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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."
... 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.
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
"Free Open-Source Software is not the brainchild of latter-day hippies, nor is it the doom of Western commerce."
It's not?!?
Damn!
Sugapablo
Why not just be honest about what OSS is? Its the Star trek ideals in software form. I scratch your back, you scratch mine and we improve the world (Universe).
Theres no need to explain it as anything more then that to non-geeks.
I like muppets.
"the FOSS era is inevitable for operating systems."
if we look at this historically, isn't Microsoft already dead?
certainly this article makes it clear that Linux may well enter a stage where it is an accepted standard, and has crushed the previous groups.
in a way, isn't that what Microsoft already did? they were once the upstart defeating the giants of IBM and Apple. history repeats itself.
I certainly don't think we'll see the death of MS for decades, if ever, but we may just see them seriously reduced
this article certainly provides a good explanation for that, in my opinion anyway - it seems pretty clear cut. perhaps someone can refute that?
i'd be interested to hear ideas...
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
But I dont think FOSS goes further than step 4. Its already apparent from the server OS market. FOSS is never going to completely dominate. 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. 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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Some current Stage 5 situation: (FOSS community begins to slowly but inexorably erode the technical lead held by the commercial offerings)
WS_FTP --> Filezilla
Winzip --> 7-zip
I'd be interested in seeing what factors it takes to push the above into Stage 6 (FOSS version dominates).
1) He doesn't seem aware that Mac OS X is a Unix derivative (more so than Linux). He firsts fails to include it in his list of popular commercial variants of Unix, and then he says that Linux will shortly be the only prominent Unix variant. I think most people think Mac OS X will be around longer than shortly, and it is the most widely used commercial Unix variant.
2) He keeps calling it Macintosh, which is the general name for the hardware. The operating system is called Mac OS X.
Other than that, an interesting enough article.
"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?
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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.
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.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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 ?
1. sharing is invented. ftp. ppp. bbs. web.
2. expansion happens. ftp bots. scp. rsyns. napster.
3. consolidation. napster, ftp, scp die. other propriatary p2p apps keep going. gnutella pulls a lot of supprort, www keeps going. bittorrent is a new idea, but pulls in and gets some supprot which will soon be pulled together with more secure tech. gnunet gets started based on p2p with security in mind.
4. maturity in a few years. secure p2p. gnunet. oss and private companiest that use propriety protocols.
5. FOSS dom. propriety sw vendors are forced to open their logs to the government, and oss are not.
6.... left as an excercise.
The real benefit of free software is being able to chose what you want. I can think of a few places that are likely to have real innovation but I'm loath to offer specifics because some obscure package someplace may very well offer it. It's not like people can't very easily make their own version of any free program and sell it. The development problem will be making it as good as the free program when your resources are so relatively limited. The user's problem, aside from quality, lack of freedom and peer check, is getting all the pieces in the same place. It may be possible to assemble all of the commercial programs to get what you want, but the result will not be as good and it will cost you lots of research, money and pain when the parts don't play well. There's nothing like being able to apt-get what you want and just knowind it's going to work as advertised.
The people at OpenBSD have lots to offer for secure systems. They have developed algorithms and systems that are indeed innovative. Can you name a commercial system that has all of the features of OpenBSD? Bastile Linux?
GNU has loads of great stuff. Everyone uses their compiler. Can you name a commercial compiler that has been ported so so many platforms?
When you step back, there are innumerable small details that make free software so polished relative to commercial software. Other details are small but annoying. When using Solaris, I really miss -h and other conveniences such as transparent X forwarding through OpenSSH. Does even Exceed have transparent X forwarding through ssh in their excellent Windoze products yet? There are few interfaces that can compete with Gnome and KDE. Winblows is completely outclassed and Mac OSX is pretty but has far fewer features. KDE's beauty rivals anything. Is there a file manager as excellent and Konqueror anywhere in the commercial world?
You might find any and all of the things I mentioned in the commercial world, but you won't find them all in the same place. Free software gives you what you want, or the tools to get it done.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.