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: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

[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.