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Linux & Microsoft as a Cold War?
I confirm writes "The BBC's Bill Thompson summarises the GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft struggle as a "cold war", and in one choice quote says:"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
I'm not sure I accept Thompson's conclusions, however: "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." "
Regulation is the worst possible scenario for OSS, regardless of any pretense towards open sourcing software. Regulation means bureaucrats, who wield great power, and who will be attractive places for people like Microsoft, who possess vast fortunes, to spend it. For instance, imagine that they mandate open source, but then throw in a requirement that the programmer assume responsibility for its performance, or become liable in other ways. Then, the only people who would be able to participate would be companies with deep pockets. Like Microsoft.
To get everyone to release source code, just make the copyright laws do what they were intended to do in the first place: no binary files should have copyrights, only human-understandable information should be copyrighted. The same goes for encrypted or otherwise copy-protected information. Those are protected by trade secrets. The purpose of copyrights is to ensure that the ideas embodied by those works would be available for future generations, which doesn't happen if only the executable binaries are publicly available.
I think that while MS may be somewhat totalitarian in their practices, a better parallel to the Cold War would be capitalist versus socialist ideals. In this scenario, it is obvious that MS is the pinnacle of capitalist practices, while the Linux community is much closer to socialism - shared effort for shared gain, group ownership, etc. Think about that one ...
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RMS has always distanced himself from the Open Source movement because (he says) we avoid talking about "freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are entitled to".
He's right. We do avoid that. But not because we don't care about "freedom", "principle" or "rights". Speaking for myself, I trust that anybody who's ever heard me speak or read my writings on the First or Second Amendments knows that I am quite passionate and vocal about freedom and rights; like RMS, I defend them even when they are unpopular with my audience. Other Open Source advocates don't seem to me to be any slower than I to speak the language of "freedom" and "rights" when they judge it is appropriate.
But "when they judge it is appropriate" is a very important qualifier. There are two different kinds of reasons an open-source advocate might avoid speaking about RMS's `freedom'; either disagreement with his goals, or a judgment that doing so is ineffective, is bad tactics.
The difference is important, and this is where RMS misrepresents what we are about. He would have you believe that the FSF and OSI have diverged over vast matters of principle, when in fact the OSI (and the Open Source movement as a whole) is carefully designed to be able to include people with beliefs like RMS's.
The Open Source Initiative does not have a position for or against RMS's goals. Please don't take my word for this; go look at our advocacy materials on the Open Source website, especially the part in the FAQ where it says "Open Source is a marketing program for free software".
Now it is true that some individuals associated with OSI occasionally argue with some of RMS's goals and principles (and one of those individuals is me). But the OSI is a big-tent organization; we have never condemned RMS's principles, and never will -- because we don't need to!
The real disagreement between OSI and FSF, the real axis of discord between those who speak of "open source" and "free software", is not over principles. It's over tactics and rhetoric. The open-source movement is largely composed not of people who reject RMS's ideals, but rather of people who reject his rhetoric.
Is this justified? Well -- consider the 180-degree turnaround in press and mainstream perception that has taken place in the last fourteen months, since many people in our tribe started pushing the same licenses and the same code we used to call "free software" under the "open source" banner.
Where we used to be ignored and dismissed, we are now praised and respected. The same press that used to dismiss "free software" as a crackpot idea now falls over itself writing laudatory articles about "open source". And the same corporate titans who dismissed RMS as a `communist' are lining up to pour money and effort into open-source development. Our market share and mind share have both zoomed to a level that would have seemed the stuff of delirious fancy as recently as January of last year.
Have all the opinion leaders and executives who have turned around suddenly seen the pure light of the GNU manifesto? No; instead, they point to the work of Open Source advocates to explain their conversion.
OSI's tactics work. That's the easy part of the lesson. The hard part is that the FSF's tactics don't work, and never did. If RMS's rhetoric had been effective outside the hacker community, we'd have gotten where we are now five or ten years sooner and OSI would have been completely unnecessary (and I could be writing code, which I'd much rather be doing than this...).
None of this takes anything away from RMS's prowess as a programmer or his remarkable effectiveness at mobilizing other hackers to do good work. Emacs and gcc and the GNU code base are an absolutely essential part of our toolkit and our cultural inheritance, for which RMS deserves every praise (which is why I led a standing ovation to him at last LinuxWorld after observing that "without RMS, none of us would be here today"). But as an evangelist to the mainstr
Calling for legislation to step in, is almost always a bad idea. We may be dreaming of an open source friendly regulation, but this is unlikely to happen. We simply don't have the purchasing power that Microsoft and others have with our politicians, so we'll end up having a heavily regulated market with anti-competitive, pro closed-source rules. Remember DMCA?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Fair and balanced.
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past. And the past is doomed to failure, simply because the technology curve has progressed to the point where large chunks of the software ecology are essentially free. Microsoft and Oracle unhappily sit right in the middle of this territory. Apple, IBM do not. I wrote about this in an editorial last year.
My blog
When you say you don't like Microsoft, you really don't like the choices millions of people make. I've been in this business long enough to know an analogy to war is ridiculous. You seem to believe that any choice of Microsoft is illegitimate and that open source can't fight fair in a free market, which is the big joke. Linux is doing great without the government, thank you.
And this committee for patriotic software, should it ever be enacted, will be the downfall of open source. It will be just another control point for power and allow the morality police a central point of control. It will become a do-nothing political body like all the rest.
Microsoft would have thousands of nuclear weapons, except they would constantly explode in their own silos. Everyone would have an easy to use rifle (with baby blue color theme), but only a handfull of people will be able to keep the rifle out of enemy hands, everyone else will just leave it lying around outside cause they're too lazy (or stupid) to secure it anywhere.
Linux would have some great weapons but only 20 people would know how to use them, 12 of these people would have them loaded correctly, 5 will accidentally shoot themselves in the face, 2 would use the guns of the people who shot themselves in the face, and continue to shoot those people in the face, and the last person would develop a new loading mechanism and distribute it to everyone so they now have to figure out how to load it all over again.
The reason that regulation of power and water in a free society is that they are what's called natural monopolies. Multiple infrastructures for power, water etc. are just redundant, so there tends to be only one utilities company for a given area. The government regulates them to make sure that they don't charge exorbitant fees and hold vital utilities hostage.
:)...
This of course does not apply to software, where competition is a good thing and is necessary for growth. There is no real R&D in the utilities industry, but just imagine if MS hadn't done R&D since Windows 3.1... they'd be left in the dust by Linux. Not that they haven't been anyhow, though
Only requirement for good karma: be pedantic as much and as often as possible.
Subject: Pig iron [Was: Article: Gates memo calls for security focus]
I disagree strongly that government regulation mandating open-sourcing is the key to solving the issues related to SCO/Linux/Microsoft, and although I agree with the basic points about FUD being the primary weapon of SCO/Microsoft, as well as the potential benefits of open sourcing for large corporations, I find very little in his article to support his assertion that this sort of regulation is the right direction.
Frankly, if open sourcing is going to be key for economic viability in the marketplace, the correct capitalist response would be to let market pressure bury those companies that don't do it, not to impose regulation. I can see regulation protecting open-source companies from FUD assaults, which are inherantly detrimental to a free and open marketplace... but not regulating the production and distribution of software.
Utilities like water and power require regulation because they are infrastructural supplies that aren't optional, nor does there exist (or can there, really) much of a competitive market in them to control excesses. With software, this is not really the case. Even for fundamental software like word processors and database tools, there is a robust marketplace with tons of options.
Fundamentally, Marx's critique of unconstrained capitalism wasn't wholly off base. But America isn't unconstrained... consumer protection laws and so forth counter the excesses of capitalism here. The government's role here should be protection laws that preserve an open marketplace (no FUD attacks) and regulation where infrastructure is privatized.
This is what I think, anyway.
If you read some of Bill Thompson's back catalogue, it seems that the man is obsessed with regulation as a cure-all solution (see here, here, or here).
It is a widely-held British viewpoint. Whenever there is some new perceived problem with the internet (a global network), politicans here start publicly calling for new government regulations. They know how pointless it is but want to be seen aligning themselves with the popular stance.
- Brian.
Last time the DoJ stepped in to deal with Microsoft being a monopoly and engaged in anti-competitive activities ...hmm, yeah, that worked out real well. Glad to see Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold on the market and doesn't have restrictive deals with other players in the tech industry.
Quite frankly, right now this is just a war of attrition, and I think Microsoft realizes they can't win with their current market strategies. If Linux was run by a single company responsible to shareholders, then Microsoft would probably have things back to business as usual, but I still don't think Bill & Steve have figured out just how to really deal with Linux as a competitive force.
The Open Source community has shown the ability to organize and get things done (yes, I know, this isn't the case in all projects, but it has gotten substantially better). And as long as the Open Source movement stays on the current track that it's on it's only a matter of time before the average consumer begins to recognize projects as Mozilla, Open Office, and the Linux OS as something they should look into using over Windows.
The fact that I can get my Mom to recognize how cool Mozilla is compared to IE/Outlook is and that she can get everything done on an install of Mandrake 9.2 is proof that progress is being made.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Of course, for this to work, copyright terms need to be returned to something reasonable, but that's a different problem.
This not only affects Linux, but any Open Source application. The last Government contract I worked on, we wanted to deploy an Open Source monitoring agent since the deployment of a "major vendor" product was not going to happen for some time. The response from IA (Information Assurance) basically was "has it passed Common Criteria evaluation and can you show us proof?" The answer was no, so the app was not deployed. We even provided the source code for "review".
I think the tools are already in place within segments of the US Government to stop the deployment of OSS by simply pointing to http://niap.nist.gov and saying "It's not on the Approved List". Most OSS does not have the deep pockets of IBM and Oracle to afford CC evaluation (SuSe and RedHat respectively). Now whether Microsoft had anything to do with this I cannot say, but I think it is not simply a matter of development models, but security models as well. And even in the case of a OSS product sucessfully passing CC evaluation, some agencies are not happy. Read the latest version of the DISA Unix STIG and see what they say about SuSe Linux (they complained that no US (NSA) Protection Profiles were used in the evaluation. So does that mean it is less secure and should not be used?
Some Governments could simply point to the US and say "we won't adopt OSS because the US doesn't". Just a thought
I utterly hate the analogy that FOSS is communistic. First of all, last time I checked, FOSS hadn't killed hundreds of millions of people as communism had. Second, it doesn't work on a philosophical level.
Communism is based on a centralized command system in which the state controls the means of production in the name of the people. Of course, this never works out as only a fool would automatically presume the interests of the state and the interests of the people are exactly the same.
In software development, this is closer to the closed source model - the state (ie Microsoft) orders that a task be done and the apparatchiks do it. Granted, Microsoft doesn't kill those that fail, and Microsoft is nowhere near as corrupt as the former Soviet Union, but the overal concept of centralization remains the same.
FOSS development is more like anarchocapitalism than anyone else. No one is forced to open their code, but programmers like myself do so because that's how we rationally get the most benefits. Granted, I could sell my products and perhaps make some money, but I couldn't recoup the costs of development without putting as much time into marketing as I do programming - and I don't care to do that.
The essence of capitalism is free exchange - which is why capitalism requires a free society in order to function well. Without the concept of the right of property, the GPL or other FOSS licenses would be meaningless. If I can't "own" my code, I can't dictate the license terms, and we're back to the state of nature. In the state of nature, everything is free for the taking - so long as you're cunning enough to take it. The whole reason government exists is to prevent that from happening by creating the social contract. (Which is why the statement that sacrificing liberty for security is wrong - that's the whole point of government itself, but I digress.)
FOSS devlopers give out their code because it provides them with the greatest rational benefit, not because some centralized authority tells them they must. That isn't communism, that's capitalism, and that's why the FOSS development model is doing exactly what capitalist economies do to state-planned economies - dynamically growing faster and more agile with each passing day.
Think about that: Soviet Union and United States never really fought directly anywhere (well, very few times and most of the public never knew about this). Their playground was Koria, Vietnam (where Soviets were sending in weapons, ammunition and training), Afganistan (where Americans did the same thing). More indirect battles were fought in the central Africa. Countries like Angola changed their eligence style of government there within period of two weeks , of course at the cost of millions of lives of local natives. What about South America? The communist gangs in Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Columbia and others did not just "came out" without support of the old Soviet Union. Nowdays these same gangs are into drugs, robbery, kidnappings and absolute terrorism for money. Now lets take a look at the world of Microsoft vs. Linux. These have never fought their direct battles either. GPL has never been tested against Microsoft EULA (oh I wish there would come a day when such test would be possible). The companies that support and endorse Linux have funded or persued anti-Monopoly lawsuits against Microsoft, and as we recently found out it is Microsoft who funds and persues the lawsuits that came on us from the face of SCO. And think about it too: SCO has not dared to sue Linus or any of the special groups surrounding Linux (OSDL, FSF (GNU), the Open Group, Kernel development team, whoever else). Instead they choose to fight their battles via the third parties and the users, or code contributors. So far the battle is fought on the sidelines. There will be a day when Microsoft and FSF, OSDL and others will be in direct lawsuit against each other.
Essentially, US exports of tangible goods are in decline, and it seems ludicrous to think that providing a management layer for organizations that actually exist overseas can last forever. Do we actually believe that workers in India will not someday discover that if they managed their own companies, then they would not need the US at all? Perhaps this is a bit of an oversimplification, but I think that the point resonates in the hearts and minds of people concerned about economic sustainability for the US. So we're going to support Microsoft, dammit, because OSS is the way to seal America's fate as the country that contributes only intellectual property to the world and gets essentially no compensation in return.
As a supporter of OSS, this notion frightens me. But I have yet to hear an argument that this is not as serious as I fear.
Software is already regulated in some fields, such as when it is part of a medical device. See, for instance, FDA-imposed design controls on medical devices "automated with computer software" in 21 CFR 820.30. FDA has stated that "Software must be validated when it is a part of the finished device. FDA believes that this control is always needed, given the unique nature of software, to assure that software will perform as intended and will not impede safe operation by the user." (in their final rule on that "Quality System Regulation"). The regulations call for extensive documented verification and validation activities.
Miles per gallon is important to consumers. A car that cannot be driven 300 miles on one tank will not sell. Most cars are just under 30 miles to the gallon, so a 12-16 gallon tank is sufficient. Buyers of sports cars and large vehicles (trucks, SUVs) expect 16 mpg, and the large vehicles have large tanks to maintain the 300 mile criteria. [My sports car can reach 300 miles on highways. City driving uses much more gas.]
Emissions were regulated. Most people do not want a cloud of black smoke, but it required legislation to make a difference. The States made it as a profit center by charging for extra stesting and stickers. Citizens were aware of the issue because of the extra stickers, and because they were responsible for more money if their car did not pass. So the manufacturers had to satisfy the buyers.
Regulating software would need to be done the same way. It is not enough to penalize the manufacturers; the users must feel the penalties. The laws would need to penalize a user for having a PC that spams or is used for a DOS attack. Unfortunately, it is difficult to verify the packets originated at a specific IP Address. What if you happened to check sco.com on the day of a DOS? Were you part of the attack, or just wondering if the website survived?
Once these issues are resolved, and the users feel the penalties, then they will demand that their software protects them. Software like MSWindows, where it is impossible to load a firewall before loading the network drivers, would disappear.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.