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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?"
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.
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!
Your examples are good, obvious ones. You could have cited GCC too, which is one of the best compiler suites that I know of.
The guy has a point, though. Not all OSS is high quality, far from it. And last but not least, not all of it is maintained on a decently regular basis. I know a lot of OSS projects, some of which quite good, which have gone unmaintained, or are maintained once in a blue moon - that is unprofessional. And that's the very nature of OSS: you can't blame the developers for not maintaining their projects as much as they should, because, well, they have a life to lead and money to make to sustain it! As someone pointed out, a developer, at the end of the day, wants to be able to make money from his work... I'm in that place too: as much as I love OSS, and use a lot of it, I am not in a place in my life right now where I can afford to contribute and not get any money in return... maybe when I'm retired? (And I think a lot of us can relate.)
Actually, the examples you mentioned have more or less all something in common: they are backed by either a foundation or a commercial company! That's actually how they can survive and keep their level of quality. Again, a lot of project are poorly maintained or just plain disappear... of course, you might say, since it's OSS, someone else can pick up where it was left off. But in reality, does it happen a lot? It does sometimes, but I'd venture that it's not the destiny of most small to medium-sized OSS projects...
All in all, we're always back to the same issue: how do we work for free and still make money? Obviously the "making money off support" is not always workable, especially for the smaller companies. Besides, that would essentially mean, for a small company, providing custom solutions; something that is very demanding (all of us fellow independant engineers should relate...) Also, some software solutions do not need extensive support compared to some others. Then, imagine you have a great software package that pretty much works "off the box" for everyone. How do you make money?
As great as OSS is, there is a point where just "sharing" stuff with others is not enough. Actually, if you're not paid for your creative work (software), but for the additional support, doesn't that imply, in the end, that creative work has no value in itself? One of the key problems, in my opinion, and not just with software. Nowadays, more and more people find it perfectly normal not to pay for music and movies - and pay for solutions to access it. I'm afraid we would run as much risk to eventually see only the biggest companies (or foundations, or whatever) survive, than we do with sofware patents. Two different approaches... but are the consequences all that different? Not necessarily.
Again in my opinion, open standards are much more important than open source software. They guarantee our freedom. OSS is not the only way to promote them, although it has taken a big part in it so far.
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...
Right on. Closed-source software often carries the *impression* of professionalism: there's a lot of pressure to look polished at demo-time. But there's no pressure for the underlying architecture to be done to a professional standard, meaning that many products reveal their flaws months after release in the form of security problems and deeper, more frustrating bugs.
Similar forces affect conceptual integrity. Engineers in a closed shop can work around design inconsistencies with janky adaptive measures, because they can talk to each other. Open source projects fail pathetically if they don't keep design integrity, because programmers dispersed over many continents are extremely dependent on design decisions to communicate with one another.
Any by the way, what was the poster smoking when suggesting this article was cogently argued? A decent vocabulary and grammatical precision do not cogency make. This guy recycled ancient fears about "hacker culture", mixing in a few plattitudes about the "legendary robustness of Linux" and taking digs at MS to semi-appease the OSS community he's attacking. The most interesting concept in his paper -- exploring OSS's indirect effects on the "software ecosystem" -- is something he doesn't even go into, instead focusing on problems with OSS which are independent of the rest of the world.
Bullocks.
"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".