Posted by
michael
on from the secrets-and-lies dept.
Tim writes "Tim Bray and Microsoft's Joe Marini are doing a back-and forth on Open Source. Tim serves (open everything), Joe returns (secret-source is good business) and Tim volleys (the closed-source niche is shrinking)."
What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
lordkuri
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just like the issue with MS getting source stolen. How many problems can/will arise from relying on "no one will ever see this" when everyone can see it?
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Try asking Coca Cola the same question...
Here are your options: 1. Support software patents, and Microsoft will gladly lay it all out in the open. 2. Don't support software patents, and the only way for Microsoft to protect its IP is through obscurity.... choose one
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
INetEngineer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why don't we send a clincher message to people that think source code ought to be "secret", by not giving them any comments, ideas, suggestions, and/or replies, because we want to keep them "secret".
"Hey, what do you think of this software?"
"Can I see the source code?"
"No! I need to be able to sell it!"
"Oh... I think nothing of it."
"What?!"
"I'm a consultant, I need to be able to sell my opinions!"
Oh wait... then we would just be propogating the "secrets".
-- --I smoked my sig.
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
DunbarTheInept
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Software patents are not an inherently bad idea. What makes them bad in practice, and in the way they've been used in our legal system is two things:
1 - Software should NOT be simultaneously closed source and patented. They are two different protection schemes that are incompatable. Patents requires that you make your design and plans public and openly copyable so others can search on the patent archive and see what you're doing (and so that when you right to exclusivity ends, your idea is now in a public registry). In the case of software, that would be the source code, although pseudocode that doesn't actually compile, but merely teaches somoene how to write the software would probably fit the legal requirement (more akin to a blueprint than a cad/cam file)). The practice of allowing people to patent things based on vague fuzzy descriptions of algorithms should never have started.
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
Quattro+Vezina
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· Score: 2, Insightful
2. Don't support software patents, and the only way for Microsoft to protect its IP is through obscurity.... choose one
I'll choose this one, thank you very much. At least this way, some OSS project can always reverse-engineer Microsoft's stuff. Look at Samba, for example--it's actually runs better than Microsoft's own SMB implementation, and if software patents were involved, a higher-quality implementation simply wouldn't exist.
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
AstroDrabb
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Um.... I have one for you:
1. You are an idiot
2. You are stupid ...Choose one.
The choose one thingy doesn't always work very well does it.
For item #1, how do you know this? Has Bill G told you this? No. MS has patented _plenty_ of software and where is all the Open stuff from them? Item #2 is just stupid and unfounded. Copyright and/or a license/NDA agreement is _plenty_ to protect a company. How many competitors would get away with copyright violation against MS once they let loose their lawyers?
As was pointed out in the rebuttal (which you probably didn't read), just don't release _any_ source until you get your product with new features X, Y and Z out to market. Once your product is out, then release the code. You already have the head start and it will take a while for competitors to play catch up. Also as the rebuttal pointed out and that I can personally attest to as a senior programmer of 8 years is that is is _far_ easier to implement a feature for scratch then pick up someone else code. The worst projects I get are where I have to pick up someone else code and fix it or add new features.
-- If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
steeviant
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because software patents are to protect ideas, not inventions, like real patents.
Copyright already does what patents on real-world inventions do, in that they provide protection against direct plagiarism of someone's work for a period sufficient to commercialise that product.
Software patents protect ideas, so that if I come up with the idea of a piece of software that can find dead pixels on a CRT display by filling the screen with blue, green and red respectively, I can patent that idea, and prevent anyone else from using it. The specific implementation of that software is already covered by copyright, but idea of displaying a screenful of solid colour for the purposes of identifying display defects is not, so that's where patents come in.
Neat huh? so in a few years once all the blatantly obvious good ideas are patented, only developers armed with a bevy of lawyers and patents and prepared to grapple with other patent holders will be able to sell software in the U.S.
God bless the rest of the world where freedom is important.
Re:What happens when it's not secret anymore?
by
theLOUDroom
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· Score: 4, Insightful
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
The trouble is problem #2 isn't fixable.
Maybe when that patent office was created it made sense to have one organization the would claim to understand EVERY TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET in enough detail to decide if an invention is novel, but I submit that idea has become totally unworkable.
Instead, the patent office should admit what it has already become, a registry of "I invented this on this date." The presumption that a patent is valid because it has been rubberstamped by the patent office should be ceased immediately.
The validty of specfic patents can then be determined in court, as necessary, where both sides of the issue can call real experts from those fields.
I am a huge proponent of open-source, but...
Writing code isn't a trivial process. Writing good code is extremely difficult, and I feel is a skill that should be well compensated for.
Re:Open/Closed
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Camel+Pilot
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Indeed however let the coding individual who has rights to their the code determine the means they wish to be compensated
Re:Open/Closed
by
cmowire
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· Score: 3, Insightful
True.
There's some responses to that, however.
First, most of the bigger open-source projects have some sort of funding and support structure. People pay for somebody to do things that *they* want to do and pay for the ability to have somebody come over and fix stuff.
In a sense, if there's enough people who need the same thing, they can cooperate in much the same way as standards are constructed. Remember, open source projects don't have many of the expenses as a pre-packaged concern.
But, also, I think there's a fine line between open-source and you-get-the-source that people sometimes skip over. Meaning, there's not necessarily as much harm in QuarkXPress's source code being on the CD that you purchase as people would like to think.
Closed source?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No problem. Here's a decompiler for you. Have fun!
Seriously though, if the only advantage of closed source is expressly to avoid someone from "stealing" ideas and to keep hackers from finding defects, it's a failure.
Re:Closed source?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Yeah, I hear Bill Gates and his friends complaining all the time. Must really suck to have all that money. What's that you say? You put a paypal begware icon on your sourceforge page and by next year you hope to have enough money to buy a pizza and 6-pack? Well hells bells, at least you're OpenSource and sticking it to the man. Keep it up!
Apple is doing pretty good by taking the middle road. Kernel, BSD utils, and compiler are open-source; graphics, window manager, IDE and apps are closed-source.
--
-- "Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Re:Half-and-half
by
Desert+Raven
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Apple's doing well with it because they didn't have to *pay* to have it developed. I'm not saying that's wrong, but you certainly have to agree that taking something someone else wrote and modifying it is a whole load cheaper than paying umpteen developers to write the whole thing from scratch.
Note that the parts of OSX they *did* write from scratch, they didn't open the source on.
Apple's a good example of how a company can succeed by taking advantage of other people's generosity. But they are *not* a good example of how a company can succeed by *being* generous.
Re:Half-and-half
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
This sounds like just the opposite of where I would want source for mods. I'm MUCH more likely to want source for my apps and IDE vs the Kernel which works just fine w/o source.
Re:Half-and-half
by
0racle
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They paid for NeXT. NeXT is the basis for OS X, not BSD. Apple, NeXT and just about everyone else wrote really important parts of the mach kernel, and instead of taking damn near forever to write everything from scratch took advantage of the microkernel architecture and turned some BSD networking into a subsystem.
Incidentally, using BSD licenced code in this way is not 'taking advantage of' in the negative sence that that phrase implies, but it is making use of it in the way the programmers intended. They have also given back many improvments they have made, something that is not required with the BSD licence.
-- "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Re:Half-and-half
by
finkployd
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In fairness, apple contributes quite a bit back into the open source community. khtml is a good example, darwin is another.
Finkployd
Nothing new
by
garglblaster
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This discussion has been going on for ages..
Yes, closed source is generating business opportunities in the first place however, open source will generate better software in the long run..
That says the algorithm is flawed, not that the software shouldn't be open sourced.
And there's no reason the rules couldn't be put into a configuration file that *isn't* open sourced for the simplest possible way to do it.
Re:Nothing new
by
myowntrueself
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"The code are the rules in this system. And if everyone knew every rule, there would be no enforcement possible!"
I don't mean to sound rude, but maybe you should learn about something called 'seperating code from data'?
It seems to me, that the data -- configuration details about how to determine whether someone gets audited -- can be kept secret, while the code -- how the configuration is used -- can be opened to public scrutiny.
IE; the souce code of your program should never have contained those secret details in the first place.
This has impact in other areas than security as well; what happens if the client wants to adjust the audit parameters? You have to change the sourcecode and recompile?
-- In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Re:Nothing new
by
cetialphav
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· Score: 3, Insightful
People could say the same thing about anti-SPAM software. I could definitely imagine a closed source vendor saying how if the software was open the spammers would have a field day. But in spite of that, spamassassin still works marvelously. A good algorithm should be able to withstand examination.
Re:Judging from the IIS error page in the second l
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Right, 'cause servers running Apache are never Slashdotted? C'mon dude...
the closed-source niche is shrinking?
by
shawn(at)fsu
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it fair to call closed source a niche market? I mean closed source software is big business, when I think niche I think small, not many players, limited use, etc
-- 500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Re:LOL
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If the floor is laughing, you might want to stop rolling on it
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
by
winkydink
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· Score: 1, Insightful
This is Slashdot.
Apple GOOD
Microsoft BAD
We don't need more open source, we need more open minds.
--
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Too black-and-white.
by
k98sven
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think there is any question. Open and closed source will both be around for the forseeable future.
To what extent is a different matter.
As long as there are people (and this would be the vast majority today) who care less about what license their software has than how well it does the job, then there will always be a market for closed-source software. On the condition that it is better than the available OSS solutions.
I think OSS will play this kind of role in the future, providing everybody with a basic set of software, and upping the ante for the quality of commercial software.
Commercial software on the other hand, will increasingly be for those who need and are willing to pay for the improved quality it offers. (and will per definition be forced to offer in order to exist)
Scientists (open) vs Businessmen (closed)
by
GillBates0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Open Knowledge, Free Information, Sharing of Ideas, Open Source....call it what you want to....has been around since the longest time, and is responsible for the scientific progress, technology and advancement that we're enjoying today.
Closed Source, Trade Secrets, Intellectual Property, etc are an outcome of relatively recent business practices and have been artificially created in order to promote innovation through monetary profit and other forms of compensation for individuals and additionally competitive advantage in the case of corporations.
To sum it up, Open knowledge is essential for overall, longterm technological progress, while Closed knowledge is useful in promoting short term business gains.
Talk to a scientist, and they'll support Open knowledge...talk to a businessman, and they'll argue for closely guarded trade secrets
-- An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Re:Scientists (open) vs Businessmen (closed)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Closed Source, Trade Secrets, Intellectual Property, etc are an outcome of relatively recent business practices
And just what do you base that on?
For thousands of years there have been secret societies, trade guilds, and even religions where the fundamental practices and methods have been held in secret. The only way to get in on these secrets was to join (if you were allowed) and work your way up for quite a while.
A few examples to start with: Freemasons, Judaism, and Catholicism. While what goes on at these organizations is now fairly well known or can be found out somewhat easily, it used to not be that way.
If anything, you'll see more openess today than just 100 years ago, whether willingly or legislated.
Re:Scientists (open) vs Businessmen (closed)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I agree, but would like to take this a step further.
Scientists recognize the value of temporary secrets - they don't want to publish their research until they have completed it because they don't want someone else to pick up from where they are and finish before them.
This is essentially the same argument business men have; they want to protect their initial investment (be the first). This is a logical and acceptable argument for closed-source in the beginning.
After the initial release (i.e. the scientist publishes their work) comes the difference. Scientists find value in making their work public; it makes their work legitimate and can give them name recognition. In business (in particular, software), this does not happen. This doesn't mean there isn't advantages to making software public knowledge (we all know those reasons). The unfortunate fact is that businesses either don't know these reasons, don't understand them or simply don't care. There is a prevailing attitude in modern business of short-term profit; there is an incredible amount of talk in business about growing the company X% in the next year or 2 years or maybe even 5 years, but there is virtually no discussion about how to build the company to last a century.
Open-source allows the product to become better, grow with time and still be maintainable. Closed-source allows for short-term profit (potential). It is clear that the prevailing method of doing business doesn't fit with open-source; now it is just a question of "don't know", "don't understand", or "don't care." I hope it isn't the latter.
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
by
saintp
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the difference between Quark and iChat -- which, I agree, was not very well stated -- is that iChat contains some magic that no one has figured out yet. When a new version of Quark is released, competitors might sit up and say: "Hey, that's a neat feature. Let's duplicate it!" There's essentially no advantage to closing the source, since people will clone it anyway.
When iChat was demoed at MacWorld, competitors sat up and said: "J.C. on a pony. How the fuck did they do that?!?" They can't clone it, because there's too much black-box magic, which is maintained by the fact of being closed.
Re:Judging from the IIS error page in the second l
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LurkerXXX
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Right, because we know both websites are hosted on hardware with equal processing power and available bandwidth.
What? We don't?
"Code is hard to read" is NOT a good answer
by
Chemisor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Good code is not hard to read, and even the worst code is a million times easier to read than the output of a disassembler. So the argument is really not valid at all. If you have some copyable secrets, the only answer is to keep the code closed. Not everyone wants to use the open source development anyway. A company is much more likely to want to only take code from its employees, and so will derive no benefit from opening the code. Back to the drawing board, OSS advocates! Come up with a better argument.
Re:"Code is hard to read" is NOT a good answer
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Eric604
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· Score: 2, Insightful
even the worst code is a million times easier to read than the output of a disassembler
So what you're saying is, assembler is not code? Weird. I guess these old skool coderz weren't coders after all.
Some software SHOULD be not open.
by
azav
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· Score: 1, Insightful
If you example, you are responsible for a mission critical software deployment for company or country A and you are using software that is not closed but is say, a product of the open source community, there is little to no guarantee that a backdoor or little known security exploit has not been put in to the code that you base your software system on.
I may be expressing my ignorance to current well run open source projects but actually, what does prevent a coder agent from putting in or keeping on security exploits? All the low level bit and byte override overflow exploits are very difficult to understand for regular people and harder to protect against.
Can there be a point where software that was previously open is licensed for private uses and security audited while development on a private fork continues??
-- - Zav
- Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Simple solution
by
YouHaveSnail
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The simple solution to this problem/debate, and really the only solution, is to let the market decide in each case. There are many markets where a proprietary solution may in fact be the best solution, and there are others where open source, communally developed software is more likely to succeed.
A good example is the games market. Developing compelling games is a lot of work (just ask the poor schlubs over at EA). Some games are written as a labor of love and may be released as open source projects. Far more often, though, games are produced like movies, using expensive resources and labor. And they often have to be produced on a tight schedule for marketing reasons, so that their release coincides with the release of some movie or holiday buying season or whatever. For these reasons, there are few if any open source games out there, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Obviously, there are also many areas in which open source products are kicking the proprietary competition's collective ass. These are usually products which work best if they can run on multiple platforms, meet the needs of lots of different people in different situations, and provide enough value that smart people are willing to spend their time improving and customizing them. Linux, Apache, PHP, etc.
So lets stop worrying about whether open source software is better than proprietary software in all cases or vice versa. It's pretty clear that both bring value to our society and to our economy. Lets instead keep improving the ways we develop products under both systems, and make sure that we maintain an infrastructure that works for both. Software patents are a dumb and harmful idea, but copyright is important and should be respected and protected. Open standards are essential to vibrant markets and useful tools, and we should insist on vendor-neutral bodies to develop and maintain them.
On the contrary
by
eobanb
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But they are *not* a good example of how a company can succeed by *being* generous
How do you figure? Apple's given a lot back to the open source community, especially in terms of user interface and networking. Yes, Apple used to be very unfriendly to open source, but now it's just as easy to dual boot a Mac with Mac OS X and Linux as it is with a PC. And Apple even directly controls the hardware. But back to software; Apple basically re-wrote KHTML for Safari, and then gave it all back to KDE. Rendezvous is also an important project, largely under Apple direction, that probably wouldn't have otherwise caught on.
And don't even get me started on user interface. Apple might not have contributed to this directly, but have you ever stopped to think how much of Gnome and GTK+ is influenced by the Mac OS? Cosmetically, the two are becoming more alike all the time. Example: GTKFileSelection really really sucked. But then Gnome took an idea straight from Mac OS X and brought us GTKFileChooser, which is way more intuitive and easy to use.
In the future, it'll all be even more prevalent. Jabber is coming to iChat in Tiger, for example. It seems like most, if not all, improvements Apple makes to open source libraries/programs all gets given back to the open source community, which is way more than can be said for a lot of other companies.
So stop bitching.
--
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Re:LOL
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And amazingly that comment is insightful.
Lets watch this one be also, I will never understand some mods.
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
by
Dorothy+86
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Which features of iChat are "magic?"
I use iChat daily, but i don't really know anything "magical" about it...
The interesting thing about Spolsky's essay -- and I think it's a very good piece -- is that its principle example is what a big mistake Netscape made by deciding to re-write Mozilla from scratch.
In fact, he calls that "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make."
Excuse me while I piss my pants laughing. Ok... I'm back now.
That statement sheds light on another difference between one sort of software developer and another. It's not necessarily a matter of open vs closed source; it's a matter of intent. Spolsky sees Netscape's decision as disastrous, and from his perspective, he's right -- Netscape's stock went down the toilet and they lost millions.
But from another perspective, it was the perfect decision. They through out a bunch of lousy code that Andreeson wrote as an undergrad and replaced it with a real architecture. As it stands, that architecture has allowed the Mozilla foundation to produce Firefox. There's no doubt in my mind that if they were still working with Andreeson's hacked pile of crap, Firefox wouldn't have happened, IE would be the only web browser for Windows and the rest of us would be using Konqueror. And maybe Netscape's executive would have a few billion bucks more.... more power to them I guess, but speaking for myself, I'm glad they "screwed up!"
What I'm getting at is that if you think that the reason to develop software is to make a shitload of money, there are times when closed source is the best way to go. But if you think that the reason to develop software is to make the best software you can for joy or fame or the betterment of your fellow humans, then open source is almost always the right way to do it.
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
by
saintp
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think the magic gets released until Tiger. Did you see the MacWorld when Tiger was unveiled? One of the improvements was to iChat, to let you video-conference with up to four participants in split-screen. It was pretty crazy.
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
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Moofie
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· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, they skew two video feeds and put all three in a frame. I don't really see how crazy that is. I mean, it's neat and all, but it doesn't seem "magical".
I love my Powerbook, and I'm going to buy Tiger as soon as I can get my grubby hands on it. But the iChat thing is just kinda neat, not "magic".
-- Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
super sekret sorce
by
geoff+lane
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with secrets is that they rarely last.
If your business model is based on a secret then you end up spending more on protecting the secret than developing new products.
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
by
thephotoman
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The way you keep your competitive advantage is by being at the leading (not bleading, leading) edge. Besides, if they don't have the rights to access your binaries, they cannot see the source. That's one of the things about the idea of open source software. Sure, they'll eventually get a copy of the binary through legal means, but that can take a while if you charge a reasonable price for the binary.
The problem isn't that you've got to keep your software secret, it's that you've got to support it better than the other guy and be reasonable about your pricing scheme. Sure, if Quark was open-sourced, I could download it myself without paying, but your large contract companies want support, results, and reliability. If you deliver on those three things, and do so better than your competitor, you should dominate.
Of course, if you were really paranoid, you could write your own license that gives you exclusive rights to the source for a brief period of time after the software is released (say, one year), and then after that the license converts to a free license. This can help recoup the losses to R&D, get mindshare out there, and general respect for the product.
If your company cannot compete based on price, then the laws of economics dictate that your company should fail. It's okay to charge more if you're providing more, but if you provide an equivalent product, you shouldn't expect to be able to charge twice as much as your competitor.
Granted, it's not true freedom, but at the same time, it'd be a step to allow people to better appreciate the freedom given to them by free and open source software.
-- Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Re:Is Some Software Meant to be Secret?
by
Apathetic1
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One alternative is that a company that's developing code could decide to release their old code after some time has elapsed. For example, surely it wouldn't hurt Microsoft if they GPLed Windows 95. No one's going to create a competitive product from it
Microsoft's biggest OS competition right now is their own obsolete versions. I have no intention to upgrade to XP or Longhorn on my Windows computers (information for the curious: I have two Windows machines, an OpenBSD machine and a dual-boot Win/Lin laptop) because Windows 2000 does everything I need.
None of the commercial closed source software that has been Open Sourced has relied on control and vendor lock-in in the same way that Microsoft's products do. The worst thing that could happen to Microsoft is loss of control and that's exactly what an open Windows 95 would do. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft would be happy if every obsolete version of Windows were to spontaneously self-destruct because it would mean continued revenue and furtherance of control.
--
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
Relationships, relationships, relationships,...
by
plopez
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What makes a successful company? Good customer relationships.
I too have work for large organizations, and the traditional B2B relatioship was to give the open source to the client. It was licensed, patened, copy righted etc. but we still had the source which our in-house staff (I was one of them) could modify to meet our customized needs. With the understanding that we would have to support our own mods.
If our mods were good, the vendor would essentially buy us out by giving us discounts, free training classes etc. and take over the supporting the modfication, which was then rolled out to other clients. Sure we could have ripped off their code, but it was in our own best interest not to. The vendor, by licensing the code over a broad number of clients created a cost sharing situation. And they were pleasent to work with.
How did the vendor succeed? By building a good working relationship with the customer. It is all about relationships. This is something MS and other closed source vendors never understand. Especially when they have a monopoly and they can abuse the customer with impunity.
The closed source approach really did not start until the 80's when world+dog thought that the path to fortune was in building proprietary closed source software. It is an anomoly which is slowly shrinking.
Closed source is also product based, which really does not make sense for software as it is an industrial paradigm. Software is more of a service, and open source is more service oriented than closed source (IBM understands this). It is the level of service on which you will win in the long run. Anything else is a short-term anomoly.
-- putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
by
dgatwood
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Now, most of my experience is in the packaged software world and not that of IT departments in big companies, so my view is somewhat different than his. I can understand why a customer company that is basing its business of a piece of software might want the right to look inside it to see what is going on, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a great idea across the rest of the software industry.
Here's why - when you develop a piece of packaged software, sometimes you only have a short amount of time to establish your product as a viable entity in the marketplace. If your competitors could just look inside your source code to see how you accomplished a certain feature that their product doesn't provide, then your fledgling product would be neutralized almost instantly.
There are three problems with that argument:
All software can be trivially recreated. If a company wants a feature, they don't need to steal your company's code. It wouldn't do them a bit of good because the time to integrate your code into theirs for almost any feature is almost always greater than the time needed to write it from scratch. The rare exceptions are large features that are almost completely stand-alone tools, in which case even then, the amount of trouble they would get into for stealing it costs far more than writing it themselves.
There is no such thing as a product that businesses don't depend on. And even individual users want some control over their software---at the very least, some assurance that the company won't just abandon it after they've spent hundreds of their hard-earned dollars to buy the program only to find a dozen bugs that they can't work around.
There are very few "particularly prickly" problems anymore outside of the academic world. Commercial software development is difficult because of the difficulty of debugging such large pieces of code. There probably hasn't been a "really prickly" algorithmic problem solved (with the possible exception of game development) in the general-user commercial programming world in two decades, and algorithmic problems are the only ones that closed source really protects. For any other features (like "ooh, that's a cool way to integrate those tools" or "ooh, it keeps the line formatting when parsing HTML") can be trivially rewritten by a programming team of sufficient competence simply looking at what it does and coming up with a good architectural design that supports all of the desired features... usually in a matter of hours or minutes unless it's a really large feature.
The only place where your argument would be valid -might- be in areas like 3-D modeling/animation, audio/video/data compression, and audio/video effects processing, since there's still some algorithmic work being done in those narrow fields. That said, those things make up only a very tiny percentage of software development, and most of it will never be used by the general public (outside of games).
You can write your code in any style, it doesn't matter; some jerk will flame you for it because it isn't his style and he thinks he is god. It is particularly funny when that "god's" software is buggy and yours never crashes, is portable, and easy to read. Oh, they hate easy to read -- plain spoken code means that you just don't have the intelligence to write code that is hard to understand! It never occurs to them that communicating effectively is more intelligent than obsfucating to try to make yourself look smart. These people are hard to ignore, I'll admit, but we gotta do so. They're the kind of people where they're sitting behind their computer, afraid, and frustrated. They get off by hurting others smarter than them like the bullies that surely must have beat the crap out of them in grade school. And when that smarter person makes a mistake, like all people do, watch out! I had a collection of code I tried to port to the Amiga once that used all kinds of obscure features of GNU C++ that made it hard to port. Because I didn't know what one of them did and tried to work around it, you'd think I was dumber than a box of hair based on the flames I got back. I also treat warnings as errors -- OMG, how awful! It means I can't write optimized code (and of course, these warnings are the reason it didn't port!) Of course, to avoid it, I should have never tried, which is what they want because then they don't feel threatened.
The better your code is, the more angry they'll be. Have pity for them. They'd never talk that way to your face because they know they'd deserve a fist buried deep. And don't expect them to know context -- like putting simple example code on a posting to show a concept instead of being complete. Oh man, watch-out - it's self-worship time^2 when that happens!
PS: The more you do, the more you'll get this kind of flack, so you can turn it around and use it for a guage of just how hoopy a frood you are! After all, useless people who do nothing never gain the attention born from resentment!
One of us should re-read the essay
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ccoakley
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Nothing Spolsky says in his essay would have prevented Firefox, nor the better Mozilla codebase. He simply says not to rewrite from scratch. He never says anything about refactoring or improving the existing codebase. Version 2 may not have any code in common with Version 1, but throughout the development process there were feature improvements, architectural improvements, etc. The point is that by starting with a working version 1, even an ugly version 1, if the decision was made to release early, it would have been possible. Once you have something running, don't throw it away.
Of course, there is an old adage, "All absolute statements are wrong, including this one."
I don't mean to debate the accuracy of what he said, just that the interpretation you have is different than my interpretation. However, I do know that my productivity is higher when I modify a working program than when I start over. If the architecture is *really* bad, I could see where it might actually be beneficial to start over, but I think programmers have a tendency to overestimate how unworkable the current system is when the chance to rewrite from scratch appears.
-- Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
There's no doubt in my mind that if they were still working with Andreeson's hacked pile of crap, Firefox wouldn't have happened, IE would be the only web browser for Windows and the rest of us would be using Konqueror.
Dude, you've got to read the whole article. Particularly this paragraph:
First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without
throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away working code.
He is most certainly not saying that once you've made a poor architectural decision, you are stuck with it for the lifetime of the project. Instead, he's saying that it is possible to change these things without discarding everything. (Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
There are also lessons here for when you are writing the first version. Here's one: if your code to open a window needs a lot of new workaround code, add a comment, for the love of God. Version control logs are often enough for fixing existing code, but a big block of code that only is important on one platform really should have a comment in front of it. And, if you have a test machine of the type needing the workaround, add a unit test. (And if you don't, maybe you should get one.) You should never get into that situation where you have that two-page long function for a tiny task and no idea what all that code does. If you do, someone will inevitably rip it out without realizing they've introduced a bug on a platform they're not using.
I laughed heartily as I got questions from one of my former employees about FTP code the he was rewriting. It had taken 3 years of tuning to get code that could read the 60 different types of FTP servers, those 5000 lines of code may have looked ugly, but at least they worked.
In which you're afraid to touch those 5,000 lines of code because there are so many odd situations. If you have tests for them, this isn't a problem. Can you get ahold of all 60 types of server? Maybe, maybe not. But you can at least get a good chunk of them for integration tests. And you can certainly write mocks for the behavior noted as problematic for the others.
Re:I think the point has been made. . .
by
Mmm+coffee
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Please note that the 2K Workstation's EULA states that you can not have more than five network connections to your machine at once. Failure to do so voids the EULA, and thus makes your paid for version as illegal as a copy downloaded off p2p.
All Free Software/Proprietary Software discussions aside, the Freedom aspects of Free Software alone makes it more valuable to me than closed software. At least I can do what I want with my hardware and still be legal.
Mozilla was not "exceedingly lucky", it was open source.
Yet another example of the inherent strength of open source is the fact that Mozilla didn't *have* to release a product within a certain time frame in order to survive.
-- Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
I was trying to be complimentary, but I just had my friend who graduated with a CS degree as me the procedure to setup a wireless network in their house.
He, however, is a classic example of getting into the market for the money, but no love of the technology.
C'est la vie. He still compliments my websites I've worked on, but I think if anyone who considers code poetry saw my work, they'd gag.
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
All software can be trivially recreated.
Bullshit. If this were true there'd be much more open source software of equal quality to every single piece of closed software than there currently is.
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I want all the features found in Microsoft Office, in AbiWord and others. Go and do it.
Your arguments are more like, I don't like the other argument so it must be false, arguments. The real world data shows that you are wrong. Amount of code in Office is far more than you can afford to replicate in a meaningful time. The best option is actually to look at the source code, learn how it works and then implement your own.
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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Rinikusu
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1. Then why don't they do it? The GIMP still does not have all these "trivial" features that Photoshop has, and likely will never, either. If it's so "trivial", then why aren't we seeing feature and ease-of-use parity between Open Source products and their closed source counterparts? In some software segments, yes (Apache, Tomcat, etc). In others, you don't. Maybe it's simply a matter of time and money vs. the ability or desire of a particular person to give away their work for free, but obviously, it's by no means a trivial problem. Programmatically speaking, maybe, but in practicality, getting someone to do all that hard work for basically "nothing" (except pride?), well, you've got a long row to hoe.
2. It completely depends upon the software, as well. But being Open Source does not guarantee that software will be well-supported or abandoned by the developers, either. See sourceforge. Yes, by having the source code, you might can take over and make your changes, if you have the technical know-how or even the desire to do it. Or you have to pay someone to do it. If you're paying for someone else to do it, really, why does a company care if the solution is open source or closed source? $600 for photoshop, one time license (depends upon how many artists you have) vs 65k/year for house programmer/contractor to produce work that you cannot really profit from (sell it once, but give away the source, that's the last sale you'll probably make).
3. Again, who's paying for that programming team? You seem to think there's an infinite supply of interested people working on these type of problems. There's not. I've found that even WITH the incentive of a great salary that I still couldn't bear to write software that I wasn't interested in. But the point it, to get that team of programmers, you have to assemble of group of interested, technically proficient programmers, and for many problems, that's going to cost you money because only money makes them interested.:P
-- If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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carlislematthew
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"All software can be trivially recreated".
Your comment was interesting up until that point.
You're right that most software is not very tricky but that doesn't mean that it's trivial to produce. It can take months or YEARS to reproduce a software system that someone else has created. If you're 12 months ahead of the competition then you're set. If it's going to take a million dollars and 2 months to get staffed up before you even START development, then you're going to be releasing your beta version while your competition is releasing their second version with a bunch of features that all the users requested. It can take years to catch up, if the money continues to flow of course.
The comment that you argued against has it exactly right. It's about being ahead of the competition and attempting to stay ahead.
Open source is a wonderful thing, for some projects. Arguing that it would be appropriate for something like Dreamweaver is naive at best.
MS source got much better recently
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roystgnr
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Sure, you would have been correct in May 2002, when Microsoft exec Jim Allchin testified that releasing their source code would endanger national security. I mean, surely there's no way a Microsoft executive would perjure himself to try and keep his company from being penalized for its crimes!
However, Microsoft fixed all these security problems by January 2003, when they had their source code cleaned up enough to show to 60 countries including China. So you shouldn't spread any more of these scurrilous rumors; why, that would imply that Microsoft would commit treason just to try and increase foreign revenues!
Interesting post, but I want to point out that writing optimized code does not mean going beyond the boundaries of C89/C99. I treat warnings as errors - in fact, 99% of all warnings are quite reasonable - sloppy code or runtime errors. It pisses me off that so many programmers think that just because it (barely) compiles, its worthwhile to put their abortions out into the world. For one thing, there is a high chance of the code chocking on newer versions of or different compilers.
Why are there so many OSS projects out there with incredibly sloppy code that no one bothers to fix?
I personally always compile everything with -Wall --pedantic.
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1. You're missing the point. Features are trivial to implement in that they're "just work"; sometimes they're less fun work, and there's less people willing to do it, but that's beside the point - having the source code to a competing product with a feature doesn't make the feature the slightest bit easier to implement (like is claimed by Joe Marini's article), because transferring the feature is usually just as much or more work than implementing it from scratch.
There are only a couple of cases where having the source code would be valuable for a competitor:
a. When the source code implements an undocumented protocol or file format and the competitor wants to be compatible.
b. When the source code implements a genuinely hard (and unpublished) algorithm. Non-programmers tend to assume that programs are full of such "magic formulas", while programmers (at least good ones) know that most programs contain none. These algorithms are usually "pure math" making them more easily transferable to other programs. Photoshop may have a few such algorithms (image manipulation is an area where genuinely hard algorithms for automatic image enhancement can be useful), but they're most likely not related to usability, and I don't know how well-published the field of image manipulation is.
Neither of these cases is, in my opinion, a valid reason to consider the source code a secret. For case a., it's anticompetitive to make interoperability difficult, for case b., researchers really should be advancing the state of the art rather than selling programs implementing their secret formulas. They should publish, and use patents if their inventions really deserve protection.
Re:What is the business ADVANTAGE of open source?
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Tsu+Dho+Nimh
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Most business customers are not developers. They are no more able to benefit from open source than the average person would benefit from a set of engineering blueprints of their dishwasher."
If I had the engineering plans for my dishwasher, I could FIX it when it broke. Or I could hire someone who could read the plans and have them fix it or modify it for me. If it was in a sealed module, I'd have to.... buy another one!
Re:Text of joemarini.com link
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symbolic
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Quark's trade secrets, along with the enormous amount of money we had invested in R&D to develop QuarkXPress 3 would have been for naught.
I worked with a company who used Quark for their primary workflow (one of their departments anyway). If ALdus could have gotten ahold of the source, I think the primary reason Quark would have been in trouble was their attitude toward their customers- a kind of "You owe us" mentality. It was quite annoying. I haven't had to deal with anything Quark for quite a while, so I don't know if the attitude has changed.
That having been said, everyone assumes that it's ONLY the technology that will make or break your success as a company. Technology is only part of it - unfortunately, it's the part that keeps customers locked into using your pruduct even when they despise you as a company. I think there's a lot to be said for good customer service- spreading some goodwill will go a long way toward retaining customers that might otherwise consider a competing product.
"A novel device for..."
by
Doc+Ruby
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, patents protected only devices, for a long, profitable, sensible period of centuries. If you make a patented paperclip by casting molten steel, rather than twisting steel wire, and the paperclips are identical, you're violating the patent. That patent need not identify the machine that makes the patented paperclip. The paperclip-making machine itself might have a patent, but if it makes a paperclip already covered by another patent, running it is illegal.
Believe me, a substantially rich branch of my family started in the cardboard box sales business, grew into the box-manufacturing biz, then made (& patented) machines for making the boxes, and expanded into supplying machines (tools, assembly lines) to make the machines that make boxes. All shipped around the world in cardboard boxes. Every step of the way they innovated, and licensed any device in the "process" already protected, but necessary to their new process. They probably have now obtained a patent on the process, though it's worthless, except to protect themselves from a frivolous claim by another with that patent to interfere with their process. If someone had done that first, in the early 20th Century, they would not have had room to innovate, the US would have had a lot less boxes made, and we'd all be speaking German.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like the issue with MS getting source stolen. How many problems can/will arise from relying on "no one will ever see this" when everyone can see it?
I am a huge proponent of open-source, but... Writing code isn't a trivial process. Writing good code is extremely difficult, and I feel is a skill that should be well compensated for.
No problem. Here's a decompiler for you. Have fun!
Seriously though, if the only advantage of closed source is expressly to avoid someone from "stealing" ideas and to keep hackers from finding defects, it's a failure.
Apple is doing pretty good by taking the middle road. Kernel, BSD utils, and compiler are open-source; graphics, window manager, IDE and apps are closed-source.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Yes, closed source is generating business opportunities in the first place
however, open source will generate better software in the long run..
And it's more sustainable / better quality
you know what I'm talking about..
(?)
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
Right, 'cause servers running Apache are never Slashdotted? C'mon dude...
Is it fair to call closed source a niche market? I mean closed source software is big business, when I think niche I think small, not many players, limited use, etc
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
If the floor is laughing, you might want to stop rolling on it
Apple GOOD
Microsoft BAD
We don't need more open source, we need more open minds.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't think there is any question. Open and closed source will both be around for the forseeable future.
To what extent is a different matter.
As long as there are people (and this would be the vast majority today) who care less about what license their software has than how well it does the job, then there will always be a market for closed-source software. On the condition that it is better than the available OSS solutions.
I think OSS will play this kind of role in the future, providing everybody with a basic set of software, and upping the ante for the quality of commercial software.
Commercial software on the other hand, will increasingly be for those who need and are willing to pay for the improved quality it offers.
(and will per definition be forced to offer in order to exist)
Closed Source, Trade Secrets, Intellectual Property, etc are an outcome of relatively recent business practices and have been artificially created in order to promote innovation through monetary profit and other forms of compensation for individuals and additionally competitive advantage in the case of corporations.
To sum it up, Open knowledge is essential for overall, longterm technological progress, while Closed knowledge is useful in promoting short term business gains.
Talk to a scientist, and they'll support Open knowledge...talk to a businessman, and they'll argue for closely guarded trade secrets
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
When iChat was demoed at MacWorld, competitors sat up and said: "J.C. on a pony. How the fuck did they do that?!?" They can't clone it, because there's too much black-box magic, which is maintained by the fact of being closed.
That's how I understand it, at least.
Another one bites the dust
What? We don't?
Good code is not hard to read, and even the worst code is a million times easier to read than the output of a disassembler. So the argument is really not valid at all. If you have some copyable secrets, the only answer is to keep the code closed. Not everyone wants to use the open source development anyway. A company is much more likely to want to only take code from its employees, and so will derive no benefit from opening the code. Back to the drawing board, OSS advocates! Come up with a better argument.
If you example, you are responsible for a mission critical software deployment for company or country A and you are using software that is not closed but is say, a product of the open source community, there is little to no guarantee that a backdoor or little known security exploit has not been put in to the code that you base your software system on.
I may be expressing my ignorance to current well run open source projects but actually, what does prevent a coder agent from putting in or keeping on security exploits? All the low level bit and byte override overflow exploits are very difficult to understand for regular people and harder to protect against.
Can there be a point where software that was previously open is licensed for private uses and security audited while development on a private fork continues??
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The simple solution to this problem/debate, and really the only solution, is to let the market decide in each case. There are many markets where a proprietary solution may in fact be the best solution, and there are others where open source, communally developed software is more likely to succeed.
A good example is the games market. Developing compelling games is a lot of work (just ask the poor schlubs over at EA). Some games are written as a labor of love and may be released as open source projects. Far more often, though, games are produced like movies, using expensive resources and labor. And they often have to be produced on a tight schedule for marketing reasons, so that their release coincides with the release of some movie or holiday buying season or whatever. For these reasons, there are few if any open source games out there, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Obviously, there are also many areas in which open source products are kicking the proprietary competition's collective ass. These are usually products which work best if they can run on multiple platforms, meet the needs of lots of different people in different situations, and provide enough value that smart people are willing to spend their time improving and customizing them. Linux, Apache, PHP, etc.
So lets stop worrying about whether open source software is better than proprietary software in all cases or vice versa. It's pretty clear that both bring value to our society and to our economy. Lets instead keep improving the ways we develop products under both systems, and make sure that we maintain an infrastructure that works for both. Software patents are a dumb and harmful idea, but copyright is important and should be respected and protected. Open standards are essential to vibrant markets and useful tools, and we should insist on vendor-neutral bodies to develop and maintain them.
But they are *not* a good example of how a company can succeed by *being* generous
How do you figure? Apple's given a lot back to the open source community, especially in terms of user interface and networking. Yes, Apple used to be very unfriendly to open source, but now it's just as easy to dual boot a Mac with Mac OS X and Linux as it is with a PC. And Apple even directly controls the hardware. But back to software; Apple basically re-wrote KHTML for Safari, and then gave it all back to KDE. Rendezvous is also an important project, largely under Apple direction, that probably wouldn't have otherwise caught on.
And don't even get me started on user interface. Apple might not have contributed to this directly, but have you ever stopped to think how much of Gnome and GTK+ is influenced by the Mac OS? Cosmetically, the two are becoming more alike all the time. Example: GTKFileSelection really really sucked. But then Gnome took an idea straight from Mac OS X and brought us GTKFileChooser, which is way more intuitive and easy to use.
In the future, it'll all be even more prevalent. Jabber is coming to iChat in Tiger, for example. It seems like most, if not all, improvements Apple makes to open source libraries/programs all gets given back to the open source community, which is way more than can be said for a lot of other companies.
So stop bitching.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
And amazingly that comment is insightful.
Lets watch this one be also, I will never understand some mods.
I use iChat daily, but i don't really know anything "magical" about it...
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
That it's been modded insightful... well, the carpet and I can't stop giggling.
The interesting thing about Spolsky's essay -- and I think it's a very good piece -- is that its principle example is what a big mistake Netscape made by deciding to re-write Mozilla from scratch.
In fact, he calls that "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make."
Excuse me while I piss my pants laughing. Ok... I'm back now.
That statement sheds light on another difference between one sort of software developer and another. It's not necessarily a matter of open vs closed source; it's a matter of intent. Spolsky sees Netscape's decision as disastrous, and from his perspective, he's right -- Netscape's stock went down the toilet and they lost millions.
But from another perspective, it was the perfect decision. They through out a bunch of lousy code that Andreeson wrote as an undergrad and replaced it with a real architecture. As it stands, that architecture has allowed the Mozilla foundation to produce Firefox. There's no doubt in my mind that if they were still working with Andreeson's hacked pile of crap, Firefox wouldn't have happened, IE would be the only web browser for Windows and the rest of us would be using Konqueror. And maybe Netscape's executive would have a few billion bucks more.... more power to them I guess, but speaking for myself, I'm glad they "screwed up!"
What I'm getting at is that if you think that the reason to develop software is to make a shitload of money, there are times when closed source is the best way to go. But if you think that the reason to develop software is to make the best software you can for joy or fame or the betterment of your fellow humans, then open source is almost always the right way to do it.
I don't think the magic gets released until Tiger. Did you see the MacWorld when Tiger was unveiled? One of the improvements was to iChat, to let you video-conference with up to four participants in split-screen. It was pretty crazy.
Another one bites the dust
OK, they skew two video feeds and put all three in a frame. I don't really see how crazy that is. I mean, it's neat and all, but it doesn't seem "magical".
I love my Powerbook, and I'm going to buy Tiger as soon as I can get my grubby hands on it. But the iChat thing is just kinda neat, not "magic".
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The problem with secrets is that they rarely last.
If your business model is based on a secret then you end up spending more on protecting the secret than developing new products.
The way you keep your competitive advantage is by being at the leading (not bleading, leading) edge. Besides, if they don't have the rights to access your binaries, they cannot see the source. That's one of the things about the idea of open source software. Sure, they'll eventually get a copy of the binary through legal means, but that can take a while if you charge a reasonable price for the binary.
The problem isn't that you've got to keep your software secret, it's that you've got to support it better than the other guy and be reasonable about your pricing scheme. Sure, if Quark was open-sourced, I could download it myself without paying, but your large contract companies want support, results, and reliability. If you deliver on those three things, and do so better than your competitor, you should dominate.
Of course, if you were really paranoid, you could write your own license that gives you exclusive rights to the source for a brief period of time after the software is released (say, one year), and then after that the license converts to a free license. This can help recoup the losses to R&D, get mindshare out there, and general respect for the product.
If your company cannot compete based on price, then the laws of economics dictate that your company should fail. It's okay to charge more if you're providing more, but if you provide an equivalent product, you shouldn't expect to be able to charge twice as much as your competitor.
Granted, it's not true freedom, but at the same time, it'd be a step to allow people to better appreciate the freedom given to them by free and open source software.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Microsoft's biggest OS competition right now is their own obsolete versions. I have no intention to upgrade to XP or Longhorn on my Windows computers (information for the curious: I have two Windows machines, an OpenBSD machine and a dual-boot Win/Lin laptop) because Windows 2000 does everything I need.
None of the commercial closed source software that has been Open Sourced has relied on control and vendor lock-in in the same way that Microsoft's products do. The worst thing that could happen to Microsoft is loss of control and that's exactly what an open Windows 95 would do. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft would be happy if every obsolete version of Windows were to spontaneously self-destruct because it would mean continued revenue and furtherance of control.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
What makes a successful company? Good customer relationships.
I too have work for large organizations, and the traditional B2B relatioship was to give the open source to the client. It was licensed, patened, copy righted etc. but we still had the source which our in-house staff (I was one of them) could modify to meet our customized needs. With the understanding that we would have to support our own mods.
If our mods were good, the vendor would essentially buy us out by giving us discounts, free training classes etc. and take over the supporting the modfication, which was then rolled out to other clients. Sure we could have ripped off their code, but it was in our own best interest not to. The vendor, by licensing the code over a broad number of clients created a cost sharing situation. And they were pleasent to work with.
How did the vendor succeed? By building a good working relationship with the customer. It is all about relationships. This is something MS and other closed source vendors never understand. Especially when they have a monopoly and they can abuse the customer with impunity.
The closed source approach really did not start until the 80's when world+dog thought that the path to fortune was in building proprietary closed source software. It is an anomoly which is slowly shrinking.
Closed source is also product based, which really does not make sense for software as it is an industrial paradigm. Software is more of a service, and open source is more service oriented than closed source (IBM understands this). It is the level of service on which you will win in the long run. Anything else is a short-term anomoly.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Here's why - when you develop a piece of packaged software, sometimes you only have a short amount of time to establish your product as a viable entity in the marketplace. If your competitors could just look inside your source code to see how you accomplished a certain feature that their product doesn't provide, then your fledgling product would be neutralized almost instantly.
There are three problems with that argument:
- All software can be trivially recreated. If a company wants a feature, they don't need to steal your company's code. It wouldn't do them a bit of good because the time to integrate your code into theirs for almost any feature is almost always greater than the time needed to write it from scratch. The rare exceptions are large features that are almost completely stand-alone tools, in which case even then, the amount of trouble they would get into for stealing it costs far more than writing it themselves.
- There is no such thing as a product that businesses don't depend on. And even individual users want some control over their software---at the very least, some assurance that the company won't just abandon it after they've spent hundreds of their hard-earned dollars to buy the program only to find a dozen bugs that they can't work around.
- There are very few "particularly prickly" problems anymore outside of the academic world. Commercial software development is difficult because of the difficulty of debugging such large pieces of code. There probably hasn't been a "really prickly" algorithmic problem solved (with the possible exception of game development) in the general-user commercial programming world in two decades, and algorithmic problems are the only ones that closed source really protects. For any other features (like "ooh, that's a cool way to integrate those tools" or "ooh, it keeps the line formatting when parsing HTML") can be trivially rewritten by a programming team of sufficient competence simply looking at what it does and coming up with a good architectural design that supports all of the desired features... usually in a matter of hours or minutes unless it's a really large feature.
The only place where your argument would be valid -might- be in areas like 3-D modeling/animation, audio/video/data compression, and audio/video effects processing, since there's still some algorithmic work being done in those narrow fields. That said, those things make up only a very tiny percentage of software development, and most of it will never be used by the general public (outside of games).Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You can write your code in any style, it doesn't matter; some jerk will flame you for it because it isn't his style and he thinks he is god. It is particularly funny when that "god's" software is buggy and yours never crashes, is portable, and easy to read. Oh, they hate easy to read -- plain spoken code means that you just don't have the intelligence to write code that is hard to understand! It never occurs to them that communicating effectively is more intelligent than obsfucating to try to make yourself look smart. These people are hard to ignore, I'll admit, but we gotta do so. They're the kind of people where they're sitting behind their computer, afraid, and frustrated. They get off by hurting others smarter than them like the bullies that surely must have beat the crap out of them in grade school. And when that smarter person makes a mistake, like all people do, watch out! I had a collection of code I tried to port to the Amiga once that used all kinds of obscure features of GNU C++ that made it hard to port. Because I didn't know what one of them did and tried to work around it, you'd think I was dumber than a box of hair based on the flames I got back. I also treat warnings as errors -- OMG, how awful! It means I can't write optimized code (and of course, these warnings are the reason it didn't port!) Of course, to avoid it, I should have never tried, which is what they want because then they don't feel threatened.
The better your code is, the more angry they'll be. Have pity for them. They'd never talk that way to your face because they know they'd deserve a fist buried deep. And don't expect them to know context -- like putting simple example code on a posting to show a concept instead of being complete. Oh man, watch-out - it's self-worship time^2 when that happens!
PS: The more you do, the more you'll get this kind of flack, so you can turn it around and use it for a guage of just how hoopy a frood you are! After all, useless people who do nothing never gain the attention born from resentment!
Nothing Spolsky says in his essay would have prevented Firefox, nor the better Mozilla codebase. He simply says not to rewrite from scratch. He never says anything about refactoring or improving the existing codebase. Version 2 may not have any code in common with Version 1, but throughout the development process there were feature improvements, architectural improvements, etc. The point is that by starting with a working version 1, even an ugly version 1, if the decision was made to release early, it would have been possible. Once you have something running, don't throw it away.
Of course, there is an old adage, "All absolute statements are wrong, including this one."
I don't mean to debate the accuracy of what he said, just that the interpretation you have is different than my interpretation. However, I do know that my productivity is higher when I modify a working program than when I start over. If the architecture is *really* bad, I could see where it might actually be beneficial to start over, but I think programmers have a tendency to overestimate how unworkable the current system is when the chance to rewrite from scratch appears.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Dude, you've got to read the whole article. Particularly this paragraph:
He is most certainly not saying that once you've made a poor architectural decision, you are stuck with it for the lifetime of the project. Instead, he's saying that it is possible to change these things without discarding everything. (Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
There are also lessons here for when you are writing the first version. Here's one: if your code to open a window needs a lot of new workaround code, add a comment, for the love of God. Version control logs are often enough for fixing existing code, but a big block of code that only is important on one platform really should have a comment in front of it. And, if you have a test machine of the type needing the workaround, add a unit test. (And if you don't, maybe you should get one.) You should never get into that situation where you have that two-page long function for a tiny task and no idea what all that code does. If you do, someone will inevitably rip it out without realizing they've introduced a bug on a platform they're not using.
Then you can avoid problems like this one:
In which you're afraid to touch those 5,000 lines of code because there are so many odd situations. If you have tests for them, this isn't a problem. Can you get ahold of all 60 types of server? Maybe, maybe not. But you can at least get a good chunk of them for integration tests. And you can certainly write mocks for the behavior noted as problematic for the others.
Please note that the 2K Workstation's EULA states that you can not have more than five network connections to your machine at once. Failure to do so voids the EULA, and thus makes your paid for version as illegal as a copy downloaded off p2p.
All Free Software/Proprietary Software discussions aside, the Freedom aspects of Free Software alone makes it more valuable to me than closed software. At least I can do what I want with my hardware and still be legal.
Mozilla was not "exceedingly lucky", it was open source.
Yet another example of the inherent strength of open source is the fact that Mozilla didn't *have* to release a product within a certain time frame in order to survive.
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
heh, modded Troll.
I was trying to be complimentary, but I just had my friend who graduated with a CS degree as me the procedure to setup a wireless network in their house.
He, however, is a classic example of getting into the market for the money, but no love of the technology.
C'est la vie. He still compliments my websites I've worked on, but I think if anyone who considers code poetry saw my work, they'd gag.
Can you ping me now? Gooood! | Manhappenin.Net - Things to do
All software can be trivially recreated.
Bullshit. If this were true there'd be much more open source software of equal quality to every single piece of closed software than there currently is.
Your arguments are more like, I don't like the other argument so it must be false, arguments. The real world data shows that you are wrong. Amount of code in Office is far more than you can afford to replicate in a meaningful time. The best option is actually to look at the source code, learn how it works and then implement your own.
1. Then why don't they do it? The GIMP still does not have all these "trivial" features that Photoshop has, and likely will never, either. If it's so "trivial", then why aren't we seeing feature and ease-of-use parity between Open Source products and their closed source counterparts? In some software segments, yes (Apache, Tomcat, etc). In others, you don't. Maybe it's simply a matter of time and money vs. the ability or desire of a particular person to give away their work for free, but obviously, it's by no means a trivial problem. Programmatically speaking, maybe, but in practicality, getting someone to do all that hard work for basically "nothing" (except pride?), well, you've got a long row to hoe.
:P
2. It completely depends upon the software, as well. But being Open Source does not guarantee that software will be well-supported or abandoned by the developers, either. See sourceforge. Yes, by having the source code, you might can take over and make your changes, if you have the technical know-how or even the desire to do it. Or you have to pay someone to do it. If you're paying for someone else to do it, really, why does a company care if the solution is open source or closed source? $600 for photoshop, one time license (depends upon how many artists you have) vs 65k/year for house programmer/contractor to produce work that you cannot really profit from (sell it once, but give away the source, that's the last sale you'll probably make).
3. Again, who's paying for that programming team? You seem to think there's an infinite supply of interested people working on these type of problems. There's not. I've found that even WITH the incentive of a great salary that I still couldn't bear to write software that I wasn't interested in. But the point it, to get that team of programmers, you have to assemble of group of interested, technically proficient programmers, and for many problems, that's going to cost you money because only money makes them interested.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
"All software can be trivially recreated".
Your comment was interesting up until that point.
You're right that most software is not very tricky but that doesn't mean that it's trivial to produce. It can take months or YEARS to reproduce a software system that someone else has created. If you're 12 months ahead of the competition then you're set. If it's going to take a million dollars and 2 months to get staffed up before you even START development, then you're going to be releasing your beta version while your competition is releasing their second version with a bunch of features that all the users requested. It can take years to catch up, if the money continues to flow of course.
The comment that you argued against has it exactly right. It's about being ahead of the competition and attempting to stay ahead.
Open source is a wonderful thing, for some projects. Arguing that it would be appropriate for something like Dreamweaver is naive at best.
Sure, you would have been correct in May 2002, when Microsoft exec Jim Allchin testified that releasing their source code would endanger national security. I mean, surely there's no way a Microsoft executive would perjure himself to try and keep his company from being penalized for its crimes!
However, Microsoft fixed all these security problems by January 2003, when they had their source code cleaned up enough to show to 60 countries including China. So you shouldn't spread any more of these scurrilous rumors; why, that would imply that Microsoft would commit treason just to try and increase foreign revenues!
Interesting post, but I want to point out that writing optimized code does not mean going beyond the boundaries of C89/C99. I treat warnings as errors - in fact, 99% of all warnings are quite reasonable - sloppy code or runtime errors. It pisses me off that so many programmers think that just because it (barely) compiles, its worthwhile to put their abortions out into the world. For one thing, there is a high chance of the code chocking on newer versions of or different compilers.
Why are there so many OSS projects out there with incredibly sloppy code that no one bothers to fix?
I personally always compile everything with -Wall --pedantic.
1. You're missing the point. Features are trivial to implement in that they're "just work"; sometimes they're less fun work, and there's less people willing to do it, but that's beside the point - having the source code to a competing product with a feature doesn't make the feature the slightest bit easier to implement (like is claimed by Joe Marini's article), because transferring the feature is usually just as much or more work than implementing it from scratch.
There are only a couple of cases where having the source code would be valuable for a competitor:
a. When the source code implements an undocumented protocol or file format and the competitor wants to be compatible.
b. When the source code implements a genuinely hard (and unpublished) algorithm. Non-programmers tend to assume that programs are full of such "magic formulas", while programmers (at least good ones) know that most programs contain none. These algorithms are usually "pure math" making them more easily transferable to other programs. Photoshop may have a few such algorithms (image manipulation is an area where genuinely hard algorithms for automatic image enhancement can be useful), but they're most likely not related to usability, and I don't know how well-published the field of image manipulation is.
Neither of these cases is, in my opinion, a valid reason to consider the source code a secret. For case a., it's anticompetitive to make interoperability difficult, for case b., researchers really should be advancing the state of the art rather than selling programs implementing their secret formulas. They should publish, and use patents if their inventions really deserve protection.
If I had the engineering plans for my dishwasher, I could FIX it when it broke. Or I could hire someone who could read the plans and have them fix it or modify it for me. If it was in a sealed module, I'd have to .... buy another one!
Quark's trade secrets, along with the enormous amount of money we had invested in R&D to develop QuarkXPress 3 would have been for naught.
I worked with a company who used Quark for their primary workflow (one of their departments anyway). If ALdus could have gotten ahold of the source, I think the primary reason Quark would have been in trouble was their attitude toward their customers- a kind of "You owe us" mentality. It was quite annoying. I haven't had to deal with anything Quark for quite a while, so I don't know if the attitude has changed.
That having been said, everyone assumes that it's ONLY the technology that will make or break your success as a company. Technology is only part of it - unfortunately, it's the part that keeps customers locked into using your pruduct even when they despise you as a company. I think there's a lot to be said for good customer service- spreading some goodwill will go a long way toward retaining customers that might otherwise consider a competing product.
No, patents protected only devices, for a long, profitable, sensible period of centuries. If you make a patented paperclip by casting molten steel, rather than twisting steel wire, and the paperclips are identical, you're violating the patent. That patent need not identify the machine that makes the patented paperclip. The paperclip-making machine itself might have a patent, but if it makes a paperclip already covered by another patent, running it is illegal.
Believe me, a substantially rich branch of my family started in the cardboard box sales business, grew into the box-manufacturing biz, then made (& patented) machines for making the boxes, and expanded into supplying machines (tools, assembly lines) to make the machines that make boxes. All shipped around the world in cardboard boxes. Every step of the way they innovated, and licensed any device in the "process" already protected, but necessary to their new process. They probably have now obtained a patent on the process, though it's worthless, except to protect themselves from a frivolous claim by another with that patent to interfere with their process. If someone had done that first, in the early 20th Century, they would not have had room to innovate, the US would have had a lot less boxes made, and we'd all be speaking German.
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make install -not war