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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.
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.
hey ... as long as this paradigm shift helps develop synergy and foster an environment of positive collegiality utlizing a digital framework, I'm in.
What was that sound? A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
Because Open Source Copyleft GNU/Free Software has no use for buzzwords.
Buzzwords are just so Old Media, and we're too libre for that. We work in "Internet Time".
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.
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.
...IBM chose to build its computer from off the shelf components, and to open up its design for cloning by other manufacturers... :)
No they didn't. Compaq had to clean room reverse engineer the IBM BIOS to make the first clones. IBM then brought out the PS/2 with microchannel architecture trying to lock people into their hardware and that didn't work either. Eventually IBM was dragged kicking and screaming into modern times where we all love them for being open.
Shh.
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)
Tim O'Reilly is right more than he is wrong, though. IBM did choose to make the PC open. The early PCs from IBM actually came with schematics! You could easily get the source for the BIOS! (Not useful for cloning a PC since the BIOS was still under a proprietary license.) IBM made no effort to exclude anyone from making accessories for the PC, or software for it.
It's widely believed that IBM did these things because it didn't take PCs very seriously; it didn't view PCs as a threat to its other lines of business. Ironically, it was the very openness of IBM's PCs that led to them demolishing so much of IBM's old lines of business.
The Apple II came with a schematic and with code listings. It seems probable that IBM was deliberately doing things the same way the Apple guys did things, hoping to duplicate the success with a similar recipe. But an open platform with the IBM brand turned out to be a huge success, far beyond what IBM ever expected.
P.S. I have no special inside knowledge of what was going on at IBM, but there are a few things I consider interesting that may indicate what IBM was worried about.
The original PC keyboard was painful for typing; in particular it was hard to hit the right shift key. I believe this was just to help ensure that IBM's word processors (single-task computers, that did nothing but word processing) were not put out of business by the PC. Of course, after-market keyboards came out with saner key arrangements, word processing software became popular, and dedicated word-processor boxes were in fact put out of business by the PC.
The original IBM AT came with a socketed clock chip, which ran the AT at 6 MHz. But the schematic clearly showed that the system was designed to run at 8 MHz. People replaced the socketed crystal and pushed their ATs to 8 MHz, and found they ran perfectly stable. (Overclocking!) I believe this was because IBM's minicomputer group was starting to worry about PCs displacing IBM's lower-end minis. Of course, clones of the AT came out with faster and faster 286 chips.
When the 386 came out, everyone waited for IBM to release a PC with a 386. Months went by. Finally Compaq, in a bold move, made a Compaq AT clone that had a 386 instead of a 286, and the rest is history. IBM had abandoned its leadership role, and never reclaimed it. I believe that IBM's minicomputer group was seriously worried about 386-based PCs, and IBM couldn't come to the decision to launch a 386-based computer in time to be first. (IBM was the leader only as long as it was leading. When it tried to lead the customers to a place they didn't want to go -- the proprietary, locked-down PS/2 computers -- the customers didn't follow.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
so that's what I did. And what I have here is the best of three attempts to address the subject.
Because the frequency of innovation is increasing and the initial lifespan of any one idea is decreasing, things may reach a point where innovation moves too fast for social forces to have much effect on any technology.
Example Absolutely Chosen At Random For No Good Reason Whatsoever: "Trusted" Computing
If the tinfoil nightmare indeed comes true, and laws are passed making it illegal to not use such a system, do we have enough time to reverse its effects until the rules are set in stone? Remember that Money is an immediate force ("Hey, for $X million, would you make Y illegal?"), and that Reason is a slow force ("You can't make Y illegal because you are breaking right Z!").
Also do remember that for every one of us who want information free, there are three who stand to lose money at free information, and six who just don't give a fuck, as long as they get paid.
What I'm trying to get to is that "open source/free" is nothing special on its own, but when combined with the increasing shrinkage of the scale of time, we may be headed with a direct collision with the other side; and at least one of us will be completely devastated.
Or I could just be feeling grandiose---note my abuse of capitalization and overuse of overused metaphors.
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.
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.
Programming commercial software must:
- Focus on maximizing the feature list and on marketing demands
- Protect their intellectual property by providing API's instead of file formats.
Programming Open Source means:
- Make sure that the features in the system actually work as intended.
- Exploit synergi effects with other software (interoperability, using the code, piping etc.)
- Use well defined file formats instead of APIs.
Did you know that the Microsoft Access file format is "company confidential"? Actually, the precise file format is probably not even written down anywhere in an internal document, since you don't need it - you just use the same code to read a block that you used to write it. It was never intended to be read by more than one implementation of the file format.
The software market is "collapsing" in the same way that the computer market (think mainframes, minicomputers, and proprietary stuff - atari, commodore, etc) "collapsed" when IBM allowed the PC to become standardized and commoditized. The future is "Infoware," or internet apps like Google, Amazon, eBay, etc.
The "Infoware" that will "win" is that which can leverage the open-source development model - the ones that allow users/anyone to extend their technology for them. Google is a "winner" because PageRank is determined by webmasters, not Google - but PageRank can be copied, so Google needs to diversify (hence Gmail). Amazon is a winner because they leverage customer collaboration and data - their service is better because of user product reviews, "most popular" lists, etc, as well as their open architecture that allows others to customize and use their service in ways they never even considered. Ebay is a winner because the value of their service is in the number of people using it, not some particular technological feature that others can easily copy.
Yahoo is a non-winner because their directory is written and organized by their employees, which is a finite resource. There is no dominant map-serving website (MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, MSN maps, etc) because none of them have embraced the open-source or open-development model.
There's also a bit about how open development is useful for proprietary software too - ASP.NET was made by two Microsoft employees doing a fork of ASP in their spare time, which was okayed by Gates after the fact; proprietary software companies use open-source style collaboration and CVS-type tools within their company.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Gnu tools
The GNU part is more than some tools. It is an unix like OS framework which contains also many libraries.
better price on commercial alternatives.
You mean non-free? Free Software/Open Source can also be commercial. There is money involved in support and in coding new features.
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
Thats great, Linux has great mindshare amongst those who create some of the leading web applications.
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. 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. You either conform to the view thats presented, or you'll be annoyed by it until you get frustrated.
Right now I'm running Windows XP, I don't need to compile anything, I don't have to subscribe to a mindset, I just have to use the software. The "You use Linux if you use Google" is such bullshit in retrospect, we all use DNS a lot more, and that's mostly run on proprietary Unix and in some cases the BSD's. Noone goes playing that trumpet, do they?
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.