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McVoy Strikes Back
cranos writes "Fast on the heels of his previous article claiming the kernel is at risk of Bad Things over the BitKeeper fuss, Daniel Lyons has released a new article where Larry McVoy attacks the Open Source movement as non-innovative and dependent on the kindness of corporations. The following quote says it all: 'The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.'"
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?" McVoy says.
...or time. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting. This is really how open source got to be big in the first place. McVoy seems to ignore the fact that, in general, open source software is really only gaining momentum and that it has its roots in hobbyist tinkerers; people who do it because they find it fulfilling for their own personal reasons.
To begin with, software these days is quite complex and it really is impossible to have a full-blown operating system with all the applications people expect and not have some sort of issues. Secondly, the vast majority of people out there are not computer savvy and are going to need help regardless of how well built their OS/applications are. Red Hat isn't dead yet so I wouldn't be so quick to proclaim them as such, although their demise wouldn't entirely surprise me.
"The other problem is that the services model doesn't generate enough revenue to support the creation of the next generation of innovative products.
That's one of the great things about open source software; it doesn't have to. Companies like Red Hat are packagers, not necessarily creators. What they provide is a nice, neat package of what others are already creating.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
But McVoy says open source advocates fail to recognize that building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money.
But none of them can show me how to build a software-development house and fund it off open source revenue. My claim is it can't be done."
This statement really says everything about why McVoy feels the way he does; he's only thinking about money. He has completely forgotten that open source software doesn't require a profit to exist or be innovative. People write free/open source software because they enjoy it not because it is going to make them rich.
"Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around?
Nothing. I will continue to use Firefox, OpenOffice, X Windows, and all the other software I have come to rely on. This is another great aspect of open source software; it isn't going away because someone else can always pick up a dead project and run with it themselves.
...When they said that McVoy really is an asshole.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
..this guy would be on -1 Flamebait.
Does a single counter example invalidate his argument?
I for one cannot think of a single innovation to have been made in the open source sphere ;o) tosser.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
What a great way of reasoning. The more I read from that guy the better I think it is that Linux kernel development got rid of his junk.
Another idiot heard from.
Because every piece of open source software is something that was reverse engineered, and none of those awesome new features are things that people came up with on their own.
Firefox, BitTorrent.
I'll allow replies to provide more examples.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Thats just like your opinion man...
For the most part, it is true, open source strives to give the community what is availible commercially. I don't believe there is anything wrong with that philosophy, too many people think that open source should be something more but I believe it is fulfilling it purpose nicely.
Yeah, because any project that has its source code available has obviously just reverse engineered Microsoft's^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H another company's code.
Is this the bit where I "call bullshit"?
That explains the (frankly baffling) line taken in the article he wrote yesterday. The article linked in this story is Part Two...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I am a big open source fan, but I can't disagree with this. Most open source applications are built as replacements for commercial applications. Many try to look just like the original. Sure most have one or two innovative features, but what applications in the OS world are really innovative, especially from an end user perspective?
I don't think that is true, I mean what percentage of all developers could be considered "innovative", and what percent of all developers are open-source developers? If you have 1% being called "innovative" and 1% being called "open-source" developers, then you get 0.01% being "innovative open-source" developers. Which just means that there is innovation, just not at the rate of closed-source developers. Besides, if all developers were to switch to being open-source, then the rate of innovation would stay the same, as you have the same number of people!
-nosebreaker.com
that open source/free/libre software is not just about innovation - it's about freedom. I agree with RMS on this one. I would rather have a piece of software that has some features than a closed piece of software that has many.
It's unfortunate that many people - even open source advocates - don't realize that "open source" is a methodology. Software freedom is the goal and the end result of the FSF/GPL.
In fact I think the situation that will kill innovation is one where only one proprietry vendor wins. Without competition there won't be the need to innovate. Bring on software rental and patent protection and then innovation in the industry will die. That scenario will bring about legally enforced vendor lock-in with the vendor able to just sit back and rake in the rentals.
Don't believe me? Look at how Internet Explorer stagnated when Microsoft thought it had no competition. Look at the innovation in Firefox.
The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new
Wha..?
Not in terms of man hours, nor tools require, nor expertise of the people involved.
I'm calling this one: Bullshit.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.
I'm trying, I'm really trying, to see how this one works. If I can have the source to anything I'm working on, and I decide that I like it better this way, and everybody else agrees with me, isn't that innovation? Hell, isn't it innovation even if NOBODY agrees with me? So, by the sheer numbers of casual programmers like myself in the world, doesn't this mean innovation actually sky rockets with the more code we have access to?
Newsline next week ( and remember, you heard it here first! ): MS buys out bitkeeper!
Ok, that was supposed to be a joke, but it makes a weird sort of sense, doesn't it?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
True innovation is rare amongst computer software, and none of the big players can claim much. Microsoft and Oracle for example, made their millions from tweaking and marketing the ideas of others. Can anyone tell me if BitKeeper contains any innovations?
It's not a curse of open source, just the way things are made.
Not that these things matter, since Free software is about making good software available to everyone, not about innovations.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
So who is this Daniel Lyons and why should I even care?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I mean, just look at Bittorrent, completely non-innovative if you disregard the fact that it is currently the most efficient way to grab large files for package upgrades. Hmmm, maybe I should take this article to heart and go back to downloading my updates at 100k/sec for my home box. Nah screw that, I'll use the torrents for my updates. It will be a matter of time before the back end for the transfer of this code will work it's way into other means of transferring large files.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The article completely misses the importance if git.
Yes, Linus is a limited resource, and if he takes time to work on a development tool, kernel releases are delayed, but that doesn't mean overall kernel development has delayed overall.
But the importance of git should not be overlooked.
Linus and friends have been making a custom tool designed to fit their hands perfectly and accompany them in the way that they (the developers) work. In the long run, git will be a better tool for them because they designed it to meet the way they work instead of using an existing tool and changing how they work to match the functionality and nuances of that tool.
Look forward to more efficient development in the next year, that's what I say.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Like apache, sendmail, and mozilla. Oh wait, in all three cases, the copies are the proprietary code and they're lower quality. Sorry, I meant like Linux.
Oh, wait:
uptime
9:01am up 252 days, 11:23, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.03, 0.01
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
What part of using XML for window layouts was reverse engineered?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
"All the so-called new OSS products are just copies of..."
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but a LOT of the products you're describing -- eg., the browser -- existed in the OSS sphere before it did in the closed-source sphere. Let's list the "killer apps":
Spreadsheet
Word Processor
Database
E-mail
Browser
Of those five, only the spreadsheet and word processor got their starts as closed source. (Well, okay, the database is a tough one; see Ashton Tate v. Fox Software for details.) Regardless, there are damn few ideas for software these days that didn't exist ten years ago. In other words (and here's the whole point, so pay attention) MOST ALL SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF LICENSE, IS DERIVATIVE THESE DAYS. Or, in a nutshell, your argument is specious, ill-informed, and simply dumb.
HOWEVER: Larry might be right, but for the wrong reason. The ONLY thing that drives corporate (as opposed to individual) innovation, as far as I'm concerned, is competition. If competition goes away, innovation stops. See myriad Microsoft cases (eg., DOS 3.x vs. DR DOS, IE vs. Firefox, etc.).
So why is Larry bashing Microsoft?
Microsoft has amassed a huge pile of money and really hasn't innovated anything new.
From TFA:
To be sure, a few open source companies are successfully generating revenue and even (possibly) profits. But none of them generates enough money to do anything really innovative, says McVoy, 43, an industry veteran who has developed operating system software at Sun Microsystems, SGI and Google.
Of course, having working at Google, he would know what a curse open source is. No wonder Google make no money with all that OSS they use (and create).
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
BitTorrent and all the other P2P apps out there. Even Napster was free to use when it first started.
I don't think I ever really *thought* about P2P apps for file sharing before Napster appeared.
His whole argument goes out the window if you look at the history of the Web and P2P systems like Gnutella and BitTorrent.
The flip-side of this is that if BitKeeper were an open source product, you could brush it off as "non-innovative" just by saying that it's a source code control system, and there are tons of those out there. The innovation is incremental, and that's important to remember. Now go look at all of the Open Source projects whose innovations are incremental. A few that come to mind are gcc, Gnome, The Gimp, Perl, Python, Bash, Gnu fileutils, ReiserFS (well ok, not so incremental), BSD's IP Firewall (ok, again not so incremental).... there are dozens of other examples with significant, but incremental innovations.
The problem that he REALLY has is that open source as a BUSINESS MODEL is fundamentally different from that of proprietary software, and he's right: he'd be out of business in a week if he went open source. That's something that the market will figure out in time, and I think the correct answer is that software as a commodity just took several steps down the ladder in terms of total value.
I'm good with that, and in fact as a conusumer, I'm thrilled.
Sure, the Open Source community is non-innovative.
Let's see... BitTorrent?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
OpenBSD's pf? CARP?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
Rsync? SpamAssassin? Encrypted file systems, such as cgd? Zope? Stable journaling file systems, such as ReiserFS and ext3fs? Or even Arch, Monotone and other source management programs?
Well, I guess some innovations come from the Open Source community, after all...
Frankly, big corporations (Microsoft comes to mind) do not 'innovate' either. They slavishly copy whatever worked for the competition.
I think this gentleman is just angry that some people decided to copy his precious SubVersion. But guess what? That is the nature of Open Source. If the 'community' likes something, it is going to copy it, and then improve on it.
And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Oh Yea. . .Necessity is the mother of invention. Had he remembered that then he would realize that the source of innovation in a 100% Open Source world would be new things that are required and not some desired cash as things stand now. Personally, I would rather see things being innovated because I NEED them, not because some company wants to put a "New and Improved" sticker on a box to justify a price raise.
If I recall correctly, all that was "reverse engineered" was the client-server protocols. This is the same sort of thing that the EU is currently yelling at Microsoft to release to the world, as keeping it quiet is a great way to lock people in to a product.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
That said, I don't think McVoy is necessarily coming from the right place, and I am not convinced that Free Software is inherently imitative. Certainly RMS started with a project to create free alternatives to useful software, and such an objective seems useful in many fields. And it has also been proven time and time again that open source can match and exceed the quality of proprietary products... I tend to agree with RMS that until we can do our daily work using free tools, innovation (at least radical innovation) maybe needs to take a back seat - not that it is in any way excluded!
Take Subversion for example. It's easy to see it as a "cvs clone" - although it adds substantial value. Sometimes a free work-alike is a very valuable thing in itself (probably the best example of this is Linux).
Everything I've heard from McVoy makes him sound like an avaricious, self-interested twit, and this latest serving of hyperbole seems very well timed to boost interest in his product right at the moment when his destructive antics are leading a lot of smart people might have second thoughts about a product with such capricious licensing.
you had me at #!
What FUD...Everyone offers support services for software. Event BitKeeper does. As for RedHat not creating, it's sole business model is the support service field. Moving from business model to business model is not a model for staying in business.
His claim is that the profit motive is required to drive innovation. But a simple fact refutes his claim: UNIX preceded Windows. A large part of the original Unix OS was open source. From the link:
Later, Doug McIlroy would write of this period [McIlroy91]: "Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations". But it would take another quarter century for all the implications of that observation to come home.
There really are other motives besides money!
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
It is a dark time for the
Opensource Guys. Although the Death
Star has been destroyed,
SCO troops have driven the
Opensource forces from their hidden
proxies and pursued them across
the internet.
Evading the dreaded Imperial
Lawsuit-fleet, a group of freedom
coders led by Linus Torvalds
has established a new secret
server on the remote network
of Kenya.
The evil lord Darth McVoy,
obsessed with finding young
Torvalds, has dispatched
thousands of remote BitKeeper's into
the far reaches of interweb...
I'm sorry, I think this is simply not true. The fact is the open source developers HAVE TO reverse engineer existing stuff to be able to write software that's usefull in a world of proprietary softs.
If the world goes 100% open-source, imagine how many skilled programmers will have time to invent new things instead of having to copy others ?
Now, who is really to blame here ?
That said, with very important exceptions much of the open source world while, not being truly uninovative, seem slow to innovate. Open source excells at ironing out demonstrated tech, particularly when the nature of the software is both technical and has high dev support. However, outliers omitted, the really big moves in design tend to at least start out and often stay in closed code.
Whether this is bluster because of that or he _really_ doesn't get free software at all is a good question.
On the plus side of free software are all the companies that don't sell or service software, but still have developers on staff for their custom applications. Free software magnifies the power of these developers manyfold, and they are often the source of innovation. You don't generate new solutions to a problem unless you have to solve it.
So in a way, McVoy is right, the days of the software development house may be numbered, but the tap of innovation stays right where it has been, and always will be, with individuals who have a problem to solve.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
I'm taking notes here. There's lots of good stuff to really get under people's skin:)
The guys at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/ did innovative things.
Linux has been good at optimizing the above mentioned guys previous attempt.
There are some great examples of innovation in the Open Source community. Debian apt, tabbed browsing in Mozilla and virtual desktops are my favourites (not sure that last one didn't appear in UNIX somewhere first) and there are many smaller innovations that go largely unnoticed. However, the vast majority of monumental, earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting innovations seem to come from closed source efforts. Sad to say, but I think greed is a stronger motivator than anything that drives Open Source projects.
The PHBs read Forbes, not Slashdot.
I wonder if MS is "funding" his research, too...
Very little in the most popular free software projects has ever been innovative. Sadly, it's true. And even sadlier, this is even more true for proprietary software. We all know that Microsoft has never contributed a single notable innovation to any computer-related field. That didn't stop them from the world domination, did it?
What people like Larry McVoy seem to be unable to understand is that any innovation in computer science takes years and sometimes decades to be easily available to the end user and it usually happens in the academia with no press releases and conferences.
For example, there is a lot of innovation in the Hurd kernel and that is why it is not ready yet. And I'm sure that when it is ready and stable then Larry McVoy will complain that those ideas are old and obviously he'll be correct.
I'm sorry, Larry, but once again you complain that you don't have innovative mature systems. Do you want innovation? Use Debian GNU/Hurd. Do you want a mature system? Use Debian GNU/Linux. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Sad but true.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
HAND.
Although 80% of OSS is not innovative, there is significant innovation in the OSS world. Look at winamp. There are other OSS like C-JDBC, which is innovative and doing things other commercial companies are not doing. I can think of a dozen or more OSS projects which are innovative, and have a broad user base. The same can be said if commercial software. Only a small percentage of commercial software innovates. The rest are also just copying.
So, what happens to all the programmers in the world when everything goes open source and free? Are you all willing to take jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds to pay your rent while you do your old job for free at night to "support the cause"?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
that it cost him half a million dollars a year for providing bitkeeper....what is this about? Potential lost sales or actual direct costs he ate?
What is innovative about bittorrent?
Normally, the download speed of a file is inversely proportional to the number of people downloading it at a particular time. In other words, the more people downloading, the slower it goes and the longer it takes for all of them. With bittorrent, it's DIRECTLY proportional - the mroe the better.
Firefox? Tabbed browsing. Yes, yes, i know. Firefox wasn't the first browser with that (I read here once that it is infact the IE shell Maxthon). But there are plenty of other innovative things about it. RSS bookmarks? Themes? The layout of the preferences page? to name a few.
Jesus - how many people already fell for this troll? Just coz its posted as story doesn't mean you have to take the bait people.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Q: And what is linux?
A: A knockoff of Unix loosely based on POSIX
All of those other projects exist due to the charity of corporations that need those projects so they can make money in other areas.
How many true volunteers are there in the Mozilla project? Few -- most work for companies like Sun or IBM.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
McVoy was never Linux's "friend". He was a businessman, looking for Linus and crew as poster boys to sell his product.
Linus was fooled. Sure Bitkeeper was a superior product, but the fact is that if the Linux developers really wanted it, they should have ponyed up the cash. McVoys ridiculous licence sounded like something you'd hear in junior high sleepover party. It's for free, but I control what you do.
Yes McVoy did not have a say over the Linux project, but he did in effect have a say of what the Linux developers did with their private lives. This was really asking too much. If I work for company X which develops an alternative to bitkeeper then I can't help write Linux. That not good karma man. That's exclusionary, not inclusionary. That's not what Linux is about!
The cost of accepting his agreement in my opinion, was more expensive for Linux than simply forking over $500,000. You can't put a price on cordial developer relations, and McVoy and his "free" product have really soured relations. I hope everyone is mature enough to realise this.
I don't know what McVoy is up to now. He's openly decieved everyone before, by saying he was "for" open source. He wasn't. He was for himself. Nothing wrong with that, it's telling other people you arn't that was wrong.
What's he doing now? Discrediting Linux. Why? We can quickly deduce it's for himself. How does he benefit? Lure away disgruntled developers? Hardly. Linux developers are a little above falling for this level of petulance. Maybe he's getting hard cash for voicing such opinions. He wouldn't be the first. Can you say Yankee?
The bitkeeper fiasco is an example of how you can't eat your cake and keep it too. If Linus wanted bitkeeper he should have paid the full licence fee. Anything less was fooling no one. If you want to play with proprierty sorftware, you have to pay the price, one way or the other.
In a way, this has benefited the whole OSS movement. We now have a perfect case study on how not to use proprietry solutions in an OSS product. In other words, don't give one vendor undeserved and unaccountable control over either your project or your developers.
May the Maths Be with you!
Way to go, attack potential buyers of your software. Thats a sure-fire way of scaring off anyone even remotely interested in what you offer. Being hostile so openly doesn't make you look like the victim in this and will only make people question your stability. I know I won't be looking at his product anytime soon.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
From TFA:
"Open source actually builds on a base that works even without any commercial interest [which] is almost always secondary," he says. "The so-called 'big boys' come along only after the project has proven itself to be better than what those same big boys tried to do on their own. So don't fall into the trap of thinking that open source is dependent on the commercial interests. That's nice gravy, but it is gravy."
I totally agree. All the big companies involved with Linux like IMB, HP, Novell, RedHat, etc etc only came into play when Linux was already a successful OS with alot of momentum. The same thing happens with other FOSS projects. All the commercial sponsors come in when the project has proven itself and it's very popular.
So FOSS projects don't depend on commercial sponsorship, though their support certainly helps.
VStrider.
# strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. =]
How much BSD code is still in MS's network
stack?
McVoy: But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero
Penn: Bullshit!
McVoy: Red Hat has produced nothing innovative
Penn: What do you call the Tux webserver then? Can you smell the bullshit!
McVoy: Is the government going to fund it?
Penn: Hello? Yes! Ever heard of Universities? You know, the places where real future shaping ideas come from? This guy is complete and utter BULLSHIT!
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but a LOT of the products you're describing -- eg., the browser -- existed in the OSS sphere before it did in the closed-source sphere.
The basic idea, perhaps, but not necessarily the design.
Version control with all the bells and whistles is a complex problem. Coming up with a good solution is difficult. Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
If I was Linus I'd stay far away from this idiot and the flood of bad publicity he's going to grow around himself.
It occurred to me about five minutes after using OS X: "what the hell have I been doing with this other crap?!".
This is ridiculous. Sure, I can pick and choose open source projects and say, "They're not innovative." I can do the same of a billion commercial apps. Is Word innovative? It depends how you define innovative. Is Linux innovative? Again, it depends how you define it.
There are truely innovative apps that began as open source. But there are also a lot that have been created specifically to provide an alternative to commercial equivalents. Every new application is not meant to be about innovation. It's meant to fill a need. Clearly open source fills a need, otherwise it wouldn't exist.
This guy's an idiot.
Yes it is all true...for the most part. What annoys me a bit is there is nothing in TFA that everyone doesn't already know anyway or couldn't be said by any AC on /. It's all rather obvious.
That said there have been some great triumphs to come out of OS, innovative or money making I don't know but all the web stuff like Apache and PHP is a great credit to the open source movement. Very difficult to make money out of FOSS though and kind of a contradiction in terms.
Linus has some interesting friends, doesn't he? I find it hard to believe that someone behaving like such a brat could produce anything 'innovative'.
What's unfortunate here is that Forbe's magazine is read by thousands of executives and this propaganda is going to probably affect some people, and worse, some decisions that are made.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
[quote]Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around?[/quote]
Non-OSS companies like IBM fund OSS because they benefit from it. IBM makes tons of money by packaging Linux as part of their business solutions. They package Apache as IBM HTTP Server as part of their Websphere solution. They aren't going to stop funding projects that help them make money because when those projects die, IBM will need to take over development or switch to new software while maintaining patches for the old software. Either way it will cost them more if an OSS project dies than it would to fund it to keep it alive.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The wheels really come off when some corporate busybody has such a bad case of Cranial-Rectal Insertion Syndrome, that he thinks the same rules apply everywhere else in the world.
Because companies won't innovate without a profit motive, that does not mean that *people* (or organisations) won't innovate without a profit motive. All you need are some intelligent, creative, and driven people.
What we don't need are money-grubbing blowhards who think that the world should revolve around money.
Corporate guys hate it when I say that, but it's true.
The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
Some popular Word Processors that were packaged as such essentially started off as the combination, usually packaged into one executable for space reasons. WordStar would be a good example. Essentially a visual editor, WordStar allowed you to embed formatting commands in your document, that, when the time came to print, would be interpreted in the same fashion as the "dual program" system of word processing had.
Really, nobody "invented" the word processor. It just kind of came about. Pretty much every development that happened was obvious. Programmers sought to move from line editors to visual editors. They sought to have the visual editors show the effects of the formatting and integrate the packages to a certain extent. They sought to have the visual editors show a good approximation of what would be printed. When GUIs came about, the notion a word processor should display a document exactly as it would be printed became obvious and programmers sought to implement that.
As such, saying word processing was the product of "open source" (or "Free Software", or whatever) or "proprietary" methodologies isn't really right. Both contributed to an overall model that we use today. The chances are that word processing would look as it does today regardless of whether Microsoft had invented the EULA, or Stallman the GPL.
Two interesting anecdotes about WP btw: Unix was originally justified internally at AT&T as a powerful word processor, rather than an operating system. That's not to say Thompson et al started out with the intention of writing such a thing. The first visual editor for Unix was "vi", a Free Software project from Berkeley.
The other is that one of the major players in the early development of visual editors was a certain Richard Stallman.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Innovation".
This word is pissing me off. Its the new "Quantum Leap" of the '90 transposed in to the '00. Every fucking tech advert includes it somewhere and every company claims to do it.
People, the world we live in generally changes slowly, people stand on the shoulders of others and make small improvments. Science works this way mostly as does software. OK, the odd wright brothers come along but most things seem to be improvments on earlier ideas.
I'm not expressing this very well, but it is almost like anyone who doesn't claim to be an innovator is an ideas thief. To me this is what McVoy is stating; closed source companies do the real work and we OSS guys just rip it off?
That's an significant oversimplification.
If "something" is more complicated in its behavior it can be quite time-consuming (i.e., expensive) to reverse engineer than if an application behaves more simply. Imagine reverse engineering Windows 98, or Office XP, or the entire Linux kernel without seeing any code.
But Larry might be right in this way: customers are fed up with overly complicated applications that break a lot, lock them in to a vendor, are expensive to develop for, etc. If the world demands simpler applications that interact more predictably, then the majority of applications will be reverse-engineered.
But I'm more optimistic that there's plenty of room at the top for innovation and business opportunity to manage growing complexity of many simple interacting commodity components.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
young McVoy has become.
Lemon curry???
We'd all be consultants.
Seriously.
That's the IBM model, and why they're so eager to support OSS. Don't pay money for licenses, just our army of Global Services.
-Stu
Support for products where it all works as designed is pretty much for the shrink-wrapped market.
Plenty of companies are using Fedora Core and Whitebox, CentOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD etc... without support as the basis of products and services because they can't see the benefit of paying RedHat support licenses... especially if they have the talent in-house (which most companies using FOSS do) to do their own support.
I'm not sure how many non-MIS shops in big companies are paying RedHat yearly for updates and support.
I think that people in SW industry (or in IT in general) believe that 'get paid for time you spend working' is not good enough for them. Do they (we) identify themselves with big CEOs like Gates od Dell, or they just believe that current SW business model (develop once, sell n times) is God-given to make them instantly rich? What about good old 'working per hour, at defined rate'?
I believe that software is service. This guy complains that if you make some program easy to use, most of the users will never call you for service. Ok, they will not call you, but how they hurt him? They use his software, but does that takes money from his pocket? Did they burned his house using his product?
Let us make some example. Guy 'A' spends 1000 hours making some program, for general purpose. His software is somewhat complicate to use, so his user base is 1000 people, but every 10th has to call him to for some kind of support. It makes him, say, 100 x 2h x(his rate) per month of possible income. There is second guy with his own program, which is better, so only every 100th user needs some support. But as a result, his user base is larger, so he may have 100.000 users, so he may get more consulting hours. We cannot say for sure, but it may also happen to him to have actually less consulting hours comparing to the first guy. But as a result (not taking into account initial investment of time spend for writing code[*]) both of them get paid for time they spent working.
What's wrong with that concept? Why should I expect for someone to pay me for doing nothing? When they spend an hour for their costumers, costumers pays them. Is this guy McVoy too noble to be paid per workhour?
[*] Initial time investment could be significantly decreased if you use open source development model, as we know.
No sig today.
A computer is a TOOL, nothing else. If it can't do what you want it to do, then you shouldn't be using it. And at the end of the day, although Linux is a fun OS to use, the fact that every time I want to add a wireless card or install some software, I have to open a terminal and type some commands, just shows that Linux can't afford to be innovative yet because it doesn't even have the grounding to be a desktop OS.
Once Linux can be a desktop OS, then throw in all the innovative stuff.
- Bittorrent
- Struts (mayby not a great example)
- Ruby
- Perl
- Postgres
- Sourceforge, Freshmeat, CPAN, RubyForge (like uh, where are the commercial examples?)
- Linux kernel build system (Microsoft so copy-catted this thing for WinCE, but it is still inferior in nearly every way)
- automake/autoconf/libtool
- Emacs (yeah Emacs, think back now when this thing came on the scene there was nothing like it)
- GCC (Didn't reverse engineer anything, but a common compiler build environemnt was unheard of when this project started out)
- ICU
- Uh, like "The Web", think about it.
- CGI
- TeX/LaTeX
- MajorDomo
- OpenMosix
Frankly I didn't think he was as clueless as he now appears.
Whether one wants to make money or not is entirely unconnected with how well one can create new ideas.
He's just lost it completely now.
...where on one end, you have software "everyone" needs with high volume, low cost and on the other hand you have highly customized software, expensive, perhaps one of a kind, where is OSS?
On the volume end, because more people = more developers, which is the lifeblood of OSS. That also means mass market products, which aren't particularly innovative.
Does that in any way mean there's no innovation? Bullshit. I've seen lots of it when there's opportunity, but it is typically difficult to gather the resources. Usually they are small projects or extensions or plug-ins to mainstream software.
OSS has taken the exact opposite approach of commercial development, which typically involves finding some niche or angle you can expand into mainstream. OSS is starting dead center in mainstream and moving outwards to fit niches. If we ever get to the point where there's a "surplus" of developers, we will see a lot more innovation than today.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hee hee. Nothing gets a good rant from someone when they are called to task about their proprietary software, which got dumped in favor of GPLed software. That's what this is really about and nothing else.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Well, let's start with Firefox. Exactly what great, utterly innovative features did it come up with? No, seriously?
Tabbed browsing? I do believe that Opera had it first.
Gestures? Ditto, Opera was the first, and copied it from Black and White, which debatably got the idea from PDAs, starting with Apple's Newton if I'm not mistaken. Was _any_ along that chain open source? Nope.
Anything else? I'm already drawing blanks here. Skins? Nope, it's not a Firefox invention, sorry. Plugins? ActiveX. A half-arsed popup-blocking that worked only because noone bothered circumventing it for the benefit of 1% of the market? Nope, Opera had that too, and there were a ton of IE plugins that did the same. What's utterly innovative about Firefox that I'm missing?
I thought the _whole_ idea of Firefox was to be "just a browser". I.e., just to render HTML, something that they did _not_ pioneer or invent. Mind you, I actually like that idea. But utterly original and innovative it _ain't_.
Well, ok, maybe Firefox was the wrong example. So let's look at other "original" and "innovative" OSS stuff.
BitTorrent? Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster? Yep, another app that copied a closed source product.
OpenOffice? Need I point out that the vast majority of work was originally called StarOffice and was a closed source product? And its innovations are...? Reverse-engineering MS's file formats? (Which just makes the point about reverse-engineering.) The interface? Nope, I seem to remember closed source publishing packages (e.g., Ventura Publisher) with a very similar interface long before Star Office ever existed. So the great innovation is...? Let's face it Star Office and then Open Office have been officially struggling to copy MS Office for as long as I can remember.
PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)
MySQL? Need I point out who and from what corporation invented SQL? Hint: it starts with I and ends with BM. Wasn't an open source project. Sorry. And MySQL consistently got features only by the time everyone else got them. E.g., took them a while to support XA transactions too. Kinda doesn't really count as innovative.
OK, I could go on for a few more pages, but you can tell that I'm drawing blanks already. Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product, or a former closed source product that's being given away by some corporation (IBM, Sun, Novell, whatever) as their way to fight MS.
Speaking of which, how many of those do make a revenue from support? Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office? Last I've heard, it was losing money hand over fist with it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... but I'll give it a shot. I think that there is plenty of room in the world for both OSS and commercial software. FOSS will continue to develop free alternatives to commercial products. One of the things that drives people to create FOSS is the wish to have an alternative to commercial software. That is a good thing.
Commercial software has a niche, as well. Sometimes you need a pile of money to develop a new idea. In order to get that money, you usually have to promise some kind of return to investors. So you need to make profits. That's cool too. I don't mind paying money for things like games and innovative applications. I want software engineers to live comfortably since I'm married to one.
Down the road, I think we'll see that OSS will takeover the common applications. It will be used for the OS, obviously, basic productivity applications, software to run governments and schools, voting machines, security applications, all the kinds of applications where it makes little sense to duplicate effort and where budget constraints are tight. There will continue to be commercial applications that introduce new ideas, but eventually, those will also find their way into FOSS, as they should.
Attacks on either system are silly. Just as it makes sense to have competition in products, it also makes sense to have competition between ideas. You can't have a good democracy if everyone has to march in lockstep. We should all welcome new ideas that move us forward, regardless of where they come from.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Beagle. Didn't it spawn OS 10.4's new search utility?
And apt-get, pacman, portage? These are open source, no?
And X.org? Dependent upon the definition of innovation, but pretty amazing stuff they're up to.
Enlightenment E17.
Apache. Python. PHP. TeX.
I'm not sure they're all open source, but a lot of them are.
I think the reason why it looks like open source is less innovative than the robber-barons is that the robber-barons get the word out about what they stole from OSS before OSS gets it out.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.
What a bunch of crap. That like saying that when there was no licence system there was no innovation in the world.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
McVoy is helping FOSS!
He's taking a page from TQM, and helping to create dissatisfaction with the status quo as a way to motivate change!
http://www.improve.org/tqm.html/
Now, it's up to us to promote an alternative vision which is desireable and practical, to capitalize on the dissatisfaction McVoy stimulated.
He's daring us to prove him wrong!
A linux system with such high an uptime has multple security problems. I don't mean to troll, but your particular example is just plain wrong.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
1. Linux developers use a model for distributed development.
2. mcVoy comes up with a Software tool to support it
3.. profit... BUT...
4. tridge comes up with a reverse engineered BK.
5. ???
6. Mcvoy: Profit is the answer!
McVoy will stop the give-away, saying it has been costing him nearly $500,000 per year to support Torvalds and his programmers.
...
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?"
Maybe he ought to think again about the service model seeing as it could be bringing him in the amount of money he suggests. Or maybe BK is crap as it seems to need so much support? Which is it Larry?
In any case, to say McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet is plainly bullsh*t.
"We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six months" - the key words there are "we believe". This is nothing more than flimsy opinion which does not seem borne out by a survey of the open source marketplace. Again, the article puts this rubbish forward as gospel.
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?" - again, this is simply nonsense. It's hard to imagine someone who's spent his career in software not grasping the 'free software/paid support' model. Certainly plenty of customers understand and use it. It sure makes sense to me. Then again, maybe all those years just closed his mind.
McVoy says ... building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money. - Perhaps he can try his hand at explaining the success of Linux? Sure, today there is some corporate sponsorship, but there is plenty of 'trial and error' going on that is not directly paid for. And in its early years, before sponsorship, how does McVoy explain its high quality and consequent success?
'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free,'" McVoy says. "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me." - Well, Larry, you can live in your world where Windoze runs everything including your heart defibrillator. Good luck to you but I won't be joining you. "Quality software + support" beats "Crap software + support" any day. Try getting a bug fixed in an Adobe or M$ product, Larry. I have had many experiences in the past year where open source developers have fixed bugs within 48 hrs of me reporting them (thankyou JavaSVN developers, Subclipse developers, and others!) Larry, you cannot get bugs fixed by Adobe or M$ unless you are God himself - and I invite you to try. Furthermore, the trend is to charge the user for bugfix releases (thanks Adobe). That's just nonsense.
most of the money funding open source development ... is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves - he clearly doesn't realise that funding open source (for instance, on the scale IBM does) means you are an open source company - a viable participant in the community. Does Larry think IBM would be doing this if it were losing them money? Guess what runs on their servers (Linux). Guess what applications people want to run (Apache, OSS databases, etc, etc).
If you are IBM and you're paying 1000 programmers to write open source, you are an open source company. What part doesn't he understand?
the popular Linux operating system would suffer if hardware makers stopped their sugar-daddy support for its development - LOL! Linux thrives despite the obstructions of people like Larry who won't provide interoperability information. Thanks for nothing.
McVoy wants to be on the side that innovates and makes money. - All evidence seems to indicate that Larry only cares about the latter. To Hell with him.
you had me at #!
Or...it could mean you're working with a nontrivial problem. Yes, sometimes people sell software that is garbage and rely on revenue from services to stay afloat.
However, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to talk to somebody with experience in a problem space. Dismissing the service model as crappy software is completely ignorant.
I used to live in a remote village in the Pacific. When someone needed a new house, everyone in the village came together and built a new house. It was not an 'innovative' new house but one of the same efficient models which exploited available resources and had been modified over millenia to be comfortabl ein the climate. An 'evolved house', if you like. Sure, we never built a bamboo Eiffel Tower. No for lack of ability. Just no need.
;-). In this sense are their products any less CRAP than FOSS stuff?
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?" McVoy says.
McVoy is playing at post-modern deconstructionism with his choice and use of the word 'service'. Why should service of FOSS software be something you don't want to pay for, like getting your crappy lawnmower serviced because of poor design leading to fatigue cracks in the push bar rather than service in the sense of say a waiter taking care of your individual needs.
The latter source of service is lacking in some commercial products from such fine companies as IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, Apple, Microsoft, cisco, etc while they all have their share of service requirements in the sense of correcting product flaws. Some more than others
No, the service model is a simple 'revenue shift'. People create FOSS to suit their needs or some perceived need in the market place. Rather than investing heavily up-front, they hope to collect the rewards on the back end through service. That the model works is evident in the market.
Neither model is best for all products. This is why we have both commercial and FOSS products in the market. Just because something as specialized as bitkeeper makes a better business in one context while Linux does in another does not make either chosen model BAD!
It happens in life and the software business that folks are too quick to get caught up in the 'either-or' dichotomy and forget there is often room for both and something else/new as well...
Ok, Mr. McVoy. Show me how to list open file descriptors for a specific file on most close sourced UNIX using the command that came with the distribution. Can't be done. For this simple operation necessary by SysAdmins, you need to get the open source program lsof. Redhat and other Linuxes include it, but so far I don't know of any close sourced UNIXes that do. wtfn?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
HTML MOSAIC
PERL
Bit Torrent
The open source guys hate it when I say this, but...
I found these three examples on one google search page. Saying something as broad as "Open Source is not Innovative" without some sort of proof to back it up just proves your talking out your rear! That statement is like saying "Innovative Products are never invented by anyone outside of a corporation"! Airplanes, the first Apple, come to mind.
Firefox
LiveJournal
MySQL
EVMS
The Linux Kernel
Mosix/OpenMosix
Slashcode
SpamAssassin
It's a little difficult to come up with examples of hugely successful innovative open source projects which were started by a single person or a few people, but i'm sure there's thousands.
However McVoy is basically saying innovative projects initiated using corporate funds "don't count" because apparently the corporation isn't doing "real" open source work. So McVoy is obviously either retarded or a troll.
What kind of flawed logic is that?
Of course there are a lot of incomplete projects out there, as everyone and their mother can start one. However, that has nothing to do with it being open source, or do you really think those hobby projects would not be incomplete if they were closed source?
So, again, not open source, but the projects being hobby projects leads to incomlete projects. However, the great thing about open source is that everyone who feels like it can pick up those projects and work on them, even if the original developer isn't interested anymore.
On top of that, there are tons and tons of open source projects that do exactly what you claim to be a problem for open source. Or do you honestly believe, that the success of Gnu/Linux would have been possible without proper QA?
Do you really think projects like Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, KDE, Gnome, etc. were where they are now if people hadn't spend a lot of their time doing exactly the boring things you describe?
Well, let's take a look at an open source desktop that any one of us might set up in somebody's home or office...
;) Apache, PHP, Python are all very cool projects that you or I may may love but is of limited use to most people. Where email is concerned, I can't think of any whizz bang email program that sets itself apart from most other email in an innovative way. Okay Outlook, but that's only innovative in the virus and trojan propogation field ;)
Linux kernel = Unix knockoff
KDE = Windows knockoff
GIMP = Photoshop knockoff
Open Office = MS Office knockoff
Gaim = AOL knockoff
Firefox = innovative (sorta, see below)
Apache = innovative
PHP, Python, etc. = innovative
Firefox is shaky because tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera (a commercial comany). It didn't bring the browser into mainstream awareness like, say, Adobe did with graphics and DTP software. It is, however, the freshest face on the browser scene which has seen a much-needed revitalization as a result so I'll throw it in on the innovative side. Yes, IRC was around before AOL but AOL brought internet chat awareness to the masses so they get the credit. History is written by the victors
Don't get me wrong, open source is a fantastic and vital field in computing. Having access to a software library that is free in both the money sense and the libre sense is a big deal and in particular, those that cannot afford a quality commercial version such as developing countries.
On the other hand, commercial software is where most of the innovation and R&D takes place. They have to offer fresh and compelling reasons for us to part with our money. They have to be better than their competition (including open source). I know, I know, Microsoft isn't better than the competition nor are they innovative. True, but they are one company in a sea of thousands that would fall under the software industry umbrella and their monopoly status makes them an exception.
Open source needs commercial software and commercial software is recognizing the importance of and becoming more reliant upon open source. There is room for both. McVoy is right. 100% OSS would stagnate as its current model seems to be copying the work of others. Its strength lies in its license, not its feature set. As for the other extreme, we only have to look at Microsoft to see the effects of a commercial software dominated world.
Monoculture is bad and that goes for Linux as well as Windows.
What about Struts, Hibernate, Spring??????? Those three have become very important tools for some Java developers and they aren't copies of any commercial software...
It's by people who try something different and in one way or another succeeds at it.
This is just corporate FUD, I think people like this guy have more fear, uncertainlty and dispair that Linux and other FOSS tools will give more (common) people the tools for potential innovation away from coprporate profit channels.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Oh, how insightful! What wisdom!
There are plenty of examples to prove the man right. Take a look, for instance, at the unfortunate, stagnating world of physics. For some silly macho reason, all physicists have to provide their experiments, their data, their calculations, their data and their conclusions in excruciately detailed papers that are submitted to journals for all to see. This process is glorified with noble-sounding terms such as "peer review", "refutability" and "sound science". Physicists pretend this allows them to build on their predecessors' results.
But, as you have guessed, this is just another example of open source. That's right, folks, physics is plagued by a generalized use of the dreaded open source! The source is not code here, it's data, theories and calculations, but the principe is the same: let's face it, physicists don't know how to keep things proprietary.
Which explains why the field is so totally devoid of innovation. Ah, if only physics was practiced with a decent proprietary attitude, like back in the good old time when Galileo taunted his colleagues by hinting about wonders he had observed with his new expensive telescope! Or when alchemists jealously kept their recipes and processes a secret! By now, we would have wonderful machines, such as vehicules flying in the air, devices carrying your voice on a wire, and calculators weighing only a fraction of a ton!
Verily, physical sciences needs to get rid of its openness to finally become innovative. And that is also true for computer sciences, of course.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Well written article, face the music boys and girls. profits, money (and sex) are whats it all comes down to. The merits and philosophy of the Open Source ideology are wonderful and I think its great, but when it comes down to if what you do doesnt make the house payments, then you gotta find something that does. Actually its very simple.
"Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around?
Why would the hardware makers suddenly go away? Does McVoy think they will no longer want 'something that will entice customers to buy their boxes'?
As far as I know, there is no non-free networked object-oriented database. Relational databases are nice, flat files have their place, but OO databases are quite useful too; I've built a few webapps using this. Thanks, Pavel Curtis!
Several programming languages exist only in a free version, or the non-free versions are derivatives. Scheme, Squeak (Smalltalk based), Python, and Perl are just a few that come to mind. Perhaps this clown would say that these are all derivative works from Fortran, or somesuch, but it's a stretch.
And I have to tell it is really overrated. This guy is just angry because his company is going to the ground.
He pissed off the Linux community. Companies which want a commercial option for code management use Microsoft, everyone else, use/ will use an open source alternative. So there is no place for him.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
because my crypto library [libtomcrypt] is the provider for the BK license engine...
And I wrote all of LibTomCrypt from my parents house while I was in college...
So in other words, McVoy... GO FUCK YOURSELF!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Proprietary software with "many" features DOES NOT make work easier. Infact, it MAKES WORK HARDER. People have been using WordPerfect clones for so long that they just don't know any better.
The more features an app has means that there is a bigger mess in the GUI to deal with and more code that can break. If you are only using 5% or 10% of an application's potential, the rest of the features are a burden, not a help.
This is why the whole "wizard" concept came about in gui applications. Interfaces became too complex to deal with.
A WordPerfect clone is gross overkill for the average user.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> All of those other projects exist due to the
> charity of corporations that need those projects
> so they can make money in other areas.
If the companies need those projects as you claim then how is it charity to support them? Sounds more like self interest to me.
He shot himself in the foot when he kicked Linux off BitKeeper. Linux gets huge publicity. BitKeeper shared that publicity, essentially for free. Now Larry has decided to keep reloading and shooting with his rants.
perhaps McVoy could explain why people seem happy to use limited functionallity applications they can get for free rather than the bloated commercial applications that cost a lot, are difficult to use and require you to buy into an operating system that is buggy as hell!
I would say that it is the commercial software market that doesn't address the true needs of the users.
What this article is really saying is that Larry does not have the imagination to create a business model through which he and his business can make a profit from OSS. Somehow he thinks this makes the whole concept flawed. I think he has become entrenched in an outdated reality. Rather than looking at the Open Source trend and trying to build a wildly successful business model around it, he is clinging to a traditional commercial software development model and claiming the emerging trend is unsustainable. Maybe the RIAA needs another yes man.
I think Larry must use the RIAA's accountancy methods
Please don't demean accountancy. The term you were looking for is "pulling numbers out of one's arse".
Larry seems to be saying that Open Source and commercial interests are at odds with one another, and it's only when a company tries to see beyond its profits that it participates in a compromise with OS software. But that's not what OS is about. Just ask RMS. His original intent was for companies to make all software free (as in "open"). The volunteer world of OS sort of came out of that idea, but I don't recall any histories describing volunteer work as a deliberate goal of GNU.
I also take personal exception to the lack of innovation comment. I'm doing postgraduate research in an area where no acceptable solutions exist... and everything I'm doing is open source. If I can't prove that I'm creating something innovative then I'll won't be awarded my degree. So far my university believes that I'm track.
Sure, innovation is hard, which is why we don't see a lot of it, either commercially or in the volunteer OS world. But just because we don't see it much is no reason to claim that it does not exist.
The traditional software company was a "product" company. Productization of software relies on strong intellectual property protections and the inability to share information rapidly - both of which seem to be eroding in the face of the Internet and the improved economics of open source.
This is the "old" approach, and McVoy may have a point -- you can't do things the way you used to if you rely on OSS. Lots of software people got their start in the shrink wrap product world and think that's the only way things work... but it's not.
There are two archetypes of the "new way" -- IBM and Google. The commonality is that they are, at their core, service companies, serving different market segments. Lots has been said about Google (take a look at Tim O'Reilly's presentations on this topic), so I'm going to focus on IBM.
IBM serves businesses. They like OSS, particularly in the Linux and Java/J2EE segments because operating systems cost a lot of "overhead" money, and Java appication servers usually cost around $10,000+ per CPU.
An (over)simplified view of WebSphere is takes a lot of Apache-based open source components, intgegrates them together, adds some proprietary code for manageability and reliability, and ships.
Even though they charge similar prices as BEA or Oracle, they don't really care too much about charging for licenses. They really want to dump the busload of Global Services consultants on your doorstep.
By 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
In the end, they make more money doing this, and their marketshare goes up for doing this. To the customer, it's about shifting buckets of money around. Buy $5 million in licenses and use your in-house (or a 3rd party's) employees to use + integrate it, or get licenses "free" and spend $8 million on IBM's services, which supposedly covers all the nasty issues your employees aren't qualified to handle.
As for the 'quality' issue -- "does requiring services imply a poor quality product"?, note that most of the services have nothing to do with the product and a lot to do with human fallibility, politics, and externalizing risk & cost. I don't know how IBM justifies its investment for in-house development of WebSphere -- perhaps it's still license based -- but their external sales behaviour indicates their priority is elsewhere.
Now, is this a "better" model? Audience?
-Stu
An AI strong enough to replace non-trivial support will probably require a pyschologist from time to time.
Luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time.
Gee, let's rephrase that to something closer to the truth:
One problem with boxed software is that you're giving the customer crap. How else are you going to sell them another box?
People are always going to need training, they will not always need a new program when they have one that works. The whole idea of copy protection and treating bits like paper is stupid. As a former customer of Winblows software, I'm really pissed that I could not just add on to the software I used to own but was forced to buy new coppies to get the same functionality without improvement. It did not work for me and it really does not work for anyone but people who are greedy. That's why free software works and boxed software vendors are going out of business.
"The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you?"
How am I going to make a living? That's the big question all of us has to answer every day. You have to provide something of value. If other people can do what you do and give it away, you had better have something else up your sleeves. Sitting around flaming people who are doing well with other models won't help.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
He was never a friend of opensource and only in it for the $$$$. I will put our ideas against any company. What as M$ created in the last 15 years??? I can't think of one thing that wasn't a knock off of something else.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
I will start out that I think the Bitkeeper open version was evil. The idea that if I used it I could not try and write a better CVS system was just wrong and should never have been accepted.
Frankly a lot of what he has to say makes perfect sense. The world will never be 100% open source. And unless you make it illegal "so much for freedom" to charge for software closed source will always be around. That is not a bad thing.
Open source will also never die.
I work for a company that produces closed source software. Not one of our customers has ever asked for the source code. They also pay us $600 a year for tech support and updates. Most of them are happy with our software and we provide documented file formats so their data belongs to them. There is not a single open source product that competes with us. So guys the market is wide open if you want to jump in.
One thing that really ticks me off in the FOSS community is the idea that OSS has to be free as in beer. It does not. What it does mean is if you pay for OSS you get the source and the right to give it and the source to whom ever you want. And yes you can charge them as much as you want.
The other thing is if you do not contribute code, money, documentation, or at least good bug reports to the project you are a freeloader. I want to smack people that I hear complaining that this free program or that lacks this or that feature or that the guy that wrote it is an idiot. SHUT UP AND ADD THE FEATURE YOURSELF! Or pay the developer to add it if you want it. But do not sit on a message board complaining about what you are getting for free.
Before any of you RMS fan boys jump on me let me say one thing. I have released a few FOSS programs I wrote. The first couple where not GPLd because the GPL was not written yet but I gave away the source. I have contributed to a few more GPL programs since then. The world will never be all open or closed source. People that think it should be are like those that think the world should forced to all be one faith.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In these discussions I never see mention of software produced in academia. Guys, research software was open source decades before the term was first invented. NSF or DOE give us money to do research that involves producing software, and when the software is finished it typically goes on a web site. Ftp archive before the web was invented. If you use it, kindly acknowledge us.
Unfortunately some research software is completely forgettable, but there is plenty that is high quality. Just a few names: Lapack http://www.netlib.org/lapack/ does linear algebra software, has been around forever, and is in fact part of the Intel and IBM scientific libraries. Atlas http://www.netlib.org/atlas/ gives highly optimized kernels. We suspect that vendors take this as a code base for their own optimizations. Petsc http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-2/ is orders of magnitude better than anything available commercially, is now probably 10 years old, still developed and supported, and used all over by engineers and scientists.
Just thought I'd mention that model. No "kindness of big corporations" needed.
Victor.
GNU created the first compiler? Is that what you're trying to imply?
Hello, I'm crack and we've obviously met before.
Knock yourself out.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
The whole point of Linux developers using MacVoy's product is that the tool was solving some problems free tools couldn't solve.
Because Linux developers have so special requirements (especially in distributed development and patch/branches maintenance) no free tool was capable of supporting it at that time. Even bitkeeper was pushed to its limits. Isn't that innovation? Not in software itself but in software development process.
And nobody ever said that all software is going to be Open. Stop that crap.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
But McVoy says open source advocates fail to recognize that building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money. Software companies won't make those investments unless they can earn a return by selling programs rather than giving them away.
Software companies don't make those investments at all. The institutions that make those investments are the government and a few large private research labs. Almost all the software and almost all the innovation you see around you ultimately comes from those sources.
People like McVoy and other self-proclaimed innovators are adding little gimmicks and tweaks on top of that massive, publicly funded innovation. The question we should be asking is why we should let people like McVoy continue to leech off the investments that taxpayers and a few private labs are making.
Why McVoy and other nay-sayers feel the need to point out what they think are flaws in something they have no interest in is beyond my understanding. If he prefers the proprietary route because it allows him to swell his fat wallet then that's up to him. I don't however, want to be lectured to by someone who has greed as the primary motivation. Similarly, if someone wants use proprietary software because it's personally more convenient to them, then so be it. I don't appreciate however being called a zealot simply because I view the world differently to these people and have different priorities when selecting computer software.
On second thoughts, I do know why McVoy and the massed ranks of end-users feel the need to express their thoughts on the subject. In the case of McVoy and other proprietary vendors, he want's the labour of the Open Source movement but the ability to profit from it without limit. Whereas the users want stuff for free (as in beer) but don't like (and remind us constantly) that this free stuff is not exactly the same as Windows, Photoshop or whatever piece of software they've attached their umbilical cord to.
A big "Hrmph" to all of them.
-- GS
Stuff himself. Sour grapes sour grapes ...
Why doe we even pay any attention to this whiny GIT? (pun intended)
If he feels so ripped of then why doesn't he go ahead and sue Torvalds and the gang for having used his toy in the first place?
Yeah, if it wasn't for OSDL, who would have known who THE F*CK LARRY MCVOY was?
Larry, blow it out your ADDRESS!
Much of the initial work was part of BSD, which was a free as the Unix license from AT&T allowed. And the BSD code was basis for most vendors, including Microsoft.
Or for those who think the Internet is WWW, the original implementation of HTTP and HTML were also free software.
It's hard to say whether open or closed source is "innovative" without having good definition of what innovation is. McVoy claims Redhat isn't innovative. I'm not sure that doesn't miss the point, but what's an example of an innovative thing a close source company has done for which there is no open source equivalent (or vice versa)? Or let's take some seeming comparable projects:
Is C# more innovative than Python?
Is IE more innovative than Firefox?
Zope vs. ASP.net?
I know there are other close source outfits than MS, but I'm honestly not sure how to make those "who's more innovative" comparison.
What's a sig?
If the first part of what he says is true, then how can the last part be true?
If innovation requires money, then the innovative software will not be free. It's as simple as that.
I think McVoy knows very well that just a few Open-Source zealots are enough to come up with something better than BitKeepers "superior" technology. That is why he keeps saying "you cant do it": he hopes that at some point everybody believes him.
Sure, having the source code is great for all the reasons enumerated. However, what's not so great is that I'm not in the software development business. My company is not in the software development business. If open-source products will fit the bill, aren't buggy and deliver the needed functionality, then I'll use it. But for applications which are buggy or which need enhancements to make me or my business more productive, I'm going to buy. I paid for it, it's borked, you fix it. I paid for it, if you want me to continue paying for it, I'd like to see these features. Otherwise, I have to accept the burden of fixing bugs or adding enhancements and that makes no business sense.
I think the point the Forbes articles are trying to make and the Sun guy who forwarded one of these articles to me is trying to make is that developers who want to make money are going to look at all the friction that McVoy's experiencing and pick a different platform to target. Which then, in turn, suggests the number of quality open-source or COTS apps will dwindle. Which, for a business, is a factor taken into consideration when evaluating operating system purchases.
Venomous whining self-pitying asshole.
If he had of released it as FOSS it wouldn't have cost him a cent!
Larry McVoy is upset because the leader of the largest open source software development project in the world stopped using his crappy software. Feeling less than useless, he's got an axe to grind. As a result, his comments should be taken with a grain of salt. Lets face it, the guy has lost touch with reality. Publishing his mindless dribble is flamebait. We could all rewrite his crappy software in less time it takes to figure out how to use it.
BitTorrent represents very little actual innovation. For the most part it is just a ripoff of Swarmcast.
When my work is getting me down, I go to kernel traffic or git traffic.
Let's see some examples:
Microsoft. The OS, Webserver and IE are all classic examples.Their attacks on Open Source are in a league by themselves, including the "stifle innovation" argument of McVoys'.
Windriver. These folks bashed Linux mercilessly while their marketshare dropped from 35% in 2000 to 14% today. They threw in the towel and went with Linux last year (though VxWorks is still around, it's clearly not the priority).
GreeenHills. These folks have been bashing gcc for years, as the embedded market has moved away from speciality development tools except in certain small areas where the performance is required.
So McVoy's response is nothing new here. He must be feeling the pinch of people moving away from his software.
Now, if Slashdot would only stop giving him free publicity, we'd be all set. McVoy has already stated that everytime he's mentioned on Slashdot, his "sales go up".
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
The origin of computer-based word processing goes back further than vi. I used TVEDIT in the mid-1960s to write a paper for my anthropology class at Stanford. TVEDIT ran on a PDP-1, though printing was done by sending the data to an IBM 7090 which wrote it to tape for an IBM 1401. This was my first experience with word processing and networking.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
His hostilities are because he is getting customer backlash. I bet he is losing customers due to this mess.
I have no problem with commercial software. I think it's a good thing. I think ol' Larry was just absolutely stupid for the way he has handled this whole thing. The guy is obviously a smart and innovative programmer, he is just business stupid. It's why you keep real techie types out of the board room. (most of the time anyhow)
It's like when all those companies release versions of products for other countries not realizing their logo, trade mark phrase or whatever else is "inside" is insulting to that culture. Larry wants the OSS community to use his product. His view and OSS view didn't line up. instead of working to get something worked out (beyond the half assed attempt made) He insulted the OSS community and he is getting burned in the process.
Cause and effect Larry. "Think before you speak" isn't just a word jumble. It's how you are supposed to conduct yourself.
After all,
the intarwebby was invented on a windows PC with teh cumming of Win95 no?
...and I'm sure to be modded into oblivion for it; but, McVoy is just a cocktease. That's his problem right there.
He had this tool he teased the OSS crowd with. When some of them decided there were other fish in the sea, he got royally pissed because his tease no longer held any power. So not only did he run away pouting, he literally joined up with some of the worst hacks out there...specifically, Daniel Lyons. Mr. Lyons is well regarded as a talentless hack who hates anything that brings to light the truth of the matter: his relevence is waning and soon he can fade to black and nobody will miss him.
Can't say that I blame them. If my career were pinned to the software publisher business model of the 80's and 90's, I'd be scared as shit right about now and willing to say anything, stretch any number, exaggerate any claim, and basically claw and scrape as long as I could to maintain my position before I found myself out of work, out of money, and out of options.
Don't get me wrong, open source has lots of new and interesting projects.
Many open source projects copy many ideas as well. The windows task bar, showing up in gnome, kde and Open Office? Thats not coincidence. Many open source apps seem like other "proprietary" apps. Seen the lindows music player (itunes *cough*)
Sometimes interfaces get panned because there not like existing apps, people complaining that Gimp is not like photoshop, etc...
A linux system with such high an uptime has multple security problems.
First of all, I don't think innovation will go to "zero", that's just ridiculous. Innovation will go down, and that may not be a bad thing, here's why:
The software world is jam-packed with features no one really needs and a ton of it doesn't work properly or securely.
The whole reason for that is that companies create 'features' that they can tout over their competition, even if it they're not properly implemented, or needed. So we end up with tons and tons of pointless code.
There is innovation in the OSS world; one example (off the top of my head) would be Gnutella. Gnutella wasn't that great, but everyone was able to alter it, and fix it, and make it suck less. That doesn't happen in the closed source world. OSS innovation is just less frequent and more esoteric. Less "customer focused" and more "what's interesting" focused.
The sensible thing to do, for humanity as a whole, is to focus our energy on making things perfect before we go on to the next whatever.
Offensive Tshirts
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Mind you, it's mostly very technical, but I joined the Linux Kernel Mailing List just to watch the discussions on the process and I/O schedulers, and it was a lot of fun watching people come up with neat ideas on making the schedulers more scalable and improve interactivity, etc. Ok, so maybe things like GIMP are playing catchup, but there are some FOSS tools that have caught up and surpassed the competition, and the trend is that once they support all of the basic features, they just keep going, adding new stuff. And I also notice that they tend to do the old stuff in novel ways, learning lessons from how people didn't do it so well in the past.
Shouldn't this really have gone into the humor section? Larry McVoy is practically a self-parody.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Dear Larry,
There where version control systems before you wrote yours.
Love,
the giant you kicked in the eye
If we taxpayers stopped funding R&D, I think it would dramatically damage the pace of all technology. It would have stopped people like McVoy from using the nuclear bomb metaphor as well. He'd have to come up with an original metaphor.
Same to you buddy.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
To begin with, software these days is quite complex and it really is impossible to have a full-blown operating system with all the applications people expect and not have some sort of issues.
Sure, but on the other hand it is possible to write software that just 'works' most of the time. I'm willing to bet Apple gets far fewer support calls about OSX then RedHat would if they had a desktop OS. (don't get me wrong, I hate Apple).
Look at the example of Sourceforge. They intentionally made the installer hard to use so they could sell the "pro" version. Even though their software was just a hodgepodge of other people's work.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Good ol' Linus really needs to tell Larry to Shut The Fuck Up.
It's gone beyond a joke, I can't believe that they're still friends after all this.
Opensource is not used to make money, open source is a way to share ideas, methodologies to other people the way science works. Science does not make much money in the research and development stage. It only makes money when science can make a product. But it is true that complex software projects need money, and if you wan to make money off a complex software project it is better to make it a prodcut and not release the source. I mean if cisco released the source of there IOS, what do you think would happen there would be like a million Cisco IOS running knock off products.
But if you want to use OpenSouce to make your bread and butter go and work for a big company that needs some one who is knowledgeable in it. Or provide a service with it or solution. But a big project in a developed nation it is hard.
finally a reasonable argument for closed source. Your second paragraph makes me rememeber why I still think there is a place for closed software. Its the McVoys and M$'s off the world that confuse people by spreading FUD but closed software will always have a place in places such as niche areas where FOSS simply doesn't make sense. Sure it would be great if it was FOSS, but lets be realistic.
and before anyone bags me for being a corporate wh0re, this is coming from someone with a poster of the GPL on his wall.
What geeks don't seem to realize is that most people look at a computer as a machine.
Oh, I think we do.
And machines are supposed to make work easier.
True
Proprietary software with many features makes work easier.
Not always, sometimes the attempt by some proprietry programs to do everything means that they do nothing really well
Open source software, free as it may be, often doesn't have the features or ease of use that regular folks are looking for.
True but then again sometimes proprietry software also fits that statement
They also don't get how some nerds equate software licenses with freedom fights for civil rights.
I don't get how some folks swear blind that nothing Microsoft have ever done has been wrong. What's your point ?
Folks just want the best products.
No. Most folks just want products that are good enough to perform the job at hand
If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
Maybe if they are wealthy but if they only have a fairly limited budget for software and the GNU/Linux versions of software do what they need then they're unlikely to choose Microsoft alternatives are they ?
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications
Er, have you actually used any recent incarnation of Linux ?
. . is in some way a GOOD thing and are simultaneously confused and bewildered that the other 99% of humanity disagrees.
I'm in no way confused nor bewildered thank you. I know there are very good reasons why the majority of people use Microsoft products, including myself. I do, however, think that Microsoft has, over the past decade, acted as a massive negative force on the pace of technological change in the computing industry and approve of the Open Source movement as a means to boot all the established computing companies out of their comfortable beds and back into the forefront of the computing revolution as well as a shining example of how lots of people co-operating sensibly, without the usual cut throat business tactics, can build something to threaten some well established but very unethical institutions,
Cheers,
Jeremy
The problem with OSS isn't lack of quality it's the goals. If someone codes a free and open project he might do it just to prove to himself that he's *technically* capable. However a technically capable project doesn't allways bode well with users.
The problem is polish at the end. Directing the project towards users. This is where OSS has had a problem for a while.
If you look at gnome though they are starting to look really good as far as ease of use is concerned and feature set is growing and growing. However they aren't much in terms of innovation. This is where we see a great imbalance.
He's GOT to be kidding; can anyone point out an innovation that's seen the light of day, lately?
Investors are now gunshy about lending money for new apps- every time someone releases one for Windows, Microsoft either steals it and re-sells it as their own, or duplicates the idea and puts them out of business. Instead, new ideas come in a form that isn't tied to Microsoft, like http://carrierpoint.com/ and similar business-to-business, web-based things.
Sure, OpenSource has spent the bulk of it's time getting caught up with the other OSs, but there's been a lot of code to write, test, and improve. New things will slowly start popping out, and when they do, they'll be built on a stable, well-considered platform that 'just works'.
And as to 'producing crappy software since you sell service contracts', hasn't Microsoft become the largest maker of crappy software from doing just that? Who IS this guy, and why does anyone listen to him?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Who is this Mc Fly guy anyway???
You have 2 nucular Moderator Points! Use 'em or loose 'em!
Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
And why should I care?
Okay, your point may not be that I should care. It does illuminate why Larry cares though -- with development of an open source replacement for BK the writing is on the wall for him and his per-seat licenses.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm gonna keep it and I'm not coming back to play again - not ever!
Oh well, what the hell...
instead of an all or nothing approach. Doesn't it make more sense that Open Source software will thrive where a commodity product or platform is used and the development costs can be shared among the entire community?
Closed source software, in this situation, would then be built on top of OS platforms or frameworks. Money can be made either on customization of the OS frameworks/applications or by building innovative and specifically targetted products on top of those frameworks.
The innovation would continually trickle down to the underlying OS level forcing the closed source companies to constantly innovate to stay competitive. Open Source would, in fact, allow more innovation by more companies, by amortizing the development costs for large complex frameworks among large numbers of developers. This seems to be what the IBM's of the world are looking at right now.
"what happens to all the programmers in the world when everything goes open source and free?"
...
...
they get paid to improve open source and free software and are getting paid a much higher price then on proprietary and closed source software as shown by the last 12 years of GNU/Linux
"Are you all willing to take jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds to pay your rent while you do your old job for free at night to "support the cause"? "
For one flipping burgers at Mcdonald is an honest job and it pays at the end of the week , second there is more to business then software and McDonalds.
You would know that if you ever add an higher education.
You know why your comment is actually tottally stupid , the simple fact is that Software programmer usualy get an education in two domain minimum , Programming + Nursing or MBA or Accounting or Human Ressources or finance or Engeneering or Electronics or Bio mechanics or Marketing or sales or etc
BTW you know what job and experienced programmer gets at Mcdonalds : Managements.
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
"Open source software is like handing you a doctor's bag and the architectural plans for a hospital and saying, 'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free,'" McVoy says. "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me." ...Isn't that the service model he says you can't make money from?
However, McVoy says it took him five years to create an industrial strength version of BitKeeper, and he thinks Torvalds will find it difficult to create a full-fledged replacement.
Git's done. Linus thinks it needs some polish, but he calls it "Feature Complete". If Linux can do in weeks what McVoy took 5 years to do, just imagine how mature and innovative BitKeeper could be.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
"Let's see... BitTorrent?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me."
and
"Well, I guess some innovations come from the Open Source community, after all..."
Well no. The OSS community are implimenters not innovators. Others from universities and corporate research labs actually do the innovating.
"Frankly, big corporations (Microsoft comes to mind) do not 'innovate' either. They slavishly copy whatever worked for the competition."
Check out what Microsoft Research is doing, plus I don't see you complaining about "copying" when OSS does it.
"I think this gentleman is just angry that some people decided to copy his precious SubVersion. But guess what? That is the nature of Open Source. If the 'community' likes something, it is going to copy it, and then improve on it."
He has some valid points, but since this forum isn't actually about "finding truth" but more about one big "yes" fest. I expect those points to be lost in the noise.
"Proprietary software with many features makes work easier."
Not always true. There are many instances where the shear number of features make learning how to properly utilise a package detrimental to actually getting work done. For instance OrCAD is a proprietary PCB design package, with many features, it is also very complex and hard to learn how to use - I know, I've had to learn the basics in the past. Where as Easy-PC, which lacks many of the advanced features that OrCAD has, is much easier to learn and use, is more than adequate for many users.
If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
This again is simply not true. I know many photographers that are happy to pay for photoshop, I also know many photographers that are not and are quite happy to use the GIMP. Many authors do not use Microsoft Word, at least up till 2000 it had an annoying feature of becomming very unstable as documents got large, especially if they contained a large number of images. There are people that use word for large documents, but there are also a large number of authors that use simple editors and write there documents using TeX. I admit that if you want to play all the latest games then Windows is still pretty much a prerequisite, though this is changing. A growing proportion of the largest games titles are being written and ported to windows, Mac and Linux. For example: Unreal Tournament, Doom 3 & Neverwinter Nights
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications is in some way a GOOD thing
I once again disagree. I have been more productive since I started using opensource software. I have been able to concentrate on the job at hand, without worrying about the latest viruses and worms. I don't have to worry about attachments so much. All my applications are updated from one simple to use GUI updater. I can quickly search and install hundreds of useful applications from a similarly simple to use GUI and uninstall then just as easily if I find they do not do what I want them to do.
To paraphrase Han Solo: "The people aren't in this for your revolution, princess."
With this I will have to agree. The majority of people do not use opensource to be part of some revolution. They use opensource because it offers them things that other software does not. The web is driven by open software. Google use Linux, Yahoo uses one of the BSDs, most DNS servers run BIND, a large percentage of mail servers run sendmail, again a large percentage of webservers use apache. A large number of acedemic projects utilise and/or produce opensourced software. A growing number of large corporations and municipal authorites are turning to opensource software for their IT needs. Very few of these people are doing this just because it is opensource. They are doing it because it makes good political or business sense to them.
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out Larry.
If that was in any way true, how is it that so much innovation comes from students at university who don't even have a fucking job?
Get real Larry, you're wrong.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
If the cost of software goes to zero, then people won't have the money to pay for foolish reviews to make folks interested. Then I wouldn't have to listen to McVoy any more. Problem solved. Innovation at its best.
i know torvalds doesn't care about the politics, and for him it's all just for fun, but maybe now would be a good time to consider the company he keeps.
who is she? leave a comment!
In every programming job I've had, there didn't exist any tools that did the job properly. Most of which was reports.
I remember one time, the managers tried using a reporting tool they bought to make a daily report. Unfortunately, it took 26 hours to run. After one of the programmers rewrote the report by hand, it ran in under 2 hours.
And there's lots of web development that can't be done with webpage writting programs. I wrote lots of serverside scripts at my last job.
General purpose office applications are a small niche market in the sea of software development. The only people who'll loose their jobs are those working for MS.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Why would you invent "Yet Another Templating System" when there are about 3 dozen good ones out there for a variety of languages? Seriously, unless you've moved your framework up the abstraction ladder somehow (like for instance being able to specify entire complex forms in just a line or two of code along the lines of Ruby on Rails) you're just attempting to lock your customers in to something for which no one else may even have the source or documentation.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
That's my heart bleeding for poor Larry.
Cry me a freakin' river.
It is much, much harder to try to figure out what somebody else was trying to do than Larry thinks. Granted, it does vary from protocol to protocol, but still it is a very frustrating thing. I can't tell you the number of times I tried to figure out what someone else was trying to do and ended up just writing from scratch.
Even if the particular reverse engineering effort isn't all that difficult, it isn't nearly as rewarding as developing from scratch. Larry has forgotten what it means to be a software developer. He's strictly in it for the money... I'm just waiting for him to try to sue now. Perhaps Darl has an opening? He'd fit right in.
McVoy is hurt and angry. He doesn't know how to handle his emotions, so he's lashing out at those he perceives to be his injurers. The article said that he's 43, but emotionally I'd guess he's closer to 14. I think we should all just ignore him.
it never would of happened without the Netscape and AOL money. And this really is the point McVoy was trying to make. Innovation costs a lot of money.
Better mousetrap.
Beaten path to door.
If there's a market for something and you build it
or improve on the basic model that implies a certain
amount of creativity but what do I know.
There are other motivations for open source besides creating a company to support x number of people. If your lucky then it may turn out that way.
Sometimes people just want another medium to express their talent or make something available without certain restrictions.
Wasn't OpenSSL successful? Didn't that initiative work out well for Eric Young and Tim Hudson?
I guess that's why Linux has a completely working NTFS driver but not a half dozen other superior file systems. I guess that's why MS Word's .doc format is so readily readable and there's no other format that gives the same flexibility.
What is he babbling about? Once you get beyond a trivial protocol or format, reverse engineering is harder. He's just pissed that bitkeeper has a trivial protocol and someone actually spent the 15 minutes to figure it out. I hardly consider "echo foo | telnet 128.0.0.1" a prototypical example of hard reverse engineering.
These guys crack me up when they scream about their so-called innovation. Did Larry invent the convept of source control systems? Hell no. He took the ideas of others and (apparently) improved upon them incrementally. That's not innovation. It's what we all do, regardless of how we license our software.
Most new ideas in software are incremental improvements in processing. There is little real innovation, ever. All improvements in software are inevitable. Someone, somewhere will get peeved enough with the status-quo to change how something is done, and the state of software will creep forward. That is the nature of having conscious thought.
Money is not going to create an idea. Nor will the absence of money destroy an idea. A programmer with a software idea will pursue the idea regardless of most circumstance.
What McVoy is really pissed about is the fact that he isn't all that creative, and he's watching the scientific process shatter his perfect little delusion.
Writing software is physically cheap, and has only one natural scarcity: time. All physical resources for writing software come at essentially no cost by comparison, and that is one of the reasons that software as a revenue generating product is not naturally sustainable in the long term. McVoy must be ignoring this to sustain his perfect little delusion.
The services model is a naturally sustaining model in the absence of artificial constraints such as software patents. People are lazy, and they don't want to know how to use their software. However, they know they have to have that same software to make their (non-software) operations run. More than not are perfectly willing to pay other people to keep that software in order. That is the whole impetus for maintenance subscriptions.
Open Source, however, addresses the one big issue people have with subscriptions to proprietary software: control.
People don't want to have to maintain their own software (and hardware, for that matter), but they also hate the overbearing cruelty imposed upon them by proprietary vendors. Open Source gives customers the best of both worlds. Someone else takes care of the headaches, while the customer retains all the power in the form of the ability to switch service providers. This keeps vendors honest.
None of this is a replacement for keeping knowledgable staff on the payroll, but it's the next best thing.
Word processor? Emacs.
E-mail? Emacs.
Browser? Emacs.
Spreadsheet? Emacs.
The transistor? Em...*ducks for cover*
I certainly think this guy is dead wrong. OSS is for the little guy and innovation almost always comes from the little guy. Most of us who serve our time in the fluorescent lit trenchs of the corporate world know that vast sums of money/power rarely drive anything new -- just the opposite, in fact. The juggernaut is good (adept, actually) at taking something that has been around for ages, moving the bell from the back to the front, increasing the tone of the whistle by one octave and then selling the slightly altered thing as something new that no one can live without. Sadly, enough people sign on to this charade to make this "business model" much more than just viable -- I suspect McVoy is a regular customer at Juggernaut Inc.
But what is one to make of McVoy's attitude and others like him? IMHO, people make statements like this because juggernauts deliver them intellectual fast food. Trying to dig through 4000 projects on sourceforge is a pain in the ass but sourceforge is absolutely bubbling over with innovation. Juggernaut Inc. has no new ideas (ok, maybe one or two) but the average Joe on the street is inundated with Juggernaut Inc. advertising making Juggernaut Inc. a regular part of his life. Street Joe couldn't give a rat's ass about sourceforge, however. Do we care? Should we care? 51% of street Joes generally decide who is going to be running things in a given location at a given time. So, yeah, I kinda care. So I ask the question: how does one get street Joe, fast food consumer #1048576, to realize the value of OSS?
In other news, Microsoft is delivering tabbed browsing with their new OS. People like tabbed browsing. When people start using Windows Longhorn XPFU (now with bells in front AND back) a lot of them are going to think, "hey, these Microsoft guys are on the ball with their innovative, fancy tabbed browsing. Big corporations always give us great new things." To which I grumble, "fuckers!"
Depending on how you define innovation, one can argue that it's rare to find it anywhere. Everything is built on everything else. Is BitTorrent innovative? I'd say yes, it's the first independent app that offers a truly powerful P2P-accelerated download. Someone may say it is not so revolutionary, it is just an incremental step from concepts found in Kazaa, or eDonkey. And you know what? They're right!
Is BitKeeper innovative? Someone might swear by whatever cool feature it has, and proclaim that it's revolutionary (I've never used it), but I could just say that it builds on concepts in CVS/RCS/SCCS. Without those predecessors, BitKeeper might not even exist.
I digress, lets attack the real misconception: shrinkwrap software products are not universally viable business models! There's Microsoft, which is the industry big-player, Adobe, and then thousands of little boutique companies that make peanuts on selling boxed software and make their real profits through consulting and support.
The model is hardly viable for proprietary software companies, so it shouldn't suprise anyone if it doesn't make sense for open source software companies. Red Hat's product model is based on convenience, or as Bob Young would say, the "Ketchup Business Model". Any idiot can make ketchup at home -- it's really easy, easier than downloading and burning an ISO. But no one does. Red Hat isn't so lucky to be like Heinz in this regard, so they make up the bulk of their income through service and support. And so does every single other shrinkwrap software company not named Microsoft.
Well, he's implying that if the world went 100% open source, and open source is about reverse engineering, then innovation goes to 0.
Does he also imply that in the early days, Compaq (or whatever that company may be) did not innovate by reverse engineering the IBM's BIOS so that IBM-compatiable is made?
Not the least of things McVoy doesn't understand is that the software industry (as he sees it) is a boil on society's posterior. The real market for software (bepoke software) doesn't depend on shrink-wrapped software anymore.
When a client tells me they need an integrated in-house system with CAD integration, production scheduling and workflow management, linked to an existing accounting program, I'm not stuck buying off-the-shelf software. I can choose any of a number of web servers, database vendors, scripting languages, document convertors, and communications protocols. In some cases, the cost of buying off-the-shelf will be offset by a higher cost of maintenance or a steeper learning curve with an OSS equivalent.
But, lately, it's becoming more and more likely that the business will pay much more for the off-the-shelf implementation, because when I run into bugs, they can't be fixed. My programs have to change. When I can't figure out something particularly obscure, I have to pay for help (which I probably also did in scenario #1!!), and when new versions come out to address those issues, they pay the software vendor again -- AND they pay me to fix a whole new round of quirks.
OSS isn't all roses, but the community spirit can't help but focus on the needs of the users sometimes. In the past, the implementation costs of the commercial solutions were lower, because that's what most developers had exposure to and experience with. In the last 10 years, though, with the software companies charging hundreds of dollars for a student or developer license versus $0.00 for open source, whose products do you think are gaining mindshare?
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
It is a shame that computer consumers don't want innovation; they want quality. Thankfully, this is where open source shines.
Sorry Larry, few want an innovative source control system and fewer still are willing to pay through the nose for one. The sooner you realize this the less money you'll lose.
"The vast majority of programmers do not work in the software industry. Our programs are used by millions of people, and are never found on the shelves of Circuit City or Office Depot. And we'll be needed whoever writes the software before us, because no matter whether it comes from Microsoft or the Apache Foundation, it'll never do exactly what our employers need."
Correct, and neither will it end up being given back to the OSS community.
The two word response to this nonsense is - "the wheel". There is even a one word response - "fire".
Even the frigging cave men could innovate.
See Peter Salus' excellent series, The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin serialised at Groklaw.
you had me at #!
I've never considered him evil or stupid or considered him "bad" in a general sense, but he just made me drop him in the "clueless" category with that comment. Money can buy the resource you need, but it's far from being the only resource needed to innovate. Like a lot of things, we haven't found the magic formula that leads to innvoation, but the main ingredient seems to be people. Yeah, you can buy those, but that's not the only way to get it. what a crock.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.
I didn't RTFA, and I won't (not going to give him the hit). But zero? Zero is a very small number. I can't speak for every OSS developer, or every OSS application. And I haven't done a whole lot of Open Source development, but I did write a GUI tool for Log4J. It competes with Chainsaw, which is also quite good, and which is also Open Source.
Did Lumbermill or Chainsaw get written because of private benevolence? No. Did either copy a commercial equivalent? Well I don't think Chainsaw did, and Lumbermill was written from whole cloth.
Those may not be big innovations, but they are innovations - and what is an operating environment if not a collection of small innovations?
And what is the extent of commercial involvement? The company I work for uses Lumbermill; early in development they would make recommendations and let me work on it on the clock. That's not benevolence, that's rational self interest, the backbone of the free market.
Zero? I think not.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Someone's getting their hand chopped off.
Assuming his statement is literally true, then his beef isn't even with open source, it's with giving away support. Which he didn't have to do. Just say, "OK, use this for free, but you're on your own". If they don't like it, they don't have to use it.
This would be true whether he was giving the software to OSS projects, schools, hospitals, churches, the homeless, or whatever.
His base argument is that he's lost money giving away support. That has nothing to do with open source.
As for his arguments against open source, some of them that deal with business models are valid. But a lot of what he says is utterly bogus. You could just as well apply his arguments against closed source, citing MS as an example. The vast majority (if not all) of their software is based on someone else's software or ideas. But while I abhor many of their business practices and most of their software, I have to admit their business model has been very successful-- the opposite of what applying Mr. McVoy's argument would conclude.
McVoy: The other problem is that the services model doesn't generate enough revenue to support the creation of the next generation of innovative products. Red Hat has been around for a long time--for a decade now. Yet try to name one significant thing--one innovative product--that has come out of Red Hat.
Red Hat must have innovated something, haven't they? Tux is the first kernel-space http server on Linux, but it's been done before on other O.S.'s so maybe that doesn't count. Does buying smaller, innovative companies and releasing their products count?
Daniel
I particularly liked this line:
McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet. Though his product, BitKeeper, is not an open source program, from 2002 until 2005, McVoy let open source programmers use it for free.
i might have believed at one point that providing a free tool for open source development somehow halped him understand open source, but every time he opens his mouth he he shows even more just how litle he really understands open source.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free,'McVoy says. "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me."
I can think of useful analogies to suggest the opposite: Using proprietary software is the equivalent of paying a quarter to use a toilet. I'd rather shit on the bathroom floor.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm sick of this guy. He consistently contradicts itself, it is amazing ! :
: ... So now we know he doesn't get it ... Yes, just not in a positive sense ... That's because OSS advocates do it without investing lots of money. Instead, they invest lots of time and cooperation ... That is 5 very well paid engineers full time for a year.
He is a true enemy of Free Software, and really full of himself. Some amazing pieces of contradiction
- "if you give [customers] software that works, what is the point of service?" VS "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me"
- "One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap" VS "But I'm not evil"
Some funny ones
- "'You're an evil corporate guy, and you don't get it.' But I'm not evil"
- "I'm well-known in the open source community"
- "McVoy says open source advocates fail to recognize that building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money"
- "McVoy says the cost of offering free support to Linux developers has grown to more than $500,000 a year"
GZip and PNG were "invented" for opensource use and now everyone uses them.
You are mixing open _source_ and open _standards_.
While former is nice to have (facilitates freedom
yadda yadda yadda), latter is must have, because it
ensures interoperapibility and thus drives the
technology forward.
Both PNG and GZIP are important because they are
standards. Should they be just the open-source,
their acceptance would've depended on completely
different set of factors.
I don't think he realizes that his attitude will only embitter his own customers against him. This is a sure fire way to piss off admins who are OSS advocates who may have a say in whether or not BitKeeper is used in their organization.
Since when has attacking the community helped anyone? If anything, everyone who has ever attacked to OSS community has looked like an idiot, and it's no different here.
I have been in this industry for about 12 years and I've yet to see even one BitKeeper installation. I'm not sure what his marketshare is, but I'm sure it's probably pretty abysmal.
So, goodbye, Larry. Thanks, but no thanks.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
In Germany we have a saying that goes like this: "Umgekehrt wird ein Schuh daraus."
If you translate it word by word you'll get "The other way round it becomes a shoe."
It basically means that the statement turns out to be true for the one who made.
Innovation costs money. Thus big companies are not interested in it as long as they are not forced by the market (consumers or competition).
Opensource in comparison is written by ideological individuals who have a focus on technology.
These people innovate because they want to improve their software and not to make money.
However, as always, only future will show us which concept is/was the better one.
However, a lot of McVoy's support of the kernel developpers also contributed to BitMover's ability to support such working groups at all. BitMover learned from this "free" client.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The only downside that I can see with FOSS is that it doesn't pay very well. :)
Most of the programmers I know are working on custom software in-house at various companies -- they don't work on software intended for commercial resale -- and I think that represents the vast majority of commercial programming effort being done today.
Because of this, the software development market isn't going away even if open source software becomes more prevalent.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I agree, but this doesn't just happen with Open Source software. There are closed-source applications out there that are free (beer) that have tons of features. One example I like to use is Irfanview. It is a free image program that IMO has no equal. It is light, fast, and has tons of features. It is Windows only, and is closed-source. But there is no trial period, no ads, no gimmicks. And it gets updates often. If you use Windows, try it out. It is really good software. I believe that it has been somewhat innovative, and has things in there that I need. A few things that it has that I use:
Single keys to do certain tasks - F (fit image to screen), R (rotate image), (previous/next image)
Create panoramic images
Create slideshows of images (SCR or EXE)
Screen or window capture
Image manipulations (using plugins)
More complete list
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Based on some of the patent law suits and other law suits involving former partners, there seem to be plenty allegations that Reverse Engineering is the least of it.
...
Why is OSS being damned for reportedly doing what Microsoft does? Why is Microsoft not damned in the same breath?
lotus -> excel
With non-proprietary standards, it does take time to reverse enginere/emulate them. Time which can't be spent on innovation. Prove the OSS wrong by providing full access to the standards, and see if they use the rest of the time to innovate. Bert
Here are some of the biggest problems in computing.
This is the fundamental source of buffer overflows and most software crashes. No language since C (other than C++) has worked that way. The Pascal/Modula/Ada family, Java, and all the scripting languages have subscript checking. But C does not. We pay a huge, huge price for this. Most of the instability in software worldwide comes from this one mistake.
Back when transistors were expensive, the cheapest way to build I/O devices was to put them on the same bus as the memory and store directly into their registers. IBM mainframes had "channels" between devices and memory, but minicomputers couldn't afford that. So mainframes had secure I/O, where the device couldn't write all over memory and device drivers couldn't tell the device to do so. But minicomputers did not. In the mainframe world, drivers could be in user space, and unprivileged. In the minicomputer world, drivers were deeply embedded in the operating system. PCs followed the minicomputer approach, because it was cheaper and that mattered back in 1980. Transistor count stopped being an issue years ago, and peripheral controllers are more complex than IBM channels ever were. But the unprotected I/O model stayed, long after it was no longer necessary. Now, hardware designers are so used to the minicomputer model that they design new interfaces, like FireWire, to emulate register-oriented I/O, even though they're really packet networks. So we have drivers in the kernel and thus huge, unreliable, ever-changing kernels.
UNIX traditionally has lousy interprocess communcation. In the original UNIX implementations, the machines were so small that you assumed you were talking to a swapped-out process, so the only mechanisms were pipes (which were really files) and signals (which emulated hardware interrupts). These were terrible constructs. Yet what we have today in UNIX tends to be minor modifications to the pipe/signal model. Sockets are very like pipes, as is System V interprocess communication. Both are unidirectional and stream-oriented. What you want is a subroutine call between processes; what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. You can make one out of the other, but the overhead is high. (Check out any CORBA ORB.) This led to the One Big Program approach to software. It also leads to the temptatation to put too much in the kernel, because calling the kernel works well, while calling another program doesn't. Linux gives in to that temptation far too much.
The open source world can't fix any of these problems, because they require wrenching design-level changes. The Wintel world has at least tried to fix these problems, although their own legacy issues keep them from making much progress.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.
/. :) - I don't say people are making good free software, don't have any income, but still are happy, no. But the wast majority of FOSS developers have regular jobs, families, they live their lives somehow and still they provide us with an extreme amount of qualuty free software.
Ok, clearly some people can not comprehend that there exists motivation sources and goals for exceptional software creation far beyond and besides corporate welfare, higher salary or making William Gates yet another good day. Don't get me wrong - hey, this is
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
In a free market, the price of most software will be zero:
1. It's free to make lots of copies of software and production cost is less than say writing a book or making an episode of Simpsons. In fact, people are willing to program as a hobby or, in 3rd world countries, for very low pay by our standards.
2. As McVoy pointed out, users of the software - big companies like Apple (hardware maker) or IBM (making money on service and support) - have interest in open source to free customer's money for themselves and soak up other people's contributions. There are more software users than software sellers. Oops!
3. On consumer side, intellectual property that has similar costs to software - TV shows and newspapers - has long been free and makes money on advertisement or convenient delivery (cable or newspaper subscriptions). There are all signs Google is trying to get into both models.
Microsoft and music record companies are seemingly beating this trend by selling IP which is relatively cheap to produce at increasing prices. I say it's because they operate under corpitalism - government rules that favor otherwise unsustainable business models of big corporations - rather than true capitalist open market.
For one thing, piracy is impossible to control without unreasonable laws like DMCA that prohibit studying mathematics and allows invasive snooping of Internet by private entities. In a normal society, content produces would have to come up with reasonable prices and attractive distribution channels to encourage honesty. Also, control of limited distribution channels - like buying all radio stations so that independent music can not be heard - would be illegal in a society that promotes free competition. So would be patent lock-in of trivial ideas, like Amazon's 1-click.
The most extreme case of corpitalism is bankrupt airlines that continue to operate as usual while being allowed to break any contracts that they voluntarily accepted (like employee pension plans). You would think if government gets into social protection, the target would be poor individuals rather than huge companies. PanAm ran out of money and folded and air travel is generally better/cheaper because of that.
Fortunately, it just takes one country in the world to switch to true capitalism instead of corpitalism. After a short time, everyone else would leach their software and domestic companies would have to switch to better business models to compete.
I find it interesting that Larry was spending $500,000 dollars a year to support the kernel. After just saying there was no money in support, where did he pull $500,000 dollar from then? He can sell support contracts like everyone else..
~matt
Yeah, well, if open source developers didn't need to reverse engineer the popular file formats, they could spend more time on innovation.
By attacking Linux like that, McVoy just tries to keep the name Bitkeeper in the news. Let's just stop giving him free publicity and ignore this shit.
He's really acting as an idiot.
He can't get rid of "reverse engineering" phrase for the last few months, and recently we found out that "reverse engineering" which occured with BitKeeper was a 'help\n' (or was it 'help\r\n'?) string on an open port.
Might be that certain companies canceled BK licenses, since they don't need them anymore to access kernel tree, so he got pissed off.
"I want software that works, not software I have to hire consultants for to make it work."
You must not be a programmer or sysadmin. This is the attitude of the former COO of the company for which I used to work. A few years back a former Director of IT started building the company's web site and business on apache and php (albeit with a closed-source sybase db driving the backend). The COO thought that the company was paying too much for consultants and decided to hire someone to reimplement everything with MS SQL and IIS.
He thought that because it was easy for him to use MS (tm)(c) Windows(tm)(c) on his home computer, it would make development easier and cheaper to get rid of linux. He thought that the company would effectively be able to get the software developed and then get rid of the IT staff and then things would just continue to run with no need for maintenance b/c the company would be running "good software" for which they wouldn't have to pay someone to administer.
Well, after paying developers $50,000 to design and build part of the redesigned corporate web backend, buying a new MS Exchange and paying some totally ignorant windows admins about $10,000 to migrate to it from the old exchange 5.5 (really, it was scandalous, they couldn't accomplish this after weeks, it should take no more than 1 week -- TOPS), and buying new hardware for the new systems, the projects eventually got abandoned. They continued to go overbudget. The consultants working on them couldn't finish the job. The company spent probably $100,000 in development, software and hardware costs (and they continued to pay the COO to "manage" it all).
Then he got laid off, all the incompetent windows admins got laid off, and they hired me. I continued to develop and maintain all the linux stuff and add more open source solutions. The company spent zero for support and software costs (I ran everything on Debian. All software was free as in speech and beer). THey just had to pay the salary of one guy to manage the open source website, database, and do continued development in free languages like php, perl, python, ruby...
The argument that companies should "buy" "software that works" instead of get free software and pay someone to implement and support it is 100% BS. Companies that depend on their computer systems to work WILL ALWAYS need to pay SOMEONE to support their systems SOMEHOW (whether they hire on a full-timer, pay consultants, or enter a service agreement).
I heard some companies are paying $5,000/license for multiple BK licenses. This strikes me as being a tremendous waste of resources. Hire ONE consultant to work 5 hours a week to support everyone who needs to use the source management tools and go with a free solution like subversion, darcs, monotone, or, now, git.
I bet in 5 years BK will cease to exist because the free open source solutions will be just as good or better. The international community of open source programmers will outpace BK's innovation and develop a better solution.
Sure, there are a lot of counterexamples. Mozilla for one is a huge one. Mozilla is easy lightyears ahead of any browser. Go OSS!
However, there are also a plethora of examples where he is basically right. Gnome and KDE are great examples. Gnome and KDE bring very, very little to the table. Instead, they are both trying to copy other proprietary GUIs in order to give Linux a more mainstream look and feel. I wish someone would just create a session manager that brings something truly innovative to the world of GUIs.
This is repeated ad nauseam not only by Larry but now by his supporters. The problem is, it's based on (IMHO) the premise that his company comes crashing down if he ever went open source.
1. That may even be true. But even if he tried it and BitKeeper folded and he had to (horror!) get another job, he could NOT therefore conclude that Open Source is a flawed model and no open source business can survive (which appears to be his contention).
2. He's never going to try it, which further disqualifies him from commenting on the topic.
3. Even if the sun turned green and Larry open sourced BitKeeper, my bet is that he would make a decent living doing support for it. The problem appears to be that he cannot stomach any challenge to his cash flow. If one dollar less reaches his pocket, he blames open source. That's what all this is about. The almighty buck. It's time to mod McVoy down - especially since he's not even an open source groupie, let alone a contributor.
you had me at #!
Not quite. OpenOffice is an Open Source version of StarOffice, which before Sun started caring about it, was produced by Star Division, a for-profit company in Germany. Yes, it's an MS Office knockoff, but by a commercial company, not OSS developers. I think this proves that on both sides of the fence there both innovation and reverse engineering on both sides of the fence.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
If the world goes 100% open source, McVoy's revenue drops towards zero, but innovation will rapidly rise closer to 100%.
It means I'll never get paid to code "Hello World" again unless there's something innovative about the implementation because there will be freely available open source alternatives in multiple languages and platforms. No, this doesn't mean I'll be unemployed. What it does mean is that I'll only be working on things that are new. I'll be creating new software, or adapting available software to the specific needs of my employer. He may see it differently, but I think that would make my job a hell of a lot more interesting.
i used to work in design/communications.
quark was the defacto standard for layout and typesetting, but the company just sat on their product for years [and years]. no competition meant no incentive for the proprietary company to innovate or enhance...
many designers grumbled, but it mattered not. let's all thank god for monopolies and closed-source software.
sum.zero
unless you're referring to established, well-defined physical principles about the world around us, you're going to be wrong. McVoy may hate it when I say this, but it's true.
...which isn't necessarily a bad thing. when you really put your heart and soul into something, you tend to do a much better job at it than if you're doing it for some alterior motive.
most of the time, speaking in absolutes is a dead give-away that someone doesn't know what the hell they're talking about, or that they're just trying to spread FUD, and likely both.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero.
see, this just doesn't make sense, although I think there's a degree of truth to it. Innovation will not stop, that's for damn sure, even if the world goes 100% open source, Microsoft crumbles like Rome, and we all join hands and sing Kumbayah. It may, however, slow down - the fact is (generally speaking), people like money, and if exchanging money for inventions is going to spur on innovation, so be it. if money or corporate profits are no longer a motivational factor, then you're left with the people who'll innovate for the sake of innovation itself.
(disclaimer: I did not RTFA, although I think what I'm talking about here is general enough that I'll be okay)
Agreed. I was going to say this same thing myself. Too bad I have no mod points currently. This guy makes it sound like reading through assembly code to implement a complex system is easy. Yeah right. It's a hell of a lot easier to just write your own system, and less prone to errors as well.
Seriously, this is getting rediculous, you're changing arguments more frequently than most /. readers change their underware.
"The closed-source programs have to compete for market share: they must innovate or die."
Ehm, yes, that's why all those great closed source apps form MS, that so constantly innovated are so successful...
"The popular open-source programs don't have to innovate, they just need to work. There's no incentive for them to be innovative and in general they aren't."
There's lot of incentive, competition you claim to be the incentive for closed source programs is one of them. And your claim that they aren't is simply baseless.
"Most of the true open source innovation is going to be lost amongst all the non-innovative software: after all, you said yourself anyone and their mother can start an open-source project."
So, how does my statement support your statement? It doesn't and again, your statement is totally baseless.
Everybody knows that EMACS is just a rip-off of edlin, just with other keybindings.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
> This statement really says everything about why
> McVoy feels the way he does; he's only thinking
> about money. He has completely forgotten that
> open > source software doesn't require a profit
> to exist
> or be innovative. People write free/open source
>software because they enjoy it not because it is
>going to make them rich.
Open source may not require profits, but it still quite badly requires MONEY...
Try holding a full-time job and contributing in a major way to a complex open-source project..
(Mozilla, gcc, Perl, Python,...). Keywords: "major contribution" and "complex project".
Try it...Then we will talk...
Yes you can submit a patch here and there but that's about it for a normal human being...
Yes, there are super humans who can do more but that's a rare exception...
The question of funding of open source is very very real...And until there is a way to fund open source in some way, Larry McVoy has a point...
>> What happens when these sponsors go away and
>> there is not enough money floating around?
> I will continue to use Firefox, OpenOffice, X
> Windows, and all the other software I have come > to rely on.
But you are not answering McVoy's question... Yes, the users will continue using OSS, but will developers continue to develop it??? Yes, some will but the rate of development will go down dramatically and things may start falling apart...
McVoy lives in the San Francisco Bay area. The rents there are enormous. EVERYTHING costs an insane amount there. If McVoy and his *team* weren't wrapped up in the idea of living in a swanky place like SF then they wouldn't have to spend so much damn money. Still they don't even really need it there. Lots of poor people live in the bay area but McVoy has obviously bought into the materialistic, capitalistic notion that if you're a software developer you DESERVE fast cars, nice houses, going out to expensive restaurants, etc. We have computer networks, he could live almost anywhere in the world, i.e. some place cheaper to live, and do his job just as well. McVoy is a greedy SOB!
The illusion that all good things come from closed source solutions and that open source is merely a reverse engineering hackery is pretty easy to shatter.
The reason one knows about such amazing new innovative products in the first place is due to marketing. Corporations use campaigns to get the word out -- look at how much Microsoft does a razzle dazzle when a product isn't anywhere in sight.
The Open Source community tends to rely more on word of mouth -- the product quality speaks for itself. And, sometimes, a really project that scratches a large enough itch gets a lot of public attention in the media.
But pick your favorite commercial application and you'll discover if you look hard enough there was something else it was based on. From word processor, to web browser, to chat client, to drawing package.
Closed source companies do something right that open source communities don't -- they see a need and focus on a set of target users. Look at yourself on the bell curve of comparison: you're not 'average', more than likely you're somewhere over on the far right. And that means that there are more people out there with LESS knowledge than you. Closed source companies want that market -- because those people are willing to put DOLLARS down where you're willing to put in TIME. As such, they cater to the lower common denominators.
What's great is that once the closed source community determines the threshold of what the minimal user is able to grasp, the open source community can usually produce a better implementation.
Of course closed source people are upset; they've made an investment in parting people from the contents of their wallets, and you're raising the standards that must be met while teaching them to fish for themselves.
If you want to be successful one of the best ways to do it is to copy a success, and in particular learn from the mistakes the first person made. I've seen several examples in this discussion where a successful open source project has been copied by a closed source project as well as vice-versa, or closed copying closed, or open copying open. After all source code control ala bitkeeper ain't exactly a new idea. What we have is a lot of people saying "good idea but I think I can do it better", and they often succeed in doing just that, in my experience quality and capability is an iterative process. But in the end we all win. Excellence is fostered by competition. In the end we all benefit by higher quality products both open and closed.
My Weblog
I guess in the wake of MOG getting kicked out of LinuxWorld, /. needed a good FUD article to vent some of that pent up rage and hate at ;)
Seriously, fuck the guy and the horse he rode in on. He has no credibility any more in the F/OSS community (not that he ever had), and he was made out by most as a complete asshole who threw a hissy fit and took his toys home. Beyond Linus, his accusations just didn't wash with people, and he's bitter about the amount of flack he's got from the F/OSS community over his hissy fit. Of course he's gonna try and get his own back, and if he can spread a bit of FUD about OSS development in an attempt to get more people signing on to his "innovative" product, and 'prove' he was right all along, then all the better for him.
Ignore the waste of space. I'm quite sure he appreciates the value of F/OSS only too well, it just suits him to attack the community and spread some FUD.
Huh. You must have severe performance bugs in your kernel, because both 2.6 and 2.4 kernels have addressed problems relating to them much more recently than that. Linux doesn't hotpatch, so no one really cares about your uptime dicksize.
Wasn't the whole selling point of his product that the Linux guys were using it? I mean, if Open Source is a pile of shit, why did he go to such great lengths to glom onto them and get some of that mojo?
I mean, making a huge exception to his licensing so that a bunch of people who are too stupid to come up with any new ideas can use your code for free seems stupid. Right?
To my way of thinking, anyone who insists that there's one dominant source (among OSS, academic research, private research, commercial products) of Good Ideas And Innovation in all of computing has to be examining the evidence very selectively.
...)
:-)
I can think of great new ideas - and first practical implementations of not-so-new ideas - from a whole range of sources. Note that it's probably almost as important (if not more important) to have someone actually build a workable system as it is for someone to have a brainstorm and say "I know, dude, let's build a system with a mouse and stuff".
The range of sources includes:
- Straight commercial software releases from established big or medium-sized companies
- Startups that were 'made' by their new software idea
- Random guys in a garage / dorm room giving things away for free
- Academics, operating either in conjunction with industry, government, the miltary or just under their own wacky steam
- Well-established OSS guys doing similiarly
- Corporate research people (Bell Labs, Xerox,
I think it's riduculous for anyone to try to fold these disparate sources together and pretend that any one side has been a dominant source of good ideas or implementations. For a start, many of the OSS zealots on this thread have had a tendency to fold all academic research into OSS regardless of whether it ever actually was released under an truly 'Open' license. On the other hand, a anti-OSS zealot is really stretching their case to claim that the original Unix somehow belongs firmly in the camp of commercial software; as if Ken Thompson and friends were just a bunch of salarymen building another commercial product for AT&T.
You can always build a lawyer-ly case for or against your side (OSS, free software, commerical software, academic research) by simply deciding to trace the chain of influence for all other innovations until you can identify the 'truly' original project that fits your prejudice. We'll forever have to live with pissing contents such as "did the Apple guys really add anything original to Xerox PARCs research" (my take: yes).
Diversity is good. All of these disparate groups that I listed above are well suited to make contributions that might be much harder to make in at least some of the other groups. Almost none of them are nearly as original - or, shall we say, "independent of influence" as their boosters would like to make out. Even research academics (who occasionally find themselves chasing after the field that they'd like to imagine themselves leading).
But remember, not all OSS believers are so pooly behaved. Those guys just stick out more.
You're 100% right about them being freeloaders. OSS is a back and forth were the user needs to play a more active role then closed source users are used to. Users who don't get that are nothing but freeloaders.
Quack, quack.
* * 5 * * * head -20 /dev/random | slashpost -s "McVoy says something cantankerous"
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Most truly innovative software was never written for the market in the first place. Most really neat stuff is written by on staff programmers or consultants and never leaves the company. There are so many scientific apps that are used that were never on the shelf and probably never will be.
It's always bothered me that so many OSS zealots are so limited in their vision. They're just as bad as the "Corporate Sheeple" they deride. If you want to make something Innovative, don't just make a themeable Windows. That's quite possibly the stupidest example of creative software. Who gives a fuck if you can make a scroll bar look like it's a leaf if you need software to model water flow through pipes? There's a lot of areas where Open Source could be useful but everyone's jerking off over Windowing Systems and Word Processors. McVoy is saddly right in this regaurd at the moment.
The open source oses are there, it's time to actualy make something worth running on them and not just focusing on the same 5% over and over.
Linux is really boring from an os standpoint. Now Plan 9......
You're worse then the leftiest linux zealot if you believe this. That must be why Trolltech is considered innovative. Wait, now that they use Dual Licenses are they 50% less innovative?
Judge my code by its function (propsoft) or by its code (OSS) not by its license. Plenty of hidden proprietary code sucks or is a blatant clone in fuctionality. Hell, alot of it is copied directly from FOSS, you just can't see it.
Larry seems upset because his most important users are being forced to leave. Does he realize he is the one forcing them?
Frankly, as the clown once said, "I'm glad he's dead." ("he" being BK. No offense Larry.)
BTW, how does Linus feel about his buddy calling him (and the rest of his OSS customers) a non-innovative parasite?
True, OSS always works best with a clearly defined target, thanks for the newest one Mr. McVoy.
--=
Exit stage Left "/oblig script joke"
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Sometimes (at least when its used like this) its more like a buzzword then anything with real meaning. People need word processors, spreadsheets, basic desktops, etc. OSS is still new enough that they need hand-holding and familiarity anyway.
But lets not delude ourselves into thinking there's a lack of innovative software just because some of the more popular packages are familiar. Look at Blackbox for an innovative desktop (clean, nice looking, fast) . Look at Bittorrent, Zinf or Webmin.
The further off the 'beaten path' you go you'll find more and more innovation. The fact that mainstream projects like Apache, PHP, Python (Perl) and Firefox (its not the tabs, its the extensiblity that allowed tabs to be added-on in the first place) have gained as much mind-share as they have is just as sign that not only can OSS be (more) successfully inovative (remember, Microsoft *buys* innovation more then they produce it) but it can change the market place. And closed or open source projects alike, thats no small feat.
You are of course very correct, monoculture is a lose-lose and I left my "everything needs to be free" behind a long time ago (even OSS costs, we should value that too).
Quack, quack.
I have seen 1000 zeolot comments in response to McVoy saying that innovation will cease.
He stated that companies trying to make money off of open source will stop innovation.
Things like libpng and the like, aren't huge companies with tons of paid coders and support people. So Yes, they are innovative.
I saw someone mention OpenBSD. I know for a fact they have had numerous issues with money. Without government funding they would be working out of a garage. Huge projects need coders, coders need money. Libpng took almost 10 years to get where it is today. How soon do you think it would have come to market as a closed source item?
Other open source companies that don't have a lot of community support, and pay people salaries to live (support, QA, coders) I would say they are on the lesser end of innovation.
he claims open source is supported by corporate welfare then claims that if 100% were open source there would be no development. that (a) implies he thinks 100% open source would mean no corporate sponsorship, contradicting what he just said, and (b) implies that he thinks innovation depends on non-welfare systems rather than the desire to get things done.
pass the crack pipe.
gcc takes in Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Java and ObjC. (It has available frontends for
CHILL, Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, Mercury, VHDL, PL/I and ObjC++.) It outputs code for a long list of processors, including Alpha, ARM, x86 and x86-64, IA-64, Motorola 68000, MIPS, PA-RISC, PDP-11, PowerPC, SuperH, SPARC, VAX and some processors I've never heard of like A29K, ARC, Atmel AVR, C4x, CRIS, D30V, DSP16xx, FR-30, FR-V, Intel i960, IP2000, M32R, 68HC11, MCORE, MMIX, MN10200, MN10300, NS32K, ROMP, Stormy16, V850, and Xtensa.
It may not output the fastest x86 code ever constructed, but I doubt anything can match it for breadth and interoperability---after all, interoperability is one of the big selling points of open software, since there's no benefit in the embrace/extend/extinguish tactics commercial software vendors engage in.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Here we were, working 90 hours a week to build something to help Linux, working long hours, giving up a lot of money and time, and all the time we were doing that, at every step of the way, we had people abusing us, sending us nasty e-mail, telling us we're jerks. It's been constant. It gets tiresome. After five years of that you just say: It doesn't make business sense and it isn't that fun."
Translation:
"For years we enjoyed a lot of low-cost publicity for BitKeeper because the Linux kernel team was using it. We could go to IBM and HP and say `Look, these guys use it, and they're really discriminating programmers. So, that'll be $2000 per seat.' It costs us relatively little to donate a server to the kernel team, and the occasional nasty email is easy to delete. All in all, it was a successful campaign until TRIDGE CAME ALONG and almost made us obsolete -- at that point we'd be crazy to give him any chance of actually polishing it off, so we yanked the plug."
Open source is a good business for poorer countries in Latin American, Africa and Asia . The excellent quality of the OSS development tools is helping to the local economy because is a little harder, an example, to a fame less colleges and programmers in this countries, pay the licenses for Visual Studio and tools like Bitkeeper. Has McVoy an idea about how to distribute free or good quality cheap software and development tools with the same impact of the OSS movement?. Smaller versions of commercial software is not helping, think Windows XP Starter Edition vs. any respectable Linux distribution or Office 2003 Basic Edition vs. future OpenOffice 2.0.
He's saying EXACTLY what you accused Tridge of doing!
It made no sense when you said it and it makes no sense when he says it.
End of story.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
ELIZA (1966)
GNU/Linux was successful before it was a commercial success.
It will continue to be successful even if commercial support dies off.
Why you Ask?
Because it does the job better. Plain and simple.
At least, the open-source movement has brought together a handful of great programming languages and models that the commercial ones can't even touch.
I'm thinking Ruby, Python, Perl, OCaml, Haskell and others. Truly innovative, feature-rich, expressive and concise languages.
Now, compare that with recent offerings from the proprietary world: Java, C# together with the tons of libraries you need in order to cope with such poor expressiveness and heavy IDEs to deal with such a messy, redundant and overloaded environment...
truly sad state of affairs for the proprietary guys and those who make a living by blindlessly following them...
I don't feel like it...
I agree with McVoy about it taking a lot of resources to develop and support something. That's partly the reason the project is inactive. There's a small amount of hardware and platform specific stuff that would have to be developed and tested for each platform. Even more so for the RCU-SMR stuff. You have to find a way to get thread or processor status for each platform and it's different for each platform. But even though the algorithms are generic, I suppose I could just support one platform. That would reduce the amount of effort considerably. The big problem there is you might end up hard coding something that would make porting more difficult later on.
If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
Maybe if they are wealthy but if they only have a fairly limited budget for software and the GNU/Linux versions of software do what they need then they're unlikely to choose Microsoft alternatives are they ?
There's like 3 games on the open source side that are worth playing, everything else is a bloated hack of 10 year old games.
Everyone who talks about closed source seems to make it out like Microsoft Windows and Word are the only closed source apps out there and that Open Source is saving us from the tyranny of Microsoft. What a load of crap. Blizzard makes tons of cash with very closed source software and no one seems to even try to make any open source software that's better than them. ID just put out a very innovative game engine the game play sucked but the graphics were spectacular. Where's the better open source app? Where are the open source games that aren't clones of 10 to 20 year old games? Maybe McVoy was right in some regards and that makes me sad.
Linux is really boring from an os standpoint. Now Plan 9......
McVoy has it correct... but only in this weird mixed economy that software currently operates in. This is because the market has to deal with both the natural low-scarcity of information and the artificial high-scarcity of proprietary software.
The increased profits of proprietary software are diverting resources away from open source. Innovators are more likely to work for a proprietary company that will pay them good wages, then to innovate as an unpaid hobby on weekends. Heck, by the time the weekend rolls around, the innovator probably wants to do something other than program!
This isn't solely the fault of copyright, as you can certainly have proprietary software in a society without copyright (though it's certainly much harder). A lot of the blame has to be laid at the feet of patents (what other than software can you copyright, patent AND trade secret?), and a lot has to be blamed on the courts letting click-thru, shrink-wrap and other bogosities stand as valid models of contractual consent.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
libz and libpng are opensource (their libraries match the OSI definition) and several closed-source apps use it: including Internet Explorer...
I'll be sure MySQL is aware that my company does not approve of relying on BitKeeper. We're prepared to vote with our platinum support contract.
The original poster doesn't necessarily have the bad attitude, just the guy to whom you replied.
Or maybe it makes perfect sense when both people say it?
End of the OTHER side of the story.
"McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet."
No he doesn't, or else he wouldn't be spewing this nonsensical crap! -_-
How many opensource projects do you see out there are truly creating something new? or making something no one has ever thought of making?
Most popular projects are substitutes to commercial projects.
Nothing new is being done.
Ever looked at a linux distro and compared it with modern operating systems like BeOS?
It's piss poor. It's burdened with technology that came from unix in the _1980's_
If someone were to innovate linux, we wouldnt have to use X11, we wouldnt have to wait a minute or two to boot the system up, just to put it into a gui mode which has to boot itself up.
I have some ideas where linux, itself could be changed, and where the whole desktop thing could be changed.
Otherwise, linux is just going to become the alternative OS to MacOS and Windows. With free clones of apps in both systems.
I love opensource, I just believe it's not living to its fullest potential.
That and there are devs who prefer to keep things simple and not try to advance any, one of the reasons Xorg is becoming preferred, the xf86 guys werent too hot on adding modern features to X, because they were personally happy with features from the 80's.
Linux as a desktop could be so much more.
As server, I think it's fine and great. Very little more you could do to improve it other than the faster init. boot time should be quick, if a server restarts, it should appear as a flicker and resume normal operation as quickly as possible.
We need more creative and innovative thinkers in opensource. too many coders who know how to code, but may not necessarily have a vision of making something better.
because of that comment.
but just for a week, I'm a little bit spiritually fickle.
-pyrrho
I think he's right, to some extent. Although I wouldn't say open source completely fails to innovate (you and I both have projects demonstrating otherwise), it seems that the projects which get the most support and popularity are the ones that set out to reproduce some functionality that has already been implemented in a proprietary way. I guess the problem is that it's much easier for the potential supporters to see the value in a product which already exists.
For example, Linux is a Unix clone. Unix is not the pinnacle of OS design. There are tons of projects out there trying to create new, innovative OS's, but we never really hear about them, and so they don't get the attention they need to succeed as open source projects. And, so, we remain stuck with our Unix clone.
well try explaining the battle between Eliza vs. Alice!
she'll be totally lost!
but please don't even try to start on emacs vs vi because... well, emacs is better that's why.
-pyrrho
OSS is a choice just like cosed is. Its a decision and I'd be no more happy being locked into one or the other. Both (all) are important in their own right and we've certainly benifited from the diversity (thank you Microsoft for forcing standards onto the PC platform!).
Quack, quack.
In the beginning, there were no software companies. Companies maintained there own software departments that
could be quite large, and software provided by hardware companies was fairly minimal. One thing about OSS that people don't get, and try to obsecure, is that if you never ship the software in any form, you don't have to publish, or share it.
Corporate in-house projects, that solve a problem inside HQ , are really as far as the license goes no different from a hobbiest hacker, that changes a program for personel, ad-hoc, use. With open source, companies can get source rights
that they used to get by default in the 70's, and early 80's. Take sony adapting gcc for their development of their console for instance. If they had used a product of a software company they would have to negoiate a license and new terms just to adapt something they already payed.
Really the success of gcc, is proof that OSS can be successful. People try to whittle away at is success, but it's proven, and only continues to be more so, with its use in Apple's OSX. So there's one, so there's the proof, and what is Apple still making money?
It's a marketing problem. :-) But, yes, I agree with you about that.
One problem in the tech industry is teaching people why your product is better than what they've been doing. And that can be a very difficult task.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
WebSphere, their flagship application server, has major OSS components inside of it. In fact, you could think of it as a federation of OSS components with proprietary code for management and extra reliability features.
And by 'services', I don't mean tech support. I mean business strategy (ex-PriceWaterhouse Coopers) consultants that will teach and help you to change your strategy, financial consultants who will help you fund & build a business case for it, project consultants who will help run the initiative, IT architects that will help it fit into your tech environment, and THEN developers and administrators to do the work , and tech support.
IBM could care less about license revenue. Hence OSS == goodness.
-Stu
Nobody likes consultants.
Really? Then why all the eagerness to outsource to Indian system integration (SI) / consulting firms like Wipro, Infosys, and Tata? Or for that matter, IBM global services, or BearingPoint, or CGI, or any number of services firms. It's an epedemic.
It's becoming a lot rarer to work in IT as an employee of a firm, unless you're in management or architecture.
I would rephrase it as:
Nobody who cares about actually delivering quality results likes big body shop consultants.
Boutique firms and independent consultants can be very useful. The odd SI, you might get one out of 10 sr. principal consultants worth his or her salt.
-Stu
PHP = Cold Fusion knockoff Python = Java/C knockoff
McVoy just rehashed the same tired argument that has been used against open source all along. Just because the speaker changed doesn't make it any less of a paranoid FUD fantasy.
But giving Space on Newspages like /. to people like this is killing innovation at all in every sence anybody can imagine.
... but he has a voice on Forbes.com. And a "respected" magazine is the only important thing for
:-(
a.) PHBs
b.) VCs
c.) Politicians
a list of innovative OSS apps:
gnu/hurd (honest)
fuse
kde (kioslaves, kgethotnewshithotacestuff)
X (was it OSS when network transparency was introduced?)
linux is probably innovative, cant think of anything
apt-get
emerge
amarok (kde media player, im sure thats innovative)
slashcode??
basket (new kde tool, have a gander - basket.kde.org)
there's billions more, i just cant be bothered thinking any more
You're willing to give Firefox the benefit of the doubt due to tabbed browsing but you dismiss the GIMP as a knockoff of Photoshop? There are plenty of GUI innovations in the GIMP that are not found in Photoshop. You may not like them but they are still innovative.
There's too much innovation and not enough improvement. Just stirring things to create unnecessary new releases is not interesting.
Bitkeeper = CVS, subversion knockoff
> Firefox is shaky because tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera
Look farther back for the innovation. Other people had did hypertext, but the idea of standards (HTML is SGML) based markup delivered across diverse networks with multimedia (at the time mostly pictures) and the ability to seamlessly link to content hosted on computers outside the author's network was first created in an open environment (research) and the first implementation was released as open. Then the first totally graphical browser, and the foundations underpinning the market leader today (Microsoft's own Internet Explorer) was released as Free Software. It's name was NCSA Mosiac. NCSA also implemented a httpd server that went on to greatness. After being abandoned by NCSA it was taken over by a band of OSS programmers and patched so much it was renamed "Apache". You may have heard of it, it now powers about 70% of the web servers worldwide. So non-commercial OSS types created the World Wide Web that lead to the Tech Explosion of the 1990's and direct descendents of their original code is in use to this very day on millions and millions of machines. In short, they changed the world. Where I come from that is called innovation.
> Where email is concerned, I can't think of any whizz bang email
> programthat sets itself apart from most other email in an innovative
> way.
But email as we understand it, as in a universal service across networks, is an invention of the OSS/Unix community. Sendmail wasn't an open source re-invention of a commercial product, it was and remains to this very day, THE mail transport mechanism for the Internet. The very IDEA of a universal cross network, cross OS, cross archetecture mail transport didn't really exist until sendmail created it.
> Yes, IRC was around before AOL but AOL brought internet chat awareness
> to the masses so they get the credit.
Please be consistent. You admit AIM was only a poor imitation of IRC yet you don't give the credit for the innovation to OSS. Although to be truthful, neither can claim the credit because Compuserve's CB Simulator did it first and inspired all of the later implementations all the way down to IRC's use of the term 'channel'.
> Open source needs commercial software and commercial software is
> recognizing the importance of and becoming more reliant upon open
> source.
No it doesn't. It does need commercial USERS and the demands for QC and documentation they bring plus the money they are increasingly willing to spend to obtain it. But we don't 'need' commercial software anymore, never did. That was a major league wrong turn. I expect we will still have closed CONTENT, i.e. games, but the idea of software as a big secret black box is dead.
Even if you don't get full redistribution rights the idea of not getting a copy of the source along with binaries is fast dying. Eventually all software will routinely ship with source and might not even bother with binaries as the underlying hardware becomes diverse again. Closed binaries were only really practical during the WinTel hegenomy where there was, for all intents and purposes, one hardware and one software platform. Part of the normal software install routine might include compiling a version for your computer. (This would make the Gentoo kids the leading edge of the revolution. Ugh.)
Democrat delenda est
I'm really tired of hearing about this clown.
We all knew he was bad news from the get-go. It seems that Linus, of all people, was the only one who didn't see it, and, well, he does now. I wish he'd just go away.
I think some one takes his turf....
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
"Okay, your point may not be that I should care. It does illuminate why Larry cares though -- with development of an open source replacement for BK the writing is on the wall for him and his per-seat licenses."
And the writing's on the wall that you can't trust OSS, and you better be careful working with them.
You'll note that Trolltech got similiar treatment, right down to the Harmony project.*
*Maybe OSS will do something similiar to what MS is doing? Make enemies in the relentless pursuit of their goals. The latter in the pursuit of money, while the former in the pursuit of ideology. Both uncompromising.
only a sith thinks in absolutes
"Why is Richard Stallman outside in a bulldozer marked 'LART'?"
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
From your comment, you seem to define something to be innovative if it's the most popular product today. People may have slightly differing ideas what innovation is about; but your's is so far off the point, it's not even funny.
Was UNIX the first time-sharing system? Was Windows the first GUI? Was Photoshop the first bitmap image editor? Was MS Office the first word processor+spreadshead+whatever? And so on. All of them are "knockoffs" of some existing products to a large amount, adding only a little new. Why would it be different with free software projects?
And how do you come about to claim there is no competition in the free software world, to drive innovation? If there are several projects doing similar things, won't the innovative ones have an advantage? Actually, there is more incentive for innovation, as that's the only way to keep an edge! In contrast to proprietary software, there is no way to fend off competition by locking the customers in.
All my comments get moderated +-0, spotless.
And it worked.
But shame on McVoy for collaborating with Forbes on this. He's sort of a pseudo-traitor (BitKeeper wasn't even open source) that Lyons has pounced upon as an example.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting. This is really how open source got to be big in the first place. McVoy seems to ignore the fact that, in general, open source software is really only gaining momentum and that it has its roots in hobbyist tinkerers; people who do it because they find it fulfilling for their own personal reasons.
Or you have the case of Apache where many businesses with low profit margins but a surplus of expertise (ISP's, Web Presence Providers, etc) used it because they could tinker with it. Not in their spare time but in lieu of licensing fees.
Now you may say, "The end user shouldn't have to know how to program in C to get the features they need." Sure. They can hire someone to add those features, and they are better off under *any* FOSS license if they contribute this back to the community.
What McVoy doesn't understand is that FOSS provides a different way of paying for development and distributing the costs of said development. Instead of a licensing model, it is a pay-to-help-with-features-you-want model. This is ultimately more customer-centric and provides for *better* (if not more) innovation.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The program *as it currently exists* is free. The work for new features, support, etc. are not. Therefore if you release a great piece of software called SuperFoo 1.0 and I think it would be great if it had one more feature, I can pay you to impliment that feature. This is done in lieu of licensing fees.
Open Source does *not* reduce the revenue a programmer can get for his or her work with a very few exceptions. Instead, it increases the value of that work and the productivity. With any luck, it can even *increase* one's revenue from programming.
I know most of the programming I do for customers would not happen if I were not extending open source software.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Most software companies are not huge cash cows. So if you can make money doing development and release the software under an open source license, this can reduce your advertising costs, increase your productivity, etc.
So, lets say that 90% of programmers write in-house software. That leaves 10% writing software for sale (in reality it may be less than this).
Now if 90% of those programmers writing software for sale are working for small firms without much economy of scale, then only 1% of the total number of programmers are working for large software companies which can really make a handsome profit on their license fees.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I *don't* think it means less money for computer scientists and programmers. It just means that these people are more productive. If there is a quantum leap here, they may even be able to charge *more* for their work.
Here is the problem with your assumption: A great deal of the cost of development on proprietart softrware comes either from rebuilding wheels in order to avoid licensing technologies from third parties, or in paying licensing costs to third parties in order to use their technology. If I were to rewrite some of my software to release under proprietary licenses, the costs could double or worse (in some cases, increase fifty-fold).
This means that it costs *me* less to write FOSS than it does proprietary software. Although my customer pays me less for the Free package, I still make more per hour.
Sometimes it is important to really look at upstream costs before assuming the effects of Free Software on one's bottom line.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
3) You are releasing the car, CD, etc. as a trial to determine if you can make money at it. Or for the CD, maybe it is a loss leader to make you more money somewhere else.
Economics today is somewhat limited in that it tells you that money is the objective, but doesn't say too much about how to build revenue. I humbly suggest that if someone is only trying to make money, the *only* industries that this person can be even remotely successful is financial services. Yet we have many other types of businesses. Even so, if one's primary goal is to make money you won't.
People start businesses for all kinds of reason. The *final* test of a business is whether it makes money, but this may not (or even should not) be the primary goal. The primary goal is usually to help people, at least for the most successful businesses. Yes I think that even Walmart or Microsoft think that they are helping people and do their best to do so within their business model.
So.... The point of a business as such is to make money, but the point of any given business is to help people in a way that makes money.
My business is centered around FOSS because I think I can do a better job of helping people while staying profitable there than working with and developing proprietary software. But helping people *has* to be the first priority because if it isn't you lose your customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have revenue. If you don't have revenue, you don't make money.
So the *first* goal of any business is to help people. The *final* goal is to make money. These are intrinsically related.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/
I am a big open source fan, but I can't disagree with this. Most open source applications are built as replacements for commercial applications. Many try to look just like the original. Sure most have one or two innovative features, but what applications in the OS world are really innovative, especially from an end user perspective?
Sure. I can't even disagree with you either. The reason is that most applications (OSS or not) are designed to replace other applications. Usually a large portion of the interface is copied because that is what users are already familiar with.
So while I can't disagree with your statement as such, I think it implies inaccurately that proprietary software is any different.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not ground breakingly innovative, but other than Smalltalk and perhaps the first compiler, function language and precious little else really is.
Yes, the bits had been around, but the way they glued them all together was innovative.
They are all GPLd.
Whenever I read one of Larry's quote, I have the mental image of Simon the used car salesman (Bill Paxton's character from True Lies).
Software *is* crap! Period. Why? Because this is still a pretty immature business.
Support is what differentiates good and bad software today. Linus Torvalds is as unreachable to me as Bill Gates is. The biggest difference between those peoples software (to me) is what kind of support I get:
- Microsoft offers me free support, but trying it only confirms why you avoid it. So I have to pay someone to give me good support on Microsoft Windows.
- The Linux side of the story? I have free support through a huge number of mailing lists, and are forced to navigate carefully between them (a lot of those "support people" bites your head off if you do something wrong). Getting free support for Linux, takes a lot of time. So I have to pay someone to give me good support on Linux.
What's the difference between Microsoft Windows and Linux? Price on the software."If you open source guys pull any of that shit around me, I'm going to rip that keyboard out of your hands, shove it up your butt, and type on it until it goes 'click'."
"Jesus."
"That's right... NOBODY FUCKS WITH THE McVOY!"
"8-year olds, dude."
He's saying a business based on the open source model cannot sustain innovations... 1) without support (monetary or otherwise) from non open-source companies, 2) or because the service contracts don't bring in enough revenue to support heavy R&D.
I think that's a legitimate point. He's talking about three things: innovation, (in the context of) business, and sustainability.
To refute his point you'll need to give examples of some companies which have built a business around open source and continue to churn out innovative open source products without outside financial support (self-sustaining). That's a mouthful.
With that said, in some ways this is like talking apples and oranges. The model and philosophy of open source is so different from the business realm. In terms of how innovation happens, Businesses have usually sustained their innovations from a central/focused R&D arm. However Open source innovations work mainly because it's not centralized. Also the philosophies are night and day. As Linus pointed out, the primary goal of open source isn't about economic sustainability. For a business, that's the primary goal.
Sure there's a tiny area where business and open source meet but somehow in discussions like these everything gets cojumbled together.
I'm all for Open Source, and I am not an "Objectivist" in the pure sense, but you just need to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to understand what will happen if all software goes Open Source. Altruistic Open Source Software development is GREAT, but greed is "good." Anyone who blindly follows their "principals" of open source and the GPL really needs to read the work I cited above. Admittedly it's an overexaggeration but there are alot of lessons to learn there about what really drives human nature. Think what would happen if MS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Adobe, EA, Symantic, McAffee, etc all revoked all of their EULAs simultaneously and basically said that if you want a refund take us to court. No bug fixes, patches, security fixes. No nuthin. How long until the economy is on it's knees? How long until the government is on it's knees? I don't expect this'll be modded up because this place is the gathering place for the Open Source Nazi Horde (A cult of geeks) but I just had to add my $0.02.
My web domain.
...for all of the "Open Source doesn't innovate" folks out there.
Why are solutions that enhance security, reliability, and performance not considered innovation?
What closed source OS implemented O(1) algorithms in just about every major subsystem including the scheduler before Linux (and I think FreeBSD)?
Why is it that when Microsoft makes security nightmares like ActiveX, it's called innovation? Why is it that when Open Source comes up with web server software that is built from the ground up to never fall over, it's just "copying" or "uninteresting?"
Why can't OpenSSH and pf's security enhancements over the years be considered innovative?
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Not to mention things like XUL in Mozilla/Firefox. Here's an instance where a group of developers collectively decided, "Since we're rendering GUIs anyway, why not have the browser render the enclosing widgets as well?" Most people moaned that it was a bad idea -- just check the Slashdot archives from five years ago. Now look at Microsoft's XAML and Apple Tiger's desktop widgets. Who's following who?
How about PostgreSQL? In what other database can end users write a little bit of code (and I stress "little") and create entirely new datatypes?
Check out Apache Cocoon and its document processing pipelines. While you're at it, check out its Flow engine with which continuations have revolutionized server-side web development.
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Another post stated that Open Source only implemented what academia invented. While only partially true, I don't see the problem. All good software has a design step from Oracle database engines to Microsoft word processors. Are people actually saying that referencing the most innovative and inventive designs is somehow a bad idea? Some projects in universities for all intents and purposes mathematically prove that a particular solution is the most efficient. It's not cheating or unworthy. It's just common sense to use these designs.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Innovation (R&D) requires lots of resources. I have been developing a program that I would call innovative - for a three years (parttime). Depending how you count it there are currently ~ 100000 lines of well tested code. But the coding isn't the main point, what to code (new mathematical algorithms which no one haven't though before) is the hardest part to develop/innovate.
You must
All this takes lots of time and some $$$. You can do it during freetime but it really slow things down. If you are student you might be able to spend your summer on the project (but still 'lose' money/work experience).
Going back to article I don't understand what's the McVoy's point is. OSS cannot be really innovative because it costs $$$, but what's the point? What OSS does is (mostly) non-innovative. That's just good thing. Companies which are non-innovative are forced out of the market and innovative companies still success (if they have enough resources/money) because OSS won't be able to compete with them (think Google).
The way I see it, open source isn't too much different from software projects in academia. Academic projects are more formal, perhaps more esoteric, but like OSS projects, done for the love of the work, the furthering of the field, and usually open source as well. If they are not similar, they are at least good complements to each other.
From this point of view, closed-source folks criticizing open source folks for lack of innovation is comical. The vast majority of closed source "innovation" derives from academia. Tell me, what has Microsoft, or Sun, or the like done in the last decade that is truely original? Don't get me wrong, they're great at making good implementations of existing ideas, but they don't make anything new. You think there is anything in Longhorn that hasn't been seen before? You think there is anything in Solaris 10 that hasn't been seen before?
If commercial folks want to mock open source folks for lacking innovation, will they please sit patiently while the academic folks mock them?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...