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.'"

Comments

Re:McVoy doesn't get it

[ssj_195]

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.

Indeed. Non-trivial software will require support (either to install, or to tailor to your companies specific requirements) until we invent Strong AI, not before.

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.

Even then, Redhat to a *huge* amount of development, especially on GCC. If I recall, Luminocity was also funded by Redhat. This is not even close to an exhaustive list.

Re:I can't disagree

[MrDomino]

Sure most have one or two innovative features, but what applications in the OS world are really innovative, especially from an end user perspective?

Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.

Because all of those things are just replacements for commercial applications, and did nothing new.

Re:Yeah

[squiggleslash]

Netscape started as a rewrite of Mosaic, an academic project, and I don't believe there were any proprietary browsers at the time Mosaic was written and released, as Lynx (which wasn't initially a Web Browser but soon became one) and WorldWideWeb.app were, I believe, Free Software.

So apart from the World Wide Web, the socket-based TCP/IP model, increasingly powerful systems to transfer large files from one place to another, email, discussion networks both in "instant messaging" form (IRC) and store-and-forward conferencing (Usenet), the bulk of the underlying technologies used to build today's applications (C++ style object-based programming, plus Perl; CVS), etc, what has the Free Software movement ever given to us? ;-)

I think it's one thing to argue that we've had a lot of innovation from both sides. It's another, as McVoy does, to pretend the only source of innovation has been proprietary software and the Free Software community hasn't done a thing except clone existing technologies. People scratch itches. Sometimes they do so in a commercial "we can sell this" environment. And sometimes, well, they just scratch those itches because they want to.

McVoy, of course, based his SCM system on a model defined by his friend Linus Torvalds. There's little reason why such a system couldn't have been Free Software and developed by Free Software People, Linus chose, however, to work with Larry. It's interesting Linus didn't make any high profile complaints about the Free Software communities lack of options until after he adopted Bitkeeper.

If McVoy believes what he's said, he's a utterly ignorant idiot.

Re:Well, let's have a look

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.)

Reality: the original PHP (PHP/FI) was developed in 1994, released in 1995; ASP was released in 1996. Sorry to shatter your precious illusions.

It's just a standard response to Freedom.

[btarval]

What's also interesting is that McVoy's response here is the same exact response that closed-source vendors ALWAYS make when Open Source starts costing them market share. McVoy's statements are nothing new; just a variation on a them.

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".

I wouldn't lose mine

[Dog135]

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.

Re:Well, let's have a look

[Alioth]

Well, firstly, file sharing was NOT pioneered by Napster. We were using IRC to file share peer-to-peer in 1990, probably years before the writer of Napster had heard of the internet. In any case, saying BitTorrent is a copy of Napster is so wrong it's not even wrong. It works in a completely different way (and is designed to solve a different problem). The only similarity with Napster is it allows peers to exchange data.

PHP came out before ASP too. You are not letting reality get in the way of anything, because Microsoft did not invent server side scripting first.

In any case, the first web browser was open source. The first web server was open source. The first TCP/IP stack was open source. The first SSH was open source. The first network transparent windowing system was open source. There is no closed-source equivalent of rsync.

McVoy is bullshitting I'm afraid.

Re:wouldn't need to

[ArmpitMan]

Psst -- "telbij" and "vrmlguy" are probably different people.

Re:Well, let's have a look

[Wdomburg]

The C implementation of PHP was released in 1995. Language constructs existed in the beta versions also released later that year.

Whether you think its a "shoddy piece of work" or not, it clearly isn't a clone of a product released a year later.