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There is No Open Source Community
porkrind writes "There is no Open Source Community is an Onlamp article about the economics of open source and how most people get it wrong. Really, open source is much more about supply and demand than it is about an activist community or individual drivers (individuals or individual companies) affecting change on society." From the article: "Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software. Businesses unaware of the falsehood of this claim are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests. Both open source-based and proprietary software vendors need to challenge these assumptions."
Allow me to provide some anecdotal evidence of this fear. I work at Corporation X. I'm assigned to a project that requires me to program quite a bit of Java from scratch. So I download the latest version of Java and try to install it. No dice. I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough
So this FOSS department gives me a business process to follow which contains 31 steps that I have to push paperwork through. I say screw it and attempt to befriend a system administrator. About as far as I got was asking him to put the JDK, Apache Ant and Eclipse on my computer
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
I can't help but smile at the wad of dough next to this articles on the homepage as whoever made that the icon for this category had no idea how much it applies here.
My work here is dung.
Rule #1 of Open Source Community:
Do not talk about Open Source Community
Rule #2 of Open Source Community:
DO NOT TALK ABOUT OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY!!!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I should assume that the autohr is trying to destroy open source. If everybody went with their economic interests, there would be no open source.
"Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software."
There's a Non Sequitur right there in the summary; just because an individual may have pushed open source forward in the past does not imply anything about future need.
Contrast this with saying "an individual pushed the invention of a wheel forward, leading to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of the wheel" and you see the flaw in the reasoning.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
from this guy.
Here's an anecdote from Richard Stallman.
At a trade show in late 1998, dedicated to the operating system often referred to as ``Linux'', the featured speaker was an executive from a prominent software company. He was probably invited on account of his company's decision to ``support'' that system. Unfortunately, their form of ``support'' consists of releasing non-free software that works with the system--in other words, using our community as a market but not contributing to it.
He said, ``There is no way we will make our product open source, but perhaps we will make it `internal' open source. If we allow our customer support staff to have access to the source code, they could fix bugs for the customers, and we could provide a better product and better service.'' (This is not an exact quote, as I did not write his words down, but it gets the gist.)
People in the audience afterward told me, ``He just doesn't get the point.'' But is that so? Which point did he not get?
He did not miss the point of the Open Source movement. That movement does not say users should have freedom, only that allowing more people to look at the source code and help improve it makes for faster and better development. The executive grasped that point completely; unwilling to carry out that approach in full, users included, he was considering implementing it partially, within the company.
The point that he missed is the point that ``open source'' was designed not to raise: the point that users deserve freedom.
Spreading the idea of freedom is a big job--it needs your help. That's why we stick to the term ``free software'' in the GNU Project, so we can help do that job. If you feel that freedom and community are important for their own sake--not just for the convenience they bring--please join us in using the term ``free software''.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I often hear: "Why don't they make $X to do $Z like $Y" or "they should make $ABC, that would make it better for me". - But Linux (as an example) is no product. It is just an aggregate of tools other made for themselves.
I use Debian, because it fits my needs.
with the article.
"Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software."
Take the formation and continuation of the United States.
Certainly it was started by a small group of ideologically and personally "strong" individuals, a core group that got the ball rolling. But today, the country has reached a critical mass that although could be unravelled, seems to be for the most part on autopilot.
This article irritates me in the way that most news media coverage irritates me: they purposefully polarize an issue, then present two exaggerated extremes, and try to figure out which one is correct. In the real world, neither is correct, and the truth is somewhere in between.
This article tries to conclude "there is no open source community." They say: "Some software vendors believe that open source is an ideological movement." but say that this is an "entertaining narrative" and that the conventional wisdom (that ideological people drive open source) is wrong.
Why can the middle ground be true? Ideological believers in open source contribute significantly to open source. They evangelize and often they diretly contribute (with code, for instance!). Will an open source project die if the ideological believers abandon it? Will an open source project die if the community stops caring? The answer is (as always): it depends. Many projects are community-driven, so of course they require the community push. Others are driven more by companies, so as long as there are enough companies involved, the project will persist.
I have not finished reading the article, but already I'm annoyed. I find the black vs. white picture it paints a bit boring. The real world is complicated. It is worth making the point that companies should not fall into naive assumptions about open-source... but then again they would be silly to ignore the history of open-source, and the fact that alot of it really is driven and maintained by the community. Use that community to your advantage (but do not be led to believe that they are the final word in every respect).
So is there an Open-Source Community? Yes, of course.
open source is much more about supply and demand
Very true. If there was not a need, OSS would never have gotten started. If vendors had provided good quality, resonable cost software, OSS would not exist.
.signature not found
I agree there appear to be many misunderstandings regarding Open Source software.
My experience so far has been with IT management who seem to fear the unknowns of 'free' software.
There is a basic lack of ability to evaluate the product as a product and not based on it's source and/or lack of marketing.
It seems that managers (and I've heard this from them before) think that when you get something for free you get what you pay for. Suggesting that it isn't valuable because they don't pay for it.
Case in point:
Fairly recently during the initial feature investigation phases of a fairly large development project myself & 2 of the developers (I am a Buisness Systems Analyst/QA person) were recommending MYSQL over Oracle as the licensing cost (this was just before the announcement of OracleXE) for a few hundred clients was going to be in the order of 100K to 300K.
We told them that there is excellent support for it for only 5K/year.
Essentially the response was "Eventhough it is much slower we will go with SQL Server because it's licensing is only 80K for the server".
Interesting business decisions... what happend to return on investment?
Fortunately Oracle XE saved the additional hundreds of thousands so we still have a high performance database option. And we could have had MYSQL 5.0 for 5K a year that performs in some ways better than Oracle (which I think we still paid 50K for).
Either this story is totally fabricated, or the company you work for is staffed by complete morons and will likely go under shortly.
First of all, you don't need a system administrator to install any of those things. Apache, Java, Ant, Eclipse, Tomcat, can all run from your home directory, or anywhere else for that matter. Don't have access to port 80? Run it on some other port for development.
Second of all, Java is not open source in any way, shape, or form.
Third, WTF is your employer doing asking you to write a Java application, but forcing you to jump through hoops to get the software to do it?
Fourth, if this application you are writing is supposed to be deploye don Apache and Tomcat, then obviously the company has already given the go-ahead to use this open source software. So why the hassle?
It sounds like this is either a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or a case of complete incompetance. Neither of which is good for a company.
During Margaret Thatcher's reign in the UK, she said 'there is no such thing as society'. I find this to be very similar and flawed in the same way. Not everything is supply and demand, tooth and claw. There is room for altruism, generosity and openness too. I find all these in many of my contacts with 'open source' folks. Or maybe I'm just and old hippy, past my sell-by date...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I installed linux on my compter as my only OS for a month and during that month I met and talked to lots of people who were part of the open source ommunity people helped me get my sound card working 1 guy showed me some fun things to do with the commandline, I have a passion for open source because even if there is a monopoly in the software world for this or that open source can still compete.
I've seen some open source programs out there then the commercial alternatives as well, after talking to developers, and people who work with and use this stuff, and even go that extra step of helping new users I think says there is a community, Linux User groups are a form of community people sharing idea's and supporting each other in linux. Am I wrong?
The article is correct about the internet being a pivotal factor in the adoption of open source development. The open source "movement" has certainly provided awareness of the feasibility and usefulness of making source code open but in the end, it's really an issue of economics, not ethics or idealism.
It's important not to overlook the benefits of open projects for hobbyist developers. As the article states, the internet has made it easy for people to collaborate, share ideas, and learn from each other -- something hobby developers find inherently beneficial. Ever since the WWW began to really take off, people have found it increasingly useful to share code because often, if you're doing it for a hobby, the code itself is as important as the end product itself and for many projects, keeping the code closed makes no sense.
Those of us who cut our teeth on MS platforms (DOS, and then Windows) are often berated by the self-proclaimed open source "community" and UNIX zealots, but this is entirely undeserved because open source has been alive and well on Windows and DOS and isn't going away. RMS and ESR can't fairly take credit for that.
Now, I know the initial reaction to this Anonymous Coward post is that he's a "Troll."
But I beg you not to mod him as this, I see him as a poor misunderstood individual.
His accusation was valid to make (though horrendously false). Let's examine some better delivery methods:
1) I disagree, sir.
2) Frau Farbissina: LIES! ALL LIES!
2) I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
And so you see, Anonymous Coward, you had a good underlying message, you just delivered it wrong. And you were so close to a +5 funny or +5 interesting mod!
*pats AC on the head* In time, young padawan.
My work here is dung.
The article lacks evidence. It spends a great deal of time talking about economics of scale without at any point presenting what specific scale is required for certain effects to occur. Further his timeline is very far off. When open source developed most software were written by a very small number of people living close to one another and then distributed widely by mail. Sure the wide adoption of the internet helped both commercial and open source software use resources geographically far apart but he completely fails to explain why one side benefitted more than the other.
What are the implications for software developers? The obvious manifestation of a lower bar to entry coupled with an increasing number of programmers is that it is getting awfully hard for a developer to charge for software. (Quick, tell me the last time you paid for a bare-bones email client.)
A great example. In 1995 when was the last time people paid for software that had been expensive in 1980? The 1980 office products would be free throw ins by 1995. Small utilities are first sold separately and then get bundled into other larger programs. There proves nothing about scale.
It used to be that a developer could hack up some small utility, pass it around as shareware, and ask nicely for people to send money. While shareware still exists, the trends are not in its favor. More recently, people who hack together a simple utility simply give it away. They don't ask for payment, because they recognize that it's generally a fruitless endeavor. It's not that they give away the software because they think it's a nice thing to do; they give it away because it's the only way anyone will actually notice.
There was never a period of time when shareware was a particularly good model for anything other than marketing. The original shareware authors generally had a plan of:
1) Write shareware
2) Build up a user base (who pretty much don't pay)
3) Use this base to get a commercial vendor interested enough to finance bring the product out commercially
I could go on but this strikes me as a college freshman economics term paper on applying economic ideas to a recent trend, not as a real insight.
The community behind it is not that important the ideals are what is important. As a proprietary software vendor your biggest priority should be to make your customers as
happy as possible. This may include allowing them access to the source so they can fix your broken stuff, publishing file formats etc so that they can be interfaced and
on top of all that stable and as bug free as possible.
Ask some of the java app server developers what happens when you start charging too much and pushing buggy software out. You start doing that and a customer and or a programmer gets mad to the point that they just make you go away by releasing a
similar product using a open source development model.
The OSS development model shifts the control back to the developer, make a OSS developer mad enough to the point he cares and it won't take long and your company fails to exist any longer.
Got Code?
That there's Open Source Software (OSS) and really a Free Software community. Thinking about it, the 2 do have difference in application. Hence, there's OSS and free software, where FOSS is subset. That's a business take on this. Unfortunately 98% of the non-technical people can't grasp this, considering the same 98% doesn't understand what a [linux] kernel is.
'Supply and demand' and 'open source community' aren't necessarily contradictory...
Not having read TFA, my gut reaction is that, while supply and demand are obviously important, you need to look carefully at the supply side. In simple microeconomic terms, 'supply' refers to the aggregate quantity that producers are willing to provide, given the prevailing 'price' in the market (i.e., the value which they will receive in return).
It is worth noting that, given the limited 'value' which (most) open source developers receive in return for their work, there are likely few producers that are willing to provide large quantities of product. The smallish set that DOES generate the BULK of that product appears to have characteristics of a community-- that 'core group of believers' are the ones who are most willing to produce for 'free'. Furthermore, since their 'return' tends to be intangible, the supply curve might shift dramatically-- if they are treated badly, their perceived 'return' may be diminished significantly, causing them to reduce output.
For me, open source is a simple solution to a problem that I often have. I do not adopt it to be part of some "community".
My problem: How to make sure that I can give my previously-developed source-code to my current employer, without fear of losing control of that code if once I'm no longer employed by them.
I suspect that this a very common problem.
There is no SPOON! Geez!
I guess I won't be getting that membership card I sent a $100 in for anytime soon.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Building what needs to be built is a community. Oftc and Freenode are communities.
Really, what is activism besides building what needs to be built?
===
There's two ways to do open source. The apache way and the linux way. Apache uses committees and democratic processes to, as the article seems to want to stress, place community over individual developers. Linux, the epitome of monolithic, is built under a few chief architects who direct the project. Either one is valid; either one can foster community. Hackers will play with anyone who can play ball, anyone who lets them keep hacking, it doesnt get any simpler than that.
When one developer felt FreeBSD got overly committeed he went off and made DragonflyBSD (Whoo M. Dillon!). There's countless projects which have done the opposite; been lead by a leader until they got consumed into an Apache project. Ebb and flow; hackers follow whatever seems to be working, whether its individual run project or some democratic debian. Either one is capable of supporting community.
<b>Reducing open source to little more than "not vendor lock in" is fucking perposterous.</b>
"With prices approaching zero, software developers have two choices when trying to win over users: (1) add features not available elsewhere, and (2) release the source code."
Shame O'reilly, shame! To say that Linux does not innovate! Look at yesterday's ask slashdot about how to stream sounds from one system to another. Linux has countless solutions; esound, jack.udp, gstreamer, vlc. A hundred ways to dice it. Windows requires a $49 program to make a fake sound card. There used to be an open source program to do it, but the drive dev kit is now a couple hundred from MS, so the project died. Real feature added, eh?
Open source is built around the fundamental tenants of technocracy. The most elegant hackable solutions win. <b>Source code is simply our current modus operandi for ensuring our systems are maximally hackable.</b>
Myren
The main leaders of the open source movement, I think, are akwnoleding at any chance they get, the fact that the Internet as propel and made the development open source sofware more easy.
Ask anyone of them.
He just describe a community, with the developper, the testers, users and there is no open source community? Did I missed someting?
If I recall correctly, when Linus released its first Kernel, the PC UNIX marquet was Minix (free but feature less) and SCO (costly but feature rich). I think that was the main cause of Linus developping a new kernel, the price to access the tools he wanted. Same with Apache.
I think that it was the open source movement, albeit at the time it was called free sofware, that droove the price of different sofware down and enabled the thriving of the internet, not the other way around.
Am I wrong?
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
Sure, you have working and stable drivers for hardware that is 8 years old. But if you want to use current hardware you either have some alpha driver full of holes (missing features, speed, bugs, etc) or you have to rely on closed-source binaries (which I personally have no problem with).
There have been regular distributions of free software by various DECUS SIGs continuously since spring 1977. (The 2005 VMS SIG CDs were just shipped.) Anyone can get them with a little effort and people started contributing long before Richard Stallman started anything. They sure as heck have been a community...loose, but a community.
There is no open source community, because everyone is in the free software community singing: Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free. x2 Hoarders may get piles of money, That is true, hackers, that is true. But they cannot help their neighbors; That's not good, hackers, that's not good. When we have enough free software At our call, hackers, at our call, We'll throw out those dirty licenses Ever more, hackers, ever more. Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free. x2
"Really, open source is much more about supply and demand than it is about an activist community or individual drivers (individuals or individual companies) affecting change on society."
Somebody better tell Stallman this.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Those of us who were on the 'Net a dozen years ago (geez, is it that long?) when Cantor & Siegal did the famous Green Card spam saw them argue *exactly* the same, that the 'Net was no "community", and they ought to be able to do what they wanted.
Not that I'd ever have seen them, it not being my religion, but when I was young, I used to read about fire&brimstone (tm) preachers inveighing against the worship of Mammon (aka the almighty dollar); these days, it's the state religion of the US.
mark
I'm about one more front-page troll away from bagging /. altogether. I haven't even RTFA, because this is just a sadly successful attempt to increase pageviews on this site and OnLamp simultaneously.
If there's no open source community, who the heck is it I keep going to conferences with? Who are the folks I am putting on the board of my newly formed open source organization? Who are the folks who keep volunteering to teach in my open source classes? Who is volunteering to work on my open source projects?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that management thinks this way; they never seem to get how valuable communities are to their organizations. But the /. editors should, and I suspect do, know better.
Heck, even the author should know better—he's the director of LinuxWorld Expo! There's a terrifying thought. Where does he think his conference attendees come from? He knows. He just wants to be read. He's a troll. Zonk's a troll. IHBT.
I think some good additional reading would be the essay "I, Pencil". It is an essay about capitalism, but... I definitely think it applies here.
Milton Friedman had to say about this essay:
Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."
People cooperate without coersion on open source projects. There are a variety of reasons why they may do so, one of which is certainly... Economics.
How many communities have clear divine purpose?
#1, above all; CAUSE & EFFECT
"it becomes clear that Linux or its equivalent was bound to happen eventually, regardless of whether Linus decided to release a kernel in 1991. The same applies for Apache and any other project. Both of these are the natural result of massive price drops in their respective markets."
A) Linux CAUSED that price drop, was because there WAS no cheap unix. Open source IS that price drop. Sure, its cyclical, sure its causing more people to have to resort to free software and people are starting to realize that the conversations free software allow you to have are extremely important, but OSS is the reason thats happening, its whats forcing the commercial world to change its game plan.
Now on to the actual problems with your anti-community fud.
" The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false. The view that open source participants are idealistic Davids fighting against software Goliaths is also false."
b) So there is no core philosophical underpinning. But all ecosystems have dynamics, philosophy is not the only thing that can pull together a community.
b) the dynamic of open source, the thing that makes us a community, is that we like clean hackable solutions, we like using the best tools we can, and other people's free code is often the best tool available. Its a technical meritocracy, may the most hackable most hack-ensuing solutions win. More than anything else, we're united by the desire to play around with cool technologies
You want a philosophical underpinning? the purpose is not to overthrow Goliath. we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff.
Luv,
Myren
This is clearly written from the view of an economist A sociologist would agree with the views expressed by most of those in the "community"
Thing is, look at the motivation behind those people who develop the software. There are people out there who do not use databases who are developing db management software just for the hell of it.
The fact that people are doing this shows that it has nothing to do with their inability to or refusal to buy commercial software.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
In my line of work, I spend time working with both Windows Stuff (Proprietary) and Linux stuff(Open Source). My experience is that when I have a problem, or a requirement to fulfil that is Linux based, there is a huge amount of resource available on the internet, forums, code-snippets , tools etc free and easily available. Whenever I have a windows problem I find that I invariably run into people trying to sell me stuff, components, plugin's licenses and little in the way of (free) help.
Im not sure whether "Community" is the best word to use, but I certainly find life on the open source side of the fence much friendlier and helpful and ethical than life on the other side of the fence.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I found myself skimming after page two, and it still couldn't go by fast enough. Incredible, I think instead of learning anything from it, the page actually sucked knowledge out of my brain backwards through my eyeballs, so that now I think that there is no such thing as Linux at all, because there's nowhere for the distros to come from, because it denies the existence of an open source community. BECAUSE THESE MULES BELIEVE SOFTWARE COMES FROM THE FREAKING BLUE FAIRY GODMOTHER!
> Freedom also means that you don't have to make your software "open source" or "Free" if you don't want to.
You're calling the power to take away other people's freedom, a "freedom" in itself. Rubbish. When liberty in an inalienable right for everybody, yes, the "Freedom" to own slaves will be lost. No tear shed here.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Well LCA http://conf.linux.org.au/ is about to start and there seems to be at least 8 miniconfs on before hand. If this is not evidence of strong community involvement in open source, what is?
There is no /. community either
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Spare me the "iron laws of history" bullshit.
That individual actors have had a tremendous impact on every aspect of modern technological development is obvious to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the relevant history.
Beyond that, cultural and, I dare say, moral aspects of the technology *have* played a significant role in the adoption of open source methodologies and software, particularly at the academic level. Adoption at the academic level has been, if not a driving force, a necesarry condition for widespread adoption in the corporate sector. The talking heads the author discusses may have provided some needed business-speak triggers to make corporate types more comfortable, but that's hardly important or interesting. Richard Stallman was merely a figurehead for impersonal economic forces, but Bruce Perens has changed history? Please.
So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts.
However, the course of action he proposes - which is not a challenge of assumptions, as he characterizes it, but a change in policy - is worth independent consideration.
The author thinks that corporate america should move forward with an open source development model and ignore the input and wishes of the broader community of developers - the author of the piece insists they don't exist.
Any corporation that wishes to do this is, of course, free to do so. The question for free software/open source/whatever developers is this - do you want your interests represented, or not? Individual actors have tremendous influence over the course of events from this point onward - and it is pointless to speculate on the outcome of events when individual decisions play such a decisive role.
A software developer trying to accomplish option 1 on his own will face a daunting task, whereas a developer who releases source code, assuming the project is viable, will have a ready supply of suggestions for improving the software and adding features. - This is generally true. But how, exactly, does it follow from the elementary economic forces that the author thinks drive open source? It doesn't - it derives from the existence of the broader community, about which the author urges corporate developers to "stop worrying".
The discussion of legal pitfalls and the economic advantages of scale and so forth are mostly accurate (as other posters have addressed), it is the conclusions that he draws from them with which I disagree.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You think RMS actually listens to anything outside of his doctrine? After all, this is the guy that says that "open source" is bad because it undermines the free software movement.
Thats cool because i use the other 2%
The problem is that too many people see copyrights as a meca of free markets and property rights when in truth they need to look at them as massive microregulations on how people can use and apply information in the information age. Rather than seeing them as some glorious protection for creators, they need to be looked at as the intelectual sewage that they are. The current software industry in the USA is just a manifestation of this ignorance (perhaps motivated by greed, and the desire for total control) Anyhow, when one understands that, then the success of the GPL compaired to other licenses makes perfect sense. In fact, it should really say something when the GPL is more successfull in free market economies than non free market ones. I think the bottom line is that in the information age there is a lot more money to be made from information services than there is from content control, and it wrong to hold to hold up the information age for the sake of a few media empires who can't see it any other way.
I understand your point, and I'm glad we don't all have to be constantly fighting to keep the Vandals from the gates. Luckily for you and me, there are lots of people who think otherwise:
In other words, it's not autopilot. It's just that the hard work of keeping the republic together happens out of sight. Not knowing your background I can't guess at your contributions, but you might ask yourself what you have done to deserve citizenship.
As a favorite poet put it:
sigs, as if you care.
the kid in the matrix really said "open source community" and not "spoon". i knew it.
I remember my bro telling me that if he had forums to post to when he was a kid learing Guitar, he'd be a much better player. There were all sorts of common mistakes he made that his teacher had no clue about, and he wasted a lot of time figuring this stuff out on his own.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I find the author's main argument, that FLOSS development is a natural and necessary result of economic forces, to be correct. However, to imagine that this is the only thing you should think about is naive.
I have argued many of the same arguments in the past. FLOSS development is merely a consortium for software development. As long as your core business does not rely on revenue from the software developed (i.e. virtually every company in existence) you are better off entering into a consortium for software development. Especially if the overhead costs for that consortium are (mostly) free (enter the internet).
What people fail to realize is that FLOSS is a *consumer* movement. It is not a development movement. Developers write FLOSS *because they want to use it*. Especially in the corporate environment, most FLOSS development is a result of wanting to be a user of the software, not of wanting to be a developer of the software.
It is because it is in the best interest of the consumer to join a FLOSS consortium that it is inevitable that FLOSS will continue to thrive.
BUT it is a mistake to ignore the underlying reality of these consortiums. If you refuse to believe that a consortium exists at all (the FLOSS community as it were), you will be in for a world of hurt. We have seen this time and time again. The currency in the FLOSS community is mindshare, not money. So if you try to "compete" against an entrenched player you are very unlikely to experience the economies of scale so eloquently discussed in TFA. Furthermore, if you piss off the "major players" in the community, you are likely to lose the majority of your mindshare.
My personal feeling is that FLOSS has reached critical mass. Only extreme political action (i.e. laws prohibiting it) can stop it now. Every day it is becoming more and more obvious that proprietary software does not provide a competative cost/benefit ratio.
But if you want to succeed in the FLOSS world, you need to understand the culture and be able to play in that way. Those who ignore the culture and community are doomed to failure.
Sure self intererst plays a major part - hell, self interest plays a major role in everything we do. But self interest and ethics are not mutually exclusive. In business it's often in your own self interest to be ethical and generous towards others.
I am sick of that term being thrown around by journalists, politicians and the like. A fine example is "The Gay And Lesbian Community". It's like, just because you're gay, you are suddenly the member of some really nifty group where you are magically surrounded by other gay people, being invited to gay potlucks and such, going to gay community-building meetings, babysitting each other's adopted children, walking gaily hand in hand, building your "community" with gay politicians, gay policement, grocers, teachers etc. Look at me!! I'm in a community! Isn't that special!
Wait, I just described San Francisco. Never mind.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I'm sure you've heard this before... You can take "freedom" to always mean "your personal freedom". Or you can take it to mean "freedom of society", or a tangled interconnected web of freedom. I am not free to swing my fist into your nose, as the saying goes. Is this a bad thing? Or maybe I am free to punch you, but I then must suffer the consequences of either you punching me or society kicking me out.
Anyway, I don't think "open source" is about freedom at all. Perhaps you are talking about the GPL vs. BSD license debate? From everything I've heard, Stallman is right: open source is based on the "many eyes make bugs shallow" argument, or "many eyes lead to quicker improvements and better software" (I thought The Mythical Man-Month disputed this very assertion?). The executive in Stallman's anecdote was certainly adding more eyes.
"Somebody better tell Stallman this."
Why? What's Stallman got to do with Open Source?
First "Spam Is Dead", now this?
Next thing you know, we'll see an article titled "Microsoft Is Cuddly and Fuzzy and Wants to Give You a Big Hug."
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Is Open Source software used primarily to profit? or for fun? Or both?
A community is where there is an interaction among like-minded individuals with common ownership, and it does exist.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm sorry for sounding like flamebait, but no one who's worked on the heavy open-source projects would agree with that! Look at who started the GPL! Look at who started GNU/Linux! Look at the front-runners! You can literally POINT at certain individuals and say, "THERE'S an individual that pushed the OSS initiative!" The communities develop as they share information! They develop as programmers work together! Most end users don't see that, and I can tell you that you'll also only see that if you work as part of a major opensource contributer - you're talking about this as if it were some kind of epiphany but it's just common sense! Places like sourceforge will only give you space for a project - they won't give you HQ or secret hideout or decoder rings, bub. This is real life - mincing of words doesn't change the bottom line.
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
Criticisms of journalism and its practicioners often revolve around factual correctness, the strive for objectivity, truth, and the methods required to achieve these lofty goals.
Sometimes the matter of topicality gets snowed under. Why is this an interesting article? It is not. The author is spouting platitudes. Nobody believes that open source is a community or a movement, because everybody knows that open source is a development methodology at most, and at the very least a label designed by a fat, facetious, and not overly smart gun nut who felt obliged to obfuscate the true drive behind free software as much as possible.
What? Not everybody knows that? In that case it would have been interesting to collect the opinions of developers and business people alike, and see what people really think open source is.
It's all Zonk's fault, really.
do they visit slashdot at all?
Of course we design apps that are in demand. If our efforts didn't bear some fruits upon conclusion, we wouldn't do it. It's really all about the challenge, and the learning process that goes along with it. The end product is just the icing on the cake.
There is plenty of room for both open source and proprietary code. Nuff said!!
As for his point, I did not see too much that's original or any pieces of concrete advice. The Open Source movement has never pushed the four software freedoms over "practical" matters and has always had a fuzzy philosophy based on economics above all else. Other than slapping around a strawman and GNU, I'm not sure what his point was. Mostly he thinks everyone should think like him and pretends that it's true. He does not have any positive advice like, "do this and things will be better for you." The author mostly belittles people with ideological motivation without understanding that motivation or it's importance for his own well being. He summarized in his four key points, here:
Paraphrase: The internet is expanding and that will push Open Source which is just another tool without inherent morals.
The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false. The view that open source participants are idealistic Davids fighting against software Goliaths is also false. In fact, surveys of open source participants tend to bear this out.
Surveys don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns. Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools.
If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead. A very easy test of this is to look at licenses that are open but not free. An extreme example, and the limit of amoral "open software", is Microsoft's initiatives. This is really just an extension of the cross licensing cesspool which was created when a bunch of greed heads tried to scoop up the whole world of computing back in the 80's. Other less than free licenses form a spectrum that attracts more or less participation. Without software freedom, open source would quickly fall on it's face because no one wants to particpate in things that are owned and controlled by others.
The internet will continue to be pushed and expanded by government and major publishers with more or less freedom for it's end users. Free software will continue regardless.
If he thinks he can ignore the good advice the FSF offers, he's dead wrong about that too. I don't think they ever claimed to be the one and only driving force of free software. They understand that it's users writing software that gets the work done and that they can only do that if given the freedom they need. They are a loud and sensible voice for that freedom, and have created a very popular model, the GPL. Freedom is very important to a larger piece of the Open Source community than the author would like to realize.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Anybody on Slashdot who thinks there is no Open Source Community of which to run afoul is unable to see the forest because he's a tree.
NO CARRIER
Neo: "There is no spoon..."
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
"The only point of contention that we do really follow religiously is the idea of intellectual property."
We need no such thing and at least the free software movement does *not* follow religiously the idea of "intellectual property." I think what you meant to think was that the point of contention is that you really want to follow religiously the idea of copyright. Then the rest of your post would read as follows.
" Many OSS/FSF supporters indeed support copyright, but only as a method of naming authors. I support copyright insofar as credit is given where credit is due. Money and excessive restrictions (such as DRM) are completely invalid (in my view). This is the only valid "cause" that I think OSS really has. Otherwise we would get along quite well with M$ and the other big guys. Walker in his article points out that IBM and other big names have latched on to OSS as a means for symbiosis. This is the strength of his argument. It is really a good article."
Because if you used that other term your statement would be completely meaningless.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The GPL is better than most EULAs for one good reason:
It's easy to read, and if you read it once, you know what you're agreeing to when you install 99% of open-source software.
Proprietary stuff, OTOH, tends to have a license per program, so it's really impractical to read everything you're agreeing to.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
the author just wants to sell the open source concept to business people who wonder "how can anyone make money out of free software" and tries to find economic reasons for its viabily and prospects
... balderdash.
Some random thoughts about complexity. I don't have a coherent argument though:
The author seems to assume that the more programmers there are, the more a software project will advance. In my experience, though, a small, dedicated team of 1 to 4 programmers can outperform the entire rest of the world in 99% of interesting cases. On page 3, for example,
The author seems to equate an increase in complexity with an increase in functionality. It's true to some extent, but it also makes maintenance harder. To maintain or even improve any software, you need people who understand that software and, more importantly, who understand each other's changes. Which is why it's so nice to have a small group who can meet and talk and make decisions together. And to be productive, those people have to have a really good reason to:
So far, I have seen these qualities mainly in commercial teams, with a few prominent exceptions in the open-source world.
So does this mean all I have to do is bend the Open Source Community with my mind?
What's more irritating than people painting things as black and white is people taking everything literally and not being able to handle exaggeration. I personally use exaggeration to make a point--for example, I might say, 'Geeks have no social skills' when obviously I am exaggerating, there are of course some geeks with social skills, but that goes without saying. Similarly when someone writes an article that is not a serious journal article and paints things as black and white, they are usually doing so for dramatic effect, and it is your own fault for being pedantic and not realising this.
I'm not sure the author is aware of it, but he basically advocate a materialist view of free software history rather than an idealist view.
This is a fundamental schism in history as an academic discpline, and it is kind of fun to see it applied here.
Basically idealist history writting is the "old fashioned" way of teaching history, where your learn the names (and years) of the big men (philosofers and kings), and how their ideas and actions formed history.
Materialist history writting instead focus on the basis for change found in the natural environment, the means of production, and the power struggle between classes. In materialist history, such as Marxism, individuals hardly matter, the development of history is inevitable, and governed by much stronger forces than the individuals who get the credit.
With Marxism going out of vogue, idealist history writting has yet again become dominating. Nonetheless, I suspect most researchers would agree that both viewpoints have their value. Great ideas don't matter unless the materialistic circumstances are the right for them,but they can greatly influence the form the change is taking.
Here, this would mean that the ideas of people like RMS and ESR has to a high degree shaped the form of the current free software world, but that it is the material foundation of the PC and the Internet that has provided the fertilie ground for these ideas to flourish in.
I've always explained to "market forces fix all" nutcases that capitalism is a good idea, but we've never seen it in human history (the same goes for socialism). The "GPL ideal" helps keep market forces as near pure as possible, so it behaves in the textbook capitalist fashion.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I've seen several comments here, some of which are quite good and point out glaring deficiencies in the article, which I'll try to correct in a follow-up next week. So, I'll try to respond to some of the major themse I've seen thus far:
1. There are other factors aside from cost and features that drive software adoption
Yes. Saying there are "only two" was kind of dumb. However, I would say that lowering the bar to entry and lower cost - which are not necessarily the same - can drive other factors. For example, zero cost and ease of distribution will help a project gain the critical mass necessary for additional users to aid and abet the process of adding features, squashing bugs, and so forth. Others have argued that there has to be something inherently good about the project in the first place in order for critical mass to happen. My central argument is that because of the internet, there is an incredible glut of ideas and knowledgeable people such that there are bound to be some great projects that spring up.
2. your title is wrong. There *is* an open source community.
Yes and no. There are actually many open source communities, but there is no one community. There are communities around Apache, Linux, and many many other projects, and there is even quite a bit of overlap between all of them. However, many people talk about "the open source community" as if it was this monolithic group of people, which is absolutely false.
3. It's free speech, not free beer!
I believe that the driving motivation for most people to participate in open source projects is not idealistic, but rather sheer pragmatism. It's just easier to download something and start using it than to buy software via traditional means. In that sense, open source proliferation is very much viral. Having said that, you'll notice that I didn't even begin to address the free software movement. That's because it's an entirely different beast, and it's not about economics at all. In the case of free software, people drive the projects because they believe it's better for society. I admire that, and I like the FSF. In fact, Richard Stallman is about the only relevant luminary left on the stage, although he certainly has his faults. ESR and Perens, on the other hand, are dinosaurs that need to be put out to pasture. One of the most annoying interviews I ever heards was when Perens was on NPR's Science Friday talking about how he was the father of the open source movement. Gag.
There are others... I'll try to address them as I find the time.
Hyperic Community Manager
Like most slashdotters I haven't read the article yet. But if the summary is any indicator this sounds like a message to corporations that they shouldn't contribute and FUD that trys to proclaim that corporate interests do all the work anyway.
This is complete nonsense. There IS a community and if corporations want the community to maintain their projects than they will have to contribute commercial grade code. If you don't have commercial grade code you would like the community to maintain for you (either a project or feature additions to a project) then don't contribute them and they won't be maintained. It really is that simple.
> No one is taking away anything, including freedom, by releasing software as closed source.
This is only true in isolation. When you take it on a real-world test-run, as society did in the early 80s, you end up with 99% of the world not having the freedom to study the software they're using, the freedom to help themself by using their brain to fix their own software problems, or the freedom to help or get help from others.
This was no bad luck. The problem is systematic: lack of freedom is a natural by-product of many individuals taking the proprietary approach. The proprietary approach can be profitable, but so can hitting people on the head. Neither should be part of a modern society.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
4. your argument is about point solutions, but there is more value in a software vendor writing tools that make for a whole greater than the sum of its parts
.NET strategy with Sun's J2EE strategy. I would argue - and so would the Mono team - that .NET is more open as a platform than J2EE.
I believe this is known as the "Microsoft invented vendor lockin" strategy. It is correct that many software vendors have created tools that work much better with each other than other tools on a computer or network. However, software users are in open revolt against this strategy. The ability to fire your vendor is a pretty compelling argument for many companies to go with open solutions. I'll get into this in much more depth in the follow-up article. There is a Gartner report about the long-term gravitation towards point solutions instead of using a single software vendor.
Even Microsoft has (sort of) learned this - contrast their
5. You cannot just ignore the contributions of individuals and state that it's all the result of economies of scale.
I admit that there is certainly room for individual contributions, and that without individual contributions you wouldn't have open source projects. Yes, that is certainly true. My argument is that without the economies of scale made possible by the Internet, those individual accomplishments would never have reached the point that they have now. Also, with more knowledgeable people in the universe, it's more likely that individuals will spring up with viable ideas.
Another thing that I'll get into in the follow-up article is that all the old ideas about open source - better security, better software, peer review - have not been proven. I'm going to show that adoption of software really doesn't have much to do with fewer bugs, better security, or TCO, but it has a lot to do with being "good enough" and easily accessible.
Hyperic Community Manager
That's Right Bill/Steve you just keep telling yourself that.
I know, when are we gonna break the lockin of proprietary community.
Are You sure? I could have sworn I saw a GPL'd program called Community 0.09 at Freshmeat.
Well, what are we then?
Saying it don't make it so, bro.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
"my code" - I don't want to do anything with your code, I just want to see what the that software I'm using is doing with my personal data, and if there's spyware I want to remove it, or contribute to an effort to have it removed. This will not affect you or any of the software on your computer.
Society having freedom may interfere with some business models, but propping up 20th century business models is not what the law is there for.
I've partly explained how society's freedom is harmed in the comment I posted above, but I'll give an example here. Apple and iTunes. It was recently discovered that iTunes contains spyware which sends your personal data to Apple. Users of iTunes have no choice of whether their data is sent, where it is sent to, or what exactly is sent. The reason is that they don't have the freedoms to study, modify, and redistribute the software. You could say "Then don't use the software" - but members of society can't and shouldn't be expected to boycot everything. If there were no law protecting workers, and workplaces were unsafe, you could say "Then don't work". That's not how societies should be made.
Areas such as labour have far more developed philosophical histories and movements. Software and the ubiquity of digital technology and networks are relatively new fields. Developing standards for liberty in these fields will take time. Right now, society has generally low expectations, and society is being exploited.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Freedom also means that you don't have to make your software "open source" or "Free" if you don't want to.
;)
Freedom also means that you can 'make love'.
I wouldn't recommend that you make love on a table at MacDonalds though. Yes, we have freedom to make love, that doesn't mean that limitations to that freedom are bad.
If somebody says, "Hey, you can use my code and make money from it - but you have to make the source available!" That means that you have the freedom to use the code, but it still has limitations - and those limitations are not bad. By not bad, for example, consider that Microsoft could easily wait until a popular Open Source app hits the big time, copy the code, get it to use proprietary file formats, APIs and/or protocols, then bundle it with windows. How fair is that? If you'd written the Open Source app yourself, how would you feel if Microsoft did that to you?
If you can be bothered to develop your own code, and you have the ability to, you can write your own proprietary application! Hurrah!
If you can't be bothered to develop your own code, or if you don't have the ability to, you can use somebody elses Open Source code. If you don't want to keep the code open, or any you write on top of it, just forget about developing your app. Well, you're no worse off, are you? You couldn't do anything in the first place; how can you complain? Is it really that unjust to not be allowed to copy somebody's work?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
The F/OSS community is quite different. There is a community, but only a few people at the top get rich. Other contributors will vanish into obscurity, never receiving a penny for their work.
You can be in the community of the rich, or the community of the poor, idealistic naive submissive fools.
It's your choice. You have the freedom to choose.
Remember who got the ball rolling? Richard Stallman, wrote in his GNU Manifesto (1984) http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html:
That may have been true around 1984, before the widespread popularity of the Internet. It's not true that you could make a living from this now.
These insights were penned by the same Richard Stallman who championed the GNU Hurd, which 16 years later hasn't even entered alpha. When Linux rose in popularity, Stallman tried to take credit, and insisted that everybody call it "GNU/Linux". That's sort of like Microsoft trying to tell everybody to prepend the name "Microsoft" to whatever applications they build with Microsoft products.
Now, did Richard Stallman suffer? No: he received a quarter of a million dollars from the MacArthur Foundation for the creation of FSF, and invested the dough in mututal funds; he's living off the interest. (Plus, he has no children, no wife, and no car... ) If Richard Stallman had his way, nobody would " be able to make a living from programming." He would rather you be saying "Do you want fries with that?"
Remember when Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and convinced a dwindling Netscape to open-source its code? The net benefit was predicted to help Netscape and AOL destroy Microsoft. How wrong those naive optimistic projections became. Netscape is long dead, AOL's customers are deserting to broadband provided by other ISPs, and AOL and its clientele are still reviled by most computer professionals as unwashed trailer trash. Good PR stunt move, oh Netscape and AOL.
Around 1876, author Mark Twain wrote the immortal "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". In Chapter 2, Tom finds himself stuck whitewashing a fence -- hard work he doesn't want to do. But then he comes upon a brilliant idea: Get other people to do the work for him for free! In fact, by feigning interest in his work, he managed to get other people to PAY HIM to do the work:
The author seems bent on belittling RMS at every chance he gets. There's the claim that the FSF was "blindsided" by Linux.
Utter bullcrap. Richard Stallman and John Gilmore were looking around for a suitable free OS for the 386 long before Linus even started his work on Linux. Gilmore was also pushing the assistance of the 386 BSD effort; but they were both in communication about what they were doing. And both were well aware of Linus's work; so much so, that they were even mentioning Linus's work to other developers at the time.
There was no issue of being blindsided by Linux whatsoever. I know, as I was there (via email).
Honestly, statements like these give one the impression that the author is just making stuff up to fit his own political viewpoint and/or agenda.
You do not exist. You're a figment of your own imagination (yes, it's circular, just like GNU).
Really?
My operating system, web browser, web server, preprocessor, database server, e-mail client, e-mail server, PHP/HTML/CSS editor, database admin software, and half the games I play...they're all SHIT?
Holy crap Batman! What have I been doing all these years???
Time for sepuku, I suppose.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Uhm..ahem...excuse me. Sir? Sir? You missed me.
I'm a member of that "community" you say doesn't exist. I run Debian Linux as my primary OS for over five years, write Open Source code, and am even working on an article detailing how to make Debian easy if you don't have a sufficient Internet connection. Oh, and I also wrote my congressman about open source voting.
So, um, maybe there are some of us out there?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
No, Tripwire and sniffers have proved insufficient. They are imprecise, and far more difficult to use than it is to read source code. Consider this: how many hundreds of thousands of people leave college each year being able to read source code? And how many of those can use sniffers to learn what data is being sent by an application what wants to keep that data secret? Very, very few.
This is the reason that these methods only find spyware in very mainstream applications: there are very few people who can and do use them.
Sniffers? It's my network? Not when the data's encrypted.
Laws have also not proved effective for stopping abuse of software users. Remember that End User License Agreement? No, of course not, but you agreed to it, and you waived your rights and you said it was ok for Apple, RealNetworks, and Microsoft to run spyware on your computer.
And when you require software developers to disclose what information is being sent, how is that audited? One European country passed such a law about website cookies, now every time you visit a commercial website from that country for the first time, you're asked if it's ok for them to store information about you so that they can provide better service to their customers, etc. etc. etc. (well, actually, most websites have ignored the law, but anyway). KaZaa's agreement said "we can use your computer as remote storage and can use your processor for stuff" - and everyone (with insignificant exceptions) agreed to it.
You cannot get around this problem by bolting piles of numerous ineffective ideas together. There has been no proposed solution that even comes close to free software.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
The F/OSS community is quite different. There is a community, but only a few people at the top get rich. Other contributors will vanish into obscurity, never receiving a penny for their work.
You can be in the community of the rich, or the community of the poor, idealistic naive submissive fools.
It's your choice. You have the freedom to choose.
Remember who got the ball rolling? Richard Stallman, wrote in his GNU Manifesto (1984) http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
That may have been true around 1984, before the widespread popularity of the Internet. It's not true that you could make a living from this now.
These insights were penned by the same Richard Stallman who championed the GNU Hurd, which 16 years later hasn't even entered alpha. When Linux rose in popularity, Stallman tried to take credit, and insisted that everybody call it "GNU/Linux". That's sort of like Microsoft trying to tell everybody to prepend the name "Microsoft" to whatever applications they build with Microsoft products.
Now, did Richard Stallman suffer? No: he received a quarter of a million dollars from the MacArthur Foundation for the creation of FSF, and invested the dough in mututal funds; he's living off the interest. (Plus, he has no children, no wife, and no car... ) If Richard Stallman had his way, nobody would " be able to make a living from programming." He would rather hear you say "Do you want fries with that?"
Remember when Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and convinced a dwindling Netscape to open-source its code? The net benefit was predicted to help Netscape and AOL destroy Microsoft. How wrong those naive optimistic projections became. Netscape is long dead, AOL's customers are deserting to broadband provided by other ISPs, and AOL and its clientele are still reviled by most computer professionals as unwashed trailer trash. Good PR stunt move, oh Netscape and AOL.
Around 1876, author Mark Twain wrote the immortal "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". In Chapter 2, Tom finds himself stuck whitewashing a fence -- hard work he doesn't want to do. But then he comes upon a brilliant idea: Get other people to do the work for him for free! In fact, by feigning interest in his work, he managed to get other people to PAY HIM to do the work:
Perhaps software will want to be free when software has feelings. Until then, we need to consiider what is best for users. If free software isn't being produced in an area, is it still "software hoarding"?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
From the article:
"The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false. The view that open source participants are idealistic Davids fighting against software Goliaths is also false....
Open source is not a religion. It is not an ideology. It can be used for both good and bad. It does not inhabit the higher moral ground, nor is it a more ethical way to conduct business. It just is, and it will continue to grow and expand"
Well said!
If society exists, what is its address? How do I send it email? Society exists in the same sense that air exists. But air is not an entity. It doesn't have needs, goals, dreams, or any other attributes that you hear "society" has. Anything that "society" wants is exactly equal to what the individuals living in a society want; there is nothing left over to attribute to "society". The whole is exactly the sum of its parts; no more.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There is no open source community.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
"Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever)."
Stop playing with that FUD, it's unhygienic.
GPL is a distribution license. It places no limitations and implies no responsibility whatsoever for users of the software. As far as the GPL is concerned, you can do whatever the heck you want with the software, but if you distribute it you have to make the source available too.
Come on folks, that's not so hard to understand, is it?.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way is his references to programming being a "black art" until the internet. I'm sorry, but not everyone with an interest in building software has the capacity to become a programmer. Writing software is a learned skill, which requires training beyond the syntax of a language. The open source community would be a cesspool of badly engineered garbage if this author was right. Doing the job right is still a "black art" because so few web tutorials teach it. Architects and physicians are "black artists" by this man's criteria, since they learned how to do what they do from studying it at a university.
Furthermore, his concepts of collaboration are just plain wrong. Writing software is not like painting walls. Speed of development does not unconditionally increase with added manpower. The process of software development is often represented as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) with only one source (the beginning of development) and only one sink (release). The number of persons meaningfully contributing to development can rarely be greater than the maximum width of such a graph; that is, the number of programming tasks that can be performed in parallel is the common limit for the number of developers on a given project. I invoke the software development bible:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. - The Mythical Man-Month
There is an upper bound to the amount of fruitful collaboration that can occur on any software project, and it is, often, surprisingly low.
There is an open-source community. It is the loose association of those people who contribute to the management and development of open-source projects in the interests of producing high-quality free (beer and/or speech) software. This is why the open-source movement is growing so rapidly in our current corporate culture - proprietary software vendors are more interested in making money than producing quality software. This man's argument of the open-source community's non-existence seems like an attempt to avoid indicting the proprietary software vendors.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
amateur, moron.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
..and a lot of people above are wrong.
however IIRC, although you must agree to the GPL in order to use software, it doesn't make any requirements of you as a user. only modifying, redistributing etc.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
"Businesses [...] are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests."
I read the whole article, and never understood what he was talking about there. Any ideas?
"Surveys [mit.edu] don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns."
Isn't that what I said? Open source contributors and users just want to use the technology with no ideological baggage. That's what I meant to say.
"Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools."
No no no. I'm definitely not saying that the ideologically motivated don't do important work. Of course they do. But at the same time, they are not the primary drivers of the overall open source trend. They are able to exist within the framework that I described. If not for the economic trends outlined in TFA, they would not be nearly as numerous.
As an intellectual exercise, it would be very interesting to note how many users and contributors to GCC are free software advocates. I honestly don't know, but I would be very interested in the percentage.
"If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead."
Enter the strawman... actually, the risk from software patents, DMCA, and other legal pitfalls is entirely exaggerated. I'll go into that in more depth in the follow-up article.
And freedom is a very important component in the equation, as it lowers the bar to entry and allows customers to revolt against vendor lockin.
Hyperic Community Manager
"The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way is his references to programming being a 'black art' until the internet. I'm sorry, but not everyone with an interest in building software has the capacity to become a programmer. Writing software is a learned skill, which requires training beyond the syntax of a language."
Yes, everyone has the capacity to program. It ain't rocket science, honey. As you said, it's a "learned skill"... just like plumbing, electrical work, etc. Welcome to the world of democratized software development.
"Furthermore, his concepts of collaboration are just plain wrong. Writing software is not like painting walls. Speed of development does not unconditionally increase with added manpower."
You're not the only one to note this. What I was trying to get at is that the massive scale of the internet will result in more people starting their own projects, not that more people will contribute code to the Linux kernel or some other individual project. The more projects that are begun, the more that will reach critical mass. The average success of individual projects may actually go down, but total number of projects with a growing user base will go up.
Hyperic Community Manager
"So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts."
;)
Anti-free software propaganda??? Sounds to me like you got your open source mixed up with free software again
I'm trying to take out the moralistic arguments that many want to attach to open source. An open source company can be just as exploitative as a proprietary one.
Free software is a different beast and is all about taking the moral high ground. I like RMS and hope that he continues in his current role. He's the only relevant guy left.
Hyperic Community Manager
I wish I could mark a topic as a troll.
In fact, there are many technology communities around the world. It's just easier to form a community around individual open source projects - there's no bar to entry other than your ability and/or desire to learn how to use them.
But when surveying individuals that use open source, it turns out that many of them have no ideological reasons for using it, and that was one of my points. I'm not saying that they don't exist. I'm not even saying that they haven't made important contributions. I'm just saying that this environment conducive to open source development was made possible by the internet and its distributed knowledge base.
I did not mean to make it a polarized issue. I'm just tired of seeing way too much credit go to certain individuals without any recognition of what allowed them to get there.
I'm not sure where I put things in black and white. If anything, I'm re-painting the landscape in grays. Most people want to portray open source in moral terms, and I'm trying to strip that away. If anything, what I wrote is the antithesis of black and white. You could argue that I made my points in an authoritative fashion, but that's a different point entirely.
Hyperic Community Manager
I think you need to re-read my article ;)
I have nothing against the free software movement. In fact, I rather like it. But frankly, this notion that open source inhabits a moral high ground is rather dated and inaccurate.
The media tries to portray open source as an ideological movement, and I think this is very very wrong. They also try to portray it as the direct result of specific individuals. Again, that is wrong. As I've written elsewhere, I don't mean to imply that individuals don't matter, rather that they only had the opportunity because of trends that were already in place. Yes, Linus had to actually take the steps to release code and be a good caretaker, but his doing that in a vacuum would not have led to the same results.
Hyperic Community Manager
You focus on competition, and neglect cooperation. In nature, what do we call it when a cell "decides" to act in its own "economic interest", solely? Can you say CANCER? I knew you could :-) At higher levels, we also have Al Capones, and Sociopaths. I surely don't think we've evolved through natural processes to an unnatural state, but I do think that there are more fundamental (by which I mean orthoganal) forces than just the one (competition). Thus we evolve theough natural processes to a natural state, sure, just consider that there are more diverse states possible than those you profess.
Likewise, the author focuses on economics. "When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets." This doesn't mean that the saint is nothing more than a pocket to be picked, except to the pickpocket. In terms of the article, this is a chicken and egg dilema. Obviously the internet created the enviornment that allowed cooperation to emerge into this new pattern we call Free Software. No meaningful historical account that I've read has suggested otherwise. Does that mean that economic trends created Free Software, or did Free Software created the economic trends that have marginalized software?
I'd take that quote a step further and suggest that when a "software vendor" meets a Free Software Community, all the vendor sees are oppurtunites for exploitation. Does this mean there is no community, or that the vendor doesn't belong? As a disclaimer, I do think I agree that there is no Open Source community, although there are many communities within Open Source. There is a Free Software Community, for instance. Open Source is an umbrello that covers many, many different (and sometimes opposed) groups of people.
I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough ...er... impossible to do my job without the JDK and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
You're a perfect example of corporate incompetence: neither the JRE nor the JDK are "open source", and neither requires system administrator privileges to install. And if you actually were to download the JRE sources from Sun, your company would be in big trouble because the sources come with lots of strings attached.
Instead of whining about the fact that the legal department is trying to protect your company from your incompetence, do your fellow employees a favor and quit.
that RMS and co were looking to fill that last piece with a microkernel architecture. I've read RMS himself state that they specifically created GNU Hurd to fill the last gap. Linus has stated that GNU made a mistake in going with Hurd. If you watch Revolution OS, you can see RMS' pained facial expression as he describes how Linus was able to do what he was not.
Hyperic Community Manager
... that I noticed was
...
[T]he second ramification of the global internet: instant collaboration across national boundaries. When Linus released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel to the masses from FTP servers in Helsinki, it wasn't long until developers downloaded copies in cities outside of Helsinki and in lands far away from Finland. Users of software were able to take a copy, use it, and then report back to Linus much more quickly than ever before. Gone were the early days of the GNU project, when those that wished to use the software would order tapes and wait for them to arrive in the mail. Reporting bugs and usage issues and distributing patches back to the GNU project also was no small matter. Thus, the internet sped up development time by facilitating almost instant feedback from users regardless of location,
This is in contrast to a current (non-Microsoft;-) issue in our house: In addition to a few linux boxes, my wife and I each have a Mac Powerbook. Last week, she decided it was time to upgrade to OSX 10.4, to get some new goodies for her iPod. She went to the local Apple store and got the upgrade. When she got home and I saw what she had, I asked if it was the "family" (multi-machine license) version. Oops! So a quick call, and back to the store - where it turned out they didn't have it. I'd have to order it online. They were very nice, and gave us a refund in the form of a gift card. I went home - and spent a full hour trying to persuade store.apple.com to apply the card to the purchase. I succeeded. So now it's six days later, and according to fedex.com, it's in transit somewhere on the continent, due tomorrow.
That's a full week. With RedHat or any linux distro, I can download the ISOs in under an hour. Burning them to CDs (on my Mac;-) is maybe 15 minutes at most. And we linux geeks complain that it's often too slow.
So why can't I download OSX ISOs? Why is it taking a week to do what with linux takes an hour or so?
The answer, of course, is their concern over piracy. So they need to make sure that access is strictly limited to licensed users, and they don't know how to do that over the Net.
Now, RedHat, Suse, et al are also commercial operations, making money by selling and supporting linux. But they have the sense to know that it's good business practice to let geeks like me just download their stuff via the Net. That way, I'm using it right away, I have a warm, fuzzy feeling about them, and I'll help them go about their business. I might even contribute code.
For all their cool, high-tech image, it's pretty clear that Apple doesn't understand (or disagrees with) all this. Like most businesses, they don't trust me, and take time-wasting precautions to block my unauthorized access to their stuff. Meanwhile, their upcoming competition is giving me fast, uncontrolled access, I can grab and learn their stuff easily, and I contribute bug reports and bug fixes.
Meanwhile, my wife is a bit pissed at the delay. She's not really a comuputer or internet geek, but she's getting used to downloading things. She has watched me download linux distros and install them in an evening. She loves Netflix, but is starting to ask why she has to wait a day or two for something that could just be downloaded in a few minutes.
I'll let others make the obvious inferences and predictions from all this.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Dude... you apparently have not read all the articles out there describing the "open source community" as some single-minded, idealistic monolith. Yes, it's a provocative title. Deal with it.
And you know, there isn't one single open source community, there are many communities around open source projects. Just like there are many communities around non-open source technologies. The lower bar to entry of open source means that its communities will most likely continue to grow. Duh... read the article. Or re-read it.
Hyperic Community Manager
At no point in that article or elsewhere would I ever use an argument to say that it gives me carte blanche to do whatever I or anyone else wanted. You are a troll and have no grasp of the points I made.
Hyperic Community Manager
Exactly; somebody finally says it. I hate it when people use Thatcher's quote out of context. Thatcher was talking about a common problem with society these days; individuals don't want to take responsibility for themselves, and always want to find someone else ("society" or "the government," your pick) to carry their load.
I generally agree, but there is a difference between the FOSS community and society. If I found a bug in my FOSS software and I didn't know how to fix it (I am a programmer, but only a CS college freshman), I would send off a professional bug report, without insulting the FOSS community like some people do whenever something wrongs happen to their software. However, if I made some mistake in life (committing a crime, impregnating somebody, drop out of school and refuse to gain employment, etc.), I do not (and should not) expect "society" to fly down, pick me up, brush off my back, and fix all of my problems. That is the only difference between requesting bug fixes and requesting society to solve all of your problems.
In reply to:
" open source is much more about supply and demand than it is about an activist community or individual drivers (individuals or individual companies) affecting change on society."
I classify this statement (and the entire article for that matter) in the same catagory as i classify "Junk Science", "Polls" and "Studies". IOW, the trash pile.
The folks that work on "Open Source" are not an "activist community" as the POP media calls them. But, what they are, is a loosely connected team of like minded individuals from around the world that could care less about "supply and demand".
To them, its all about the work and the possible contributation they can make for society. (sounds idealistic, but true)
They also care about making an affect and making a change on society in a positive way with their hard work.
We owe a debt of thanks for every webserver and mail server running on *nix today (which is a majority)because of the hard work the 'open sorce' folks have dedicated.
The author of this article should show a bit more respect to them and not say they only care about "supply and demand". Because this is simply not true.
I for one, hope they never stop their work.
Because should they ever stop their work, we will truly be at the mercy of those who only want "supply and demand" to affect change on society. And thats a scary thought.
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
Where is Senator McCarthy when we really need him? ;-)
moral implications of Free Software development; after all, its contribution is only incidental. If there are no moral or ethical implications, and leadership has no value in this new market of ideas, all that remains is the Invisible Hand. All praise the Invisible Hand.
What you neglect to mention is that "leadership" isn't. It consists of individuals who are fundamentally the same as everyone else (having the same requirements for bowel movements, etc) but who are led via narcissism into believing that they're somehow better than the rest of us.
Stallman, Larry Wall et al. might have contributed large amounts to FOSS's progress; I'm not denying that...but so have a very large number of other people. I'm not going to spend time contributing to the inflation of the egos of a few select individuals on the one hand, at the expense of never recognising said others at all.
I am thoroughly sick and tired of this small handful of grand standing, self promoting narcissists who are aided and abetted in claiming that they *are* Linux. It's a crock of shit from beginning to end, and it always has been. Said narcissists wouldn't have got anywhere if it hadn't been for the thousands of others in the trenches and on IRC who've laid their groundwork.
I would argue - and so would the Mono team - that .NET is more open as a platform than J2EE.
.NET, which arguably means it is more "open". Some specifications have been extremely successful at creating many options (JDBC, JMS, JCA, etc.). Whereas many parts of .NET aren't even standardized (ASP.NET, ADO.NET), and there are only three major implementations that I've seen, though perhaps I'm behind the times (I'm referring to MIcrosoft's closed branch, the Rotor branch, and Mono).
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "open". There are many more choices of application server with J2EE than there are with
My argument is that without the economies of scale made possible by the Internet, those individual accomplishments would never have reached the point that they have now
Absolutely true. One could even argue that without the captial influx from both public and private capital (VCs & public companies), most of the popular open source wouldn't be where it's at. Most full-time contributors are on corporate payroll to write OSS, which is being funded either through complementary products (hardware, consulting, support) or is just a capital sink until they figure out how to make money with it.
In general, your article is thought provoking, though I disagree on some of the points of how people perceive the role of ideology in OSS. I'm going to draw a strawman scenario here to illustrate my view of how OSS mindshare grows, hopefully it's not too far from reality:
The OSS Hype Cycle
There is no core group of ideologues that really matters anymore. Perens and ESR did good things to hype OSS in the late 1990's, but I don't think they're doing much now to increase its hype. Today, the hype cycle is fed by a large group of in-the-trenches developers that are ideologues because their don't get much personal value out of their jobs and are trying to attach themselves to a larger cause. They're frustrated with the proprietary software they're forced to use that just doesn't work the way they want it to (regardless whether their way is actually better). This leads mostly to pro-OSS postings on blogs and websites, like Slashdot, TheServerSide.com, O'Reilly Network, or whatnot.
These posts, along with their voice on projects, eventually leads to influence thought leaders inside and outside their company, looking for the next trend to exploit. Joe Developer will promote the OSS-solution-du-jour for their project, and explain its wonders to his team leads and the public, mostly based on cool-factor and some anecdotal statements about its productivity. Examples abound, such Ruby on Rails, or MySQL + PHP, or the plethora of Java frameworks.
Comment: I'm not challenging that these tools actually make life better at times, but I am concerned with two things: the influence is usually based purely from a narrow "professional lens" -- I'm a developer, I only care about developer values, and I choose tools that make me feel more productive or cool, regardless of consequences outside my area of expertise. Business factors (which often are also architectural factors) are rarely considered. Secondly, that there is such chaos and splintering in the market going on due to OSS development that qualitiy is suffering. People are going "meta" and developing more and more tools for themselves instead of using old, proven tools that have lost the cool-factor, or might be proprietary.
To continue the story, these in-the-trenches IT or ISV developers influence their team leads, who, in smaller companies with less bureaucratic oversight on licensing / legal concerns, influence their directors, and open soruce gets used on a project. Successes are bound to occur, especially if the requirements are modest, and performance demands are light, and availability requirements loose. Pundits and bloggers pick up on these modest successes and run with it, claiming that all infrastructure software
-Stu
Graduates still find it difficult to work for the industry while outsourcing marches on.
Many great developers either fall under the shadow of an IT company or they end up taking a different path.
Just recently there was an open letter published to developers urging them to work closer with society, extract requirements from daily life and promote IT.
There is a blog at http://eulife.wordpress.com/ constantly providing more information as well as a website at http://www.eulife.gr/i dunno, the notion of $25 shareware software always seemed like a quaint little windows phenomena to me. application or applet for every task. i guess thats not the point though, the point is the $80 industry standard mail clients. but then again, mail clients used to be something a couple people needed. when products start reaching commodity penetration, prices have to go towards commodity pricing. its really hard to justify $60 million buisnesses that do nothing but write mail clients. at the same, this shit is a whole lot of work.
we're at an intrem. service computing is going to come along and start making more people more money. but service computing is only possible because there's free infrastructure to build it on. eventually it'll swing back again when we have better information management tools and people realize they can build their own salesforce.com really easily, when people get tired of being chained to closed services just like users were chained to closed applications. push back and forth. thats the economics of whats happening to software. but its entirely besides the point from the open source movement, from the hacker movement.
for my money, i'd put the dollar down on open source community as being defined by the people who understand that the software ecosystem only exists because people are sharing, only exists when projects are hackable. open source is really very self reinforcing as a community; its all the people who want to be involved with technology, not merely users of it. i really think this is the key, that while commercial world is in spin cycle figuring out what to do with extreme-commoditization (answer: services), open source is still doing the same thing its always done, namely build its own hacker friendly alternate reality. money was never really part of this alternate reality, but sometimes the two can be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) connected.
in the end, i'd say open source is vital because it keeps the game moving. eudora had no reason to do anything different. ms was happily king of the pile. entrenched buisnesses have no want or need to innovate, the de facto standard by its nature isnt supposed to be moving anywhere. every application is some standalone item which will never meet with any other application, will never collaborate, will never remix. they're just growing towards deprecation, awaiting the day they'll be subsumed by some more general purpose application. the open source community, or more percisely really, the hacker community, is just a byproduct of people who want to keep the game moving. having access to a library of 50,000 programs you can install with 'apt-get', use, and-- most importantly-- remix, is absolutely vital to keeping the game moving. open source isnt about software now, its about the software that is not made yet, about building the blocks to build that future software. thats what unix was built on, small pieces loosely coupled, assembled into something greater. the commercial world does not fit that model, its inherently contrary to everything they strive for. its not about applications, its about pieces, about the aggregate. but industry isnt about creating frameworks of cooperation, not yet, its about dominance and WS-* specs so long tedious and boring they'll surely keep everyone else out. we need stuff we can hack. we cannot trust the goliaths to provide us with that. thats open source; hack. anyone in open source, linux, apache, bsd, whoevers colors they wear, i just cant stress this enough, if you cant see it you wont get it, its really just about the freedom to hack.
sry, tired from a long weekend. hope i made a couple ok points and didnt get too longwinded. thanks for the reply, i actually really would like to hear more. s'uming you're actually the author.
Assuming they *do* have access to Firefox, a clever user could simply install the Sun JRE plugin (if it was not already installed), which would just be a .so in their ~/.mozilla directory somewhere, not an executable. Via the JRE and a simple applet (which is a .class, not an executable), one could compile and execute any Java code they wanted, because you can compile and execute Java code inside Java itself fairly simply.
To get around that you'd have to compile Firefox without plugin support, or restrict user-loaded plugins somehow.