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Trouble With Open Source?
George Russell writes "Stephen J Marshall, writing in the BCS online magazine, provides a cogent argument detailing the ills of Open Source Software for the software industry - namely, the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership of OSS developed under the current Intellectual Property laws. Do these issues concern you?"
Nope.
no
Do these issues concern you?
No.
Where do these people think up these imaginary problems? "Lack of conceptual integrity"? "Lack of innovation"? The open source community has been a source of quality software and helpful guidance for as long as I've used it (YMMV of course). But I've never had the troubles which always get paraded about in the media.
He points out things like 'conceptual integrity' and 'professionalism' and 'innovation', things that can be found in many OSS projects. What bothers me about writing open source code is simple: Where is my money.
Many say, that you should make money off support. However, that is plain stupid because the software is the hard part, the part that interests me, the part that I want to be paid for instead of something like support.
The reason I support many OSS is one thing: excellence of product, like Linus.
Professionalism: wrong - all in all most of the OSS I see is more professionally done than the closed sourced crap I have to work with.
Conceptual Integrity: Totally wrong, see above. Yes, there are damn good closed source products, but the same is true for some OSS stuff. I cannot be assed to provide examples, but it's easy for everybody taking having have a clue. Yes, there is totally rubbish OSS around, but first, it's just a function of the mass of what is out there, and second, the same is also true for closed source stuff.
Innovation: Half true, but OTOH, there are many examples where the fact that something is OSS drives innovation in a way that wouldn't be possible with closed source. Internet Explorer for example would've been forked long ago if it was open source.
There is, of course, anecdotal evidence pointing to the contrary, but I would definitely agree with this diagnosis. I would, however, argue that this is exactly where the strength of OSS lies: in producing reliable software (reliable because its strengths and weaknesses are well-known). It's like common sense -- not always the best answer, but it works.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
My biggest problem with open source software is that the vast majority of open source software projects end up in some sort of limbo at an incomplete stage; there are several projects that have a lot of promise that have not been updated in 2 years (and most likely never will see another update). On top of that few people are willing to pick up where someone else has left off and complete these projects so they're somewhat useless.
Person 1: I believe there is more innovation in open source than in commercial apps
Person 2: I disagree, I believe there is no innovation in open source and only highly paid executives can innovate. Look at clippy!
Person 3: I disagree. Only apple MACOSX has innovation. That's why I gave this shitload of money for this crap G5 CPU.
Go figure.
The absence of design leadership in the OSS development process and a motivation for OSS developers to create free versions of their favourite proprietary software may also explain why there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.
A continued shift towards OSS solutions at the expense of proprietary ones is likely to result in many of the companies that develop proprietary software going out of business. This might not be such a bad thing, as I'm sure that many of us would secretly welcome the collapse of the virtual monopoly that currently exists in the desktop software market. However, the first companies affected are likely to be the small but highly innovative firms, which are the lifeblood of the software industry, not the giant corporations that we all love to hate.
Open source doesn't have imagination or innovation, yet is likely to put innovators out of business? This makes no sense. OSS will tend to put non-innovators out of business IMO, while innovators will still be able to sell proprietary software because of their innovations.
Then later the author pooh-poohs OSS because "it is clearly not the panacea for all the software industry's ailments". Who ever said it was? Reading blatant strawman attacks like this make me wonder what the author's motivations are.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Bittorrent is OSS and its about the most innovative thing in P2P that's happened in the last few years.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The responses to this will be predicatable. Outrage, point-by-point counterpoints etc.
So instead, lets discuss why they published such a piece. What was their motivation here?
I've read the BCS magazine on many occasions, and often found it to be factually incorrect from over-simplification. This is a magazine that is aimed middle managers.
This particular article is a Member view. Is this just someones blog piece, or a regular column writer? Does this piece matter at all?
We truefully don't hear about how well the Open Source works together and how conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation in the news. You only hear about the times when Open Source has problems, such as the take over of websites and taking of money by unprofessional A-holes.
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Most of the Open Source software I use is pretty much in polished form, such as Firefox and OpenOffice. However, I do know of a metric ton of apps that are extremely difficult to use.
I found the whole IP thing completely ridiculous. Why shouldn't an employee be allowed to create software for himself on his free time without the rights going to the company? Especially if the software doesn't have anything to do with the specific company. Hooray for IP capitalism!
The article asserts a variety of ludicrous ideas as common conceptions about OSS. It's impossible to take seriously.
I'll grant that the point about conceptual integrity may have merit. Distributed development makes conceptual integrity very hard to maintain. But how do I know that? Through commercial experience. It only applies to OSS because almost all OSS projects are distributed.
Frankly, the ideas attributed in this article to OSS people are so alien and fantastic that I doubt the author has even read any of the basic writings about open source or studied a single open source project.
So... is most shrinkwrap proprietary software noted for its conceptual integrity or innovation?
'Professionalism' is rather a loaded word, see Phil G.'s notes on it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Professionalism in the gaming industry- i guess thats why most games just look and act the same, as opposed to earlier games, by so called bedroom developers (like ehhh the old sierra) that made really awsome games for the time.
ok.ok so some of the arguements are well put, but still...
Without prompt action, my fear is that a further move towards OSS could result in the nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between. Where would our freedom of choice be then?
i need a MBCS CITP to say this?, i've seen better trolls here.
As someone who is directly underneath the CIO at our company, I'm frequently called upon to come up with the "execution" portion of the CIO's "big picture" strategies. This means I'm the guy that reviews all the options, compiles the case studies, and presents the final plan for approval to the board.
I consider myself to be a non-partisan technologist, meaning I'll use whatever platform or software that best fits the needs of the company, but what a lot of FOSS proponents seem incapable of grasping is that there's more to software and OS's than "power" and "technical elegance." There's user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support to be considered in any enterprise implementation. Saying that Bob's XYZ Library of Useful Widgets can do it all just as well as Bill & Steve's Really Expensive Library of Useful Widgets is only part of this equation. Just writing the damned software and slapping it in an RPM does not finish the project!
I can't begin to tell you my frustration at the current state of a lot of FOSS projects. I see some really good ideas, some fantastic concepts, some really bright people...but by and large their efforts are uncoordinated, poorly documented, and lacking in professionalism. It's hard enough getting stodgy company boards to accept that there's something out there besides Windows. It doesn't help when the application you're trying to sell them on is maintained by some 18-year-old geek with a ponytail and Cheetos dust all over his keyboard. I don't care if he is a genius, his product is generally unmarketable to a board because you can't convince The Powers That Be that his software is a serious contender.
Every year when I put our budget together, I cringe at the amount of dough we send to Redmond. But until FOSS gets its act together and treats the software business like a business instead of a hobby, we have little choice. Home users can get away with using half-baked stuff, but enterprises are far pickier.
Note that there are some shining stars of Open Source (not free, usually) that are producing quality products that beat the pants off some of the closed-source boys, and there are some FOSS projects that stand above all the rest. However, taken as a whole, so much of the FOSS we review looks more like the results of a college programming project and not like a serious business application. Perhaps it looks that way because the still-wet-behind-the-ears developers are still thinking about developing it in that way. More's the pity.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you limited your idea about Open Source to the stereotypical smelly hacker in his basement, sure, this article may have merit. When you come out of that delusion though, you see that IT industry heavyweights are contributing to Open Source. Sun, IBM and others brings tons of rigor and professionalism to Open Source.
Is he saying IBM and Sun aren't professional or have conceptual integrity?
The BCS have long wanted to be the organisation that decides who is allowed to write software. If they ever get their way you'll need a license to code. It's no surprise that they're not keen on Open Source as it exists outside their priesthood.
Arguments about who owns open source software and how it fits into existing IP laws are just silly. The author does or the person they've assigned the rights to. It's called copyright.
I think the article boils down to "Vested interests are opposed to low barriers to entry". Wow, I'm shocked.
Ame
Most contributions to open source projects nowadays come from major companies anyway: Redhat,Novell, IBM etc. etc. Complete commercially developed packages suddenly become open sourced.
That is how OpenOffice was created, for example: It started as plain proprietary software, created by professional developers who were paid monthly salaries by their company. Sun bought the software, and Sun developers added. All IP that couldn't be open sourced got replaced, and suddenly we have an open source application. No hackers working during lunchtime and evenings involved at all.
At the heart of OSS is a wonderful idealistic notion that appeals to our caring, sharing side. The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support.
Someone should inform this guy that Stallman's view of OSS isn't the heart of it.
** Martin
I don't find the article to be very intelligent. There is much more to free/open source than fluffy idealism.
And there are plenty of companies, big and small, that willfully release their software as free/open source, and plenty of individuals who are consultants, contractors, or even hobbyists who are contributing, which the author just glosses over.
In the real world, most of my projects need robust components, open source provides plenty. Since they're granular (and have always historically been so) you can usually assemble something 'innovative' pretty easily.
On the desktop it is another matter. I do use a Gnome desktop, and it does have its advantages, but there are also big cracks.
In fact, the two aspects should really be treated separately since there is a vast difference between using free/open source software for servers and software development (great), and trying to use it on the desktop (inconsistent, at best).
Sales and support are the hard part. Writing the code is easy.
Oh well, what the hell...
I find all four of the issues listed to be somewhat concerning, but I find the lack of innovation to be the greatest cause for alarm. People regularly ridicule the USPTO for awarding patents for "[something which has been done for years]... over the Internet!", yet it seems that the vast majority of open source software operates on a model of "[rewrite a piece of existing software]... and give it away for free!", which is equally uninnovative.
This isn't to say that there is a complete lack of innovation in open source software -- if nothing else, I like to think that some of my own contributions qualify as innovative -- but I can't see how (to take some well-known projects as examples) OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office, or Mozilla is any better than Microsoft Internet Explorer in any way other than its license.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I'm sometimes concerned by some of the issues that were brought up, but then go back to thinking that these problems generally aren't solely the province of 'open source' but software in general.
Conceptual integrity
We only have to look at the history of the electronic computer to see that the greatest advances in technology have been made by brilliant, strong-willed individuals, usually supported by a small team of dedicated engineers - not community-based projects.
Some of the best open source project (most, really) tend to be started and grown by a single person or a very small group of people. After a critical mass is reached, sometimes things open up to a larger community of contributors, but the projects are already fairly well established. Compare PHP and Python - perhaps not the best examples, but close to mind right now. Python was/is primarily done by one person, and PHP seems now to be more 'community' driven, and the results are that PHP tends to have more problems with moving forward (witness the recent 4.4/5.0.5 references-changed-behaviour issue). I don't see these types of problems happening in projects with one figurehead - at least not as much.
Innovation
Yes, many open source projects are copies of 'closed source' software, but many closed source offerings are copies of other closed source offerings as well, all trying to address perceived needs in a slightly different way. I would say that it frustrates me that there's many more new ideas that could be implemented in mozilla or konqueror, for example, which aren't, and probably won't be until MS or Apple does them first, then there'll be a quick copy in the open source world. File upload progress bar is the first which comes to mind, and it'll be frustrating when MS comes out with it first (whenever that is) and watch others catch up (the built in WYSIWYG HTML editor in IE was another one).
All in all, 'open source' is at heart a method of software development, and has pros and cons. Most of the things that were mentioned aren't only an issue for open source projects. I'm working at a company which has paid money for a commercial product (accounting software and ecommerce addon) and things don't work. It's been two months and things still don't work right. We've paid money, had multiple vendors out on site, been on support lines, and they can't get it to work as it's supposed to. We're one of their first customers trying to use the software this way (I think) so this is a learning curve for them, and I've seen this happen dozens of times over the years. Why people think this is 'more acceptable' than having in-house developers working with free software, simply because you've 'paid' for something, is still a mystery to me. Downtime/lost productivity is not something you can get back, even if you get a refund of your purchase price.
creation science book
everything seems to be working just fine, so I'll have to answer in the negatory@@@
SPELLING ERROR DETECTED: DISENGAGING SENSE OF HUMOUR
Too bad one can't mod opening comments.... "-1000 Flamebait"
I suggest you read Slashdot
It's hard to know where to start. Every point in this article has already been so thoroughly debunked it's silly to be dredging them up again. I suspect the author, although well meaning, simply didn't do his homework. Eric Raymond's extensive writings would be a great place to begin. I would also humbly remind everyone of my own essay, THE CARE AND FEEDING OF FOSS which discusses several of these myths.
Wow, lets consider 2 different types of jobs.
Scientists (you know, traditional chem/physics/biology professors or reseaerchers) PUBLISH their data so others (their peers) can look at it, verify it, correct it, or just plain refute it.
For a scientist to skip this step means their research is worthless.
For a scientist to hide or mangle the data means they WILL be ostracised on any other article they write/have written.
BUT!!! For a computer "scientist" (software guy), not releasing the "research" is perfectably acceptable. It's for "the profit of the bla bla bla". There's always a reason to not do this.
Take for example, nVidia.. nVidia was going to release source for their graphics drivers. They said no, when they saw that SGI had a "stake" in it. nVidia said something to the effect "SGI will sue us if we release it". SGI came back and said that there's nothing we can sue you over. Yet to this day, anybody with an nVidia card is chained to nVidia driver updates.
If anything, Open source IS becoming more like that scientist that goes through rigorous peer review to publish VALUABLE pieces of data.
(BTW, I wonder which corporation paid him to write this crap up?)
I got this far: However, when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer. This is just flat wrong, at least in the US. Who owns what is governed by the contract you sign with your employer, and most employers write that contract in such a way that code you write on your own time, for projects unrelated to your job, belongs to you. They do this because, as a general rule, the broader the rights they try to assert, the less enforceable the contract becomes.
...I know for sure that the whole BCS system is flawed. Everyone would be much happier if we just went to an 8 or 16 team playoff.
when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer.
Based on what law? In any case that is not universally so, not here in the Netherlands for example. And by the way, quite a lot of programmers are hired by their employers (Sun, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, ...) to contribute to OSS in the first place.
"Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer." Ehm.. yeah right.
What the....?
"There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry."
This is just completely made-up! In the US, the game industry struggled with the glut of awful console games, but there were no bedroom programmers for consoles. You needed development kit hardware, and so would have worked directly for a game company. As far as computer games were concerned, there were no problems at all. Computer games (Apple II, VIC20, C64, Spectrum, MSX, ST, Amiga, PC, etc), requiring no development kit hardware and written by bedroom programmers, went from strength to strength. Throughout the 80's they defined the game industry, especially in Europe where consoles were few and far between in comparison.
I don't see a glut of poor-quality OSS software around, so if there are "uncomfortable similarities" between OSS and early 80's computer games, then surely OSS will only go from strength to strength?
The biggest issue in the OSS community is a simple one: Ego. Open-Source proponents seem to take on a sense of narcissism that to 99.9% of the population seems pointless. For most people, apps are simply a time and money equation; and are willing to make tradeoffs depending on how valuable their time is. In addition, the blatant rip-off of some apps is surely for spite, and not to advance the development of better software. Lastly, the OSS community needs to reevaluate it's hatred of Microsoft. We can all agree in the OS department Bill does not have it together; but this often leaves the OSS community developing so many wonderful apps that are not ported to windows--leaving joe user out in the cold. The best example is this: I do technology for a not-for-profit group that has volunteers throughout our state. I am seeking a open-source groupware app for the volunteers to use (I prefer an app solution, not web based) While there are plenty of them, Kontact and alike, I can not find a single one for windows. I am not going to ask volunteers to change their home computer's OS just to one program--Yet for the OSS community developing apps that focus on the needs of most people does not seem to be that much of a priority.
Maybe, just maybe, most FOSS developers treat it like a hobby because it is a hobby. If you're not willing to pay them, stop whining about how they're not doing exactly what you want.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
"Cogent document"? More like a giant troll. And it's not helped by the fact that the miniscule font size.
:)
His first point about intellectual property is completely orthogonal to Open Source, since a programmer could equally create a proprietary product with the same problems. But even with that, I don't think (in my non-lawyerish way) this is a not a real problem. Any problems that do come up will be decided in a case by case basis, and we'll probably eventually have some sort of case history that allows work on outside projects not related to your employment work. Much like my current agreement with my employer.
His point about conceptual integrity has some merit, but again is orthogonal to Open Source. FOSS and proprietary software both need good design. And both have pressures against good design -- time pressures, customer needs, developers coming and leaving. Frankly, I think FOSS is better off here, since most of the design discussions are public.
Professionalism is important in some areas, and proprietary has a leg up on FOSS here, since proprietary SW can usually afford some PR or MBA person to buffer the SW people from the customer. And since FOSS programmers are usually volunteers, they are understadibly less interested in kissing butts. I guess being a SW person myself, I define professional SW as SW that works, not SW that has a nice glossy brochure. And I often love the little jokes I find in FOSS software. Some people just take life too seriously.
Finally, innovation, while important, isn't nearly as important as a good, solid system. I don't care if I'm using the system that had feature X first, as long as it has a good implementation of feature X. Linux may essentially be a copy of older UNIXes, but it does so well. My car doesn't have a heck of a lot of innovation in it -- it uses well proven technology. I don't mind my OS doing the same.
Ugh, I can't believe I wasted so much time replying to this. I should have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Just once I'd like to see a "cogent" criticism that wasn't a rehash of long-discredited FUD,.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's good to see this so well articulated. One way of looking at it is: Until Open Source grows up, it's not going to appeal to the masses. Another way is: Open Source is software, by geeks, for geeks, and will never be anything else. Think about the most successful Open Source projects. They're all projects that are more apt to be used by programmers than anyone else. I've done quite a bit of research into Open Source Shopping carts and CMS systems over the past couple of years, and the UI on all of them is so amazingly poor. The trick is this: If a programmer who's contributing to an open source project has a choice of adding a cool geek feature, or tweaking the UI to make it easier for novice users, what are they going to choose? That means we end up with Open Source bloat (yes it does happen) and a UI that starts being poorly planned, and gets worse with every new feature. The way the industry works now, I don't see this changing a lot. The one other place that Open Source does well is when it's an EXACT copy of something commercial (i.e. Browsers), because the UI is already designed, all that has to happen is someone has to have a friend that can make pretty buttons. The UI itself doesn't have to change.
And you can tell by reading the first two paragraphs where the author presents a complete parody of the attitudes of OSS as if it had anything more than a faint resemblence to the truth.
And I don't think OSS software developers are captivated by the idea of a free lunch. I think there is even greater awareness among such of money issues, payment for services rendered, and the value of a professional's time.
Also, deconstructing the three main sections...
This section of the WA statutes, and this section of the MN statutes (the two states I've researched) explicity limit 'work for hire' IP ownership transfer to work done during work hours, and/or using the employer's equipment or resources. So, the IP ownership issue is significantly less fuzzy than the article's author makes it out to be.
As for conceptual integrity, ESR has written an excellent essay entitled "Homesteading the Noosphere which talks about project maintainers and how projects move from maintainer to maintainer, thereby maintaining conceptual integrity. It's my experience, having working in several different software shops, that OSS typically has greater conceptual integrity because the maintainers feel a significantly greater sense of ownership over the software. There is no manager or marketing person with the power to tell them what must, or must not go into the software. It's their personal decision.
As for professionalism, I see no greater boost for overall code quality than for it to be seen by potentially hundreds of other programmers who have every incentive to pick it apart and find problems with it. Sure there are 100s of low quality text editors on Freshmeat, but that isn't actually very important. It quickly becomes known which ones are worth anything.
Lastly, the 'innovation' bugaboo. To anybody who's actually familiar with Open Source projects, the existence of innovative ideas is clear. Small things like Virtual Folders in evolution to big things like Bittorrent. There are valuable new ideas to be found by the hundreds in OSS. And many projects get started because someone has an interesting new idea. They have a lot of incentive to see that idea through.
Innovation isn't churning out stuff that's so brand new everybody has to learn something completely different in order to use it. It's finding some idea that creates a valuable change and integrating it with all the other stuff that already exists. Linux is a spinoff of Unix not because the process is only capable of creating copycat software. It's a spinoff because Unix was something everyone knew, and it was good enough to not bother tossing it all out.
Brand new application categories are few and far between, and OSS has had its fair share of those. Apache was the first webserver around. And Wiki's are another category that has its genesis in OSS.
So, in short, the article is complete bunk by some guy with a preconcieved notion of how things are who can't be bothered to actually look around and figure out whether or not he's right./p.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
let us write a cogent argument about marshall, i dont even know what cogent mean but heeej :D
1) paid by m$ ????
2) talks crap, looks like crap == crap ! ...
no really in my opinion all the open source alternatives i use are far superior then the commercial things i used to use
example audacity beats cooledit
gimp beats photoshop imho
and at least most opensource devs take user feedback into notice without having to pay 50 cents/minute on helpdesk line.
The one thing I was really offended by - as inded I was when I lived and worked in the UK - is the assertion that anything done by an employee in the same line, whether done on his/her own time or not, belongs to the employer.
This is perilously close to fascism. UK software developers (and other employees) should be up in arms about this.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Or does this have more to do with hobby of amatuer software development?
...is hidden in the last paragraph:
What we really need from government is an investigation of the long-term effects of OSS on our indigenous software industry, assistance to combat the threat to the industry's livelihood that OSS might pose and the development of a strategy to build on the opportunities that OSS has created. Without prompt action, my fear is that a further move towards OSS could result in the nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between. Where would our freedom of choice be then?
in other words: OSS is going to take away my gravy train!!
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Well for starters, you pay big money
When you finaly realize that you're vendor locked-in, have payed too much money for bug infested, non-working, illogical constructed program with helpdesk support that sucks.
You also realize that the only one to blame is yourself. So to keep your ass from getting fired, you write a memo to come to the conclusion that paying for not knowing how (non)functional your software is better than having the choice of supporting software-houses working on _your_ software.
Let us consider air for instance.
There is no quality control on the air that we breathe. The conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation of those sharing the air with us is severely in doubt. We should not breathe free air. We can not trust it.
The argument that software you write on your own belongs to your employer is simply not true. So, right off, the guy is starting with a fairly big lie.
This is my sig.
What we really need from government is an investigation of the long-term effects of OSS on our indigenous software industry, assistance to combat the threat to the industry's livelihood that OSS might pose and the development of a strategy to build on the opportunities that OSS has created.
If you read this guys rants A. They are all opinions and B. Most of them are incorrect because he is instantly assuming that proprietary software does no suffer from the same ills.
More importantly this guy is entirely concerned with making as much money as possible. The above statement is clearly reflective upon that. Sun, Oracle, MS, IBM, etc..etc... Are all Huge companies that are faltering against the OSS competition and have realized that it isn't just going to go away. IBM and Oracle seem to accepted it and are playing nicely, Sun is trying to pigyback on its popularity but not necesarily play nice, and MS is figting it tooth and nail and is two innovations from having a full fledge heart attack those being Acceptance of a cross platform document format and a better cross platform directory solution than exists today.
Another one of his arguments that the OSS industry is just churning out replicas of software that already exists as being bad is just preposterous. We will always need word processing software and it is vital for big business so why not an OSS solution? Same thing for Databases, OS, firewall, etc etc.. What he should be complaining about is that the OSS community has to reinvent the wheel because the proprietary solution often REFUSE to interoperate in order to facilitate customer lock in.
Lastly while it is currently true that employers own the IP of employees even if it is developed off the books, I do not see that staying that way forever. There are numerous arguments against it and no employee likes it, its just a matter of time before there is a resurgence of employee rights and the need to help the shrinking middle and growing lower class. I could turn this into a huge argument and support my statements but I just want to say that I think in the future that this will change eventually and what that catalyst will most likely be.
I knew it! Linux and FreeBSD and all they are all nothing but crap.
Windows
I think a certain amount of his argument comes via mischaracterising how most popular and prevalent open source software is actually developed. He ants to envision it as the collection of 1000 lonely teenage hackers all chipping away at the code in their parents basement. Admittedly OSS has promoted itself that way in the past, but that doesn't seem to be how things really work.
Conceptual Integrity
Marshall tries to make the argument that because OSS projects are a pure design by committee hodge podge effort from hundreds of developers they have no overriding conceptual design to create a solid architecture. While that is true, to some extent, of a whole OSS OS, utlities and applications (such as a Linux distribution) it isn't really true of most of the major OSS projects. Sure there are plenty of little projects that may work that way, but most of the big ones like Linux, OpenBSD, Firefox, Samba, GIMP, most anything that's actually achieved significant mindshare, tends to have an iconic leader, or a small team of gatekeepers that head up the project and concern themselves with conceptual design and conceptual integrity. It is very rare indeed to find a major open source project that is truly an open free-for-all with no small group dictating the overall design. Hell, there seem to be a lot of people bitching abotu the fact that GNOME is run by a small group of people who are hewing tightly to their particular conceptual design. This doesn't seem to be anything like the issue Marshall makes it out to be.
Professionalism
Marshall tries to argue that OSS is like the games industry of the early 80's with a plethora of basement hackers turning out a fine array of crap. Again, in some sense this is true: trawl through Freshmeat or Sourceforge and you will find no end of half-assed poorly written barely functional open source projects. That's mostly because anyone can write something and call it open source. Take a look at the world of shareware Windows applications and you'll see the same thing.
If you take a look at the major software and applications in the OSS world, from the Linux kernel to OpenOffice, a large amount of the work done is done by professionals working for major companies. You see, major companies are interested in having a good kernel, or office suite, or desktop environment, or whatever - and they are often willing to pay people to work on those things. Think of it as an opportunity for IBM, Sun and Novell to work together on an Office Suite that they can all get to use. Increasingly OSS development is professional development paid for by big companies. Sure the code then gets shared openly, but that's another matter.
Innovation
Marshall tries to argue that OSS is merely a matter of copying what has gone before and is incapable of innovation. In a lot of ways this is more to do with catching up than to do with a significant lack innovative capability. In every "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" article since the late 90's there have been people crying "well I would switch bt there isn't an equivalent of X", and so OSS developers have been endeavouring to provide said equivalent. There's a lot of ground to make up. Why are so many of the equivalent applications so similar? Because it is easier to bring users over that way - look at how many people won't use GIMP because it's interface isn't a clone of Photoshop, and other similar cases. OSS does innovate, it just tends to do so in the areas where it is strongest and is playing catchup the least: in security with SELinux, in networking with Stateless Linux, and other network services, in scripting and programming with new languages like Perl and Python and Ruby, and so on. Those aren't major desktop applications, so they tend to be less visible to the average consumer, but innovation is happening. As OSS catches up in other areas innovation will start becoming more obvious there too.
A lot of the "OSS can't innovate" sentiment stems from a belief that the only motivation is money
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As someone who is doing some innovative work, IMHO and maybe that of some researchers in that field, I wish innovation mattered more. But the truth is it doesn't matter all that much. Form matters much more than substance. You can be much more successful taking an old concept and putting some flashy superficial features on it than by coming up with innovative ideas. The old say about pioneers still holds true. You could tell who they were, they were the ones with the arrows in their backs.
I have a few issues with OSS myself, but the above paragraph is dumb on a number of counts.
First, industry and OSS are not at odds. OSS is a boon to industry (although perhaps not Microsoft in particular). This is because (1) developers benefit greatly from common standards and platforms, and (2) it makes no economic sense to keep reinventing the wheel. This is why industry has donated so much software, and supports OSS through consortiums such as OSDL http://www.osdl.org/, which pays Linus Torvalds' salary.
Second, the author seems to think that OSS hurts programmers. Wrong. It helps programmers because it makes them more productive. If individual programmers can generate more functionality for the end user, then there will be more, not less, demand for their services.
It's a bit like arguing that bulldozers are bad because they put manual diggers out of work. Well good - those diggers should be off doing something more economical worthwhile anyway. Constantly redigging the same ditch is not suitable work for human beings.
Third, how can one possibly slow down OSS without infringing on people's rights? These are the actions of free people in a free society.
The author's point of view seems to "something unusual is happening so had we better try to regulate it". I say let free people in a free society do their thing, and let the chips fall where they may (okay, call me a classic liberal). A rush to regulate will do far more harm than good, to the benefit of special interests alone.
That said, I realize there are distros out there which try to accomplish just this feat of making the use of their bolt-on utilities more "luser-friendly", but that also contributes to the disparity between distros and inadvertently creates a divide between the "cares" and the "care-nots" regarding (again in this example) Linux's future on grandma's desktop.
I'd obviously have to disagree with the OP's reference to lack of professionalism, there's clearly some very well thought out distros of Linux, software suites and utilities that took more than one person to work on, that were extended with some expertise and a different perspective, compiler IDEs that rival those of anything M$ could overpay their commuter slaves to write, and simply innovative designs that Billy and Ballmer could take notes from. An honest look through sourceforge could put that argument to rest fairly quickly.
This sig is six words long.
I Intellectual Property
A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects.
Hence many projects require employer authorization for contributions.
Self-employed and contract software engineers are not usually bound by employer's IP rights but are unlikely to be strongly motivated to write OSS code unless they can earn a living from doing so, and the unpaid volunteer nature of OSS development tends to rule out this possibility.
Wow, such a misunderstanding of how the industry works. What percentage of FOSS developers do so for financial gain in some form or another? I would argue that this figure must be over 50%.
Their students, however, are not usually employees and consequently are likely to have more freedom to engage in OSS projects but the students' lack of practical software development experience will be a considerable drawback.
Look at the projects that students undertook with Samba via Google's Summer of Code.... (Also note that this is software development for financial gain...)
So, it would appear that the only people who are actually free to participate in OSS projects are self-employed or unemployed software professionals, students and enthusiastic amateurs. Anyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP. This does not square well with the altruistic image of OSS.
Tell that to IBM, SGI, HP, EnterpriseDB, RedHat, Novell, Microsoft (SFU), Apple, and everyone else in the industry. Indeed, I cannot think of any major software company with the possible exception of Adobe which does not have some sort of presence in the open source world.
II: Conceptual Integrity
The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour, and this raises another point of concern with OSS. Like any engineering design project, good software needs a designer (or software architect in the current industry jargon) with a clear design concept which must be adhered to rigorously otherwise the software becomes progressively messier as it is developed in a piecemeal manner.
Ok., this is a fair criticism both of many open source projects and many closed applications. However, most badly designed applications eventually fail. Those that succeed do so because you have a small core group of developers who manage the concept design, etc.
Most of the open source contributions occur under the guidance of such individuals, as simple bugfixes, as direct contributions by such core developers, or are unlikely to be accepted into the main project codebase. Open source project management is not unlike managing the development of any other software application.
III: Professionalism
The article makes two arguments here. First they argue that becuase of bad design, all FOSS must be of bad quality. This is patently false. Secondly, they argue with slightly more credibility, that the sheer volume of badly designed open source software will destroy the industry. On this second point, I would disagree in that failed projects often encourage people to move on to other projects or products. Unlike the video game industry, we are not talking about a situatation where people have a small quantity of discretionary income to spend on low-quality games. Instead, any IT manager worth his salt will conduct reviews of possibly appropriate projects, and select software accordingly. As for open source games, many of these are pretty fun, really, and unlike the closed source counterparts are free of charge, so they don't prevent me from going out and buying Half-Life 2 if I decide that I am tired of playing Tux-Racer (yeah, they are not the same, but this is just an example of the economics)....
IV: Innovation
The absence of design leadership
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
So true! I'll just expand on that slightly. OSS is a force for commoditization. It is when industry leaders are allowed to rest on their laurels (American automobile industry, anyone?) that innovation disappears. When there are relentless forces pushing existing technology toward commodity status, market leaders are forced to innovate.
With that in mind, it is baffling to me that free market advocates don't embrace OSS as a non-regulatory means of avoiding anti-competitive monopoly situations. Does anyone really believe that the emergence of OSS hasn't forced Oracle, Microsoft, et. al. to provide at least some products and services that they wouldn't have otherwise offered?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Oh, and Mr. CIO doesn't give a flip, because he'll get promoted to Brussels before the project is completed, so he won't have to deal with the fallout.
Yeah, right.
A lot of OSS software I've seen isn't very innovative- it's mostly a clone of an existing product or featureset. Yikes, someone is STILL trying to write an Exchange clone! Where is open source pushing the bounds on innovation with NEW stuff?
Professionalism? Normally I'd discount that argument but then I'm reminded of Theo de Raadt, DJB and even Eric S. Raymond little outburst "I'm your worst nightmare Microsoft! Teehee! Hell will be so cold its superconductive" (oh come the fuck on, ESR- that's the most childish and dorkish thing I've ever read). I even find Stallman grating often enough, and these are the people that are at the forefront of the OSS movement. Let us not forget the famous OSS battlecry whenever someone asks for help- "RTFM!" or "You have the code, fix it youself"
There is certainly a perception that OSS may or may not have rightfully earned, but it certainly looks like nobody is bothered about it.
It's not the first time the BCS has vomited their FUD upon us and it won't be the last.
Most software that's developed is bespoke software (e.g. Demand Forecasting system for predicting Electricity Usage) and this type of software is not threatened by Open Source, but benefits from it (i.e. Free tools).
It's only the big boys writing consumer off-the-shelf software that need to worry. Unfortunately its these people that make up all the advertising revenue for Computer magazines, so we are treated to their point of view.
Many say, that you should make money off support. However, that is plain stupid because the software is the hard part, the part that interests me, the part that I want to be paid for instead of something like support.
Define support.... Does support include charging customers an hourly rate to help companies impliment the software optimally? Does support include adding features that some customers may want and charging for your time? There is a lot more to support than support incident resolution.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Bear in mind that the writer is writing on the British Computer Society site about the British software industry. As he says in his closing paragraphs:
... my fear is that a further move towards OSS could result in the nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between. Where would our freedom of choice be then?"
"The UK government's recently introduced policy on the use of OSS recommends that OSS solutions be considered alongside proprietary ones for public sector IT purchases.
So this needs to be seen in context - as a shot in the war for zillions of bucks' worth of new UK government software contracts over the next few years. Oh course, you could argue that the writer's "nightmare scenario" is precisely the one we've been enduring for rather a long time now.
Now, here's the kicker: The UK government has a catastrophic record with big software projects developed in alliance with large corporations. Huge installations worth hundreds of millions have had to be cancelled or redone because they didn't work properly and in some cases will probably never work properly (the UK's Child Support Agency's IT disaster is a celebrated example).
So here is this writer merrily suggesting that the best way forward is more of the same. We can't risk trying something else, still less entangling ourselves with loonies in beards and sandals, oh no siree. Run Debian? Well that must mean you are a) a tenth-rate programmer, b) dangerously idealistic and c) completely unreliable.
Oh well, I guess there is one born every minute.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
This is a magazine that is aimed middle managers.
So this article lacks conceptual integrity,
Is this just someones blog piece, or a regular column writer?
professionalism,
Does this piece matter at all?
and innovation. I have readed this somewhere...
My city: Barcelona.
if i looked like this, i would certainly have a problem with "beards and sandals" wouldn't you? the guy's email address is sjm@dcs.gla.ac.uk. i'm sure this will be useful as the BCS don't know what "feedback" is. such a forward thinking organisation. just like this guy.
it implies that if an OSS developer closed his source and started charging it would magically become "good".
the truth is some closed source is just as crappy as the crappy OSS projects. conversely, some OSS is quite good!
yet names no particular application, makes no specific claims that can be countered and provides no specific evidence of his position whatsoever.
Why should such an unsupported post rate a "5" on SlashDot? Who would mod up such unsupported claims? What is "interesting" about such unsupported claims?
The key difference is that the USPTO acts to keep innovators from doing routine things, and thus from building upon the state of the art.
Even the most imitative F/OSS, however, acts to allow innovators to freely build upon the state of the art and thus advance it. glibc may not be sexy, but without it a lot of sexy work would face serious hurdles.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Intellectual Property: A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects. In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer.
If an employee is working on software on company time, I'd hope it was because the company was using that software; and that means the company itself is subject to whatever open-source license that entails. I'm hoping the company would see the benefit in contributing those improvements back to the source pool.
Conceptual Integrity: The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour, and this raises another point of concern with OSS. Like any engineering design project, good software needs a designer (or software architect in the current industry jargon) with a clear design concept which must be adhered to rigorously otherwise the software becomes progressively messier as it is developed in a piecemeal manner.
That's why OS projects have maintainers who manage the integration of contributed code back into the project.
Professionalism: There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.
I thought they BUILT the industry. I fail to see how, for instance, someone writing a crappy HTTP daemon would affect the stability or popularity of Apache.
Innovation: The absence of design leadership in the OSS development process and a motivation for OSS developers to create free versions of their favourite proprietary software may also explain why there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.
Actually, to a large extent the reverse is true. Linux may ape more proprietary systems, but Linux and practically all the other commercial OSes being sold are descendants of SysV and BSD. Windows itself uses portions of BSD internally.
Further, as someone who works on an open-source BitTorrent client, would you call BitTorrent uninnovative?
The article asserts that any software worked on by a software professional is owned by his/her employer. I do not think this is true -- the OSS worked on would need to be in the realm of what he/she is employed to do. So, for example, if my job is to develop image processing software and I contribute to the GIMP, there may be a problem. But, if I contribute to a VoIP project, that's a problem.
Few people who contribute their time to an Open Source project actually start at ground zero -- they usually build on work that somebody else does. And, if they do this, then they any contribution is a derivative work -- something that they are only allowed to do with the permission of the original copyright holder. The GPL gives people the right to do this under two conditions: (1) they redistribute their changes under the GPL, or (2) they only use the changes internally.
So, let's posit that an employee has contributed to an Open Source project and the employer objects, and that it actually owns the copyright to the employee's work. What remedy does it have? It's still bound by the GPL and can't then decide to sell the work. The only thing it can do is try to withdraw the source code from the public and use anybody who still uses it for copyright infringement.
But, here it gets really interesting -- there are a number of defenses that infringers have, including apparent agency, various forms of estoppel and lack of creative authorship (more on this last later....) Because of the cost & uncertainty, the company will try to settle. But, they are missing a major carrot: licensing the infringer to use the work. After all, as soon as they allow somebody to use the code, the GPL kicks in and they have to let anybody use it.
(The lack of creative authorship basically means that if there's a bug and there are only a few ways of fixing it, you haven't actually created a 'work of authorship' in implementing one of those fixes. No creative authorship means no copyright. No copyright means no infringement.)
This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer.
The author makes some good observations, but twists them to appear more all-encompassing than they are. Also, he states some partial or total untruths.
Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer.
This may be true in England, but it certainly is not true in America. In America, software developed by the employee outside of business hours, using only the personal property of the employee (no company computer, software, or networks involved) is the personal property of the employee, barring any contractual stipulations to the contrary.
Self-employed and contract software engineers are not usually bound by employer's IP rights but are unlikely to be strongly motivated to write OSS code unless they can earn a living from doing so, and the unpaid volunteer nature of OSS development tends to rule out this possibility.
This may only be anecdotal, but I am, at times, a self-employeed engineer (though, currently trying to juggle an employeeship with the Archive while running my contracting gig part-time). If anything, being self-employed has encouraged me to open-source parts of my work, since I am then free to use it when employed by another company (just as I would use any other third-party OSS library or tool). Tools I develop as an employee on company time are not similarly available to me when I am employed by a different company. Often I have wished I could reach back into the Flying Crocodile codebase and use some of the message-passing code developed there, but I can't, because I don't own it. When The Sausalito Group dissolved and the VP and I co-founded Hardpoint Intelligence to support TSG's stranded clients, I had to redevelop all of the necessary technology from scratch before we could legally provide our services -- except for that technology which was already open-sourced (MySQL, Apache, Perl, Linux).
we seem to have forgotten that peer review is, or should be, part of the normal software engineering process anyway
Of course it is, and every single company I've worked for as a programmer (except TSG, where I was the only programer) used peer review as a means of double-checking code before it was deployed. But in no case were there ever more than four engineers performing this review, and more often it was only one or two engineers. Even a relatively obscure OSS project can attract more peer reviews and bugfixers than this -- when I wrote the Orcus ICB client in 1997, six fellow OSS developers leapt in, finding and fixing bugs and adding secondary features. The only time in my entire career I've gotten similar support from an employer was when I was project lead at Flying Crocodile, and had five engineers working for me. Most engineers have to work in the industry for many years before they are eligible for a project lead position, whereas any competent engineer with a cool project can attract comparable (in my case, superior) manpower no matter where they are in their career.
and good software needs a strong architectural vision which the community-based method of software development does not foster.
There was a slashdot article a while back which promoted a study someone did which agrees with my anecdotal experience, that most large OSS projects have one or a few core engineers who share a vision, develop the architecture, and write the "meat" of the code, and then anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred non-core engineers who fix bugs and add secondary features (much like what happened with Orcus, just on a larger scale). The non-core engineers are in flux, and will wax and wane with popular interest in the project, but the core engineers persist and change little. (And when there is a change in the core group, you can bet slashdot will run an article about it!) ;-)
there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far
> lack of ... professionalism
As we all know, professionalism has two meanings. The first one is that you make money from it, but a lack of that should be no concern to the user.
The second one is that you know what you are doing. I have seen many commercial software projects, and I have rarely seen one where I had the impression that they know what they are doing. Usually they are just trying something, and then wait for user complaints that it does not work.
If you take this sense, many open source projects are very professional. At least they start out with a clear idea of what to do, and with people that enjoy what they are doing.
With closed source, you find the problems in the code by accident, because you can't look at the code. You have little input into the process except to vote to send your money or not. Software giants, like microsoft, will continue to put their worst foot forward on security even when warned in advance. What alternative have you got, anyway, beyond open source?
ok, i'm sick of hearing 'open source this' 'open source that' to be honest, it sounds like a chinese propaganda attempt to convince the masses that its a bad idea. send out 30,000 people to post all over the internet (mainly bbs's) the point they want to get across, de-pants the victim and then point fingers at them.
--
i dont care if i made a spelling mistake or that my grammer could use a lesson, if you got them point, great, if not, tough!
Notice how he lacks any concrete examples. Lots of weasle words and inference but nothing concrete. How does this fellow explain Apache which dominates and Microsoft and recently decided to emulate several important design concepts. Or how about Mozilla and XUL based graphical interface layout and specification that again Microsoft is emmulating with XAML? Many many other example abound.
The problem is, almost nobody involved in computing does join as the BCS has been irrelevant for many years.
Now all these upstart home programmers have the gall to create products with the quality of Linux and Apache.
In short, the BCS is a club for people who want to talk about programming rather than actually crank code.
Further more, never came across lawyers, doctors or pilots making a case for their services being free. Why should software developers offer their products for free? On the "should" be free list, I would put health care, food and shelter far above software.
And then there's the stuff about the game industry;
Hang on - the computer games industry in the early 80s? "Tens of thousands" of copies in, like, 1983? Which early 80s did this guy live in? This was when 128K was quite a lot of memory. There weren't any platform charts back then (that weren't, it turns out. completely made up). There almost was no computer games "industry" back then - the mighty seasoned corporate oaks of today's industry either weren't even founded then, or were themselves tiny acorns in garages founded by these "bedroom programmers"! To sell "tens of thousands" would have been a runaway success virtually everyone on a platform had played -- it hardly qualifies as "destroy[ing] the industry" when almost an entire platform has bought your game!
This man is flat out full of bullshit . It's a column, it's an opinion piece pushing the agenda of the BCS (I've heard of them, they're a nothing "guild" which would quite like software engineers to become registered professionals, so they can make lots of money charging membership fees -- this explains, you see, why it is defaming the professionalism, integrity and quality of pretty well software professionals who aren't BCS members), it's factually incorrect... What can I say? The article is a troll, and we've been hooked. No reason to waste any more time here. Move along, nothing to see.
They plague every human endeavor. The article falls victim, however, to the idea that every human endeavor is monolithic. There is no one OSS vision, not all commerce is sordid, and I doubt that many hold the opinion that they be separate. The article falls apart under the delusions of its writer. Somebody give him and those close to him a wake up call!
I am not surprised to read an article like that by Microsoft "alumni" Stephen J Marshall who is afterall one of the strongest opponents of OSS.
However, he is dead wrong on many counts in this article and may want to consider to go back to school and study technical journalism. There he will learn, amoung many other things, that making up stuff and stating it as a fact is NOT acceptable. Not even in his unsubstantiated attacks against OSS.
I don't know about anyone else but as far as my memory serves me... Microsoft (/insert name of other big bloated crapware factory) hasn't done anything innovative for... well... ever, really. It's not like innovation is a must for a simple spreadsheet or something anyways.
I couldn't care less if open source guys have crazy new projects that blow my mind when I use them or not, all I care about it having an alternative to the proprietary / bloated stuff from the big boys.
Most FOSS is not that innovative and just clones existing applications. Keep in mind closed source apps mainly do this as well.
However Apache and Firefox are the few innovative apps that closed source software is playing catchup in. Gnome and KDE are also not just cloning MacOSX and Windows but are now begining to come out with their own features.
This alone dispells the FOSS only copies myth going around by the software industry.
http://saveie6.com/
As if commercial software doesn't suffer from the same problems?
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
From TFA: Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer.
Uhhh.. No. The company I worked for was started by geeks and the IP contract made it very clear things we did outside of work with our own resources was ours. When we got bought out about a year ago, this was a major concern. I read the new IP contract front to back, and was pleased to see it made the same exceptions. However, IANAL and had it checked by an attorney, who agreed. $50 seemed extremely reasonable to make sure I wasn't signing away all the IP I ever possessed. If they had not made the exception nor been willing to renegotiate, I would have quit. Luckily, I didn't have to.
The point here is that Stephen Marshall seems to be spreading FUD, albiet I believe unintentionally, but FUD none the less. I know some people are not so lucky, but anything I write outside work on my own time and equipment is mine. His first major attack on open source software is just flat out wrong.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
First for the invalid:
The UK must be different in regards to employeer-employee implicit contracts or this guy is just full of it. Because in the US, unless its explicit in the contract, employeers don't own what you write on your on time.
I'm not buying the early 80s video game industry analogy. Yeah, he's pretty much right about the plethora of crap that was turned out that resulted in the early 80s video game industry crash, but I just don't buy that you can compare it to free as in beer software
I'd argue though that a lack of people working together in the OSS world does put it at a disadvantage compared to Apple or Microsoft. There's a finite number of developers that have the skills and or inclination to contribute to significant OSS projects. Look at the OpenOffice problem, where they've got probably 1 or 2 volunteer programmers. Of course that's not OO's only problem. The code base is a mess.
By the way, lots of people miss the old bedroom programmer video game days. Some kid hacking 6502 assembly in his bedroom could make hundreds of thousands of dollars (John Harris). Read Hackers - great book
I agree that open source is going to kill some smaller software companies while Microsoft will continue to make billions
And I think governments that don't analyze their needs carefully are going to be in for a rude awakening by thinking that free software as in beer and speech is going to magically save them money. Munich is having major problems in their switch.
It's a very specious argument that linux gets you out of "lock-in". You're locked into OpenOffice and with its problems, and lack of resources you could be asking for trouble.
From the article: Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer.
Maybe that's the way it is in England but not at any of the companies I work for. What I write for the customer, belongs to the customer. What I write in my spare time belongs to me and I can contribute it to OSS projects if I so choose.
Self-employed and contract software engineers are not usually bound by employer's IP rights but are unlikely to be strongly motivated to write OSS code unless they can earn a living from doing so,
Sounds like this was written by one of MSFT's PR firms They overlook the number of programmers who are able to successfully transition to supporting the open source products they help produce. Especially these days. Your hobby this week easily could transform into your profession next week.
There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.
Says who? Unless I missed something the game industry is alive and healthy. Good games get purchased more and poor games get weeded out. Anyone who thinks OSS games never make it has never played Frozen Bubble.
A continued shift towards OSS solutions at the expense of proprietary ones is likely to result in many of the companies that develop proprietary software going out of business.
Well boo-fucking-hoo. Maybe proprietary companies should try a new, radical approach to the software business: Treat customers like people, give them a quality product for their dollar and provide quality support. Duh. The idea that proprietary software companies have some divine right to exist is horse manure.
One thing you can positively do is stop trying to impose your tighty-whitey corporate way of thinking on open source. It's doing quite well without your advice.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
he was one of the biggest idiots I've ever met. I used to be a UK civil servant, so the sample of idiots I've met is quite high.
I'm just saying...
wings of mercy flies needy remote patients to hospitals on private planes.
I really think that guy's totally wrong on the points. Think about the features of Firefox while considering the inability of IE to tab-browse anything nor block ads, or do simple tasks that now and then you may need. This is not what I think is lack of innovation. Go on and ask yourself if having virtual desktops or multiple ones is so bad. Does proprietary software have so many ideas? Main reason, I think, is beacuse if someone has an idea in OSS which is not able to implemnt, anyone can start from his work and finish it. If someone of the programmers from Microsoft ever had some really good ideas, do you think they could include it in their work freely? On professionalism, just think about the development of ReiserFS. Company-like development had thoso guys writing by scratch Reiser4 while still on bugfixes of Reiser3. That is real professionalism. NTFS came so lately just to fix the increscious lack of permissions of VFAT... Conceptual Integrity? might be true. On must admit that any piece of your OS system may have an upgrade at any time, independently. You must decide whether it is good or bad to have your WM upgraded together with your browser, your kernel, shell and various tools each three-or-so yeras or having a brand new version of each one every few months or so. Consider that even when you chose the bundle pack you may always be forced to upgrade or bugfix periodically... OSS has problems, but are not that ones. IMHO the main one is money. With microsoft spending 100 million $ to promote (I may say some of them went in that author's pocket), OSS must rely on being what one wants, on people trying and speaking with friends, and so on. Must not be so a bad paradigm if it is still alive... For what has being said, another problem is the lack of contents. OS game engines are more and more often good state of the art code, or so, but still they cant beat Doom3 due to the poorness of the textures. Not any program is well localized, or so. Those things are not funny as coding, and people doesn't do that unless thei're paid. That is a problem for which I have no solutions. Not those that guy pointed out
A plea to the Joomla! community for an unprecedented level of courteousness:
9 863.html#msg49863
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,6785.msg4
If I had written such a poorly argued piece I wouldn't want to put my name to it, much less give my professional credentials. Take the argument about innovation. It's based on a single example! Yes, Linux is not particularly innovative. It originated as a clone, so of course it wasn't innovative. Insofar as open source attempts to replace proprietary software, there has to be a good deal of cloning. That doesn't mean that open source software is intrinsically non-innovative, just that there has been a lot of catching up to do.
Even so, software intended in the first instance to clone proprietary software has often been innovative. Many examples are to be found in the GNU project. GNU "clones" of standard Unix tools are often considered to be superior to the originals. Not only is the implementation superior (typically in having fewer bugs and fewer arbitrary limitations), but they often extend the capabilities of the original tool.
The other place in which innovation is readily seen is in areas in which there is little or no cloning activity because there is little or no proprietary software to catch up to. In my own field of linguistics, for example, there isn't a lot of proprietary software because there isn't much of a market for it. Linguists can't afford expensive software. The more interesting linguistic software that has been coming along is mostly free software. For example, the most advanced database for annotated text is emdros. It isn't a clone of anything. In phonetics the acoustic analysis program of choice currently is probably Praat. It compares favorably to commercial products. (Phonetics software is a bit different from linguistics in general in that it overlaps to a considerable extent with software for use in areas like speech pathology, where there is money to be made.) As a third example, I'll cite my own program redet, which is a regular expression search tool. It has a few features of particular interest to linguists, such as widgets for entering the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ability to intersect user-defined named character classes (which enables matching over feature matrices), but in most respects it is a regular expression tool of the same sort that programmers and various other non-linguists use. There are a number of similar free tools and at least one proprietary commercial product. However you may judge it in comparison to the others, it is unquestionably not a clone. Among its innovative features is the fact that it determines the properties of the regular expression engine that it uses empirically, by running a set of tests.
Basing a sweeping generalization on a single example is a poor practice in general, but in this case it is especially bad because Linux is an atypical example. Much open source software is innovative, and much proprietary software is not.
(Please don't bother my poor spelling, I'm no native speaker)
I'm working for a large international company (about 9000 employees world wide) which is phasing out Redmond, because it lacks proffesionalism, and they constantly change their own standards.
We use open source, because of it's better (also not perfect) consistancy and much lower maintenance cost. We don't develop software ourselves, we're just users. I must admit, not standard users, all employees are engineers. We are not interested in a shiny glammer interface, the thing just needs to work. Redmond is only compatible with Redmond and nothing else, so we cannot glue applications together. That is the main reason it is phased out.
What makes Redmond so expensive is that with every update something else gets broken. Often, our Sys. Op. thought he had tested the latest patch good enough, rolls it out and "bang" the network goes down again in an area he had overlooked. Due to the lack of good technical documentation, it takes a lot of time to get it up again.
With OSS the technical information is available on the internet and we know much better what each patch does. Moreover, because OSS obeys open standards much better (also not always perfectly), we can glue applicaltions together. Currently we are working with a system that is far more powerful than the shiny Redmond system. And the system downtime is reduced considerably.
When discussing the "IP problem", the author completely ignores the fact that a great deal of core FLOSS applications are developed by those employees on paid time and released as open source by the companies (like IBM, Sun; Red Hat, Novell, MySQL etc etc). The author seems to believe that all FLOSS is developed as a hobby.
the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation
Last closed source company I worked for was promising 5-nines uptime while knowing full well that the entire application was one slightly malformed sql statement away from total and absolute (i.e. read corrupt the database in a way that it will never be recoverable) destruction. They were selling the system based on scalability, uptime, high availability, but knew when it came time to roll out to the customer's customers it would fail to meet even the most minimal load (also knowing, by that time it would be too late for thier clients to back out).
Closed source helps business grow, because you can rely on your marketing department to do the job for you, and marketing chumps are much cheaper to hire than engineers.
SUCKERS!
What is the issue of ownership? OSS is not necessarily Free Software. AFAIK, under international rules (Berne Convention) anything published automatically gets copyright protection whether OSS or Free Software or whatnot.
Is this just a scare tactic?
insightful++
Looks like somebody needs to read a few essays by Paul Graham.
The author has managed to contradict himself. Two of his bullet points in fact go directly against one another, the cases of intellectual property and innovation.
The author uses a very vague definition of intellectual property in order to discuss intellectual property ownership. Now while corporations themselves tend to favor very loose definitions themselves, even they have certain limits on what intellectual property they care about. Most people in signing away their intellectual property rights tend to focus on discoveries that they make, new ideas and dare I say it innovations that they invent while they are being employed by their employer.
The big question is, if someone in their time away from work on non-work hardware writes the Great American Novel (which is not a thinly disguised satire of their workplace), does their employer own the intellectual property of the novel that they produced in their spare time? The answer is probably not, and even if they did, it's unlikely to hold up in court.
In general, businesses are mainly concerned with the invention of profit making IP that the company itself (or a competitor) could use, that in general can be patented. In general, corporations feel that they own all the discoveries and innovations their employees make. And yet the author then turns around and complains that OSS is derivative, more interested in copying existing proprietary software and not producing any real innovative work.
You can't have it both ways, Stephen. Either people are producing innovations and illegally incorporating them into OSS in violation of the corporate IP contracts the people have signed, or OSS isn't innovative, in which case the contracts those people signed do not apply in this case. The only real contracts that corporations make people sign that could lead to trouble are confidentiality agreements and non-competition agreements. The potential leak of proprietary IP into OSS is a much more valid point than the one that is actually made.
Then we get to the Conceptual Integrity section, which cites the need for small teams working under a strong leader. And of course there's no mention of Linus Torvald and Linux at all, or any examination of the other successful OSS projects and the fact that sooner or later every OSS project needs someone or a small group of people to decide what goes into the source code and what does not. The best OSS projects all have a small group of people who work well together and usually set up a clear roadmap of where their project is going.
In the Professionalism section, the author argues that bedroom programmers destroyed the games industry in the 1980's. This is despite the fact that the collapse of Atari involved a system that used cartridges that generally were not created or programmed by bedroom programmers, but in fact had to be done by software companies working with Atari. These folks were not 'bedroom programmers' by any stretch of the word. Most of the bedroom programmers were in the computer game industry, which managed to survive the collapse of Atari. In fact, one can make a case that the bedroom programmers had a better track record than the professionals in the eighties.
And for that matter, I seem to have this strange recollection of games company after games company going out of business over the last few years. Heck, over the decades. Badly selling games being the major source of all these collapses. Frankly, the gaming industry is the least stable segment of the software industry, and even now it's having problems. And given the number of bug fixes that come out for any given game, I really wonder by what criteria the author views this stuff as quality software by any definition. Games software tends to make most application software look good in comparison, honestly.
The author is clearly spouting off on their prejudices and has absolutely no idea of what is really going on with either proprietary or OSS.
According to the article "However, when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer."
No it doesn't, in the UK it depends entirely on your contract which you can dispute when it comes to being engaged. I was offered a contract that claimed ownership of all IP I created, I disputed it, the contract was changed. I didn't mind my employer owning what I created in the course of my work, but what I created on my own time in a different area of interest I expect to keep. Now I do.
This type of sweeping statement undermines the credibility of the author.
I understand what a commodity is, but perhaps I didn't explain its effects in the OSS realm well enough. Of course software will likely never become a commodity in the manner of, say, pork bellies. I doubt software in its entirety will ever become commoditized, but the forces of commoditization can be a spur to innovation in software. As the bottom end of software complexity becomes commoditized, competition at the top end is enhanced.
Imagine a situation where company M controls the market for a type of software that allows users to create and edit documents, work with numbers, and make presentations on screen. Let's call company M's implementation of this software O.
O began dominating the market years ago, and has had a lock on it for at least a decade. The art of software development has progressed quite a bit in that decade, but O has no real competition. So in order to get people to buy O, M has to add more and more features, 90% of which are never used by customers. It's essentially purely a marketing-driven product, because the value customers derive from it has remained essentially flat for years. The price for O remains relatively high, even though the relative difficulty involved in creating software of this type is lower than it was ten years ago.
Along comes an OSS project. We'll call it F. The developers of F are able to create a rough equivalent of O with far less effort than it took M to create O. Then another OSS project, we'll call it G, does something similar. Now O has competition, and M has to come up with something truly innovative, in the form of an entirely new class of application, more intuitive and useful features, etc. Thus, because the software that M once created has become more of a commodity, M is forced to innovate.
OSS fosters innovation specifically because it is best at converting that which used to be cutting-edge into a commodity. Software developers are thus forced to innovate even more than under a system that precludes OSS.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Homesteading the Noosphere
The links to the references to Eric Raymond's work, and it is true, he covers what this article addresses.
I think all this article demonstrates is how out of touch the BCS is with the modern IT world. As I don't have a degree I've only just become eligible for membership this year as I've reached the minimum age of 35. If I'm a really good boy, they may let me become a member. However, they have no credibility in the British computing arena as it's simply a gentleman's club that achieves very little, other than patting each other on the back and saying "Jolly good show old bean" to one another.
I've been around computers since I was 10, writing Z80 assembly at 14, contract game programming at 17 and working in the industry professionally from 19. I was an IT Manager at 22 and I've been a freelance consultant for the last 9 years. I'm a web developer (PHP, MySQL), a software developer (VB), a networking specialist (CNE, MCSE, CCNA, CCDA) but mostly a technical architect (VCP) and have project management qualifications too (PRINCE2 and Project+). But the BCS hasn't represented me or other colleagues I've worked with during the past 16 years. Therefore, how do you represent an industry that you actively discourage from being a part of your organisation.
I think this article just flies further in the face of the real world. OSS is here to stay, it's too quick and too powerful to ignore. If OSS is so unattractive, why has it become so prominent, why are mainstream players looking at using this community approach more and more? Why are OSS solutions becoming more commonplace within organisations?
We live in a capitalist world, where demand exists, supply exists. People want OSS so IT managers need to exploit this area of our world, not try and ignore it. It's this short-sighted approach that has always damaged corporations, I just find it amazing that people that work in IT can be so averse to change. We work in the fastest changing business sector, if people can't stand the heat I hope they're not stupid enough to hit their head on the way out of the kitchen.
"A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects. In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer....irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours"
How do we allow corporations to treat us like this ?
Does anyone give a toss about the BCS? What's the betting that the goons behind all those well publicised UK Government IT failures are members of professional bodies like the BCS?
You have nothing to fear inFOSS but fear itself.. Why is Bill Gates so scared?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Intellectual Property: A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects. In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. In the UK, this is embodied in the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
He almost got it correct. Intellectual Property is a major flaw in this day and time. Could someone give me a legal definition of IP please? I believe there are patents, copyrights, and trade secrets but I am unfamiliar with Intellectual Property. Furthermore as an employess of Megacorp, being forced to agree that your employer owns any though that pops into your head 24 hours a day is unethical and wrong.
Intellectual Property needs a legal definition and employees need rights and protection against thought slavery. The problem is not OSS, the problem is that corporate greed and control of its employees know no bounds. I thought we abolished slavery in the "civilized" world long ago, but it appears to be coming back in different forms. Instead of "physical slavery" we now have "mental slavery".
All your Intellectual Property are belong to us...
In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. In the UK, this is embodied in the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
Sorry, this does not apply to every single country in Earth.
I do live in Brazil, I do work as a programmer and my employer does not have any rights over my software projects produced outside my work.
The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour,(...)
This must be a joke or the guy lives in a different planet.
I had few opportunities to see the source code of commercial (normally closed-source) software, and compared to FOSS, closed-source software are usually badly-written, messy and unportable.
Is such crap quality engineering? I don't think so.
There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s,(...)
The games industry learned a valuable lesson from this experience and is now arguably the most highly trained and disciplined software development community in the world. This professionalism in software development is cited as a major contributory factor to the explosive growth that the computer games industry has enjoyed over the last 10 years.
Oh, so that's why the last 10 years there were the most unimaginative, safe-bet, purely commercial games ever.
My wallet is itching to pay for a copy of another Super Shooter 3D Doom XXVI Extra Edition.
The author of the article drastically simplifies the "Intellectual Property" section of his article.
So long as you are careful about terms and conditions you can rest assured that nothing is wrong. A good book to read to tell you all about this kind of problem is called "Who Owns What Is In Your Head" by Stanley H. Lieberstein.
The author of the article at the BCS is spreading FUD.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Open source doesn't have imagination or innovation, yet is likely to put innovators out of business?
Yes. Consider worse is better to be a sort of Gresham's law for software: bad software that is given away for $0 (whether it is open source or not, actually) drives out more-innovative commercial software. People say that they value innovation, but in the end nothing beats the allure of free.
It's less affected in that there is greater motivation to be professional and deliver features on time, that being your career and livelihood. The people at Microsoft are getting paid to write a whole new vector-based, hardware-accelerated graphics layer. In the FOSS world, someone might get around to it when they feel like it...
Open Source will thrive as long as people contribute for the right reasons: to help others, to improve and share their talents with the world and to offer free solutions that people would otherwise have to pay for. It's about advancing the intelligence and efficiency of the human race.
P.S. What Open Source isn't about is money (although it can be a happy bi-product with the right business model).
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Most FOSS is not that innovative and just clones existing applications.
While this may be true the way you stated it, you can say exactly the same thing of proprietary software. If you look in a large arena, most things are not going to be innovative. The question that should be asked is: given that innovation is rare, where is most innovation occuring?
I would say 60% of the innovative new ideas in software over the last 7-8 years are coming from the open source java arena. Examples are Spring, Ant, JUnit, Hibernate, Maven, Struts, AspectJ, Cocoon. It's hard to point to any of these and claim it is a knockoff of something else.
Other recent innovative things from the open source realm outside of Java include Ruby on Rails, Subversion, BitTorrent.
I really can't think of a whole lot of innovation that is occuring OUTSIDE of the open source arena. I guess there is a fair amount of innovation occuring in the standards making processes, though it's hard to give credit to a software team as being "inovative" if all they do is implement a standard. Useful, certainly, but I wouldn't say innovative.
Everything in the article article is pretty much true but from the perspective of yesterday's status quo. Tomorrow will be owned by coders, cloners, fabricators, and those who know enough to invent the future. Those who think they can control the future with a patten are becoming irrelevant. His arguments are for the benefits of the schooner in the age of steam.
GUIs:
Development tools:
Emulation:
All in all, I may have misattributed a few innovations, but most of these are from Open Source. Also, there are many others I can't remember or simply don't know. Microsoft has done less innovation than Open Source, that much is obvious.
I would appriciate information fillers on innovations from other projects I'm less familiar with, such as Apache, the Kernel.
I apologize to everyone that I am about to offend. I am sure you are all very nice people. Most of the people on this board are probably only really good at one thing. Programming. Open Source software kicks as and it is a great thing. But lets assume for 1 second that you succeed and take down closed source software for good. That is take down the software industry as we know it. You will successfully have sealed your own fate. Most of you couldn't smooth talk your way out of anything. Most of you got bullied by the pointy head that is your boss. Most of you don't have even close to what it takes to run a company. You can scream support all you want but mostly you will all be bad at it because you are geeks not human resource people. Being a geek is a great think. But know your place. Do you really want to get paid crap wages to provide support to a some less smart person who is making millions? If you said yes you are by and large full of total shit. Yeah there are some altruistics on the board, but we all have needs. One of those needs is a paycheck. Do you really think you are going to change the world of capitalism because you don't like the current system? Do you really think that all software is going to be open source? Do you really think that the source code that can finally determine what is or is not a drug is going to be freely given away? What world are you people from. You are much smarter than the average person...leaps and bounds really. You should be paid for you hard work and your creativity. Yes capitalism breeds creativity. I did not say patents. I said capitalism. What is wrong with making a million dollars off your hard work. You studied 10 times harder than the MBA's in school. You can out think them on any problem worth thinking about. But yet they will enjoy life to it's fullest while you work so hard to take away your only chance of make a paycheck that you enjoy. I applaud open source....have contributed to it. But it is not the end all be all. OSS really servers one purpose in my mind. It keeps pushing the industry forward and for that I am thankful. Yes Open Office will eventually replace all the real functionality of Office. But during that time microsoft is steady innovating the next grand idea. Sure they will probably eventually lose the Office war. Woopy Ding. By the time Linux becomes the OS of choice MS will be moving past what you know as an OS. Shit people. People are not communists by nature....I DID NOT SAY OSS was Communist. I said the idea that all people should be equal and have equal access is one of the ideals of communism. I for one don't want to be equal to the MBA's I went to school with. I am smarter, more motivated, and I plan on doing something that interests me for the rest of my life. Developing software. You would be wise to see OSS for what it is. You would be wiser to continue to contribute when you can. But the wisest of you will realize that the world has never really been changed by idealists and you are not likely to be the idealist group that succeeds. Even if you do succeeded you will only have succeeded in removing the one career path that most of you introverts are capable of truly excelling at. BTW I did post as a different user...I see no reason to check my real user id and see that swath of flame that you will probably spew. Good luck to you all. I hope you grow up and face the world for what it is.
Mr Marshall strings together a series of misconceptions and misinformation that looks like the arguments of any generic IT manager who has heard of open source but doesn't really know all that much about it. He makes absolutely no attempt to back up his claims with any form of evidence or example. A good portion of the article can be debunked by inspection, the rest goes up in flames when held against The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron, (which I'm sure most Slashdotters have read) all of which were written after years of experience and study of hacker culture, rather than just a glance at the surface of "the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor."
In short this is nothing more than an opinion piece, definitely not news.
That depends. Do you consider a VIC20 "unusable"? Barring component failure, you can run your VIC20 forever; you just can't interoperate with the modern world. Can't play the music or movies or view the Word documents.
The state of reality is clearly portrayed in your post. I like it a lot -- it's helped me understand some of the things I haven't been able to reconcile in open source for a long time.
There are real problems with open source, though. A major one is that, once you get past the top 20 or so projects, the number of people involved per project is very small. Only the big-name projects have enough of a community that one can count on continued interest or support. From a commercial user perspective, this is a major problem.
Open source as a process has the problem that it's very tough to fix a bad design decision. The "little fixes" mentality makes it tough to go back and make a broad-based change. X-windows is a classic example.
There's cruft. Everybody puts in their favorite stuff, but there's nobody throwing out the old stuff. Long-running projects tend to crud up with support for long-forgotten devices and standards. Sendmail, for example, still has support for UUCP and FidoNet. Forgotten protocols are a good place to look for exploits.
Open source also suffers from lack of an establishd middleware base. In the Microsoft world, everything that needs a little database uses Jet. Everything that needs interprocess communication uses OLE.
What we really need from government is an investigation of the long-term effects of OSS on our indigenous software industry, assistance to combat the threat to the industry's livelihood that OSS might pose and the development of a strategy to build on the opportunities that OSS has created. Without prompt action, my fear is that a further move towards OSS could result in the nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between. Where would our freedom of choice be then?
So I'm assuming the obvious result would be that government will determine that OSS "threatens" complacent, obselete software companies, thus we'll need to protect them somehow, perhaps by taxing free software or some other, no doubt reasonable, scheme.
Surely, we can use the revenue gained from taxing OSS to build a reserve for these endangered critters. I see a revenue synergy here with eco-tourism.
More seriously, one has to marvel at the ability of Microsoft to function so well in this environment. After all, they compete head-on with free products and make what appears to be a massive profit. So maybe if these other companies can't do so, then the problem lies in the companies not in OSS or Microsoft. I recommend culling the herd as a better solution than setting up some government solution to a phony problem.
Personally, when I am in need of a piece of software no matter what it be, text editor, html editor, even instant messaging software. I always go to the open source community for various reasons. The main reason being that open source projects often take a normal everyday application and add mass amounts of usable features and customizability not found in conventional pay to use software. I find that open source software often has less bugs and glitches as well. GO OPEN SOURCE!
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The article is hardly cogent. Look at his main points:
A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects
The GPL is quite clear on the process you have to go through in order to be able to contribute to a Free Software project. If you're seeking employment, then get an agreement in writing that you can contribute to OSS projects that don't compete with whatever your employer does. Simple.
The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour, and this raises another point of concern with OSS.
Actually, he's wrong. The process of creating good software is more akin to an artistic endeavour. He even shoots down his own argument a bit later:
We only have to look at the history of the electronic computer to see that the greatest advances in technology have been made by brilliant, strong-willed individuals, usually supported by a small team of dedicated engineers - not community-based projects.
Yes, like such open-source individuals as Larry Wall, John Ousterhout, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and others. There are lots of terrific OSS projects that are basically lead by one very bright person.
Professionalism
I am am professional software developer, and so are all of the developers I employ. We all contribute to OSS projects. It's a myth that FOSS contributors are students or the unemployed; by and large, they're professional developers.
Innovation
OSS is not about innovation. It's about utility and usefulness. However, innovation is often a side-effect: Witness the amazing innovations of Perl, Tcl/Tk, Bit Torrent, SpamAssassin, and many others.
Although it's certainly true that many open source projects lack any direction/organization, plenty of big name commercial products have the same issues.
Just from semi-recent personal experience I can vouch for Matrix One and Blue Martini. Both of them cater to huge corporations, and both of them are absolutely horrible (in my humble opinoin, of course). Incomplete documentation coupled with extremely poor design and preformance more than overshadow any mythical support you might expect to get from a commercial product purchase.
At least when you find out you've got nothng to work with using an open source solution you don't have to fight against the business people who invested millions in the purchase of a lackluster commercial product.
If you can get what you pay for, then commercial solutions can be the right way to go, but there is no clear line between commercial and open source as far as quality is concerned.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
Not me.
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
"From its humble origins in the 'hacker' culture of US computer science laboratories in the 1970s, open source software (OSS)"
That'd be the humblness of the groups of people who regarded themselves as the smartest computer scientists in the world and probably thought their universities were pretty good...
And regardless of the merits of the argument, if one was pointing back to then, calling it Free Software would be more historically accurate.
Have you ever tried to 'implement' any of the following:
Tivoli
Oracle financials
Any help desk
Peoplesoft
Websphere
NONE of them have purported architectural purity and ALL of them are basically toolkits strapped together by whatever scripting code the consultants you last hired were able to cobble together.
Open source, closed source, it makes little difference.
It cracks me up that MS got its footing in 95+ by being "good enough", and cheap. Now that Open Source is "good enough", and, um, "cheaper", there's a problem? Puhleeeeze! Same curve, different "vendor". Give it a think.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
The open source movement, with its hacker ethic, doesn't promote professionalism.
Then Mr. Gates, how do you explain even a field as subdued and quant-- Amaeture Radio, is able to create tons of software
http://www.qsl.net/kf8gr/linsoft.html
for their community and the public.
And they do this by incorporating it into a mainstream Linux product, Knoppix
http://hamshack-hack.sourceforge.net/
which is a Live CD.
You can also see here, William, http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html
how an amazzzing project is allowing people to program their computers to tune into any frequencies on the radio spectrum WITHOUT the use of a radio, but by using OSS type software only!!
These are just some of the examples of what the OSS community can and HAS done, with only one of the smaller more obscure industries on the earth..
Which begs the question, just how much MORE is going on, BillyBouy, than your MicroFud article is attemping to preach. :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
I'm actually far more concerned about the lack of conceptual integrity, lack of professionalism, and lack of innovation with proprietary software, because it's evident that the major commercial software lack all of those. I'm equally concerned about the issue of ownership of commercial software developed under the current ownership laws because, as a customer, I'm screwed by them, no matter what.
Fortunately, there is a solution to most of those concerns: open source software. It's not perfect, but in the areas of integrity, professionalism, innovation, and clear ownership, it is way ahead of proprietary software.
I use open source software every day, but I must admit that its been available for free, for years now has yet to over take even apple in the desktop market. The open source community needs to examine user complaints and see why people would rather pay their hard earned cash for a insecure operating system like windows instead of using a free operating system like Linux, instead of calling these people stupid or uninformed, I would argue that far from being uniformed they probably have some reasons for doing so.
For one its still difficult to print from linux, the file system in linux is still more complicated than in windows, perhaps a google database like search bar function could make it easier for people to search their files? Fonts dont look as good as in windows...many other minor usability issues add up and turn off users.
But at least they've got a nice club where they can all meet and pass around contracts to their friends. Cretins.
When I was at Uni the BCS tried to get us to join; I'd not recommend any of the people that did so for any serious work.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Open source software is not going to eliminate closed source. I write closed source for a living. I rely heavily on open source components, such as MySQL. If open source did not exist, I would have to spend more time fixing, wrapping, choosing and working around the equivalent closed source components.
In a nutshell, open source excels at creating building blocks. Closed source excels at assembling the blocks into an application.
Well - it actually is. The arguments are based on a normal company structure and not in the actual reality. Again Linux is used as an example stating that the only reason why the quality has been achived is because its a rip off.
That would be an argument in a regular company setting, but it does not apply here.
What the author fails to grasp is that OSS is not a company. Therefore other mechanisms are in play. There is no regular oversight or leadership like in a company, rather you have an evolutionary mechanism that serves somewhat the same purpose. Like Creativism and Darwinism. Same purpose, different anyway.
Who will argue that GCC is low quality? Or how about the change from X11Free to XOrg? In difference to a company OSS deals with wasted time as an abundant resource. Somthing a company can only do if it points a gun the heads of its shareholders.
Not a bright article. At least in my opinion
OSS is the contrary of these arguments. Many OSS works lead in innovation and quality, the web would be a much smaller place if say, all of the Apache servers went down. Look at the numberous Linux distros, their competion with each other is strong force towards OS innovation.
lets look at this arguements. they sound like they came straight from a MS public relations breif. innovation - something MS deludes itself as having constantly. IP - hey have already attempted to attack OSS in a sneaky way by financing SCO. integrity - obvious that have no idea how an OSS is run, which fits with MS's other clueless statements about OSS over the years. while i'm sure software giants wet dream is to have the government grant them a state sanctioned monoply "for the good of the nation" style, it's just wishful thinking. after all the antitrust action the states have brought to them, they are hardly in any position to claim that people don't have the right to make something then give it away.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I've worked for very large companies (F-10s), and if one thing they have in common is they constantly settle for 1/2-baked CARP
Hmm, that's funny, I don't read a lot about CEO's getting food poisoning in the Business section of my paper...
He's got it right, there, through the course of his or her employment. However, unless you have a contract saying so, whatever you do when you're not being paid by your employer, not using your employer's equipment, belongs to you (with limited exceptions generally not applicable here such as if you create a software product to compete with what your employer is paying you to do, and maybe not even then.) Your employer is not your owner and you are not an indentured servant owned by them 24/7. If he's got statutory or case law to the contrary to prove the claim he's making, I'd like to see it. Copyright law on status of ownership of works for hire and labor law are two different things. Interrelated, but they cover different areas.
I do sometimes write software which I am not paid for, and have made that available for others at no charge. I also am not paid to do so, but I write articles (and make edits to articles) like this one on Wikipedia, mainly because its fun and I like to export my own knowledge so others can see it, and to improve existing articles. Now, granted, I'm not a professional writer but I do believe the quality of what I write is close to or equivalent to that of someone who is one. People do a lot of things for rewards that are not necessarily monetary.
Yes, but appearances (as he sees them) are extremely deceiving. He uses the original false premise (that your employer owns everything you could possibly create 24/7) to reach the false conclusion
(that professional programmers cannot work on anything because their employer owns everything they might conceivably create).
Where he says "stealing their employer's IP," I hope he's referring to people who intentionally make copies of software developed while on the paid time of their employer and developed at their employer's behest, and is not trying to claim the employee is an owned possession of the employer because what he's then claiming is that they are not employees, but slaves of the employer. I hope he's not making that claim, but it sure sounds an awful lot like he is doing exactly that.
He also ignores - or may be ignorant of the concept - that there are a number of professional programmers who directly work as part of their paid employment in the improvement of open-source applications whose improvements become part of the public corpus (as opposed to private, unreleased modifications) of the work in question.
No kidding.
I have worked at many places developing software and not a single one of them engaged in peer review of anyone's code unless we were looking at how they did so
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The damn article makes as much sense as just replacing Open Source with home cooking. George Russell writes "Stephen J Marshall, writing in the BCS online magazine, provides a cogent argument detailing the ills of home cooking for the restaurant industry - namely, the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership of home recipes under the current Intellectual Property laws for the food-chains-secret-sauces. Do these issues concern you?
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
But expecting the millions of experiments and halfway-developed projects posted on SourceForge to be shining examples of bug-free code is misunderstanding SourceForge's purpose. SourceForge is intended to store projects from inception to death; most are closer to inception than to birth, indeed many are only a gleam in their developers' eyes. SourceForge is not intended to be a repository of only completed working programs (although some are). Sometimes a developer may only get an idea onto SourceForge, but merely communicating that idea may help others.
[BTW I like your TOPS project. You could put it on SourceForge, but perhaps some preconceptions about what SourceForge is are keeping you from using SourceForge as a resource. Anyway, good luck with TOPS.]
The important and most commonly used FOSS elements (web servers, operating systems, communications APIs, languages and utilities that are in common use and that matter) are high in quality - usually higher than proprietary products IMO. Apache, CygWin, Linux, PHP and hundreds of other FOSS packages are outstanding software by any measure. And that is what is important.
I am a professional software developer, developing mainly embedded software for mainstream digital TV set-top boxes for quite some years. I developed for products that sold several million units. I would like to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.
My experience in commercial software thought me that commercial software is a cobbled together mess that barely hangs together. We always try to do something descent at the beginning of projects but tight deadlines, legacy code, low quality third party code, inept managers and even more inept customers (tv broadcasters) forces software to become utter tripe.
My experience taught me that commercial software will never reach anywhere near the quality of OSS.
OSS guarantees the best software quality achievable by peer review and natural selection.
There you have it, opinion from a real insider and not a nobody that writes about something that knows nothing about.
The Article is a troll, Specifically point 2 about game developers. Yeah they work hard but mostly those aren't the kinds of places that you'd want to work willingly unless you were passionate about what you do. They make it soudns like it's the industries credit as to why things are the way they are. So wrong. I hope this doesn't get in front of some PHB who thinks 'oh the games market does it, yay!" Idiots.
If it weren't for open-source products like Eclipse and Tomcat I wouldn't have a job. This is because:
The problem, apart from basic greed, is that there is nothing really comparable to software. It is critical to the proper operation of our business and government systems and can create massive problems when it fails. It benefits from having many people look at it, improve it, build on it, and learn from it. It becomes more useful when it interoperates with many systems and evolves slowly so people can keep up.
This is at odds with with corporate priorities which boil down to "make money". The markeplace has proven that it isn't a good mechanism to keep the corporations honest for various reasons including short-term thinking, lack of foresight, and general lack of technical understanding. There is a fundamental conflict between the corporate strategies to make more money from software, including strategies like planned obsolesence and vendor lock-in, and the development of software that maximizes its benefit to society.
This is why open-source rocks. It's software that's created by the people who also use it. The software has their name on it and they take pride in making it work right. They generally don't have to listen to sales people who only care about their commission or marketing people who prefer to load up programmers rather than push back on customers unique requirements that can usally be accomplished another, better way with the existing software.
I talk with many people who are very frustrated because they feel they have no choice but to buy Microsoft products. Unfortunately, they are also very frustrated that they can't afford a home or have to pay $3 a gallon for gas and those things overwhelm their concern with what to do about software. When software becomes the top story on the evening news is when the the generally crappy software issue will get addressed. Then the government will have to do something. God help us then!
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
The previous poster gets OSS, you do not.
"...if a hobbyist developer doesn't want to put forth the unpaid effort to polish an app to enterprise class, he or she should not bitch and moan when Company XYZ spends $200 million on a closed-source commercial competitor that does similar things as the hobbyist's application."
Actually, the reverse happens more often than not. Company X ends up bitching because an open and free version of X is avaliable, thus eating into their potential revenue.
Paying that developer, and or supporting their work with some of your own, could yield that application at a significantly reduced cost. Oh, you say, our competetors would then be able to benefit from our work. Yeah, ok. But the reverse is also true --and you are already doing that if you are running other OSS software.
OSS *is* superior over commercial software in that I don't have to pay for it annually and I know exactly what it's doing and that it runs on whatever hardware I have handy. (Usually.)
Does that match well with your corporate goals? Probably not, but that does not diminish the value. Consider new companies starting today, that build on OSS. Maybe some of them contribute to the software base they use (dollars and code, does not matter) and the code base gets better for all. Think that won't save money? Wrong, it will save money hand over fist while providing a degree of freedom not seen in the commercial world.
Think I am wrong? Ask the hollywood studios, who are doing exactly that. The annual costs for their production chains is less than it once was and they now have the ability, as an industry, do do what they want on their time table, largely without having to go to vendors to do it.
"99% of the computing public are not developers..."
Well, a very high percentage of the companies are just the kinds of 'people' that can contribute. The general public has nothing to do with any of the points you made so far. For them, they get what they need at the lowest cost and that's the end of it. However, companies can easily contribute to OSS both with dollars and code and benefit from it the same way they do by paying annual fees each year to major software houses.
The sum total of all those fees would more than employ enough geeks to put the major houses out of business and they know it.
Non starter...
Blogging because I can...
what this really is, is just another attempt to defend caveman mentality. There are those who have found an easy living off the unspecting population. The selling and reselling as new, the same ol, same ol...
Software is provably not patentable. The problem here is that neither side, proprietary or OSS wants to recognize this as doing so requires software to be recognized by the population as as common and easy to use as the use of math, the hindu arabic numeral system.... instead of teh roman numeral system with its "elite experts".
Programming is a reflection of the programmers mindset and by keeping programming to complicated for the typical user, even if only sounding that way, then it really needs to be understood how limiting this practice really is.
Computers could not have been invented with the roman numeral system.
You want innovation, then you have no choice but to open it up to the every day user.
Unfortunately, most programmers today have been taught the roman numeral way of doing programming, and as such there is an ihnerent resistance to a better way or approaching programming, a way that is more in accord with the nature of programming.
Business in the programming industry as been filled with consumer deception in many different ways. All to often I have participate in some programming conference or read some technical article about an easier way of doing something but always with the added "don't worry, we'll either make it not available to the typical user or complexicate it to confuse them" (if you can't dazzel them with brillance, baffle then with bullshit)...
The old sales pitch is to get you saying "yes" right off the bat, as this article did by pointing out some of whats wrong with proprietary software, then carefully leading you down the wrong road from there.
Software is not such a thing to be master over all industry, as it has become. But rather its supposed to be an assist to better industry.
You mean If I buy this software I'll make my company more productive and use less paper?
years later.... why are all the company records in a proprietary format that we no longer want to pay rent for the access tools to it.....
Why can we not integrate software packages as WE SEE FIT?
Who's mindset is running this Company? MicroSoft?
Innovation does not come from MS, they take it from others and claim it originated from them, they even used to charge your for reporting bugs in their software.
The innovation process is not one of c9onsumer entrapment abuse. Where the users knwo what they need and due the crap constraining software and over complexity of development have what choice but to give it to those who will then seel it back to them?
NO! proprietary software has to go and the development process can and has to get alot easier.... like how the decimal system allowed the common man to do math beyond the roman numeral experts.
When everyone that needs to, can develope the software they need for their main work duties, then it will be like math today, do it as you need it. And you'll even be getting paid for it.
Programming is the act of automating complexity for the purpose of allowing thge user of the complexity to use and reuse it via a simplified interface. This is a recursive act, as most nobody programs today in machine language but rather uses already created automations of complexity.
And this can and will go all the way out to the users ability to do for themselves...
Professionalism as the article mentions is really the professionalism of a con game.
Had the USTPO existed 100 years ago in the form it has today we would still be using Horse drawn carriages. IP patents, etc., would have prevented other kinds of four wheel vehicles from being manufactured because of the 'threat' to the livelyhood of the horse-drawn carriage industry.
The idiot who wrote this article now wants the US government to "investigate' the long term effects that FOSS will have on our "indiginous software industry' - code words for Microsoft. Isn't this the same Microsoft that is busily out sourcing to China and India the work that 'indiginous' programmers in Seattle were paid to do? That out sourcing is a far bigger threat to 'indiginous' programmers than FOSS.
He also has "fear' that further movements to OSS would create a situation where Microsoft is at one end and OSS is at the other end of the programming spectrum and nothing is in between. I've got news for him. That situation already exists, but the culprit is Microsoft. When ever a software startup creates a new market niche that begins to create a stir guess who eats it up? Not OSS, that's for sure. Microsoft's own agressive monoplistic behavior has made most would-be startups pass on the possibility. Those that didn't pass paid with their corporate lives. We all know the list of companies that became 'partners' with Microsoft, until Gates and company got a look at the code. Then follows a short period of silence, followed by the sudden appearance of a software product that is identical to the 'partners' application. It wasn't OSS that tried to put a patent fence around 132 public protocols. It isn't OSS money that is buying off crooked politicians to get special interest legislation passed.
If Gates and Company has its way there will be NO FREEDOM OF CHOICE in the software OR PC industry in America, or any other country if they can buy enough influence.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
This article is a pile of bovine dung. Here's a paragraph by paragraph summary w/ comments debunking it:
.NET are new ideas... jeez. The point here is whether the software is useful, not rocket science.
* Open source came from a bunch of idealist commies
Not really. Stallman and others made a lot of noise but the real reason open source succeeds is that it's good business. Yes, really. Read on.
* Open source also succeeds because IT managers are paranoid wackos
Nope, they're smarter than that. They know that open source is a way to generate critical mass -- a huge developer community that gets a lot done often at higher quality because the code is seen by more eyeballs and tested in many more installations.
Besides, it's not really feasible for even a larger company to say start maintaining Linux (or whatever) on its own because the developer community mysteriously disappears. IT managers know it costs huge sums of money do even simple things. The argument that open source protects you because you can take over development yourself is pretty lame from that perspective.
* Open source intellectual property is undermined by slave-holder, er, employer contracts.
Actually, a lot of open source is paid for on purpose by the developer's employers! See above point re: critical mass. For the truly paranoid, see failed SCO lawsuit. Besides some projects
like Python and Apache are starting to require contribution agreements.
* Open source is spaghetti code
This is just plain bullshit for any successful open source project. From personal experience with the code I can at least hold out Python, GTK, and Scintilla as very well designed projects that do in fact have extensive design-level discussions as part of their development. Much better than the commercial code I've had to work on.
* Open sourcers are unprofessional like early 80's game developers who almost caused nobody to ever buy a game again
Huh? I guess I missed that one -- thought the games were great. And again, many are paid to do what they do by RedHat, IBM, or in groups like OSAFoundation or the folks working on Ubuntu Linux, just to name a few. So how does that make them unprofessional? Because some idiot shows up on their mailing lists now and again and starts a flame war? As if that crap doesn't happen in commercial companies!
* Open sourcers are copycats
Who cares, so are businesses. As if Java or
* Somehow, open source will fail to incorporate new ideas from academia
Huh? I thought we just learned that they're copycats. Wouldn't they steal all those good research ideas too? Especially given that two paragraphs down we find out it's actually OK for academics to use open source, so there would be a large pool of easy to steal code out there to start with.
* Investors won't put money into open source
I missed this one too. I think the author is still confused into thinking an open source company has to open source *everything* and sell support. That's just not true -- look at TiVO or any number of other Linux-based commercial products. It just makes sense for them to leverage shared development of some code rather than holding everything in-house.
* But it's OK for academia to use open source
Sure, fine.
* Software is complex and a lot of companies produce a shoddy product
OK, I can buy that.
* As a result customers are trying open source, but in fact open source sucks too, which shows us that commercial software sucks and thus industry should somehow use open source to change itself.
Is it me, or was it getting late when the author wrote this paragraph?
Ah, yes, we are reaching the conclusion.
* The UK has new guidelines for choosing among software based on price. It also recommends publically funded research should output open source, not proprietary source. These hurt industry.
It's clear this change in government changes the business lands
I wonder if the BCS is trying to do little more than draw attention to itself in order to prop up its sagging relevance.
"Intellectual property" refers to patents, copyrights, and trademarks & service marks. It is also sometimes used to refer to trade secrets. Those are different, however, in that they are generally not legally recognized as "property".
First of all, no one says any idea that pops into your head 24 hours a day belongs to your employer (unless your contract says so, of course). Rather, as you quoted, IP generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. The problem, of course, is figuring out when/where the idea was generated.
Second, regardless of any wrongness, the question of whether the law considers certain ideas to be owned by employers is still a very important one to the open-source & free-sofware movements. In the real world, and in the courtroom, things like the GPL have no moral force; they are valid only insofar as they are based on actual law. So if you take an idea that that law says belongs to someone else, you can try releasing it under the GPL (say), but people out there will just ignore you. Or sue you.
Intellectual Property needs a legal definition ....
No it doesn't, since there aren't laws about IP, per se. The laws cover patents or copyrights, etc., or sometimes a combination thereof. The term "IP" is just a convenient way of discussing concepts that are treated very similarly in law.
Much of the software out there, be it Open Source, Free Software, or Proprietary, is far from best of breed. It's just that the stuff that's not proprietary is likely to evolve into it- moreso than the Proprietary stuff. Why? Well, money isn't always a good motivator for excellence. If this were the case, money being the best motivator for excellence, then there'd be a lot of best of breed products out there and there'd not be sub-optimal products that levered themselves into prominence. Other things drive excellence- money being only one of them (and actually not high up on the list at that...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So, it would appear that the only people who are actually free to participate in OSS projects are self-employed or unemployed software professionals, students and enthusiastic amateurs. Anyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP. This does not square well with the altruistic image of OSS.
Actually, a lot of OSS has been contributed by major companies like IBM, SGI, and Sun.
The /. OSS community reaction to this guy's article looks a lot like ranting denial. Everybody should take a deep breath or better yet take a nap before calling this guy any more bad names. OSS isn't going away. Its here to stay and for good reasons. If there were a way to kill OSS Microsoft would have found it. They haven't found a way and it isn't for a lack of effort, genius, or money.
/. Invoking the government isn't a solution because the government has already been bought.
At the same time I think that its unrealistic to push the idea that OSS is or can be all things to all software users and developers. I use and support OSS but I too am concerned that I am faced with a shrinking number of choices. The role of open competition to produce new and innovative products outside of Windows environment is almost completely dead compared to what is going on in the arena of third party Windows applications. There is an incredible amount innovation and competition within the Windows application environment and this results in high quality low priced Windows applications.
I use Linux and OSS because it meets some of my needs better than anything else and because some of my customers leave me no option. I use Microsoft office because all of the competition is dead and there is no option (Open Office doesn't cut it for my needs). I use OS X because it meets some of my needs better than anything else and its worth every penny that I paid for it. I also like the fact that OS X rests on an open source foundation.
While this guy's observations about OSS are based on a limited perspective I see some correspondence with my experience with OSS and non OSS operating systems and applications. There is no opportunity for improvement if every member of the OSS community takes sincere criticism of OSS personally. The fact that Microsoft uses some of the same arguments as this guy doesn't bother me because I can analyze the argument independently of the source. Of course Microsoft will use the best or even true arguments to divert attention away from the real issue which is their monoply.
The only thing that bothers me about this guys criticisms is that he doesn't make them in a constructive way. If he had brought these issues up in a discussion of ways for improving the OSS process it would have spawned a more constructive use of
FOSS seems to baffle and confuse a lot of people. the article is either very confused, or has major ulterior motives, or money-driven paranoia. OSS isn't a household term. never before in human history has there been an entity or domain where a product/good could be MASS-PRODUCED without investment (digital reproduction) and distributed the world over, free of charge. (that i can think of.) software + internet = completely new kind of non-economy. you don't need a printing press, or a factory, or a warehouse, to GET GOOD THINGS TO PEOPLE.
now, getting onto your post, i haven't seen anybody profess that FOSS is always superior over closed-source alternatives, or that nobody has a right to complain about it when an app has problems.
what people are saying is this: it's free. you just can't have the same kind of expectation about being coddled or about commitment to you as a "customer", getting your ass kissed, getting "service". because you're not paying. it's like complaining about staff/service shortage while eating at a volunteer-run charity dinner. the "business model" vocabulary has obviously failed us; everyone can and should have standards and expectations about the quality of a piece of software, but TFA and some commentators have just been blurring the issues.
there seems to be a subtlety about the situation that is lost on a lot of people, at this point in history. when you don't like OSS, you Don't Use It. there's no contract, you're not paying money, there's no agreement that you're entitled to anything. if some OSSware pisses you off, you go elsewhere, perhaps to a commercial vendor. you don't "take your business elsewhere" or anything like that, since you didn't take your business anywhere in the first place.
i've never known anybody to "bitch and moan" when a company, out of either necessity or FUD, goes with a huge commercial software solution. if anything, i've seen OSS proponents lament the fact that you yourself outlined: company XYZ makes billions of dollars, often with nothing but a mediocre product and legal/marketing muscle.
you can't lump all FOSS together and "press" somebody about a "lack of support/quality." some projects are better and more active than others. (i don't feel the need to give examples.) it's like generalizing about the quality of random street musicians.
secondly, when you bring up the "if you don't like it, write your own code!" attitude, i don't know what you're talking about. the non-developer consumer can simply continue their search for a solution. there's nothing about a shoddy or unsuitable FOSS application that somehow demands a closed-source alternative (except in cases where there that's the only option, obviously). in other words, when a FOSS app doesn't appease or suit someone's purposes, it's logical to search for the real solution in both the FOSS and commercial realms. (additionally, could anybody refer me to a case of an OSS developer telling somebody "you don't like it? quit griping, it's free." i've never seen that before, and i've been through a lot of documentation and comment-threads.)
most people with brains have the notion of a cost-benefit analysis. you find the solution that WORKS FOR YOU, and that's the most COST-EFFECTIVE. and "free" takes the cake, except when the product sucks.
the few people i've known who were "pushed" toward closed commercial software are people who just don't "trust" anything free; they assume that something they pay for won't fail them miserably. the hacker stereotypes and "cheeto's on the keyboard" tropes just make people more afraid.
and at this point in time, we're only just beginning.
and i definitely fail to see how these strawman Bad Attitudes of the FOSS camp have contributed to microsoft's market dominance, which is what you just said. remember when microsoft was hung out to dry by the courts for being a monopoly? believe it or not, MS didn't get into that position because of FOSS promoters being jerky.
First of all, no one says any idea that pops into your head 24 hours a day belongs to your employer (unless your contract says so, of course).
Most employment contracts do state that.
Mr. Marshall's argument is unsound on many levels. But, he does have one technical accuracy which I strongly oppose. The fact that many employeers attempt to harvest intellectual thought regardless of direct obligation within an agreed upon timeframe.
Slavery was outlawed, and I argue that if an employeer owns all ideas concocted by their employees on or off the clock, then they effectively "own" the individual. I work for a very large corporation. Such clauses exist in our employment agreement, however, thankfully, the only time my corporation will knock on my front door at home, is if I develop software directly relating to what I do at work. I also made it very clear to them, when I was hired, of my active and ongoing interest in the Open Source arena. This didn't bother them, and it was pointed out that, in writting, that the contract respected the personal ownership of what I did on my own time.
So, any ideas I give the Open Source community, is of my own property and of noone elses. It would be fundamentally wrong to demand that you own all the thoughts an individual makes on or off the clock, so frankly, I wouldn't give a damn if I was on the clock. Becuase I agree with my company, which they in turn agree with me by respecting my interests when at home, I glady follow along.
No one owns me. And it's illegal for them to.
His argument against innovation is naturally and inherently flawed. Most innovation comes not from a team and a leader, but an individual genius brain storming. Many techniques of brainstorming and developing artistic enlightenment comes from an approach without any leadership or direction. In school, in attempts to develop a story from scratch one of the most effective methods is to data dump ideas onto a peace of paper, then review them afterwards to decide which sparks the most interests to base a story on. Art, whether it's composing a peace of music, or painting a picture sometimes is generated by initial random strokes on the canvas, or 3am drunkun random chord progressions on the guitar... eventually, something will spark, and they build off of it to create the next best thing. Leadership, in innovation or creation, is garunteed to inhibit a truely unique idea. Leadership can only go by what is known, what has already happened... inherently detering anything new to come from it.
... the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership ...
So they're claiming that Open-Source and proprietary software really aren't all that different?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
No. Why should they concern me?
If people believe his assertions are true, and they are concerned, then they can simply buy proprietary software - problem solved.
If people believe his assertions are true, and they are not concerned, then they can buy and/or use either proprietary or open source software depending on whichever best suits their needs - problem solved.
If people don't believe his assertions are true, then they can buy and/or use either proprietary or open source software depending on whichever best suits their needs - problem solved.
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
Personally, I'm fond of disruptive change. If FOSS software manages to find a better solution to the problems we have, and FOSS costs 98% of programmers their jobs, then that's wonderful as it's better for society in the long run.
There will always be new fields and new ways of making money; we didn't stop building robots for car manufacturing because we wanted to protect the jobs of factory workers. Why would we want to stop building certain types of software because it might force people into different careers?
Proprietary software is never going to vanish because no one wants to write free open source DENTAL INSURANCE SOFTWARE. There are many more examples like this that require bags of money to be given to programmers in order to produce such uninteresting (but necessary) software.
You make an interesting point on the subject of retirement. It's not going to be long now before early geeks start retiring. After the first few innovations the number of geeks grew tremendously. Even taking into account that some of these geeks may not have kept up their geekiness once they settled down and got a family, that'll still leave a lot of geeks with a lot of time on their hands. It'll be interesting to see what results from that 20 or 30 years from now.
news at 11.
It's funny how often in 'articles' like this, you can replace oss with css and get about the same conclusion. There are only a few projects that DS out there.
Moodle, Drupal, Gallery, Sugar, obviously there are some insanely great OSS products. It takes a mix of personality, niche, goog code, and user community to make a promising OSS project a great one.
Big news flash, it takes much of this (plus the marketing guys) to make it happen in CSS. Sometimes (too often!) you just have the marketing guys..
1) IP laws vary from country to country, and the laws in the UK are not the norm. In most countries, employer's ownership of intellectual property is covered by the contract between the employer and the employee and not national laws. Also, it is generally acknowledged that working as a photographer for a newspaper does not mean that the newspaper owns your holiday pictures. Likewise, working as a software engineer for a company which makes business-to-business e-commerce software does not mean that the company would own the copyrights to drivers you would write for Linux. They are not related to your job. So unless you employment contract specifically says that they own any and all code you write in their employ or unless you are trying to work on an open source project which is very closely related to your job, then it's not relevant.
2) Saying that Open Source projects don't have a core architect only shows that he's never worked on one. Most every open source project has a very small group of people (usually just one) who has final say on what goes in and what doesn't. Sure, anyone can fork it, but in practice this doesn't happen very often. Further, the open source projects I've been involved in are much more likely to care about sticking with the chosen design methodologies than commercial software since open source projects don't have time pressure in order to fix bugs for customers or push out a new release by an arbitrary deadline in order to get the profits in line with analysts predictions so that the stock price stays high. There's never a question of "do we do it right or do we save thousands of dollars by getting it done now?"
3) The fact of the matter is that there is no problem with the level of professionalism in open source projects. Not every one is very professional, but neither is every commercial project. There is no shortage of open source projects with very solid, well written code. It's not clear quite what he means by "professionalism" here anyway. It's likely just a weasel-word used to intimate that those who do not produce software professionally, i.e. get paid to write software, don't do as good a job.
But then worse, he completely and entirely lies about what caused the console game crash in the early eighties. It didn't have a thing to do with video game quality. It had to do with a mismatch between projections of growth in the industry and actual growth. If you actually read any reputable history of what happened with console gaming companies in the early eighties, not a one of them will mention game quality. What happened was that the demand for gaming consoles and their games had been growing at 50% per year for several years. Then, one year, it only grew 17%. Now, 17% in one year is pretty good growth. Not anything indicating that the games were poorly made or the like. But if you're expecting 50% growth and you get 17% growth, this means that you've produced ~28% too many cartridges. For those of you familiar with basic economics, this means that the value of cartridges had to fall, and not necessarily just 28%. What actually happened is that the sale prices of game cartridges fell by more than 50%, which, as manufacturing, promotion, and shipping costs hadn't fallen, meant that the industry lost a huge amount of money. This is Econ 101: supply and demand. It did not have a thing to do with "unprofessional programming" and suggesting it did is simply lying.
4) As for Innovation, there are quite a few innovative open source projects. Although it's true that open source projects which serve as a direct replacement for commercial software projects are often well known, it does not follow that there are not innovative Open Source projects out there. In truth, there's no shortage of innovative open source projects. Many of them aren't terribly well known precisely because they are so innovative, so I can't well come up with an exhaustive list. But here are some obvious, well-known, innovative Open Source projects: BitTorrent, SVN (and
A binary file that is easily reproduceable?
Unless you are MS that is not bussiness. Pretty much any company that matters in the software industry has abandoned the idea of selling software per se and make money by providing services (customization, training, advice) and support (fixes, patch releases).
TO insist in making money just by selling software is childish and goes against the flow of the whole industry.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... to point us to any well known project's web site where such language is used.
May I venture that you are quoting your own b.o.?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Exactly the kind of argument the proprietary software companies don't want to hear. The collective total saved by everyone using a better product coupled with the ability to 'roll their own' solutions.
Mr Marshall writes that "However, when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer"
IANAL but I don't believe that this is the case for the UK, unless a contract states otherwise and someone is stupid enough to sign it.
I would be very interested to find out if Mr Marshall bases his opinion on any law or precedent, or if he is just wildly guessing.
No but, yeah but, no but...
If you find a good piece of software which you need to utilise commercially and are worried because it hasn't been maintained, well then as you would with any commercial component, do the CBA.
Does it make more sense to save on licences and adopt this tool in its current state? Perhaps your organisation is going to fork it for their own use anyway? So you guys become the maintainers.
Perhaps, it makes more sense for you to go and buy a pricey product which is sold as more than it actually is?
That's your call. Either way, don't take away my choice.
We have the freedom to weigh the degree of professionalism, support, security, etc, on a given open source project, comparing this with what is being offered off the shelf.
If you choose to use one open source component, you don't have to bow down and face Finland 5 times a day. You don't need to carry Linus' picture in your underpants. Well, no more than you need to carry Bill's. Oh? You want to keep Bill in there??
Either way, it's your call.
"I'm sure that many of us would secretly welcome the collapse of the virtual monopoly that currently exists in the desktop software market."
Secretly ?!?!?
I'd be celebrating as if it was the Berlin wall coming down, Hogmanay, my birthday and Newcastle United winning the English Premiership all at once.
No but, yeah but, no but...
Check out this guy's reply to the main article. Its really funny. Open source is bad you say...
Because you are gonna be building the software and not getting paid to do it. The Robot deisngers are getting paid to build....and to program the robots.
http://www.codase.com/
FunctionalMethod (751923) is correct when they say the OP was 80% is true and no one seems to realise it. Actually I think it's closer to 99.99% true. If people didn't want MS Windows, they wouldn't spend their money for it and they'd find another OS. They typical /. lack of understanding of the free market.
I don't know about everyone in the Software Industry, but I'm not familiar any Open Sores types that have been convicted in a Federal Court for lying, cheating, and stealing; But I know of one Close Sores company that has. Parents, if your child wishes to work for a close sores company; Then read the newspapers of what your childrens "new friends" are getting in trouble for. It should be enough to say that your childs "new friends" ARE getting into trouble.
Despite giving on convincing show of being a high power executive (which you could easily be, I don't know as this is the internet), you don't understand business.
Business is about investment. You invest time and money now, to make it up latter. You buy a machine because you can sell the results of the machine. My boss just spent 6 months paying me to write software that he hasn't made a penny on yet. Soon though he will release it, and we plan on making money selling it. In the mean time he is paying me to work on the next project (or fix bugs in the old).
If you are not willing to invest money to build FOSS you should not be surprised that it takes a long time to get to the point where you want it. After all, those of us who are working on it, are working on it to fill our needs first.
Example: Koffice has poor Microsoft Word import filters. The developers would like them, but it is a complex task, and there are other things they want more. As soon as someone comes up with the money to pay someone for a few months/years for filters someone will write them. Until then you will have to wait until someone finally gets around to fixing whatever bugs you have.
FOSS developers care about what they want first. We do it for fun, and we will add a feature you like if it is interesting, but if we don't want it it won't happen no matter how interesting it is. You can throw money at some of us for that feature if you really want it. (normally. Sometimes a feature only sounds good and will be rejected no matter what, but this only happens where there is a technical flaw)
I find that one of the biggest problems of open source is a coupling of politics and hypocracy.
There have been a lot of flamewars, for example, over switching the kernel to support only 4K stacks. At the moment this effectively will break REISER4, some NFS+XFS support, and ndiswrapper.
So far, the responses from the kernel developers seem to have been:
Here's a patch for Reiser4, we're working on one for the XFS issue, but f*** ndiswrapper you windows-loving loser... make a real linux driver. Now granted, I would love a real linux driver for my NIC, but after going through several laptops most I have seen don't have a suppored Wireless NIC. Given that NDISWrapper breaks, my choice is to now dual-boot windows, or go without.
Not much of a choice from the people who are supposed to advocate choice, is it? But the open-source-or-nothing approach seems to infuse many, when it should really be, use-the-best-choice.
I'll grant that source code is useless to your grandpa. However it is useful documentation to me. I'm a programmer by trade, I have the specialized training to read that source code.
I'm not a medical doctor by trade. Medical doctors have a large set of documentation that I cannot read - my high school biology just isn't up to understanding it. Should we call all those books the doctor reads worthless because the average person cannot read it, or are they useful even though the average person cannot read it?
Just because 99% of the population cannot read some set of documentation does not make it worthless.
No! What we need is for government to pay less attention to the "threat to the industry's livelihood" and more attention to removing obstacles to the rise of the public domain's interests, as is fostered by FOSS methods of product value development and delivery.
The arguement boils down like this, for me:
Are you going to make money from selling software, or are you going to make money by USING software?
When a bunch of industries all need the same set of widgets, it is to their interest to contribute a small amount to get a good common ground to work from. This is one reason why embedded linux is popular; otherwise, you end up with a tax on your products in the form of royalties or liscences to a third party.
The question becomes, does it cost society to have cheap tools in the form of IP losses, real or percieved? Is this cost offset by increased productivity elsewhere?
..don't panic
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Here's the bit that applies to me:
That's interesting, because we had a huge issue with this in getting the contracts sorted out when my employer was taken over by a US megacorp whose default contract basically said they owned everything. There is now an explicit exemption in my contract for things not done on company time, not using company resources, and not connected with the job. If they owned everything by default, why did the company need to put such draconian terms into the original contract, and then accept our changes afterwards?
I'd like to know which part of the CDPA he thinks screws every salaried software developer in the UK, without anyone even noticing, but curiously he seems to have forgotten to give a full citation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The author is an academic, whose name turns up a couple of times if you google it together with "BCS", along with some intriguing comments on other forums.
One of the most interesting was the question of why, being an academic, he chose to publish this rant in a freebie magazine rather than a peer-reviewed journal.
Another notes that his department has rather close ties to licensing of IP.
Several described the correctness of his claims about IP using various unflattering terms.
After a fairly extensive web search, I have been unable to find anything substantiating his unsupported claim that for professional software developers in the UK, any code you write (even out of work time) belongs to your employer by default. That would have been a very worrying revelation had it been true, but pretty much everyone on the web just quotes the letter of the law ("in the normal course of their employment"), mentioning the common themes of employer's time, employer's resources, and work based on the nature of the employment.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not always. You can't copyright ideas, for example, so all that matters as far as copyright is concerned is when the expression of the idea was created.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is an additional dynamic with OSS that is absent with most commercial software, and so it isn't talked about much by the institutionals. Since OSS is typically free, when innovation does occur, the cream rises to the top quickly and spreads widely to everyone who needs it. With commercial software, some may balk at the price, and others don't want to bother with extra licensing. It can only spread from a central point outward guided by central marketing, rather than from peers guided by (decentralized) consulting or advice. Still others want to try out commercial software but don't know if they need it, so they never try it. OSS, in contrast is free to try and free to buy, so there is little to hold it back, fewer restrictions and less maintenance forced upon people when they do decide to use it. Therefore, whatever innovation occurs is greased by these wheels and potentially benefits a much larger group of people than otherwise.
Just think, all of this and without the need for a $100 million ad budget or a pack of lawyers to write or interpret EULAs to protect IP.
The article tries to convince people that large companies innovate, but it fails to mention that these companies also get R&D tax breaks for exactly that purpose. So, whatever advantage closed source appears to have should be taken with that adjustment in mind, that they some extra help that the OSS people don't get.
So linux lacks professionalism and conceptual integrity? Last time I checked, it was Microsoft that was laden with such severe security problems that could only be attribute to a LACK OF conceptual integrity.
The open source movement in many ways mimicks nature and darwinism. What exactly is conceptual integrity? It's quite simple from a survival of fittest standpoint. Open source promotes diversity and natural selection chooses the best. Works better than the thousands of man-years poured into Exchange Server!
So then according to Mr. Russell is nature lacking conceptual integrity? Or do you not believe in evolution?
My web-based database project Lightspoke is a commercial software using a host of open source frameworks and sub-applications. It has saved several man-years as far as I am concerned and has hence enabled us to be very generous with our costing. Our customers routinely enjoy an extremely high level of functionality for less money. Maybe Microsoft should takes some notes on this point - more stuff, less money!
Lightspoke Web Based Database
Here's a partial summary (before I lost interest)
Intellectual Property:Since we must accept that companies are evil and greedy, demanding not only fruits delivered durring working hours but all hours, OSS is clearly a violation of the natural laws of civilized society... i.e. The slaves are trying to conspire and thats against the law. Or if its not, it should be.
Conceptual Integrity:OSS poses no advantage over proprietary software since oss does peer reviews and proprietary doesn't, but should. Huh? Am I missing something?
Professionalism:Hackers are unprofessional. I view people that consider the "balance of power" important, such as the authors of the US Constitution, as being hackers. Therefore OSS is unprofessional
Innovation: The only open source I'm aware of is Linux, so lets talk about that. Its not very creative, therefore OSS is not very creative... To summarize, all tree's are vegetable, therefore all vegetables are trees.
Now lets stop talking nonsense and start pointing out how badly OSS would be if it truely functioned the way I perceive that it functioned. I perceive that all companies start with a piece of paper with two checkboxes in it; one for open source and one for closed source. The company, upon making the decision to sell software, cuts the fingers of each employee and places a little of their blood on the little checkbox which states our selection.
Now I need to write a bunch more stuff so my boss thinks I'm doing something useful. I hope he doesn't read this far down in my little article or maybe I'll get another beating. I guess I better get back, MASTUHH needs me!!
One just has to wonder what this guy was high on while he wrote this article (and where I can get some).
His primary argument is that my employer owns me. My employer doesn't just own what I think up while I'm at work. They own what I think up while I'm at home, on my time. He contends that they own me in all respects. Simple logic dictates that something is wrong with this argument... it is far from cogent and it implicates its author to be either an idiot at best or a facist at worst.
His second main argument is that one must do what is best for the computer industry. This is simple, straight-up bullshit. It is like saying... well, I know that millions of people die each year in car accidents... but fuck it breaks cost money, and car companies don't really need to put breaks in their cars... I mean without breaks, car companies would have higher profit margins. Clearly, this is not the goal of our society... to protect buisness. Society is, and must be, inherently altrusitic, bound by a social contract as deep-rooted into the very essence of humanity as civilization itself, stating that society exists only for the betterment of the individual.
To fear what you don't understand is natural, and to scapegoat it is both common and unfortunate. That being the case, this argument appears to be just what it is -- a stupid, baseless attack on Open Source Software based on a simple lack of understanding.