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Open Source Spreads Beyond Software
B'Trey writes "Britain's Prospect Magazine is running an article entitled 'The Microsoft Killers.' The article covers the success of Open Source software in particular but also looks at how the methods and practices of Open Source are moving outside the software environment."
..I think the idea is extremely novel! however, i don't think it will work simply because of the measurability of "good things". ie. in software we can always pick, and recommend, Mozilla over IE., not only cos it is open source, but because it is better security wise. however how do you tell someone that "OpenCoke" is better than Coca-cola, can this be done? if it tasted as good and didn't rot your teeth i guess so.. heh, but i dont think prices can be cut - and freeness is one of the big drawing factors to OS/GPL products... what do you think?
by the way, i'm allergic to flames!
Tim
tim
A little premature for such a title maybe. F/OSS needs to concentrate on the details.. God is in the details, and this is where MIcrosoft excels. Sure, they have their shortcoming, but they Human Interface designs are uniform at least..
http://www.opensourcejudaism.com/
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I would suspect that Open Source is limited to particular categories of work. Labor intensive, but not capital intensive, activities are ideal for open source. With capital intensive endevours, the people that own the money want to own the output. Fortunatly, the captial required for many activities is dropping. With the low cost and ubiquity of technlogy, many formly expensive activities can be done by amateurs on an open source basis (software, indie films, encyclopedias/wikis, helpdesk/help forums, etc.).
For bigger open source projects, the problem is monetization -- converting the fruits of open source into money that goes to pay the burgeoning and unavoidable expenses of a large project. The free-software, expensive service model (RedHat) or free software, expensive hardware & service model (IBM) seems popular.
But there are limits. I doubt we will ever see open source retail stores, hardware factories, or apartment buildings (except on an unusual donation basis). Probably the only capital-intensive forms of "open source" is university science -- the scientists provide the labor, release there findngs to the public, and the government provides the money for the equipment (even here, university IP people try to own the fruits of the academic labors).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Open Music anyone?
;)
My only concern is, is it free for the idea of freedom or because nobody would pay for it anyway?
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A good example of open-source spreading beyond software is the Linux Professional Institute. They take suggestions on what should be on their certification exams, questions, and they make available the detailed process of the examination.
thisnukes4u.net
As you recognized towards the end of your post, the small details are being addressed at many levels. Stay tuned for a Linux distribution near you.
In fact, your specific example has been dealt with by Mandrake and Suse for the past 2/3 years. Where have you been?
And how do they do it? Better than Windows, most times.
No driver CD necessary. If it's supported, plug in the camera and it shows up on your desktop. Click on it and get your pictures. Now that was easy, wasn't it.
I am not impervious to criticism and there are tons of things that need improvement, but they are coming. Anyone who has used Linux for the past five years cannot be blind to the huge improvements in ease-of-use and consistency that have been made.
Finally, the community aspect of Linux is not to be dismissed. When I set somebody up with Linux, I make sure that his/her every whim is satisfied so that the experience is more positive than it was with their prior OS.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
The open source movement eschews proprietary controls and its software is usually produced not by firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of an application."
Groklaw is an example of this exact method, even though it is not involved in software development. It is a legal site that encourages anyone to join in, the results are not produced by law firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of the legal brief. It started as one woman's personal blog and then took off when the FOSS community saw the usefulness of having a subject matter expert in law commenting on cases that mattered to the community. So the community joined in and now it's a distributed project on the exact model of an Open Source programming project.
So these principles work for more than just programming. It's a useful model for any community project. The power of the community made manifest. We're stronger when we work together.
Well, it almost is.
ZeD
I doubt we will ever see open source retail stores, hardware factories, or apartment buildings
Actually it would be very hard to find "closed source" varients of the same. Imagine that if you shop at WallMart you couln't even look at Target. Imagine you couldn't check out competing apartments to the one you live in.
As for capital intensive, seems like bridges, dams, tunnels, skyscrapers are all pretty much open source.
Basically, open source benefits the industry at maybe a bit of cost to the individual corporation whereas closed source benefits the individual corporation at the expense of the industry. If "reinventing the wheel" is perceived as a loss, closed source is a good way to ensure the perpetuity of that loss.
BTW, open source does not mean free (as in beer) or cheap. Methinks open source may actually wind up more expensive than closed because it is sufficiently more effective that things will be done using open source that would never be attempted with closed source.
If you believe that open-source is causing unemployment due to a lack of a marketable product, then you are completely wrong. Open-source will, and is creating employment as programmers are being hired by small companies to tailor their software to their needs. It's just not as pervalent, as open-source is only just breaking into the SME market.
Small business can pay as well as big business, but you have to wear at least one other hat, and you don't get stock options.
You are right, parent is an idiot, most likely an American who thinks Communism == Fascism, because his country has consistantly gone to bat for the capitalist notion of "Freedom"; Freedom to purchase, freedom to be a slave to huge corporations which rape the land, the workers, the resources, and give him a pittance whilst writing another million dollar bonus cheque to its board of dictators for turning another staggering profit in a protectionist, closed competition market.
The BSA assumes three patently false notions:
1. That competition is good and is to be encouraged. This is nonsense. Competition fosters only an attitude of winning at all costs. That is why you have illegal drug use in sports and 85% of all CEOs who think that their books are cooked. Comepition is an objective moral evil.
2. That innovation is best accomplished in a proprietary environment. Well, that old canard has been laid to rest long ago. Innovation is best accomplished in an open and free environment. The best that a closed environment can ever hope to accomplish is to create a better mousetrap. The vision to create the original mousetrap came from outside the crippling corporate environment. It takes vision to get to the stars, and corporatists have proved time and again that they simply do not have that kind of vision.
3. That barrier free trade is good. This is the greatest falacy of them all. The only thing that free trade has accomplished is a lower standard of living for all. Corporatists flog free trade because it is good for them, but corporatists have their loyalties only to their corporations and not to their community or nation. Corporatists, and the corporations they run, are traitors. The same goes for the politicians that support them.
If you accept these things are true, you too are a corporate shill. Stand up and think for yourself and stop swollowing the corporatist propaganda.
This is my basic concern--that if they succeed in wiping out the remaining competition, there will be nothing to embrace/extend/extinguish and OS technology will freeze. If they can kill off the rest of the industry, there will be zero need to innovate...computing will enter a dark age.
This happened to the American auto industry in the seventies--and that was with three big competitors--there was no way for a small company to break in or innovate. Then cam the oil crisis and foreign cars, and America had no choice but to follow the leaders.
Of course, an OS is a lot different. It's possible to hide all your "IP" below an access layer (think PS/2) and that's that--only the hardcore hackers will be able to get to it, and you can charge a pretty penny for the right to modify it...which is pretty much how IBM and the other big iron computer companies treated their customers until recently. It's tough for anyone to compete with that.
There is a war between the MS controlled corporate desktop and the internet going on right now.
Lately I've seen "free computer classes" and "free developer training" popping up in the papers, and these classes are hilarious. The first five minutes is like a religious event--the speaker intones about his years as a professor, his years as an engineer, and how he loves computers, and how great they are...and then starts talking about how much innovation MS solutions provide and what a fantastic company they are. Then he starts in with the discussion of this fantastic MS-only solution.
Although they hate to admit it, I got one "professor" to admit he was being paid by a company that was taking a beating from open source, a company that sells only MS products, and he was just repeating the messages in the documentation kit they sent him. In other words, he's claiming to be an authority, but he's really a used car salesman, an infomercial "talking head". It's a shame, because he really had an impressive resume and career.
Funny thing is, he had that engineering career and professorship because he could go to libraries, universities, read books about all the math underlying enginneering, and he didn't have to get certs or attend corporate training sessions to do all of that. He has forgotten what freedom of information and technology did for him, and is now working to deny it from others. He doesn't even realize it, all he knows is the nice company is paying him to promote their product, and that product looks impressive to him, and that's about all he knows. He's retired, etc.
A lot of people in the audience were buying it. His credentials, like that of a priest, made his opinion mean something. And he is right to a certain extent...MS runs the corporate desktop. But there was no mention of the internet, open standards, other huge success stories (ebay, google) that use open source happily and succcessfully.
So which way will it go? Will the internet technologies work their way into the corporations, or will MS bust out of the corporations and creep into the internet? It will be a mix; many internet companies can't afford to lose a sale because a browser failed with their website. Thus they have to work to the lowest common denominator. They won't budge from that, and if people outside the corps use free software, that's the only real way to stop MS, prevent them from locking technology.
The problem is raising the lowest common technology level is a free way, and MS can't do it. They want to use pseudo open standards and then break them subtly when the time is ripe, and then blame the failures on non-standard platforms.
They've done it before, and that's their true goal with these patents and opening up of the C# bytecodes, etc...get people using a partially free implementation and lock it down. Ximian is betting they can come up with a free platform that will end up on MS boxes, but who knows?
Yep. It's the new kind of trolling. Moderation trolling. Get modded up, do something disruptive like changing your sig, let others point out said disruption, clean up after yourself, then ridicule the posters. Here's a journal entry which describes the method.
I realize you were only kidding, but GNU has nothing to do with the open source movement. GNU was started over a decade before the open source movement began. The start of the GNU project marks the beginning of the free software movement. The free software movement and the open source movement are different movements within the same community and, ironically (emphasis mine):
This quote was from an article RMS posted to the GCC mailing list.
Digital Citizen
...Open Source Toys?
Get it to spread into other languages in addition to Japanese, and add some open source electronic and mechanical toy designs and it might take off.
On a related note, I see O'Reilly and Associates is putting out a "Hardware Hacks for Geeks" book as part of their excellent "Hacks" series - possibly a starting point?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I think it's very appropriate to compare the universe of software development, or even business to an ecosystem.
I spent years in the environmental world, and to this day every time I walk in the woods I see examples of cutthroat competition and stunning examples of cooperation. I think the rise of free software/open source in a sense mirrors this property of complex systems of individual agents to have cooperation emerge as a major form of interaction. It is a restoring of a natural equillibrium that was disrupted by a decade or so of exponential growth. Closed operating systems and software that performs other, nearly universal functions are like weeds that prosper by being able to use the resources freed by the disruption to colonize new niches. Cooperative models can't self assemble quickly enough at first to compete.
In the long term the equillibrium will swing the other way, although not totally because cooperation is not a natural model in many situations. For example in vertical markets, the disincentives of cooperations outweigh the benefits. In that case internally developed systems make sense, and closed "black box" COT software is an acceptible compromise which maintains at least a level playing field.
I think cooperative models of production will always exist as long as the contract doesn't become the sole form of human relationship. But it will always coexist with competition as a pardigm. Speculation: as long as world population grows exponentially, and the world economy grows exponentially with it, competition will remain the dominant form of human economic interaction. It's interesting to speculate what will happen if world population stabilizes and growth switches from exponential to linear growth or steady state.
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