-sketch rocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

asdfasdfasdf

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[Bullet-Dodger]

Furthermore, it is completely impossible to blend open/proprietary software schemes in a business model. Can't be done. Give it up.

Somebody better tell Apple. 'Cause they, uh... do.

Re:Haha

[D iz a n k Meister]

I would tend to agree that most people could be able to program a computer.

The long logic chains are a part of programming, but I don't think that's where people have trouble. People don't understand how to break a task down into simple steps in another language because they haven't been taught to think that way because thinking that way makes no practical sense in any other context except programming. Even if one is doing some mathematical proof, they are not thinking in terms of "print "Q"; print "E"; print "D"; print "\n";" when they are finished. There is always some higher level of abstraction people use to operate in reality that you have to be able to lose to program effectively.

Basically, everyone can understand:

for each line in a file, if a line contains the pattern foo, print that line to the screen

Not everyone can take that and turn it into a real program or even a script. Because they don't understand that there are smaller steps to take to perform that task or specify that task to an interpreter. Which has to do with their perception of reality and not their relative logic skills.

Re:With all due respect, how many of these are nee

[Apreche]

oh, well you are using Safari. Mozilla doesn't have that many advantages over Safari because Safari is damned good. But compared to IE there is definitely a reason to change to Moz, in fact there are many many. I'm not saying everyone should use the same thing or any specific thing. I'm saying that people should change to a better thing if there is one. Especially if their current thing is extremely deficient. They shouldn't resist this change to a much better product simply because they don't want to be bothered.

a simple rebuttle

[Anonymous Coward]

While they have other advantages, message simplicity is one reason the RIAA is so effective in lobbying against filesharing. Their message (correct or not is beside the point) is summed up in one word, "theft". I haven't heard anyone make an equally coherent one word counter argument.

Oh, allow me: "Bullshit."

Re:Haha

[silverbax]

In order to program user code, just as with creating art or music, requires the ability to think in the abstract.

Can anyone be a programmer? No. Not even close. My out-of-thin-air guesstimate is that only 10% of people who are currently employed in the world as programmers can even be considered exceptional, experienced programmers. There are only a few people who are able to even be GOOD programmers, let alone the slim percentage of those who become GREAT programmers. ESR is populated by regimented business minds who know a great deal about IT processes, but that doesn't mean they understand how AI workor or when the 'tipping point' will occur where the average consumer interacts with high end technology on a daily basis.

These quotes are pie-in-the-sky dreams at best.

Re:Haha

[D iz a n k Meister]

I wasn't trying to say that everyone is capable of creating excellent code. I also wasn't trying to imply that the ability to code means that person has any understanding of advanced CS ideas.

What I was trying to say was that programming could be as common place as writing. Not everyone is a good or even remotely great writer, but most everyone can communicate their ideas through the written word. Which is why I don't think it's such a stretch of the imagination to think that most people would also be capable of communicating their ideas to a computer. It's just that people don't know how to break down their ideas into ideas that a computer can understand.

But as computer become more and more ubiquitious, communicating desires to a computer should become more and more common to the common man.

requires the ability to think in the abstract means what, exactly? It means that you need to understand that what you think you're doing is not, from some critical vantage point, exactly what you are doing. In music, that means that you understand that the intervals of the scale are the same, regardless of the key you're playing in, even though the fundamental frequencies of the sound are different. In math, it means that you understand that the addition and multiplication tables are arbitrarily defined, and quantity does not have any direct correlation to numbers. For programming, it means that you have to understand the finite ammount of work you are able to carry out in each step of a program to get any arbitrary ammount of work completed by that program.

I think anyone can understand those concepts, like anyone can understand gravity, and use them to do their bidding. But you're right, not everyone will be EXCELLENT at it. So if you're trying to define programmer to mean an Excellent Coder, well versed in the problems of CS then yes you are right, but I don't think that's what the OP meant when he said that anyone could be a programmer.

Re:Open Source is bad for the economy

[B'Trey]

Certainly, some poeple do that. Some people bound out of bed and can't wait to get to work because they love their job. Do you really think that MOST people act that way, though? Do you really think there's enough people to handle every job there is, from taking orders at McDonalds to standing on the production line at Ford to driving the semi across 18 states to deliver products to your local store, that will do it without thought of pay, just because of an "innate human desire to perform acts of compassion?" Do you really think we can run our entire economy on that?

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[autechre]

You're a programmer, right? Really good mechanics are at least as few and far between as really good programmers. They too have classes, exams, certifications (such as ASE), etc. And as with programmers, it's often the person that makes the difference, not the certifications. And surprise surprise, today's cars with their many computerized systems are so complicated that mechanics use a series of electronic "debugging" tools to narrow down the problem, but the operator of these tools still has to have a vast amount of knowledge. And the field is indeed wide; a Honda mechanic may well not have a clue what to do with your transit bus.

I'm also not sure where you get the idea that people who program for a living don't do it at home in their spare time as well. Many people are completely absorbed in computer-land; they would rather do nothing else. What do you expect them to do at home? Knit?

I'm a sysadmin at work, and shock! I also do it for free in my spare time, even though I have several non-computer interests. It's something that I enjoy, and it's a way I can help people out who are doing something that I feel is important, but aren't as computer-savvy as me (and shouldn't have to spend their time on such things when they have important work that they CAN do well).

Additionally, I find your assertation that copying Unix is the reason for Linux's success to be unprovable. And why has emacs succeeded, while BeOS failed?

Re:If you don't pay people to write code...

[plinius]

You attempted analogy with mechanics is inappropriate: software engineers such as myself would be better compared to automotive engineers, who design cars, not to people who service them. To be a successful engineer of any kind takes at least a four-year degree.

A better analogy is to compare sysadmins to mechanics. These seem to require as you say, only certifications.

Re:Haha

[silverbax]

I've changed my mind over the years on this. I used to think anyone could do anything ( in terms of mental exercise), but I no longer feel this is the case.

The ability to think in the abstract is a blanket statement which can be further clarified into specific creative methods:

1. To create 3D art, you must be able to visualize a 3D model in your mind. You must be able to rotate the image, flip it, stretch it and contort it - mentally.

2. To create music, you must be able to hear the notes and chords in your mind, even if those notes and chords have never been played in the order you hear them. You have to be able to implement changes in a song standard just by closing your eyes and listening.

3. To paint or draw, you must be able to visualize how the picture will look before it's begun, down to the conveyed emotion.

4. To write a piece of program code, you must be able to visualize bits of memory in your mind as though it was a real object. If you are programming a multi-dimensional array, you must be able to flip that array around in your mind, go down a number of levels and locate where "variable x" is supposed to be. This is why so many programmers never get past pointers when learning to code. If you get pointers, it's a seemlingly easy concept, but as both Joel Splosky and several others have mentioned, even most C programmers don't understand them. Go figure.

Re:Haha

[Hast]

But there are languages where you don't need to know what a multi dimensional array is. In fact it might be a benefit in some (eg functional languages) not to know about it.

I'm quite sure that most people will never get to the level of coding moderately complicated systems. That takes engineering to be good, and most people just aren't interested enough to do that.

The problem right now is that most people don't even consider that they can tell the computer to do new things. Basic things like renaming a bunch of files in a directory and perhaps even small web crawler scripts. Those are the things which could turn normal people onto programming. (Well IMHO naturally. ;-)