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?"

Comments

Do these issues concern you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

Re:Do these issues concern you?

[jrockway]

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?)

Re:Do these issues concern you?

[quarkzone]

"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".

Re:Do these issues concern you?

[haruchai]

Hmmm, after some searching, I'm unable to find either a company or a program called Anonymous Coward.
It may well be that nothing in the OSS world can touch what your company makes but we can't know that if you don't tell us, O Inscrutable One.

Let's not forget that OSS drives much of the Net and that a lot of great software was written by people who just wanted to get something done when there were no proprietary apps were available or affordable.
No matter what each side says, there is enough room on Earth for both software models.

Re:Do these issues concern you?

[SnowZero]

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.

Hrmph.

[nurhussein]

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.

Re:Hrmph.

[InodoroPereyra]

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).

Exactly. And let's cite a few examples:

• Apache.
• OpenOffice.
• Linux Kernel, BSD Kernel.
• KDE, GNOME.
• Samba
• Mozilla suite, Firefox

And I am leaving a lot of large scale, succesfull, profesional grade, conceptually integral and in many cases innovative Open Sourve / Free software. Many of them more industry specific, like JBoss.

And for God's sake, not every fscking project needs to be innovative, all right ?

Re:Hrmph.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always felt that Linux is a nice operating system (for hobbyists and geeks), but there are some areas where it is seriously lacking, especially when compared to its main competitor, Microsoft Windows.

* File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large amounts of files available to third parties. Even early versions of Windows automatically detected and made available all directories thanks to the built in NetBIOS-powered file sharing support. But Microsoft has realized that this technology is inherently limited and has added even better file sharing support to its Windows XP operating system. Universal Plug and Play will make it possible to literally access any file, from any device! I think universal file sharing support needs to be built into the Linux kernel soon.

* Intelligent agents. With innovations like Clippy, the talking paperclip and Microsoft Bob, Microsoft has always tried to make life easier for its customers. With Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft has built a framework for developers to create even smarter agents. Especially popular agents include "Sircam", which automatically asks the users' friends for advice on files he is working on and the "Hybris" agent, which is a self-replicating copy of a humorous take on "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves" (the real story!). Microsoft is working on expanding this P2P technology to its web servers. This project is still in the beta stage, thus the name "Code Red". The next versions will be called "Code Yellow" and "Code Green".

* Version numbers. Linux has real naming problems. What's the difference between a 2.4.19 and a 2.2.17 kernel anyway? And what's with those odd and even numbers? Microsoft has always had clear and sophisticated naming/versioning policies. For example, Windows 95 was named Windows 95 because it was released in 1995. Windows 98 was released three years later, and so on. Windows XP brought a whole new "experience" to the user, therefore the name. I suggest that the next Linux kernel releases be called Linux 03, Linux 04, Linux 04.5 (OSR1),
Linux 04.7B (OSR2 SP4 OEM), Linux 2005 and Linux VD (Valentine's Day edition). Furthermore, remember how Microsoft named every upcoming version of Windows after some Egyptian city? Cairo, Chicago and so on. I think that the development kernels should be named after Spanish cities to celebrate Linux' Spanish origins. Linux Milano or Linux Rome anyone?

* Multi-User Support. This has always been one of Microsoft's strong sides, especially in the Windows 95/98 variants, where passwords were completely unnecessary. Microsoft has made the right decision by not bothering the user
with a distinction between "normal" and "root" users too much -- practice has shown that average users can be trusted to act responsibly and in full awareness of the potential consequences of their actions. After all, if your operating system doesn't trust you, why should you trust it? (To be fair, Linux is making some progress here with the Lindows distribution, where users are always running as root.)

With Windows XP, Microsoft has again improved multi-user support. Not only does Windows XP come with a large library of user pictures that are displayed on the login screen, such as a guitar and a flower, i

Re:Hrmph.

[AndreiK]

The scary thing is, I thought you were serious until that DRM part.

Re:Hrmph.

[MerlinTheWizard]

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.

Re:Hrmph.

[ceejayoz]

The proper way to handle critique is to not respond anything, ignore the rubbish and improve on the real issues, then silently let the results speak for themselves.

Hey, are you the former campaign advisor for the Democratic Party, by any chance?

Re:Hrmph.

[tftp]

Then why do Microsoft and Google get constant flak for copying old things and changing the presentation a bit and sticking their name on it?

Because they say that this thing is new and shiny, when it is not.

Plenty of companies sell old, familiar stuff - sugar, water, lumber, grain - none of that needs to be innovative, and I'd rather prefer that it is not. There is nothing wrong in providing more of the same, with a few little things tweaked here and there - as long as you are honest about that.

Re:Hrmph.

[bitingduck]

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'm a relative newcomer to OSS, but I think that neither of these statements is a real problem with OSS.

first: Not all OSS is high quality.

That's certainly true, but not all closed source software is high quality either. A lot of fairly specialized stuff that's closed source is junk, too. (actually some pretty major stuff is junk, too, but I'll use a relatively specialized example) A friend of mine has had to wrestle a lot with electrophysiology software (to drive data acq hardware and analyze data) and a lot of the proprietary stuff is expensive and kludgy, and often you can't tell if the calculations it claims to be doing are grounded in reality. There are some open source alternatives, and although they may not have some of the features you want from the closed stuff, you can add the ones you need and know how they actually do the work . In science that you're publishing it's critical to know that the software isn't doing something wrong behind your back. OSS makes it easier to check and fix problems with the data acq and analysis software.

I've also had problems with closed source data acq software environments that force upgrades too frequently, and in such a way that if you want to make minor changes to something, or run it on a slightly later OS, you have to upgrade the whole thing (sometimes taking a lot of time and money), rather than be able to just upgrade the pieces of it that you want to use.

As for stuff that's not maintained: That's also a problem in the closed source world, and it's worse. If you have closed source legacy software that gets dropped you're SOL if you ever need to change anything (like maybe buy a new machine to run it on, because the old one died, but the program only runs under windows 3.1). You basically have to replace the whole thing.

For open source stuff that's not maintained it just goes dormant. I recently decided to start playing around with a subset of the open directory (dmoz.org), and rather than try to roll all my own software, spent a fair amount of time looking for stuff that I could start from. There are a fair number of closed source packages for manipulating the data, and a few open source ones, too. Possibly the best one I found was an open source perl module that hadn't been maintained in about 4 years (Catalog at Senga.org). It installed easily and pretty much ran out of the box (despite being designed for a much earlier version of mySQL). There were some things that needed fixing (e.g. compliance with the current dmoz acknowledgement statement) and it was relatively easy to do myself. I also can customize it to do whatever I need much more easily than trying to wrestle APIs on someone elses closed source package, and put the updated version back up for others to use and expand on.

Re:Hrmph.

[jdgeorge]

The fact that 80% of your comment is true and you don't even realise it.

Clearly, the poster was perfectly aware there was some truth in his post. That is precisely why the post was humorous.

Or are you saying that we should decide what the people want. Cause that would be kinda scary.

You have uncovered an interesting point here: The difference between closed-source systems, such as MS Windows, and free systems, such as GNU/Linux, is precisely that with closed-source systems, corporations decide what the people want. With free systems, the people not only decide what they want, but also create, modify, and improve what they want. You are quite correct that, to a company such as Microsoft, it is "kinda scary" that we, the people, have the power to decide what we want.

Not really

[vectorian798]

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.

Re:Not really

[MrAndrews]

Aha! Exactly the point I've been trying to make, and phrased perfectly! If you spend your time professionally supporting your own code, your coding time is your hobby just as much as working for Company X and programming at night.

Now, to extend that a bit further: if there were a mechanism by which you, as a programmer, could work at your code full-time, people would then naturally assume "conceptual integrity", "professionalism" and you'd have far more time (and fewer restrictions) to achieve proper "innovation".

So really, this comes down to earning money from lines written, which requires something akin to a royalty set-up, which is immensely do-able, but I'm sure will never be implemented because there's a bizarre dislike of all things monetary built into the mind of the average GPL proponent. Which is not to say ALL of them, but a great many.

So yes. Keep on supporting the code. It's your best bet.

Re:Not really

[Billly Gates]

Quite easy.

I view FOSS as a resume builder for a dream software engineering job. I have no experience developing software so would you hire me? Of course not

However if I can show what I do and what I have done I have a chance.

If you were hiring someone would you hire them on their word on what projects that did at job X? Or would you hire someone who contributed %25 of the html rendering code in Konqueror and developed a nice tcp/ip sniffing application? I would chose the later. His or her code could also be viewed by other software engineers on the team for quality and it would show that person loves developing software and its not just a paycheck.

Really this is why I use FOSS. Its a chance to better myself and other people using it.

Re:Not really

[Arker]

You want to make money coding?

So what you do is customise software. This is probably where MOST coders make their money, and always has been. The availability of standardised Free Software packages to build on has only expanded this market.

Re:Not really

[Bob_Robertson]

What bothers me about writing open source code is simple: Where is my money[?]

In a demand economy, such as a capitalist one, you are paid by those to whom you trade your labor/skills/time.

As a programmer, I think you will find most paid programming is done not to build general applications that are then shrink-wrapped, what companies pay for is something that directly benefits themselves. Tools, software customization, the generic "Database Analist" and "Systems Administrator".

So if you want to be paid to write F/OSS, find an organization which will pay you for your time doing what they need, and help them to realize that putting the resultant code under GPL, for example, helps everyone, including them.

In other words, don't sell air. You cannot make money selling air where it is freely available, so don't complain about that.

Find where "air" is scarce, sell it there. Find what people do with "air" and help them do it, that's selling services.

Bob-

Re:Not really

[DavidTC]

People will try to convince you that people can make money with OSS.

This is completely moot. OSS exists, period. People write it, period. This will continue to be true barring laws to the contrary, and I suspect even then.

Talking about where people can make money at it or not is like a world where gold suddenly falls from the sky, and people sit around talking about if the 'free gold' is going to succeed or not, because damned if they can see any way that people will make money at it.

Just because something doesn't make economical sense doesn't mean it can't happen, or it won't effect an industry. Things can happen that can destroy an industry for no apparent reason at all.

Now, this isn't to say I think the software industry is endangered. However, there is no logical reason to think it isn't, and there's no logical reason to think that if it is, OSS will just magically go away.

While it's nice fable to believe, industries do not magically transition to other things, keeping all their income and employees intact. Yes, if people buy cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, the buggy-whip industry can try to transition to seatbelts. However, if someone invents magical self-relicating teeth-cleaning nanobots and sets them free, the toothbrush industry is screwed.

So how is proprietary software less affected by...

[D4C5CE]

...the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation

?

wrong on three counts (or 2.5)

[platypus]

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.

Re:wrong on three counts (or 2.5)

[maomoondog]

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.

Re:wrong on three counts (or 2.5)

[Fortress]

Internet Explorer for example would've been forked long ago if it was open source.

Some would say it's pretty forked up right now...

Innovation

[daniil]

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.

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.

Re:Innovation

[JohnFluxx]

Heh, we (programmers) are often told (by our usability groups) that the direction we need to go in is to first do what is familiar to the user. And so we must copy MS first, then innovate second. I hate it as much as anyone, but that's what people are used to. If we innovate and make it different, people then complain about the high TCO from switching and relearning.

(I'm a KDE developer. And yes we have usability groups.)

Re:Innovation

[cheesybagel]

What the man said happens with any piece of software. Remember Wordstar? Wordperfect? Microsoft Word?

Again: Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel.

Once more: Harvard Graphics, Microsoft Powerpoint.

Need I go on?

Re:Innovation

[Arker]

Listening to those usability groups is exactly why I don't find your software very usable, personally. Of course there's another unnamed project that's notably worse, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a huge difference between good interface design, and copying MS (which has always had a very tenuous grasp on the notion of UI design, beyond copying Apple, badly.)

In another post in this article you advised 'looking at the bigger picture' even when it means doing something that seems suboptimal in the short run. Yes, if you don't mimic windows, in the short run some (definately not ALL) users are going to think you're less usable because you're not what they're accustomed to. But if you look at the long run, the benefits of doing things right are more than worth the small inconvenience to a subset of potential users, in my opinion. Particularly when balanced against the other subsets of potential and actual users, who find this crap annoying beyond belief.

Possibly that's because I'm NOT used to windows, of course.

Re:Innovation

[Chemicalscum]

OpenOffice is better than MS Office insomuch that it stores its documents in an open standard format rather than a closed proprietary binary format. This has consequences for those concerned with long term storage of documents. Will you be able to open that document in ten or twenty years time.

This is the reason why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering converting to OpenOffice.

Re:Innovation

[grayrest]

I can't see how...Mozilla is any better than Microsoft Internet Explorer in any way other than its license

Tabs
Typeahead Find
Bookmark Keywords (possible in IE with tweakui)
Javascript Errors point to the correct line of code
Javascript Debugger
Document Inspector
CSS2 selectors
CSS3 color model
  support
pseudo-classes on every element
PNG Alpha Channel Support
(alpha grade) SVG support
MathML support
(alpha grade) XForms support
User CSS
Centralized Extension Database
XML-driven UI (XUL, predates XAML by years)
Easy Extension authoring
Web Developer Extension
Greasemonkey Extension
Gestures Extensions
Download Statusbar Extension
Javascript Shell Bookmarklet
Edit Styles Bookmarklet
View selection/generated source

Yeah, I don't understand why people would choose mozilla over IE. Must be for granola-eating, sandals-wearing hippie reasons.

Re:Innovation

[l33t_n1nja]

I suppose that Innovation depends on perspective of innovation.

With OSS options are completely limitless, perhaps in the development of systems that perform similiar functions such as Wordprocessors, Spreadsheets etc, innovation is less in OSS, but when it comes to providing interesting solutions built on OSS, all you need is a little bit of Imagination, business sense and some knowledge.

I have been building solutions on MS products for the past 7 years, and in only 6 months of embracing OSS, already have so much more to offer my clients for less.

And wasn't there an article on /. last week about MS IIS7 learning a number of lessons from Apache?

My biggest issue with open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:My biggest issue with open source software

[Spoing]

My biggest problem with open source software is that the vast majority of open source software projects end up in some sort of limbo

My biggest gripe is that some of the relly good programs have names like this.

(Try selling that one to a manager just on your force of argument without using the acronym DCL instead of the full name!)

Re:My biggest issue with open source software

[jesup]

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).

Article contradicts itelf

[PaxTech]

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.

Hmm

[JohnFluxx]

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?

Intellectual Property

[yfkar]

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!

Re:Intellectual Property

[Skreems]

You're completely right. In fact, not only SHOULD they be able to, they ARE able to. The employee contract for most businesses states that employee code written in free time belongs to the employing company ONLY if it derives significantly from the work the employee is doing for pay. That means that while someone working on the Vista kernel wouldn't legally be allowed to contribute code to the Linux kernel, they're more than welcome to work on Firefox, for example, or GIMP, or basically any other product that doesn't parallel kernel programming.

Before I get flamed, let me point out that I realize there's also usually a clause that states you can't compete with the employing companies products in your outside work, so Firefox would be out of bounds for a MS employee. The point remains, though.

Re:Intellectual Property

[UncleFluffy]

I found the whole IP thing completely ridiculous.

From my memory of waving the legislation he mentions (Patents Act 1977) in front of an employer during contract negotiation time, it's not only ridiculous, it's wrong. As far as I can remember, the employer only owns the rights if the IP: (a) is produced on the employer's time, or (b) is produced using the employer's equipments, or (c) relates to the employer's business activities. If none of these are true, UK law says that the ownership of the IP is the employee's.

(Though it's seven years since I left the UK - UK-based folks should double check this yourselves).

Re:Intellectual Property

[westyvw]

I hope that janitor doesnt go home and using his employer taught skills clean his bathroom at home on his time.

Re:Intellectual Property

[harmless_mammal]

Ha! I work at the University of Texas. Any software I create during my employment is the property of the UT System. There is no concept of "my" time in my employement contract, as I am an FLSA-exempt employee. And it doesn't matter if it's on my own equipment or theirs.

And since the UT System is part of the Government of the State of Texas, everything I produce is owned by the State.

Welcome to Amerika

Re:Intellectual Property

[Haeleth]

Pretty much, yes.

Incidentally, I just scanned through the other legislation he mentions (the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988), and what it says is this:

(1) The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it, subject to the following provisions.

(2) Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or a film, is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.

This is the only mention in the entire act of any concept of works belonging to an employer, except for a couple of references to this section. I am having serious difficulties figuring out how "in the course of his employment" is supposed to imply "irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours".

As for the Patents Act 1977, what it says is this:

(1) Notwithstanding anything in any rule of law, an invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken to belong to his employer for the purposes of this Act and all other purposes if -
(a) it was made in the course of the normal duties of the employee or in the course of duties falling outside his normal duties, but specifically assigned to him, and the circumstances in either case were such that an invention might reasonably be expected to result from the carrying out of his duties; or
(b) the invention was made in the course of the duties of the employee and, at the time of making the invention, because of the nature of his duties and the particular responsibilities arising from the nature of his duties he had a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's undertaking.

(2) Any other invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken for those purposes to belong to the employee.

Now, if anything you invent belongs to your employer, what exactly is the point of (2) there?

Disclaimer: IANAL. It's quite possible that these laws are written in an evil dialect of English in which "belongs to the employee" means "belongs to the employer". Consult a real lawyer if you care.

Straw man argument

[try_anything]

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.

They concern me, but apply equally to proprietary

[Ed Avis]

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.

Of course they concern me

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.

Re:Of course they concern me

[mgkimsal2]

I've had the same issues with open source projects *AND* even closed source products that were a 'business'. I was at a company which spent 5 figures on a time tracking system which was supposed to 'integrate' with MS Project. *After* purchasing, we found it didn't do what we were told it did. Caveat emptor, etc. but what do you do? It had 'documentation', a 'support' number with people answering the phones, all the requisites of what people consider necessary for a 'business', but the product was broken for our needs. We were *lied* to, flat out, but had no recourse short of legal action. Should we have pursued that? Possibly, but that is more money and time pursuing something which has an unsure outcome.

Yes, there are more bad/unprofessional OSS projects out there than good, but it seems to be an equal problem for software in general, not something which only affects OSS.

Re:Of course they concern me

[swillden]

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.

First, the "web behind the ears" jab is both unnecessary and highly inaccurate. Second, why would you possibly expect them to think about it any other way? People who write software for fun, or to solve their own problem have no need and no desire to polish it up so it looks like a "serious business application"! They can make it work, and work very well, and that's really all they care about. They often do derive some pleasure from the fact that others get use out of it, but not only is that not a strong enough motivation to polish and support it the way you would like, it's a motivation that gets squashed in a hurry by attitudes like yours.

If you want software that has "user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support" then you are going to have to buy it. That's never going to change. Just accept it. Now, there are multiple ways to buy such software. You can do it by:

1. Paying a commercial vendor like Microsoft for closed-source software. This approach has advantages and disadvantages.
2. Paying a commercial vendor like Red Hat for open source software and support. This approach will probably cost you quite a bit of money, though perhaps less than the previous option. Documentation, usability studies and professional support are not fun and cost money, so the community is almost never going to do them.
3. Paying your own employees to take the high-grade raw materials available and, effectively, create the "serious business applications", by filling in the documentation and learning to support the software. Whether this will cost more or less than options 1 or 2 depends on many, many variables. Whether or not you can sell it to the board is another question that depends more on you and your board than on the software.

Just writing the damned software and slapping it in an RPM does not finish the project!

See here's where you're wrong. Writing the damned software does finish the project. Producing an RPM isn't necessary, much less any of the other stuff you'd like to see. What finished the project from the developer's point of view doesn't provide you with what you want but that, my friend, is not his problem until you choose to pay him to take it on as his problem.

If you see lots of great software out there in FOSS land that could be fantastically useful to your business if only it were "finished", perhaps you should think about starting up a company a la Red Hat to polish, package, sell and support that software, or just wait until someone else does. If you're waiting for the community to do it in their spare time because it's so much fun... you're going to be waiting a long, long time.

Re:Of course they concern me

[mmurphy000]

There's user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support to be considered in any enterprise implementation.

and

Home users can get away with using half-baked stuff, but enterprises are far pickier.

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".

Re:Of course they concern me

[mykdavies]

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.

So what about the heavy hitters?

[Spectra72]

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?

only RMS's view matters?

[heller]

I read this in the first paragraph and decided the rest isn't worth it:

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

depends

[nostriluu]

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).

Wrong...

[HermanAB]

Sales and support are the hard part. Writing the code is easy.

Yes and no

[mgkimsal2]

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.

These myths have already been thoroughly debunked

[cjames53]

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.

Hmm, professionalism, you say?

[Creepy Crawler]

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?)

Re:Hmm, professionalism, you say?

[GauteL]

I'm sorry, but most computer code is NOT research. It is more akin to engineering and not all engineering projects are something which is open and peer reviewed.

Open source is just open engineering projects. Not all of these actually do get proper peer review, although sometimes they do.

Besides almost all researchers does things to keep people from catching up to them by reading their papers.

If you routinely read lots of research papers you will find that it is not straightforward to follow their work. The needed information might be there, but there are probably massive amounts of intermediate steps you will have to take to redo their work. Thus there is normally quite a bit of "reverse-engineering" involved in following other people's research.

It is probably akin to releasing specs for hardware, but not providing an open source driver.

And finally, plenty of research is not open, but a trade secret. Just because it hasn't been published does not mean it is worthless. Things might actually WORK even if it isn't published you know.

Cogent? Hardly.

[btobin]

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.

Ego

[mikejz84]

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.

Too bad

[Nasarius]

But until FOSS gets its act together and treats the software business like a business instead of a hobby, we have little choice.

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.

Re:Too bad

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.

If they want to be paid, they must first come forward with a marketable product. This isn't "hey, I'll pay you and then you make something," it's "hey, if you make something good I'll pay for it."

You seem to misunderstand how business works in the real world. That is also a common failing of lots of FOSS developers who assume everyone will beat a path to their door instead of the other way around. The whole "if you build it, they will come" argument is very true, but you have to build it first. Half-baked pre-alpha code does not encourage people to pay you large sums of money for a finished product...unless, of course, you're Microsoft.

Re:Too bad

[swillden]

If they want to be paid, they must first come forward with a marketable product.

What makes you think they want to be paid?

Re:Too bad

[darkmeridian]

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If OSS wants to play with the big boys at Redmond, they cannot dismiss any criticism as "it's just a hobby!" How seriously can anyone take software that's just a hobby?

Re:Too bad

[l3v1]

How seriously can anyone take software that's just a hobby?

Ignorance won't help you here. Oh wait, this is /. Whatever. The point is, it's "hobby" because most developers do FOSS development in their free time, and if most of them wouldn't do it because they like it, they wouldn't do it at all. And since this is something they like doing, and they do it in their free time, it's naturally called a hobby. "Professional" is what most people call what you do for a company for a paycheck.

Re:Too bad

[rm69990]

You say OSS developers and we don't understand how the business world works, yet maybe it is you that doesn't understand how the OSS world works. Most OSS programmers do it because they enjoy it, or else they do it to scratch an itch. Someone doesn't wake up one day and say "Hey, prisoner-of-enigma on Slashdot needs a new CRM database to run his business on, let's start a Sourceforge project to help him out!!!". In other words, they don't give a shit whether or not their application is suitable for your business or not, because they are not in the market of selling their software to companies like yours. Their attitude is "I'll write some good code that solves my problem, and if someone decides it runs good for their business, excellent, go ahead and use it. If someone decides they want to modify it to make it suitable for their business, even better, because they can share the changes with myself." (assuming it is GPL'd or under a similar license).
Essentially, what I am saying is, if you expect a high end solution for your business, go to Red Hat or Novell. But to shop around Sourceforge for business applications and then to criticize developers for not making their software suitable for your business, when that wasn't their primary goal in the first place is childish and selfish at best.
And, if you don't wish to pay these people for their work, then take their software as a base and make it suitable for your business....or, even better, buy something from Microsoft. I don't think the average Open Source coder on Slashdot or Sourceforge will lose any sleep over it.
So, to reiterate, Red Hat and Novell care whether OSS suits your business, your average Sourceforge coder does not, so go and bitch to them. :)

Re:Too bad

[prisoner-of-enigma]

What makes you think they want to be paid?

Gee, maybe it's comments like "If you're not willing to pay them, stop whining about how they're not doing exactly what you want" in the prior postings? Try reading the entire thread for better comprehension of responses.

But to address the point you're attempting to put forward, hey, 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.

What you and many other are arguing here is that you want to have your cake and eat it, too. You want to proclaim the superiority of FOSS over anything closed and/or commercial, yet when pressed about a lack of quality or support, you always fall back on the "hey, it's free, so quit griping."

I've got a news flash for you: 99% of the computing public are not developers and have no idea how to develop nor an inclination to do so. Therefore the old "if you don't like it, write your own app!" argument is also short-sighted. When you use that argument as a crutch, you're just pushing people towards closed, commercial software. So when this happens, you don't have to look far to figure out who to blame.

And FOSS proponents wonder why Microsoft is so successful and profitable making mediocre software. You can't see the forest for the trees.

Re:Too bad

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Both RedHat and Novell would come to you with marketable products.

Bingo! And we use products from both companies because of their support policies. However, when you look at the initial cost to purchase, both RedHat and Novell charge a pretty penny for their stuff just like Microsoft, and then it becomes a difficult sell to any non-technical person because it's almost impossible to talk about TCO to someone who doesn't manage I.T. for a living.

Of course, we're our own worst enemy because we run some very tight Windows servers and PC's as well. We haven't had a virus/worm problem since "I LOVE YOU" about five years go, and WinXP doesn't bluescreen but once in a blue moon for us. 2003 Server is very tight and has yet to let us down in any way (we avoid IIS like the plague). Thus it's hard for us to use the "but Linux is more stable" argument to get purchasing decisions changed.

In the meantime, I make a living installing and supporting the applications you snob, and it cost my clients a fraction of the price of shrink-wrap software. Go figure.

I do not "snob" anything here except inflated expectations and claims. What you are failing to grasp here is that I realize FOSS has limitations and that sometimes even a closed-source commercial app is the best platform to pursue. The trouble is that most slashdotters live in some fantasy world where vi is considered an ideal word processor and where writing a shell script that will sort your sister's MP3 collection by Britney's breast size at the time is considered to be high art.

In the real world, people want word processors with GUI's more than they want arcane commands that can fold, spindle, and mutilate. They'll gladly pay out the nose for inferior software just so long as it doesn't require them to learn anything about the platform, the software, or both. What I find all too often is this elitist attitude by developers (especially FOSS developers) who think that everyone should be forced to learn C++, Java, and Perl before they can be considered worthy to use any computer. The world might be a better place if that were true, but it is not true and it's high time FOSS developers figured that out if they ever want to be considered candidates for serious software development.

Re:Too bad

[Xepo]

Uh. We're saying "We don't give a shit what you want" because you're not paying us, nor providing us with any other benefit. We *are* paying those companies for their video cards, motherboards, win modems, etc. I find your powers of analogy severely lacking.

The real story...

[passthecrackpipe]

...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!!

Re:The real story...

[Peter La Casse]

in other words: OSS is going to take away my gravy train!!

And "therefore, my gravy train should be legislated into permanent existence." Insert Heinlein quote here.

Clearly a biased perspective.

[MonGuSE]

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.

Rebuttal

[einhverfr]

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

One business model

[einhverfr]

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.

A very British coup

[FishandChips]

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:

"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. ... 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 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.

That's right

[Uukrul]

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...

Point by point...

[TheSHAD0W]

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?

Re:So how is proprietary software less affected by

[thsths]

> 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.

Why does the BCS care?

[geoff lane]

The BCS is The British Computer Society. For a fee and proof that you spent years toiling in a Cobol foundary, you can become a member of the BCS.

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.

Not Imaginary.

[hackwrench]

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!

mod up!

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:OSS is *good* for competition and innovation

[LO0G]

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

cogent? ha!

[belmolis]

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.

Yeah right

[elteck]

(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.

That's the BCS through and through...

[PaulusMagnus]

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

[Proudrooster]

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...

This guy's arguments are flawed

[keeboo]

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.

What your employer owns depends on your contract..

[borgheron]

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

Worse is better

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Terrible Article

[dajobi]

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.

Cogent??

[dskoll]

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.

compared to what, exactly?

[gelfling]

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.

You have a point, but...

[crucini]

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.

There are so many errors it's ridiculous

[rfc1394]

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'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.

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.

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.

So, it would appear that the only people who are actually free to participate in OSS projects are self-employed or unemployed software professionals

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

Anyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP

(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.

The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour

No kidding.

the much-lauded OSS process of peer review...is an unquestionably powerful method of improving code quality. But we seem to have forgotten that peer review is, or should be, part of the normal software engineering process

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