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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?"
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.
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.
You took the words right out of my mouth :)
Seriously, if you don't like open source then you're free to get your software somewhere else. The fact that people even write articles like this really says something -- that the traditional industry is afraid of open source. It makes sense that an industry that sells virus-infected software for $200 a pop is afraid of a kind of software that doesn't cost any money and has most of its critical bugs fixed in a week.
But, if you don't like that, nobody's forcing you to use it. Don't like Linux? Don't use it! Whining about how it's unprofessional or unsafe or whatever isn't going to solve any of your problems. Try writing software that's better or cheaper... if you can't do that then you need a new industry. (Oh, I have an idea. Let's make OSS illegal since it hurts business. It worked for P2P and the music industry, right?)
My other car is first.
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!
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?
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
Sales and support are the hard part. Writing the code is easy.
Oh well, what the hell...
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
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.
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
...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.
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.
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 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
I'm a linux developer, and I don't get your point at all. If you want to deal with a company, then deal with a company.
/. whines about how FOSS it the best, FOSS rules the world, FOSS is the only real solution to any problem, and anyone who spends any money on commercial software is a fool.
This is exactly what we do. But then everybody on
You can't have it both ways, guys. You keep trying, but you can't. Either embrace the fact that enterprises demand enterprise-level services and thus most FOSS is completely innappropriate, or bring FOSS up to enterprise-level standards.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
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?
> 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.
and
To generalize in the opposite direction, enterprises seem to think that everyone is an enterprise. Guess what? Most businesses are small businesses. Most employees work for small businesses, and many of those that don't work for smaller public sector agencies (e.g., municipal governments), small non-profits, etc. Having deployed a fair bit of FOSS at outfits of that size, today's FOSS works out quite nicely, given somebody like me who can smooth out the rough edges.
Enterprises seem to think that the whole software world is supposed to revolve around the enterprise. To a large extent, they've succeeded in getting the software world to buy into that vision — it feels like everyone's trying to pitch to the Fortune 500 and, as a side-effect, making their products too expensive and too complicated for smaller customers. Given a choice between spending a ton of dough on tech they need somebody's help to use, or spending next to nothing on tech they need somebody's help to use, what do you think a smaller firm is going to do?
So, I'll agree with your assessment that lots of FOSS is unsuitable for the enterprise. But, as the adage goes, "the barbarians always win".
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
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!
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/
This is so true - OSS is a force for commoditization. But you missed the corrolary to point.
Commodities aren't innovative. By their very nature, commodities can't be.
When was the last time you saw innovation in rice? How about innovation in breakfast cereal?
The key thing about a commodity is that they are 100% fungible. Each one is just as good as the next.
This totally precludes innovation - if it was innovative, it wouldn't be a commodity.
See the wikipedia definition of commodity for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
(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.
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.
But this isn't an issue with F/OSS, it's a issue with small or unprofessional development teams. You only have to look at the shareware industry to find examples of poorly thought-out and unsupported hobby software. You, and the original article, have a genuine concern about such unprofessional developers, but in identifying such developers primarily with F/OSS, you're confusing the discussion.
There are plenty of F/OSS developers who treat their work in a business-like fashion: Apache, the Linux kernel, Eclipse, Firefox and others show that F/OSS is not incompatible with professional development.
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
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.
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.
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.
"Oh, I have an idea. Lets make OSS illegal since it hurts business".
You have given the best summary of what this author is really selling.
Leads off with IP laws (written before there was such a thing as software) and ends with:
"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"
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.
Pretty cute, too, use of "the industry" - as if processes and methods matter more than the public value of, and accessibility to, the product. And as if the 'proprietary' world's processes and methods are "the industry" while FOSS is not.
As pointed out in at least one other post, I think that - for example - IBM, Sun and HP would be surprised to discover that they are not in "the industry".
You indirectly use OSS all the time and probably don't think about it. The webservers you visit, some of the mail you send and the protocols to get there, for example. Yeah, granted these could be made "better" if introduced by a proprietary company. But would you want that?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe then I could go a day without the constant prattle about how Windows is so horrible...
Then stop emailing us Word documents and complaining when you can't play standard video formats in Media Player.
Or you base your code on a really useful library at the time, but then that library atrophies and doesn't get updated with support for 'foo' or 'bar', or serious bugs X, Y and Z don't get fixed. You may now be screwed and either have to take over an external project (that you may well not have the skills/resources to handle) or redo your code to replace that libary with something else (which hopefully is available and not TOO much of a modification to use).