The Care and Feeding of Open Source Software

An anonymous reader writes "You might find The Care and Feeding of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) interesting. This article debunks a lot of the myths and misunderstandings about the open-source software development process."

Comments

The real reson

[j_heisenberg]

... FOSS has flourished in recent years is a tiny nuicance up in Seattle. Microsoft crushed (almost) all competitors in their main markets, OSes, productivity suits and browsers. The only way to avoid this fate was to produce free software, using the same tactic MS has employed.

Another explanation would be: A lot of highly trained, intelligent and creative people have rather dull jobs, maintaining or servicing existing technology. They want to "realize their potential", and they do open source.

Re:The real reson

[ThogScully]

The grandparent talked about the recent successes of FOSS and attributed them to a greater need over the last few years.

You started your reply seemingly to show him he's wrong by limiting your response to discussion of the last year or two and showing off the recent successes of FOSS.

His point wasn't that there aren't good alternatives. His point was that if you look back further than a few years, MS did eliminate the competition in many realms. The alternatives you list now are a result of that.
-N

Re:The real reson

[Decaff]

Yes it is. And I hope it makes huge gains. But my comment speaks directly to the main article, 'The care and feeding of Open Source'.

I see what you mean. However, I was replying to the post that said that Microsoft has 'crushed all competition'.

Where would OO.o be today without intial care and feeding from Sun?

Not very far. Which is why the 'Sun is as bad as Microsoft' attitude which is common on Slashdot is so wrong. Sun has provided one of the killer apps for desktop Linux.

Re:The real reson

[david duncan scott]

The source to the BIOS may have been available (although that's not my recollection) but it certainly wasn't free -- Phoenix went through a fair amount of work to create their "clean-room" implementation of that BIOS, and even then there were issues with non-IBM PC's, due to the lack of the tape BASIC ROM (which, AFAIK, was never duplicated) in the clones.

Furthermore, WordStar was never open, WordPerfect was never open, Magic Wand, Electric Pencil, CP/M...the world of software was not a free software garden until Gates. Some of the freedom that RMS remembers had something to do with the lack of portability -- for many companies, software was just a way to sell hardware -- and some, I suspect, never really existed -- while I'm certain that he was invited to examine many AI projects, I'm not so sure that he ever tried to look at the source for MIT's payroll software.

Re:The real reson

[Decaff]

If strong means less than 10% of the productivity tool market. M$ Windoze and Office account for 90+% of the market. Inertia has a very hard thing to control.

Yes, you are right. Part of what I meant by 'strong' is that Open Office is powerful enough to compete, even though it does not have a big market share yet.

http://www.users.on.net/~farnik/wikicgi/wiki.pl?Ma rketingFLOSS

An interesting post, but I disagree with many points, based on personal experience. Not even MS Office is 100% compatible with MS Office! Compatibility only has to be 'just good enough', not perfect. There has never been perfect document porting between software suites, not even between suites from the same manufacturer. The selling points of Open Office are that it does almost all of what you want, requires minimal retraining (with the exception of Access), and provides considerable financial savings.

The real killer selling point is that it allows companies to either proceed with or plan progressive migration away from Windows on the desktop. Having Open Office on Linux as well as Windows allows companies freedom to choose the appropriate desktop system and even to have a mix of operating systems. Even if companies don't go ahead with this, my experience is that having the choice to do so is very attractive.

but what about the programmers?

[Anonymous Coward]

they need care and feeding aswell
ideology behind open source is nice of course, but some of us have to make living by writing code
open source isn't always the solution for everything

Re:but what about the programmers?

[DrLZRDMN]

Do we need to make a living writing code? If you are a hobiest programmer than no. There are other ways to make money such as selling hardware, support, or installation services. You are also assuming that open source programmers neveer getg paid, this is not true either.

Re:but what about the programmers?

[RAMMS EIN]

But if you're suggesting that you can't make a living writing open-source software, you're wrong.

I'm a webmaster, and my customers get their websites delivered with full source. (And no documentation! now if that isn't open-source... :p) I bet most webmasters work the same way. Now I don't think you want to argue that we don't make any money...

The way I see it is that you can make money writing software, be it closed or open, as long as it's custom software. Commodity software is a different story - you can make a lot of money with it, but it's difficult.

Re:but what about the programmers?

[saigon_from_europe]

You are missing the point. Instead of fruitles multiplication of people doing the same job, now we can code things that are really different.

I used to work in company that produced wireless routers (for our internal usage only; unfortunately we never reached the stage to sell them). They were based on Linux. In propriatery world, we would have to buy licence for OS. Then, we would be limited in changes we could made to them. And many many related things (no documentation, no source of drivers...). Company with 3 developers would have no chance to make anything similar.

So what is the point: Instead to write OS from the scratch; to write drivers and similar things we used existing free technology. My main task was to write bash scripts, to patch kernel and similar. Other guy wrote sofware for automated control.

Basically, we did not try to reinvent flowerpot hole (i.e. writing something that already exists), we focused on new value - i.e. things that were specific for own company.

I can say, without FOSS, what we tried to do would be totaly impossible. In this case, FOSS created 10 new jobs.

(Unfortunately, they lasted only one year, but it was not related to FOSS.)

In more general terms, FOSS enables you to move from general things to company specific things. All companies calculate taxes same way - but many many companies have their own in house built software for that. At the other side, there are no two same companies with exactly same business logic. FOSS, in theory at least, allows you to spare resources from coding tax logic (common tasks) and to transfer them to coding support for your business logic (specific taks).

To be honest, this happens also in propriatery world. SAP has same tools for all companies, but their (expensive) consultants will (hopefuly) customize their software for your own needs.

Re:but what about the programmers?

[Mikkeles]

Well, the last time I looked (admittedly, a couple or so years ago), the major portion of software spending (80% - 90%) was on bespoke and vertical market applications which seem to be completely ignored by the article. (That is, the article concentrates on horizontal products such as OSes, word processors, programming systems; e.g.: languages and DBMSes.)
While it's true that a large amount of this is taken by such items as military, aerospace, and big enterprise systems, there is still a large body of smaller systems so developed, from web sites (agreed that it is more graphic design and usability than programming) to software that tracks your milk production from goats and their lineage and feeding.

Since there are many smaller companies which can use software oriented to their specialisation, I think there is plenty of potential work for individual programmers and small groups as many of these types of applications are not profitable for the big, big, big software house.

Too deterministic

[Staplerh]

The article is interesting, and its nice to see an interpretation I had never thought of before, but another poster was right when he mentioned the Marxist angle to this particular interpretation.

Open Source software is simply too new to establish a model for this to follow - there are many different models that could be followed, and it is simply too deterministic.

The Marxist connection jumped right out at me, from this one quotation in the article.

The hard-core FOSS advocates would like to go directly from Stage 1 (Innovation) to Stage 6 (The FOSS Era) and skip the whole commercial part. They argue that proprietary software ownership is undesirable at best, and immoral or unethical at the worst.

But ignores capitalism and human nature, and the economic forces that help fund and drive the creative process in Western society. In spite of fundamental differences between software and brick-and-mortar industries, software follows the same first four phases of the lifecycle.

Come now, this sounds exactly like Marxism.. It is interesting that there has never been a self declared communist state in the world - they were always going through the SOCIALIST stage of the model. The article is essentially saying that they should follow a gradual evolution of ideas, but that is inevitable.

Determinism is dangerous to use in this context - you can't just sit by and wait for Open Source. 'Lifecycle' my ass.

Re:Stage 5 Today

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean Winzip -> Windows XP? Because thats what I see.

Re:Paints a pretty picture

[salesgeek]

Its main effect is to take out all the small/medium players and polarize the market into FOSS and the commercial giants which is unfortunate because the smaller commercial endeavours are where (as far as I can see) most of the innovation tends to come from

Maybe a more positive way to view this is that FOSS commoditizes markets that are way overpriced. This is especially true of:

* Compilers and software development tools.
* Operating Systems
* Productivity suites
* Web servers & Application servers
* e-Mail services

Now even the tiniest organizations can use FOSS to gain an advantage. I was able to start a regional online advertising network for less than $500 by using a commercial, open source ad manager that I've retooled to fit my needs.

FOSS also tends to lag behind the technology curve so by the time it starts to mature the market has moved on, creating new options for commercial software so FOSS will constantly be chasing a moving target.

I have got to disagree with this on many, many levels. A great many of the innovations you take for granted now were invented via FOSS (try basically, the internet as a platform, web browser, email, etc). FOSS has nothing to do with commercial or not. It's about the app coming with the source with rights to modify (oss) or source + right to mod + right to redistribute (free). There are plenty of commercial apps that are oss. There are also commercial apps that are Free as in speech. I think what you are comparing, is for example, OpenOffice vs. MS Office, which compares a commercial closed source with a semi-commercial FOSS one. Even so, OpenOffice has capabilities that MS office does not and MS Office has capabilies that Open Office does not. The technology curve is more of a 3d wave than a 2d curve - it's possible to lead in one area and follow in another.

Don't assume that because an application is FOSS that it is somehow inferior to a closed source product.

Can OSS survive?

[nodehopper]

I think this Article includes some points that I see developing.

"Both FOSS and commercial versions may coexist, but commercial forces usually dominate the innovative process at this point."

As Corporate America embraces the OSS culture it will take what was once an "IDEAL" and find ways of turning it into something that is good for the Corporation.

I think a great example is in the Music Industry. A genre of music will develop in some obscure place creating something living and evolving and vibrant. Then the big record companies will discover it and then it starts. They milk it for every cent available until that great sound becomes lost in the watered down mass of "product" that they churn out. Soon the creative subculture has been bought and sold and cloned so many times it losses everything that was good about it. Could this be starting to happen with OSS. Red Hat has become a corporate entity. Suse is on it's way. When the cash offers becomes so large that OSS developers start to sweat and their knees get weak....will the "IDEAL" be enough any more? Will the culture survive or will it sell out?

Not sure about this

[GebsBeard]

I'm sure I'll get modded flamebait but this article strikes me as deluded. It assumes the following:

1. The market leader once gaining dominance will just choose to gravy train their product, ala IE.

2. The flow of new features goes from the commercial version to the FOSS version. The commercial entity apparently isn't capable of absorbing new features from the FOSS version.

This is a crock. A commercial version can remain hyper competitive even in the face of the "FOSS onslaught". There are numerous tricks than be pulled. Obscure or constantly changing file formats (ie .doc), cross integration with other products such that the whole "web" must be replicated to be truly competitive. And let's face it, not all software is an OS. Or an Office suite or a web server. Especially complex client server products can have dozens or even hundreds of interoperating processes; this stuff is a nightmare to replicate. You may find these tactics unpopular or even unethical but that's just the way it works in the real world. Large successful companies can and do make it painful in the extreme to erode their market share. The author seems to ignore the economics of market dominance.

FOSS - you work, I profit!

[Tom Armadillo]

As someone who works in a company which does FOSS and commercial stuff too, I obviously have a (financial) interest to watch this debate. Firstly, I find the trend amongst OSS developers to just build free versions of commercial stuff is very problematic. Yes you can say we're making a better version, but truth is, that many users will go with free from a financial perspective, not coz the software is better. So e.g. Microsoft/Apple/Adobe spends years of market research and focus groups to develop new features - and other people just copy it. I reckon most (not all) modern day FOSS is simply parasite-ware. Eventually there will be no incentive for anyone to make much new. Let's face it, we all have to eat so great, we can all starve together and eat from Paypal donations. Secondly, what is this absurd assumption in OSS is it so moral to make money off of selling software services rather than sellling code? Is this simply because most people writing into /. make money by selling their IT services.... My point is - is this a logical point or are you just simply fighting your own corner (as I am). Lastly, will OSS become less interesting to end users as we move to a more network-based computing world? i.e. do I care whether it's LAMP or Java or MSFT behind the online service I'm using? The way to protect your code is to create a whole managed service web infrastructure and service behind it.... I have more to say, but you're probably yawning if you got this far...

Conclusion mostly correct, reasoning wrong

[wrook]

I have to agree (mostly) with the author's conclusions (or at least the ones I didn't ignore :-)). However, I disagree with the reasoning.

FOSS dominance in most fields is inevitable. I'm not talking market share, I'm talking stable features. In a prorietary world, features cost money. Bug fixes cost money. Even worse than that, they cost resources (one can have money to do something, but not enough people to pay to do it).

Currently, proprietary providers live with a difficult economic reality. They invest 10% of their expenses on R&D and require at least a 5% total profit. This means that you need a 10.5:1 return on R&D investment in order for a feature to be worthwhile. Since not all development works out, successful features need to be even more profitable.

When you first start, there is lots of low hanging fruit and even a 20:1 return on R&D investment (what most VCs demand) is quite reasonable. As the product matures, features get more difficult and more and more of your R&D gets used up by support (bug fixes etc). Not only that, but by Brook's law we know that adding R&D resources slows things down (due to communication overhead). This means that's there's a practical maximum of resources that can be added to the project. At some point, development slows down to a crawl.

FOSS, by nature of the fact that there isn't an expected return on R&D investment, runs into no such problem. In theory, there are infinite resources availble to the problem.
If a feature is desired enough by someone, it will be implemented. The return on investment (benefit vs cost) only has to be worth it for *one* person. The benefit does not even have to be returned as money.

Not only that, but FOSS operates in an evolutionary way. HUGE numbers of resources are expended on projects which yield no results (just check the abandoned projects on sourceforge). But it doesn't matter. Those people eventually migrate to the successful projects. If I develop A and then discover B is better, I can abandon A with no cost to myself. Eventually the more successful projects end up getting more and more resources.

FOSS generally doesn't need to worry about Brook's law, because wasted effort is irrelevant. FOSS projects can afford *not* to communicate thereby duplicating effort. The popular version will win out and everyone can migrate with no loss (generally speaking) to themselves.

That is why FOSS feature/stability dominance is inevitable (generally speaking). So why doesn't it always work that way? Well the first problem is recruitment. At the beginning, there may be many different competing projects. Until the consolidation period (in the author's paper), there may not be enough resources in any one project to compete with a proprietary provider's VC backed investment. This is not always the case. A good example where FOSS was *way* ahead of the curve is window managers. I think most people would concede that OSX temporarily tipped the balance, but not for long.... FOSS dominance is inevitable. Good ideas will be copied, bad ideas abandoned and new ideas will be forthcoming.

The other area where FOSS does not dominate is in projects where there isn't enough interest to do development. Word processors used to be a good example. Nobody wrote one because nobody used one. Now there's are a few groups of people with a bee in their bonnet about office suites. Given enough time, most areas will probably be dominated by FOSS. They may lag behind the curve, though, if developers don't see the reasoning early enough.

Finally (whew!), feature/stability dominance != market dominance. I personally don't agree that IIE *ever* had feature dominance over Apache. However, market share is market share. The thing about FOSS, though, is that it never goes away. You can try to kill it, but it will just resurface a year later. With proprietary software, all you have to do is cripple or buy the producer. With FOSS, you are faced with the prospect of a never ending propoganda program (making your product even *more* expensive).

The *only* way for proprietary companies to successfully compete against FOSS is to make FOSS illegal. We need to be vigilant.

Re:Conclusion mostly correct, reasoning wrong

[SlashdotMeNow]

You seem to think developing FOSS is somehow free (as in beer). That's only true if the developer's time costs no money.

Sure it's free if the developer is a hobbyist, but remember hobbyist developers can just as easily develop closed software.

So your whole argument breaks down. Abandoned projects on SourceForge costs millions in lost time. My time is pretty valuable. If yours is not I have a job for you. You can do it in your free time!

The article basically states that in software markets where there is still money to be made (all the 'happening' areas) closed software will always be ahead of the curve because companies can pour millions of dollars into them where FOSS guys can't. They can do this because they know that when they finish ahead of everyone else they'll have enough time to recover their investment and make some profit before anyone else (including the FOSS guys) catches up.

Later when the money is gone from the market segment the FOSS guys will catch up and the closed-source guys will find a new market to make money in.

Thus FOSS does not need to be illegal. The proprietry houses will make money and move on. Always.

Civil Rights

[Spazmania]

Listening to the most dedicated FOSS advocates, one could easily imagine the speaker was talking of civil rights, war protests, or women's suffrage.

No imagination necessary: that's exactly what we're talking about. Only the enemy has changed: domineering big business instead of a domineering government.

That's a laugh!

[Bjarne Bula]

It's kind of hard to take an author seriously who writes

"Besides being portable, Unix happened to be the best operating system invented to date. Its kernel, its unified file/IO system, its security model, and its "shell" were all major advances. Unix quickly pushed aside almost all other operating systems."

That's a laugh! UNIX certainly stole a bunch of good ideas from MULTICS, and did invent a few, but "the best operating system invented to date"? That's just ludicrous.

If AT&T had sat on it, UNIX would have gone nowhere. They key innovation of UNIX was not technical, quite the opposite. What made UNIX what it was (and is) was "open source". AT&T Labs made the UNIX source code available with few restrictions to universities and researchers, and this is what made UNIX great.

Anyone who has seen early UNIX versions will agree that it was, in all honesty, a fairly mediocre operating system. Then again, the very first Linux versions released were, again in all honesty, not much to write home about either.

Since then UNIX (and Linux) has improved immensely on the technical side, but even today, UNIX/Linux is reinventing features of operating systems of the 1970s and '80s.

His "Hard Core" reasoning flawed.

[twitter]

The hard-core FOSS advocates would like to go directly from Stage 1 (Innovation) to Stage 6 (The FOSS Era) and skip the whole commercial part. They argue that proprietary software ownership is undesirable at best, and immoral or unethical at the worst. ... And in the commercial corner is software that can never be FOSS. It might be encumbered by patents, or more likely, is sold as an adjunct to some piece of hardware, such as "embedded" software found in modern cars, printers, scanners, wrist watches, cell phones, and so forth.

It is interesting that the author uses the unethical behavior of commercial software producers to say that free software advocates are wrong. Patents, FUD and other tricks the author mentions do not make commercial software more innovative.

The second assertion above, that embedded software is not well served by free software is simply wrong. Embedded development has swung to free software in a big way, as commercial software there was expensive, buggy and had all the other problems of closed source. According to the Free Software Foundations' last newsletter, the majority of embedded developers now make use of free software, at least for development. They will soon make flexible tools that will dominate the embedded market. The same development model, which is more flexible for servers and desktops works for embedded projects too.

The whole argument that closed source software provides swifter innovation is shaky. Many of the so called features are involve product lock in and other dirty tricks that cost you more in the long run. IBM and others are showing that you can develop free software faster than closed source and make a profit. The era of software development he looked at, where indeed many closed source projects were "innovative", is over. As he pointed out, many people lost lots of money in the closed source game and will be reluctant to risk it again. In short, the rush he saw was unsustainable and should not be used to judge the future. Software development itself has reached a Maturity phase where the tools needed are well known and available. Free software now has a combination of development, distribution and user tools that can not be matched by any single closed source thing. To say that rapid development MUST be closed source ignores the awesome and unmatched feature advancement going on with KDE, Gnome and others. It's somewhat insulting to say free software developers simply copy commercial junk.

software lifecycle

[Jimboscott]

Quote : Capitalism will continue to be a part of the software lifecycle as long as software is useful to society. It's a negative point of view, what if Capitalism is no longer usefull ?

Re:P2P doesn't fit his model.

[SlashdotMeNow]

P2P is in the 5th step of his model. I.e. there's no more money to be made in P2P so closed source houses do not really care about it anymore.

P2P is still very young (technically) but it's mature from a business, can-we-make-money-from-this perspective.