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The Open Source Paradigm Shift
Tim O'Reilly has written up a talk he has given about the open source paradigm shift, which he describes as fundamental and long-term changes in the technology world brought on by the widespread adoption of Free and open source software.
You see people using BS buzzwords constantly in the industry where money and marketing are everything, but why in F/OSS software? That just seems counterproductive.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
If we ban ALL of these words from our vocabulary, it will make many things difficult to express.
Also, at some point it may become necessary to actually communicate things to men wearing suits. In particular, it may at some point be necessary for Tim O'Reily to communicate things to men wearing suits. If Tim O'Reily is to communicate with men wearing suits, it is likely it is to Tim O'Reily's benefit to do so using words that men wearing suits are likely to be accustomed to hearing.
It's interesting how a phrase can lose its meaning; it's context. Tim credits the phrase "paradigm shift" to Thomas Kuhn in a 1962 book that describes changes in scientific reasoning. These days we associate it with meaningless over-use by Suits trying to sound intelligent.
Microsoft will dominate OS market as long there's no OEM Linux distributors.
The "Open Source Desktop", by that I mean the Linux kernel + Gnu tools + Gnome and/or KDE, has now matured to a level where it has become a real choice, or threat depending on perspective, to commercial alternatives. Goverments are looking into Linux and switching or using it as leverage to get a better price on commercial alternatives. This is new. Not something that came overnight, though, it's something that's been happening for a while. Personally I've used Linux both as desktop and server OS for many years. But I am a "skilled", not average computer user. The big change is that Linux distributions and other OS software is now so user-friendly and complete that average joe can use it to get all his tasks done. And this is a big change.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
to simply abide by the terms of the GPL? Then you won't be sued.
OSS, while it may be changing the way the industry works, is still not commonplace to the end user. Linux distros will never have the distribution Microsoft has because of brand name recognition and accessibility. It may be getting there, O'Reilly points out the fact that web-based "killer apps" that appeal to a desktop user (ie. Google) run Linux but a Dell shipping with Red Hat is a long way off.
What was that sound? A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
Oh come on. It's easy really. Anyone can do it. All you have to do is blip your technology strategic outlook and ease the paradigm into the new gestalt when the synergies match.
KFG
A 'paradigm shift' is a radical shift in the way people think. Not individuals, but a large group as a whole. a population.
Right now, individuals think of the idea of free software being both good and viable.
But more and more people are thinking that way. When enough people think that way, the population as a whoel will effectively be thinking that way, and the way soft ware is produced will have radically changed (hopefully for the better).
At this point, we will have a paradigm shift.
now, given that we may be facing a paradigm shift that might greatly reduce Microsoft's ability to generate large revenue, at least via Windows and MS office, the idea of a service-software industry (aka Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, etc.) being the next big market makes sense. It's certainly already growing.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Not to be an arse, but why is this modded so high?
Such an emotional attachment to words. Shouldn't you just lay off the attachment, and look at what is meant by the words?
Unless you also rely upon the emotional attachment of "Open Source" as well?
Just use the tools, stop crying, and play the game properly
(and here i go down to bad karma world)
You forgot the two most common buzzwords... scalable and robust .
They're in every blurb targetted at boardroom executives who'll collectively act like they understand something and will agree to pay for it, while individually being too embarassed to admit they don't even know what they're agreeing to.
Open Source will prove to be another milestone in human history.
s hipofi nternet12402.html
Like the gun, printing press, internal combustion engine, anti-biotics, concepts of Freedom/Liberty/Rights and various other recent human inventions it will eventaully have dramatic effects on people beyond the obvious ramifications in business.
The movement of human technology is a movement of intellectual and political power from the minority to the majority.
Guns destroyed Feudalism as the professional warrior class that protected it was wiped out by peasent armies with firearms.
Philosophy, science, and religion became accessable to the common man thru the cheap books created by the invention of the printing press.
So on and so forth.
Without the gun, knowledge would be worthless because professional warrior class would still be dominate and enforce the will of the rulers weither or not it made sense for the majority of the people.
So all this goes hand in hand.
Remember the show "Connections"? This is the sort of shit I am talking about.
If it wasn't for BSD and Unix there would be no internet. Without the Free Source software products like the BSD TCP/IP protocol stack (used in early OSes from Windows NT to AT&T unix) we wouldn't have a common language that all computers could communicate with.
Now the entire Internet is full of more usefull information to more people then anything the world has seen before.
Anybody that can afford a computer better then a 486sx, and a internet connection has access (by using Linux, and TCP/IP originally produced by BSD) to the same amount of information that only previously aviable to people attending large universities.
Take the MIT open course work for instance.
Any person, from butt-fuck montana to the tribes of South africa, if they have a internet connection, can have a presence on the world stage.
Think about kids from small towns, many of those places don't even have libraries. Now they can read about science and liturature and other subjects only aviable to historians just 20 years ago.
Free software means free access. I can run on my cheapo laptop the same software that multimillion dollar companies use to help develope their infrastructure.
I can set up servers, websites, anything I want and it just costs me the the cost of the internet connection.
Even rights-stomping, oppressive communist countries can't sensor the net well enough to stop intellegent citizens communicating and learning about the outside world. Middle eastern countries can block websites and ip addresses, but they still can't keep the truth away from their people anymore. If they do then their country will become so obsolete that they will be driven to obsolencence.
Although they do try:
http://wais.stanford.edu/China/china_censor
Right now pirated commercial software is filling the void, but as MS is working with countries like China to stem the flow of illegal software, free software is will begin to replace it for people that either can't afford or do not want to use Windows.
It isn't important that free software is cheap or even more or less secure then commercial software. The Freedom means freedom of ideas, knowledge, business. Anything that people desire.
Of course this comes with a price, but personally I am willing to sacrifice Microsoft and Bill Gate's fortune on the alter of advancements of human sociatal evolution, dignity and experiance.
Is there anybody who can quickly digest about 20 pages of excellent story written by Tim O'Reilly and produce meaningful comment in an hour.
Slashdot needs "slow stories", "slow food".
One point in the article I found very interesting: Net software is different from simple applications. It's an important shift.
Take an old word processor; put it on a compatible computer and fire it up. It still works to process words.
Take an old Internet system (such as an old search engine). It's useless unless it contains up-to-date data, which means continual upkeep, and if it's old perhaps there's no one left who remembers how to tend it. A system like Google can include input from the rest of the Web automatically, which helps it stay up to date, but it's useless in isolation. And feedback systems in eBay and Amazon are very important factors in their success.
We will still need word processors and such in the future, but they won't be as important as they have been in the past. The value of word processors and similar software will plummet towards zero, as the free programs like OpenOffice get better and are more accepted; but Google, not even ten years old yet, is essential and growing.
General-purpose software like word processors will be a commodity. Custom apps for business will remain as a niche. Net-enabled software will be where the real value will lie.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Which makes IBM out as a benefactor to the Industry. But from what I remember and have read... IBM didn't seem to be the willing participant that Tim makes them out to be.
The story doesn't begin with IBM at all. It actually begins with Apple. Apple had made the first real consumer microcomputer. The Apple II came complete with keyboard and nice custom plastic case. But until the first killer app, the Apple II was just a neat hobbyist machine.
Microcomputers didn't catch the business world's attention until Visicalc. Visicalc was the first spreadsheet. And once people began to realize the power of the spreadsheet, everyone who crunched numbers for a living needed a microcomputer on their desktop.
IBM had dismissed microcomputers as being the realm of scientists and hobbyists. The sudden demand for microcomputers by businesses took them by surprise. But they rallied the troops, fired up the engineers, and set an almost insane schedule to produce a machine that would cash in on this sudden market.
We all know they made a deal with Microsoft. But since we're talking commoditization of the hardware market, we'll save that for another time.
What's important is that IBM's engineers went for off-the-shelf components to comply with the need to get an IBM microcomputer product out fast. The only thing that made the IBM PC hardware unique was a proprietary BIOS. Enter Compaq.
Compaq entered the market after a million dollar investment to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS. They produced a superior machine for less than IBM's offering. And since it was compatible with the machine that dominated the business computing market on brand recognition alone... it was wildly successful. Compaq made back their investment and then some; $111 million in first-year sales.
More important than Compaq's success was the beginning of a new industry. The beginning of a process. The move from proprietary hardware to commodity hardware.
It didn't seem like this was IBM's intent at all. In fact, IBM made a failed attempt to regain control of the platform in 1997 with the PS/2 and its proprietary Micro Channel bus.
In conclusion, software itself is no longer the primary locus of value in the computer industry. The commoditization of software drives value to services enabled by that software. New business models are required.
This doesn't apply to software alone, but to all the DRM crap that is going on with the RIAA and MPAA. It could read "The commoditization of music drives value to services enabled by music". The business model for music should probably focus on these "enabled services" rather than the old "pay-per-use" method. I guess that's what is going on with the iTunes Music Store and the iPod.
If that does come to pass, I see a future of widespread civil disobedience (think Prohibition, or quite possibly P2P copyright infringement), as well as world technology leadership and power shifting elsewhere (think German rocket science at the end of WWII, or outsourcing to India - or Hymn/Playfair and VLC)
I don't think either Microsoft or the US Government can ultimately stop the freedom of information, but I think they can drag down this country trying.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Quoting Tim O'Reilly's speech:
RMS' retelling of the history of the movement he started does not begin as O'Reilly describes above (or, reading O'Reilly differently, RMS is being called an "open-source advocate"). Either way, O'Reilly is wrong. RMS has made it very clear that he does not wish to be lumped in with the open source movement. As for the story of how the free software movement came to be, RMS describes how fortunate he was "in the 1970's to be part of a community of programmers who shared software" which "could trace its ancestry essentially back to the beginning of computing"; as you can see in the brief quote I include below, RMS made it clear that back then source code sharing was the norm and there was no need to define a movement to underscore the importance of treating others in the ethical way these hackers treated one another back then. It is this description of RMS' experience as a member of the MIT AI lab that sets the stage for the jarring experience he had when trying to get the source code for software which controlled the early laser printer Xerox had donated to the AI lab. RMS wanted this printer program's source code so the program could be modified to include the end-to-end feedback improvements the MIT AI lab had hacked into their previous printer control software. Read or hear the speech for yourself (links go to the 2001 NYU retelling of this story -- two years before O'Reilly first gave his speech). Read a relevant portion of RMS' speech:
Furthermore, when O'Reilly tells a story of "building better software through transparency and code sharing", he is not in any way speaking t
Digital Citizen
You might say that the phrase itself has undergone a "paradigm shift" since 1962.
Those are terms, just like "garbage collection" or "monolithic kernel" are. Do you sneer at those terms? How about the computing terms you don't (yet) understand?
The business terms are more abstract than computing terms, they often refer to people's behavior (people in large groups), they do not refer to anything crisp but something very fuzzy at best. They define concepts.
But they're not "bullshit" as you so bluntly put it. Look behind them, there's actually many interesting things.
Of course some people just throw them around like rice in a wedding, in which case the person is at fault, not the terms themselves.
I do not moderate.
I liked this section best, particularly his argument that Amazon is not as vulnerable to competition (say from Walmart) as previously thought due to the way they have managed to incorporate a kind of network effect into their system via all their user contributions to the site. The lesson is to get users to provide value for each other, even if the site's ultimate goal is selling widgets.
And this argument:
seems to refer almost directly to Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law:
But I dunno, maybe these arguments only make sense to the minority of internet users who actually contribute content (if only to sites like Slashdot).
However, the reason that it's not going to help in the slightest when it comes to client penetration is that an operating system that works well essentially becomes transparent to the user, who should only be interacting with their task and using the operating system to achieve this.
You know, that is so absolutely true. But it is also where Windows fails miserably. I made the switch to Linux when it got to the point that downloading and installing the latest patches, cleaning out adware/spyware and just bloody maintaining Windows was getting in the way of doing any productive work!
Take for example, the latest SuSE's, Gentoo, whatever, there's penguins plastered everywhere, their nice logo is rammed down your throat left and right, and the constant trumpeting of OSS is everywhere, from readme's to splash screens.
And what version of Windows are you running? The one without the wavy Windows icon smeared across every open window on the desktop? The one without lengthy Microsoft EULA's greeting you at every install? Thge one that doesn't splash Microsoft and copyright notices on every startup screen for every application? Tell me where to get a copy!
You either conform to the view thats presented, or you'll be annoyed by it until you get frustrated.
I am flabbergasted! That is exactly how I felt about Windows. Nobody likes Microsoft's registration scheme, but Microsoft has demanded of every user that price for using Windows. If that isn't conforming to the view thats presented, then I don't know what the hell is! And that's only one example!
In short (I know, I know, too late!) all of the ranting you've done about Linux distros is exactly what I dislike about Windows!