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Open Source: Facts and Figures
Eloquence writes "Much of the debate about GNU/Linux and open source is dominated by rhetoric rather than facts. David Wheeler has just released a new version of his "paper" (which, at 440,000 characters, is more of an e-book now) 'Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!'. According to David, this paper 'examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions.' May come in handy when talking to your boss about Linux."
...put this story under bsd.slashdot.org?
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
this seems like something that needs the "validation" of print. It would make for a very informative read, clear up a lot of misconceptions, and not suffer from the "I read it on the internet" stigma. People are more likely to believe something if it doesn't glow when they read it.
More like War and Peace... :p
To describe why we don't need a lot of rhetoric to support linux.
I know "irony" isn't the correct word to use, but I don't feel like thinking of the right one.
To summarize: Some blowhard likes linux and wont shut up about it
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I dont need 440,000 words, and neither do most others. I use Linux because it makes me feel happy. And I feel like I'm in control.
That said, kudos to the wordy crowd too.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
why indeed. look at these numbers. i'll no doubt me modded down as a troll or something but when the linux community can make a powerful desktop thats not SLOWER than windows2k/xp then i will switch.
Windows XP: 233 MHZ 64MB min, 300 MHZ 128MB recommended
Xandros: PII 64MB min, 450 MHZ 128MB recomended
Mandrake: 64MB min, 128MB recommended
Fedora Core: PI 192MB min, 400 MHZ 256MB recommended
SUSE: 128MB min, 256MB recommended
Sun Java System: 266 MHZ 128MB min, 600 MHZ 256MB recommended
Turbolinux 10F: 1GHZ 512MB recommended
Linspire: 128MB min, 800 MHz 256MB recommended
Cant help but notice that usability and features aren't listed. There's a reason I still use Photoshop. Its features and ease of use make it worth the price.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I work in a small medical device company writing java, and I could not imagine them using my software for free -- I need to eat too.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
The article referenced does a fair job of displaying the info used. References are linked to, explanations are provided (I.e. the difference between "all sites polled" and "inactive vs active" sites when talking about market share). All in all, an article that raises many good points. Useful, from my perspective.
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" Oscar Wilde
You'll have rhetoric as long as you allow people to make sense out of facts... For example, the same fact (let's say, "source code available to the world") can be interpreted two ways: "More secure because it has been scrutinized by all sorts of people" and "Less secure because it can be scrutinized by every possible hacker."
What follows is the rhetoric...
This counteracts anything your employer might claim about not having any research to back up your claims about open source software. However, they might already have a lot of money and effort invested in closed technologies and might not be ready to move completely right away. At least they'll be convinced to move the non-critical stuff over first. :)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I've developed both.
I'm not a disciple of either.
They both have their place.
As a wise man once said, can't we all just get along?
I can't even imagine where the web would be today without Perl, PHP and Python. Perl and Python are excellent CGI languages and PHP 5.0/5.1 is a great substitute for commercial products like ASP.NET in many cases. Small businesses and home users simply don't need all of the wiz bang features of something like ASP/JSP. OSS has definitely stepped in to provide a lot of power to the little guys who want it. Now Mono is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft's .NET and Tomcat has been for a long time a very solid basis for J2EE web projects.
But perhaps the best thing about OSS is that it has helped to return a bit of an "ownership society" to software development. The GPL despite its problems says that it doesn't apply to you if you are just a regular user who isn't going to modify the code and redistribute the changed binaries. For all intents and purposes, you "own" that code until you do something public with it that takes commercial advantage of it without meeting the GPL's requirements. That's a hell of a lot more property rights-centered than a typical industry EULA.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
http://www.dwheeler.com.nyud.net:8090/oss_fs_why.h tml
I may be too late though, as I cannot get to it myself...
[Posted Anonymous Coward as to avoid Karma Whoring]
Does this mean that computers that are purchased with OpenOffice are then "upgraded" with pirated copies of Microsoft Office 2004?
If so, no wonder why Microsoft claims that Open Source stifles innovation and is more expensive to support than commercial software! This post is intended to be insightful. Moderate as such.
This is true. If it doesn't come in an overpriced management tome or as a summary in some slick corporate rag, not only will the PHBs not believe it, they probably will not even read it.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
a huge "paper" full of anything besides pr0n isn't going to be fun.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
The thing that gets me is how open-source vs closed-source debate is always OS-centric. True, you have Microsoft on one end and Linux OS family is one of the most succcessful open source products, but what's wrong with promoting open-source product on top of Windows platform?
OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox and many other products off the SourceForge.net have a Windows binary available for download. Windows itself provides great hardware support with almost anything imaginable out there, and has nice OS-level features like fast GUIs and built-in support for burning CDs and what not.
If you look at a Linux box and a Windows box, the price difference from the vendor is generally $50-60. If you use the computer for 5 years, the cost of Windows is $10-12 a year. What's the incentive to go "free" and deal with ugly fonts, hardware issues and other problems related to Linux nowadays?
Moreover, promoting open source on Windows nowadays would set the ground for switch to Linux in the future. Guess what - the aforementioned OO, Mozilla and other apps work exactly the same way either with Linux or Windows. Thus a switch to Linux later on would not require such huge re-education costs, since the user lives in app world, not in OS world, and doesn't care whether it's kernel32.dll or kernel.org latest version, that's running on his machine.
Numbers exchanged among people are also rhetoric, though clever. Quantative selections and qualitative exaggerations are equally misleading. Debate, as opposed to argument (or mere contradiction, or being hit on the head), requires consensus on facts, or at least values and rationale in evaluating statements. Marketers don't care about consensus, and most purchasers/consumers have a catch-22 with consensus before decision. What really counts is results. Especially because the cost of the switch itself, between any platforms, is so high, only when the benefit of one over the other is easily demonstrable will enough people be convinced to matter.
--
make install -not war
There would be no comments here, if we all R'd TFA. Too much reading for my small brain.
Good lord! You actually need to make a living from your work? Back to the re-education camp with you! But all kidding aside, I have yet to see a reasonable answer to this question. While it is true that there are many paid programmers writing Open Source for a variety of companies such as the biggies Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and so on, in the overall scheme of things, they actually account for a small percentage of OSS programmers. But at least for those of us who do not work for "benevolent" employers, we can still write code for the various Linux and BSD platforms for profit (as in money to pay the rent and buy nice threads and such.)
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Google Cache: www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html+&hl=en
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:c8XPqYPcEggJ
Sig
I use it because its more reliable than other software. Also excellent documentation helps.
/unix servers would be too high.
I've paid for my open source support software when I've placed in on deployed servers. Without Apache/Linux/Php/mysql I wouldn't be able to afford to work on side projects as the overhead of windows
Keeps my prices lower so the software is more affordable and I take home more.
Everone wins, except proprietary expensive software makers.
I work for a company whose business is not software. We need a webserver, operating system, database, etc.
Sometimes, what comes in an open source package doesn't meet our needs, so I fix it. Sometimes I think others might want the same changes, so I submit them (like when I changed the behaviour of a device driver to be more configurable). Sometimes I don't think others would want the same changes, so I don't submit them (like when I made dbmmanage able to be called from a shell script).
I get paid to solve my boss' technology problems. OSS is the most flexible way to do that.
not to know either math or english.
First, the document is 440,000 characters - about 400K, not 400M.
Second, you obviously don't know the definition of the word rhetoric.
You fools! That's exactly what they expect! You can't fight the system playing by their rules! It should end with a tangent. Or an introduction. They'll never see that coming!
You damned fools, you've played right into their hands! We're doomed, doomed, doomed ...
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
I'll summarize for you.
"Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
I'll openly admit I didn't RTEFA. Still, through "critical skim" (a frequent management trick), this doesn't seem to be very persuasive.
GNU/Linux is the #1 server OS on the public Internet (counting by domain name), according to a 1999 survey of primarily European and educational sites
Interesting -- using a survey prior to the release of Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 server as the basis for trends today. Reading the article critically (as the hypothetical "boss" would), those numbers aren't as significant as the state of the world today. I may be completely ignorant to research turnaround, but doesn't it seem more recent data would be more relevant?
Consider this one as well:
GNU/Linux is more reliable than Windows NT, according to a 10-month ZDnet experiment
How many companies today are deciding between Linux and Windows NT?
Clearly there are reasons today that companies / governments / users are seriously considering OSS. However, to try to convince through comparison with 5 year old OS is probably not very effective.
Besides general statements like "because it's more reliable than other software" are obvious karma-whore statements.
"The phishing threats and the growing professional chorus of disapproval for Internet Explorer provide Windows users with very good reasons to turn elsewhere, even if only temporarily. But [OSS/FS] Firefox is so good that many will want to stay with it. And once they have tasted the power and freedom of open source, maybe they will be tempted to try 'just one more program'."
Sounds like a commercial for potato chips. However, I'll admit that I can't download just one OSS/FS product.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I recently upgraded my cell phone to a Nokia 6620. This rather amazing phone has several hundred dollars of commercial software "bundled" with it. Each one has a trial one time use, then a need to pay a license fee, which can be $15 to 20 dollars or more. This market [micro applications on mobile and wireless devices] is growing very rapidly. For example, many companies now are discovering that almost 1/2 of their *entire* data communications, networking, and telephone budget is going into mobile and wireless. My question is what is the status of open software development for these new platforms? There surely is a great deal of money to be saved.
I don't think IBM and RedHat are really "hiding" anything, since it's well known by anyone likely to pay for such things that this is how they make money. With that point out of the way, all large systems cost money to support and integrate.
Doesn't matter how much you pay for closed-source software, if you're intending to use it in even a small enterprise, you'll be paying more money to integrate it. And the company that sells you the software is probably also selling you the services to make it work. This was true when I worked for PeopleSoft, and it was the standard for the entire industry. The open source model is no different in that regard, except that it's probably cheaper to customize and integrate open source, because (a) integration is very important in open source for reasons I don't think I need to discuss and (b) you have the source.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I, for one, would create software for free and do other stuff for free too, given: 1. some greedy assholes won't exploit me, 2. what others make/do is free for me too, 3. I would have food to eat and a house to live in.
Of course the world is not like that, so we must whore ourselves and our best years until we die forgotten by our children who live in the same damn wheel of fortune (only the lucky or should I say FORTUNEous get out when they're still young).
Money is the root of all evil.
Increasingly, people are being paid to work on OSS/FS software. That's how X and Apache were developed, so this isn't new. The Linux kernel is almost entirely developed by people paid to do so (37,000 out of 38,000 changes a few months ago). There are lots of articles about this trend, referenced in the paper. Also, nearly all software is not developed for sale, but is custom-developed for a particular purpose (most estimates place this at 95%). For custom, you're paid to develop it anyway, and having an OSS/FS program to base it on makes many things easier.
My site's up, but it's not handling Slashdotting as well as I'd hope. I'll see what I can do.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Feather Linux 64 megabytes total install (I've run it on a 300mghz with 64 megs RAM, and my regular box with a 200PP at 224 ram) It's a knoppix/debian live CD that is hard drive installable, or can run from a 64 meg flashdrive, etc, that's what it's designed for really, but cool for older systems with minimum resources
Vector Linux A slackware-ish effort: this is from their requirements page, note, I never tried it: VL 4.3 Hardware Requirements
The minimum hardware requirements to run VectorLinux 4.3 are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of RAM memory, and just 850 MB of hard disc space (*).
To have a more comfortable experience with VectorLinux 4.3 we would recommend a 233 MHz (MMX) processor with 64 MB of memory as a minimum.
(*) 835 MB of space for the installation plus 64 MB of swap space is the very minimum.
Extra space would be required for additional applications and / or your personal files.
I run FC2 on my machine, and in my experience, yes, ram is more important than processor speed
Of course, I still got my old mac 512k, runs a GUI environment from a floppy......
Basically, you get what you want and pay for, want a zillion programs and a lot of multitasking and full GUI, you need moah powah, regardless of OS.
Openoffice and added programs expand specs.
Basicly I would not try running window xp and office Xp on a 233 chip it does not work. Most cases linux min specs are less when full spec compare is matched ie what software is creating the spec.
"I find it unlikely that Joe Random Hacker ... Open source effectivel ignores copyright"
PLEASE don't say it like that. The reality is that copyright law is the one and only thing that gives open source licences their legal clout. Without copyright, Open Source does not exist. Open source is built on copyright, relies on copyright, must have copyright, won't work without copyright. So, in that sense it does not 'effectively ignore' copyright.
Maybe you meant that open source allows kids to download heaps of stuff without paying for it, just like pirating copyrighted software by 'effectively ignoring' the copyright. Yes, in that sence, it does 'effectively ignore' copyright. But then you are giving weight to the anti-FLOSS FUD-mongers, and perhaps giving kids the wrong idea about the rights of copyright holders.
I am not attacking your post. I liked what you said, it was well thoughful and informative. And, I am not saying you don't understand Open Source. I am just asking that you be careful when you say things like that, because it is too, too easy to take the wrong way.
IANAD (I am not a dog)
Most people never saw any of these things and _most_ will never see any of them in their lives!
:-/
OTOH, many won't even see 1997 hardware, too...
Reasoning this out is not rocket science. No one seriously belives that there are "legal issues surrounding IP claims in Linux"; even the shills paid to spout it from the hill tops are starting to hedge and waffle.
I call FUD!
-- MarkusQ
I'm feeling happy about my Linux box because with Win4Lin running over it, I can run my legacy apps on a Windows environment that almost never crashes on a Linux box that stays up until I decide to shut it down.
Though I was not happy doing the work needed to get the Linux part of this box up to this point and I'm still picking out backup solutions for both my bootable clone drive (ok, I used dd once... looking at an rsync script since I don't need to recreate partitions or back up swap/boot... and suspect that dump might be overkill) and DVD-R.
While I think there's a lot that should be in distros (I use FC2) right out of the box (how about a configured mplayer? how about a backup program? A GUI ftp client?)... switching from a pure Windoze setup to this is the smartest thing I've done since I got a 286 way back when.
Tech Public Policy stuff
not suffer from the "I read it on the internet" stigma. People are more likely to believe something if it doesn't glow when they read it.
I have a great bridge to sell, excellent condition. Don't just believe this glowing msg, read my paper booklet !
Working for necessity's mother.
Photoshop is about 1.000 US$, a new computer to work with it (w/o screen) probably less than that including windows license. I would't hesitate to spend that knowing that it's the best environment to run it and it works like a charm.
;)
IMHO Photoshop is one of the most important things that keep me apart from linux in my day to day job.
If Adobe releases a Linux version as fast as the windows one, I'll swap in a day. (Please, let me use my licenses
Forgot to say that it was such a pity that adobe discontinued Photoshop for Irix. It worked like a charm.
As a small business owner these types of studies are interesting, but a write up on the use of open source (like OpenOffice) really drives home the strength of open source.
One of the paragraphs in the opening says: "This paper includes data over a series of years, not just the past year; all relevant data should be considered when making a decision, instead of arbitrarily ignoring older data. Note that the older data shows that OSS/FS has a history of many positive traits, as opposed to being a temporary phenomenon."
For market surveys, sure, more recent data are often more relevant. But those are in there, so it's not like they're missing. But older survey data can help you see that this isn't as "new" a phenominon as some people want to claim.
As far as the reliability experiment goes, the end of the reliability section explains further: "One problem with reliability measures is that it takes a long time to gather data on reliability in real-life circumstances. Thus, there's more data comparing older Windows editions to older GNU/Linux editions. The key is that these comparisons are fair, because they compare contemporaneous products." That shouldn't be surprising. If it takes 10 months to do a study, then it takes quite a commitment to keep re-doing them.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Yes, but you didn't answer the question. What risks are you talking about, extactly?
I'm not espousing a "philosophy" here, one that you and your co-workers may or may not agree with. I'm asking you, point blank:
Unless you have a clear and cogent answer to that question, all you are doing is spouting FUD, and not particularly convincing FUD at that.-- MarkusQ
I run Mandrake 10.0 on a PIII 500 box, bought new, then recycled many times (used to run Windows 98SE, then BeOS) into a new case, and configured with these specs: PIII 500 on ASUS MB (damn, forgot the model) ATI Radeon VIVO (now known as a 7200) 128 MB EDO DIMM 40 GB DeskStar Hard drive (I think that's the size) Sound Blaster Live! Value audio 3Com 3C905 10/100 NIC Creative Labs' 6X DVD Drive ...and a few other things (I guess I rambled a little there.....)
Runs very smooth with GNOME 2.4, Mozilla 1.6, OpenOffice, and some games to keep me happy. Haven't got DVDs to work under Totem yet, but once I get the codec that problem should be solved.
Out of curiousity, I tried Windows 2000 ( a faster and more "stable" NT variant than XP, I found out) on this setup.
I won't print the results here, for those of you with a delicate sense of nature might be deeply offended.
Enough said.
Is that for SP1, SP2 or unpatched? YMWV.
Does the 300 MHz, 128M for XP include running a virus scanner?
This may change, but for the moment, Windohs is the only system where you have to have a monstrous virus scanner continuously running, periodically swapping out your frequently used apps so that they take just as long to start up the second time as the first time you launch them. This is with an 800MHz/256M laptop.
When you factor this in, even a bloated KDE or Gnome system offers better response time on a machine at half the speed (in my personal experience). And just be glad you don't need a virus scanner for your virus scanner.