Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Thats just like your opinion man...
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)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
"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?
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)
Ok, so everyone should love Larry because he is a buddy of Linus. That is just stupid. They spin he has been putting on all things Open source lately, I wonder how things are really going between him and Linus right now.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I agree in a way, but I think you should see that sometimes, you can't do (or think) different: try to replace the wheels of your car by something else. I bet it won't go faster, because the wheel shape is the best for what it is intended to do.
And so is the case of a text editor: you will always have a place where to put your text, etc... Of course, some softs will try to challenge this and will provide new ways of doing this, and I bet there are more OSS taking "risks" than commercial applications.
You can say that about softwares, but this includes also kernels (which is a software of course).
I mean honestly, the OSS community has not treated him with any respect, despite the fact that he's a good friend of Linus.
Ya know... he hasn't really said many things lately that deserve our respect. Does being a friend of Linus really demand all that much respect? This guy seems to have his head up his ass so why should I show him anything but contempt?
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)
I'd also have liked it if he'd been honest enough to say "I'm an innovator, and I encourage Linux developers to use BitKeeper in order to boost their productivity and my business profile. But please bear in mind I reserve the right to take it continually change the licence conditions, and then take it away completely on a whim, and then give interviews slagging off Open Source at every opportunity."
At least Linus and Bill Gates are relatively honest about their motivation being World Domination.
A little bit of honesty goes a long way.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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"!!!
So what exactly was it that products like sendmail, bind, apache, etc where copying from the closed source world? It also seems that Internet Explorer starts to rip off features, which where introduced with open source browsers. (Safe for Opera, but it was Firefox' success which finally convinced MS of tabed browsing and the implementation has yet to be seen).
I'd wager that the internet would be a duller place, would it solely be reliant on such engineering gems lik IIS and Exchange (which came later in the first place).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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.
I'm taking notes here. There's lots of good stuff to really get under people's skin:)
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)
I'll allow replies to provide more examples.
Please do. Because though he's not 100% right, I do think McVoy has a point, and the two projects you mention are not so overwhelming as to prove him completely wrong. For all our talk of innovation, very little open source software is innovative -- much of it exists to mimic some proprietary alternative. Even the linux kernel was created as a project to get a unix-like system on x86 hardware. Firefox, though built from the ashes of Netscape, was mainly driven as an alternative to I.E. -- it just had new and innovative features added along the way. But that's no different from the "embrace and extend" that we give MS so much hassle for.
I use open source software on a daily basis, and I love the freedom it provides, but McVoy is right that it is very hard to monetize. Labors of love don't pay the bills. That doesn't mean it's impossible, and McVoy's opinion has obviously taken a ridiculously extreme conclusion, but there is a grain of truth in his words.
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.
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.
So, he should be treated with respect just because he's a friend of Linus? Regardless of the fact that he acted like a whining and annoying brat during the whole BK-debacle? His behavior was downright moronic, and he kept changing the license under wich BK was released. then he pulled the BK-license for OSDL, because one independent contractor of OSDL happened to Telnet in to the BK-server.
Linus and McVoy might be friends personally. But that does not mean that McVoy should earn respect because of his professional activities. Just because he's friends with Linus does not mean that he's a great guy. This whole debacle has shown that he is in fact a grade-A asshole.
He started to whine when others tried to "reverse-engineer" his precious BK. Well, too bad for him that reverse-engineering is allowed. Looking at his comments, it seems to me that he wanted BK to have similar protection a patent would give him. Of course he couldn't say that he supports software-patents, so he started bitching and moaning and being a real jerk hen people didn't like his constant license-changes and *shock and horror* tried to reverse-engineer BK.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
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.
[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.
Firefox, though built from the ashes of Netscape, was mainly driven as an alternative to I.E
Which was made as an alternative to Netscape. Open source software is no less innovative than closed software.
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.
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
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... 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
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 #!
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.
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/
Less resources wasted reinventing the wheel, because you can re-use everyone else's software without paying them a dime.
The fact that software programmers only earn money with opensource by actually working (i.e. doing support or adding new features with contract work) mean software will move forward in stability and/or features instead of being milked to death by the creator company (Quark XPress anyone?)
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.
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
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.
Sure. I've had a few similar replies so maybe I needed to quote more of the guy I was replying to. Roughly:
Larry: Money drives software innovation
GGP: Hobbyist time works just as well
Me: Hobbyist time will only get you so far
As another AC pointed out, yes, the innovation often will happen in the hobbyist bit. But you're not going to get complete, visible innovative software unless you go full cycle. Sure, someone else can pick it up an run with it but it's hard to get those people to notice your project unless you've got it so far.
Yes, there are plenty of OSS projects that do go full cycle but they're often the popular-closed-source clones that Larry's complaining about. The ones you cite all are, arguably.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Mozilla comes from Netscape. IE came because of Netscape. They were both either clones or directly based on Mosaic. Which was made by academia (you know, NSF funding, which some people say isn't useful for anything).
Several things had plugins before Active X. Cubase has had plugins for yonks.
Microsoft Office started with Word and Excel. Word is a Wordperfect clone and Excel a Lotus 1-2-3 clone.
FTP was also file sharing before Napster. It just wasn't p2p. p2p apps predate Napster (e.g. the military has used them for a long time for massive distributed networks). Napster however, sucked.
Napster was basically IRC with DCC and a search engine tacked on top. Hardly innovative, and I still remember how it was lame at resuming broken downloads, how it didn't segment downloads and did not check if files had errors in it.
BitTorrent on the other hand segments downloads, does proper checking, and works well for downloading large files. Napster didn't. Napster was for mp3 files, and sharing anything else was broken.
Before PHP and ASP there was cgi-bin, which you could write in shell script, which predates either of those by a long time.
Everyone and their grandmother has done SQL after IBM. Including large closed-source companies like Oracle. Does not mean theirs aren't better in some way of course. Just because you made the first version does not mean your version will always be better.
Besides these are non-sequitor, because I didn't see the parent poster mention them. You just threw them in to prove your point. If anything you just proved closed-source commercial works are as big a bunch of cloners as opensource, if not more.
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.
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.
...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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
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 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.
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
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.
because alot of people felt that being at the mercy of McVoy was not a smart thing to do. By creating a free altnernative that could interoperate with BK, they would have eliminated that dependancy. And looking at McVoy's behavior in this case, they were 100% correct! Being at a Mercy of someone who can take your tools away from you at will, is NOT a smart thing to do! The one good thing McVoy did was to show what it can mean to be at the mercy of a vendor of proprietary software! What McVoy did could NOT happen with free software!
Sure. But the fact remains that reverse-engineering is still allowed and legal. What McVoy wanted was for BK to have similar protection as software-patent would have given it, without actually patenting it. He wanted all the "benefits" of patents, without the downsides (bad blood with developer-community for example).
like I said, they did it because they felt that being at the mercy of McVoy was not a smart thing to do. And McVoy kept on changing the license. Hell, the license said that if you USED BK, you are not allowed to work on SCM-systems for several years! What if Microsoft added a clause to their EULA which said "if you use any software written by Microsoft, you are not allowed to use or contribute to open-source-projects"?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.