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."

Comments

The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[eldavojohn]

Despite the nascent success of open source software, there has been increasing concern about potential pitfalls, such as patent infringement claims from large software companies including Microsoft. Many fear that Microsoft, often seen as an enemy of open source, is looking for the right opportunity to spring a patent infringement trap. Further fueling some of these fears is the copyright infringement by the Linux kernel claimed by SCO when it filed its lawsuit against IBM. While largely seen as unfounded, SCO's claims have led to some open source leaders calling for such things as more audits of open source code and legal indemnification from open source software vendors.

You can say that again.

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 ...er... impossible to do my job without the JDK and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.

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 ... which resulted in him running around the room, rotating his upper torso, flailing his arms and yelling, "Warning! Danger Will Robinson!" Two weeks of pushing paperwork and I get my JDK. However, no one's asked for the Eclipse IDE version I want so that takes no less than 34 days (a day per step isn't bad).

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.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Walkiry]

But remember, if it weren't for these patents and their precious attached IP there would be no progress at all in the software field!

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[DDLKermit007]

Actually in the graphic design filed with editing such stuff most "photography" is bought as "stock" with the photographer not being able to say what we do with it, but still able to sell his original to others. Modifying a design done by an agency under contract can be a bit more sticky depending on how good your contracts are. As long as your agency isn't the seedy variety and puts in a clause about any changes must go through them (they want to milk you for more money) there are no issues generaly. Having Artists Guilds is invaluable when you need a readymade contract and your freelance.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Narcissus]

It is true that the licence needs to be cleared, but surely that would be generally easier in the F/OSS world than the proprietary one.

In reality, the legal team should just go through the major F/OSS libraries then they would have no need to continually ask people about "what ifs". They could have a checklist of things that the software will be used for and you could probably tell in 15 minutes whether or not that licence is acceptable for that case.

In fact, that's one of the reasons I love F/OSS so much: with normal closed source software I have to read and re-read the licences to know exactly what I can and cannot do. With the free stuff, I just look at the name of the licence. I already know my rights and requirements for a fair few of these licences and I save time just knowing that I won't have to try and understand yet another licence in the closed source world.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[the chao goes mu]

At long last, I found my new .sig!

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Scarblac]

Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever).

No you don't. The GPL doesn't restrict use in any way, and you're entirely free not to agree to any of its terms. If you don't agree, you're not allowed to do any things that copyright law restricts (e.g., distributing it) but then you weren't allowed to do before you started using the software either. Merely using GPL software doesn't mean you have to agree to anything.

On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[fossa]

Remember that by using hte [sic] software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever).

Incorrect. For most proprietary software, yes, the license attempts to govern use and must be "agreed to" prior to using the software (whether this is legally valid of not I don't know but remain extremely skeptical). Most free and open source software does not include any license governing use (though it does include a disclaimer of warranty). The GPL merely stipulates conditions under which actions that would otherwise be copyright infringement may be performed. And I don't see how any court could decide that a text edited using a particular program is then a derivitave work of that program; please correct me if I am wrong.

I've noticed much free software ported to Windows requires, during installation, that one click "agree" to the GPL. This annoys me to no end because I need not agree to the GPL in order to use the software. Perhaps this common practice has confused you.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[oztiks]

You've explained IT experts (sys admins) upper hand in just a few sentences and why they think they are god half the time.

I dont really think that has much to do with open source. I've done dev contracts for a few companies which I have relied on services to be pre established for me, EG a soap interface for instance.

It took nearly 3 months to get the damn thing established for me before i could do what was required. So likewise weather its Java SDK, .NET, MySQL setup, ISAPI filters on IIS, or whatever. I'd be blaming your companies policy for addressing the technical needs of the employees in such ways or worse yet the fact you have to "befriend" a sys admin to establish a fairly standard software package on a server for you.

Seems like more of an internal political/process issue then software related.

And in all due respect the Java SDK comes as a rpm or a deb file in Linux most of the time and requires you to type in a command or click a button (you cant get much easier then that dood). So a 31 step manual is perhaps, some dork in your FOSS has gone to the Sun website and just downloaded some dumb ass doco and sent the thing to you while thinking "here ya go now piss off i have other things to do".

What you have done in your posting is prove something which i've been saying a long time, people blame open source because its hard to use sometimes but really we should be blaming the cheese churning IT industry for producing dimwits under a 6 month time frame by shipping them off to MCSE courses and paying them an upwards of 60K a year to sit of their fat lazy asses. While you can hire a decent industry experienced system admin with a few years Unix experience for 10 or 20k extra and can do the same thing 5 the other idiots can achieve in less time.

Remember a good trade mens NEVER blames the tools, and if he does then hes a fool, though if the tools are broken you have to consider that the tradesman usually picks the tools most of the time and therefore if he cant use them he shouldn't have them.

Further to that i dont want to hear this "oh it has to be easy otherwise no body will use it" because your dealing on a different level here. You don't hear doctors chucking a tantrum because the process of a heart transplant is difficult and only a few people can pull it off.. Thats why they are called professionals and it should be the same in IT, up to this point i cant see why it cant be in many occations for IT.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Henry V .009]

You don't have to agree to a license in order to use most GPL software. You have to agree to a license in order to copy the source code and use it for your own programs.

That more and more open source programs make you agree to the GPL like it was some sort of EULA, baffles me. It isn't.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Narcissus]

Agreed. However I was thinking not so much in the vein of Eclipse (although it was mentioned above) but moreso things like:
* we're writing a program and there's a free library here... what are our requirements in using that instead of writing our own?
* we're wanting to use a web app but want to change / add some features... what are our requirements with regards to our end users?
* we're writing an app that uses GPL code but only for internal use... do we have to provide source code to anyone?

There's just a few questions that even I've been asked from time to time. Having said all that, I think you almost made my point: you mention 'GPL' and knew that you didn't need a licence to use it. By just knowing the name of the licence, you understood your legal rights and requirements.

Now if I asked you: does the developer licence on Company X's component Y allow you to write a competing product, the only way you could be sure would be to read (or get Legal to read) the actual licence. If it was the LGPL, for example, you would know without even having to read the thing...

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

In reality, the legal team should just go through the major F/OSS libraries then they would have no need to continually ask people about "what ifs". They could have a checklist of things that the software will be used for and you could probably tell in 15 minutes whether or not that licence is acceptable for that case.

Your description looks a lot like an e-mail I received the other day at work. If you want to include software on/in products list the code, license, use and send it to legal. They review it, approve it, and add it to our license database. The nicest thing is they can give us guidelines in advance listing what we should be able to do with code from a particular license (dynamic linking, static linking, include but without alterations). Companies that aren't leveraging open source code are at a serious disadvantage due to their substandard legal team.

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[Anonymous Coward]

:sigh: So many misinformed people...

If I write a program, it's automatically--under federal and international law--my intellectual property; I hold the copyright to it, and I retain all rights to the software. The obvious right I hold is the right to make copies of the software.

Because using my program requires making a copy of it (i.e., downloading it from my Web site, copying it from a disc, or through some other medium), it follows that all users must obtain permission to copy the software; how does one go about obtaining copyright permissions from the software author? Licenses. Licenses are the legal means by which an author gives (i.e. "grants") users copyright privileges.

You can't just download a GPL-licensed program and use it without agreeing to the terms of the license; the license is the legal means by which the author gives the end-user the permission to copy--and thereby the permission to use--the software.

It's like if I was to draw a picture. I hold the copyright to the picture. You don't need my permission to look at my picture, but if you want to look at my picture at your house, you either need to a) take the original with you to your house [in which case you definitely need my permission], or b) make a duplicate of my picture and take the duplicate [in which case you need my permission to make the duplicate].

Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture

[HiThere]

The bicycle is a worse example...or it will be until someone builds a matter duplicator. The picture example is pretty dead-on, the only thing it leaves out is the status of transient copies made during the execution of the program.

OTOH, what is the legal status of a photograph taken by a respected professional of a painting by a painter who was unskilled and had never sold a painting? Practically, the professional would get the permission before taking the picture, unless the painting was in a small part of his composition, in which case...fair use? But is this the legal requirement? It would be difficult for the painter to demonstrate ANY financial harm, and he probably hasn't registered his copyright. Imagine a photo which the photographer titled "Art Class" which contains numerous paintings which are "works in progress" in an art class (after the class was over and the students had left) at a local high school. Say the photographer got the permission of the teacher, and the students weren't even informed.

Now imagine a software library containing an assortment of algorithms programmed by unknown programmers of varying levels of skill, such as used to be commonly available at various schools. (Maybe they still are, though I doubt it. But you can find such collections on the web, if you happen on them.) What is the status of that library? What if one of the authors happens to find that his work has been included. Yes, he would have given permission, probably, if he'd been asked at the time, but at the time no one *thought* of asking for permission..and not it's been circulated for years.

These aren't simple problems, and legal changes have made them ever more complex, and dangerous. Copyright law isn't as bad as patent law, but it's bad enough. At least patents still expire, but Mickey Mouse will slave eternally.

Here's why they've written this article

[XxtraLarGe]

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!!!

Re:Here's why they've written this article

[MyLongNickName]

{Slowly pulls handgun out of pants and pulls back the hammer}

Next time, make sure you get it all the way out of your pants before letting go of the hammer.

Its a trap

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its a trap

[OneSeventeen]

My business is currently working on developing an application I believe to be better than the current application commonly used. The current application is priced in the millions of dollars, and they charge implementation fees, support fees, etc. on top of that, creating a product with a TCO in the tens of millions of dollars. (An organization I worked with once spent $65 million on the entire implementation.) That software can be modified, but the modified modules will not be supported, and the "vanilla" system meets only 80% of their needs.

My application hopes to produce a product of equal or greater quality, be released open source, and charge only for implementation, support, and custom modules. All custom modules will also be released open source, giving greater incentive for future customers to switch. If an organization creates their own module, they may submit the code for my company to review, clean up, document, and completely understand. At this point, they will receive a discount in support, and their custom module will be supported and offered as an Open Source module for other organizations to use free of charge.

In the end, my open source license makes for a more attractive package, and makes more organizations want to switch. I will make more money in the long run, and will provide a better quality product as well. Had this been closed source, nobody would have a reason to switch, and the incentive to create new modules for my company would be low to non-existant.

While the other company makes more money per sale, I am hoping to make more sales and focus more on creating better modules that meet the needs of my customers. Happy customers tip big, dissatisfied customers jump ship. While it is possible to satisfy customers with closed source applications, it is easier and more flexible with open source.

A clearly marked mission statement, terms and conditions, and license agreement should cut through 90% of lawyer fees, and should make for a quicker implementation at most large scale corporations. Licensing fees would be non-existant, and there would be no penalties for having too many copies, which accounts for a majority of software-based lawsuits.

Re:Its a trap

[alexborges]

This is not insightfull. Its plain stupid.

Economic interests are not only about money. They are about cost.

Cost can also be time, work done or not...etc.

Rick Stallman started this movement so he could have an OS he could use for some shit he needed to do at the AI lab.

"Shit" here meaning work. Which costs.

So, it just goes to show that we humans are moved mostly by what itches. Itches are economic because if you dont solve the itch, it wont let you work, study, have fun...whatever.

Dont be confused by what politics call "economic". Economy is a science that meassures societal aspects through quantifiable data; thats why money is important to economy.

But in no way does this mean that any "altruistic" work done is not work. Or that any "altruistic" vision is not economicall in the long term.

Hell, Stallman's philosophy, looking at the final objective IS economical. He'd rather see a market where the rule is cooperation, not stupid obstacles to get things done.

Now in this modern Open Source world we live in, this body of software is increasingly becomming an asset for some corporations, a liability to other corporations. And those corporations react accordingly when taking decitions regarding this software. If the corporations are large enough, they actually affect this body of software (IBM-RedHat-Oracle contributions affects it, Microsoft FUD affects it). This is unavoidable and true as well.

So no, the author is not trying to destroy anything. Hes observing what is above described.

Re:Its a trap

[TheNumberless]

I understand that software commoditization force you to give it away for free, but since you'd have to do that, why write it in the first place?

Because you need it? Because the cost savings associated with using computers to do many tasks outweigh the cost of development? Because you can make gobs and gobs of money customizing and supporting software that you've given away for free? Because it's good publicity? Because you're a hardware vendor, and your hardware is useless without good software? Because by giving something away for free you can undermine a competitor? Because you just like writing software?

And if you don't believe me, you could ask one of the many successful companies who routinely put a lot of money into developing free software. RedHat, IBM, Apple, Sun, Novell...

It's incorrect to assume that free software can only come from an economic incentive, but it's also wrong to assume that such economic incentives don't exist.

Fallacious argument in article summary

[Xemu]

"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.

Re:Fallacious argument in article summary

[JesseL]

Are you an idiot? Did you read the sentence right after the one you quoted? The one that says:
"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."

Re:Fallacious argument in article summary

[JesseL]

I'm not arguing one way or the other. I'm just pointing out that the sentence that you quoted was clearly not a statemnet of of the author's beliefs (as you seemed to imply) but rather a statement of what the author believed to be a widely held falsehood. It seemed silly for you to make a post explaing what was untrue about a statement that the author himself didn't believe.

Must be taking pointers

[spurtle15]

from this guy.

a relevent anecdote from RMS

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

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''.

Waitaminute...

[Penguinisto]

From TFA: " While this makes for an entertaining narrative, there is quantitative evidence to the contrary. The reality is that placing too much emphasis on individual players in the open source movement ignores overarching economic trends that drove open source development and adoption."

...most projects are run by a core of developers and (at least) maintainers who are individually reponsible for the care and feeding of a project. And while TFA goes on to say that "Furthermore, 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.", I submit that the beauty of Open Source is that if said individuals all gave up, evaporated, ran off to Tahiti, whatever, others can take the existing code and still develop/improve on it. A closed-source project is hosed once whoever owns it decides to not do anything about it anymore (e.g. the decision by MSFT to let WMP for Mac dry up and blow away)...

/P

I agree one 100%

[vmcto]

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.

Re:I agree one 100%

[Russ Nelson]

Um ... the original design of the US (small central government with most laws enacted by states) doesn't exist anymore. That ball stopped rolling a long time ago.
-russ

Why not both?

[kebes]

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.

Re:Why not both?

[cnerd2025]

Agree, but disagree. He says that OSS communities like to paint themselves as combatting the "evil commercial software" vendors. And I find that is correct. How many people, if you asked on /., would respond that they favor open source because it is a more ethical idea? I should think that this number is quite high. The article states that "religious communities" with people such as Linus Torvalds would never have gotten off the ground so rapidly if there hadn't been an internet. In other words, the classical model of development, to have experts gather and design software and then centrally distribute the software has worked and continues to work. Without an internet, this would be the only method of distribution viable. Walker's thesis is correct about the floppy disks; such a material-intensive approach is just ludocris and wasteful. Torvalds would be required to spend huge amounts to get the Linux kernel off the ground, and this is highly unlikely for a college student. In essence, we are OSS/FSF junkies because we see the advantages of it over commercial software, rather than as an avenue to "purify" software development.

What I will agree with you about is the fact that "open source communities" do exist. What I will also say, however, is that many of the projects on sourceforge are ghost-projects. Many of them are excellent ideas, but lack of interest and group dissolution tore them apart. The idealistic "good versus evil" is not strong enough to hold the projects together, so only a certain percentage of the projects ever acheieve even beta status. Walker says that without the internet, OSS communities would have never sprung up, as some OSS pundits would like you to believe. Many of us would preach about our ideals and our hatred of the software giants, especially the Redmond Giant, and act as if we were some outshoot of local game-enthusiast meetings. Not true. I would never have gotten involved in OSS had there not been an internet. I would have no reason to. It would have been totally preposterous, a waste of time, and a waste of money. With the internet I was able to learn programming and learn about OSS. I personally believe that OSS is a better approach to design than commercial software, and I think Walker is saying this. We can't keep treating OSS as just some holy crusade against the commercial industry.

The only point of contention that we do really follow religiously is the idea of intellectual property. Many OSS/FSF supporters indeed support intellectual property, but only as a method of naming authors. I support IP 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.

supply and demand

[N3Z]

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.

Fear and Avoidance

[meregistered]

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).

Where do I begin...

[brunes69]

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.

Re:Where do I begin...

[sheldon]

Honestly.

The story sounded pretty much the norm for any corporate development job at a company whose primary business is not software. The IT idiots setup the environment for Joe Friday computer user, and then think that developers ought to be able to conform within this same environment.

First - My guess is he's running on Windows. The port 80 limitation isn't the problem. The problem is writing files to c:\windows without admin access.

Second - Aspects are, like JBoss and such. Whatever

Third - That's pretty much standard operation procedure for big corporations

Fourth - Apache and Tomcat are not Eclipse. The corporate lawyers wanted to be assured that Eclipse had not been made by child slaves in Madagascar.

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.

Welcome to Corporate America. You obviously have never read Dilbert.

But don't get me wrong. The salaries more than make up for having to deal with incompetence. :-)

Re:Where do I begin...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You don't need to install any files to any restricted directory to do Java development in any form. Period.

Your comment is nonsense. You don't even know what platform we're talking about, or what restrictions are placed on users in that environment. Maybe he is running on a locked down Linux box and has no permission to install executables at all.

However the GP specifically said the whole debacle started when he needed the sysadmin to install the JDK, which is not Open Source.

This much is true.

Third - That's pretty much standard operation procedure for big corporations... Not where I work

I've worked a number of places where legal was over-enthusiastically paranoid and banned everything they could think of left and right. On company I worked at developed software that ran on Linux and a number of UNIX's. We did all out development on cheap Dells running, Linux or BSD. Note this was our company's only product and source of income. Corporate banned all freeware specifically including Linux and banned all e-mail programs except outlook. Obeying those rules would have meant absolutely all production in the company would come to a halt. After that kind of foolishness, I'm not surprised by anything lawyers dream up. Before that job Dilbert was funny, then one day it just became really, really depressing. I stopped reading it for about a year after something in one of the comics actually happened to me the same day. Luckily, I don't work there anymore and things like this are funny again. Do not, however, doubt the stupidity of corporate lawyers.

If he has been assigned to develop an application that is going to run on Apache/Tomcat, then someone already approved Apache/Tomcat to be used. So why does it need to go through a re-approval process?

Usually approval for servers is given on a per-machine basis in more locked-down environments.

Not every company is staffed by idiots. We aren't even talking about PHBs here - this sounds like idiots tfrom the top through the whole chain down, including the GP poster. Supposedly a Java developer, yet not even knowing he does not need admin access to install the JDK/Tomcat/Eclipse. Obviously he does not know much about the Java platform.

Certainly there is paranoia, but not necessarily idiocy. As mentioned earlier, we don't know the state of security, lockdown, etc. For that matter, maybe the user is on generic Windows, but this is their first Java project and the JDK would not install for some unrelated reason. As for all the bureaucracy, it may be warranted, depending upon the environment, liability, etc. Be careful about labeling people idiots before you have all the information.

Like Margaret Thatcher's quote really

[hughbar]

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...

Re:Like Margaret Thatcher's quote really

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I've noticed before that extremists of both Left and Right can be identified by, among other things, their tendency to look at everything in terms of classical economics -- they assume that "the economy" will always make "rational" decisions, whatever they consider "rational" to be. (It's almost tautological that, being extremists, they have an idea of what's rational that doesn't coincide with anything real, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) It's left up to those of us in the Vast Middle to note that irrational forces -- altruism, generosity, and openness, yes; also greed, envy, fear, and group-think -- very often profoundly influence how people spend their money, as well as every other aspect of how they live their lives.

Re:Like Margaret Thatcher's quote really

[TheSync]

Indeed, economics is incorporating pscyhology as part of an effort known as Behavioral Economics. Often these new theories are based on empirical results from human subject studies.

Psychology can help to reveal the true nature of human "utility measures," which might be "rational" (in terms of being rule-based), even if they do not produce the best personal results.

For example, drug addicts have a higher utility measure for their drugs than non-addicts, regardless of the fact that the additional use of drugs may have long-term negative effects. It is a "rational" decision in that not taking a drug may cause an addict great short-term pain. Part of behavioral economics is understanding the relationship between short-term and long-term utility, as well as expectations of rare versus common events, etc.

At the same time, while there are plenty of interesting Behavioral Economic results, there still seems to be plenty of validity to most of the generalizations of classical economics (such as supply/demand curves, etc.)

It is easy to try to bash classical economics on special cases, but its predictive power for large marketplaces remains.

am I missing something?

[beta-guy]

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?

Bad history

[jbolden]

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.

No Open Source Community?

[Billosaur]

I guess I won't be getting that membership card I sent a $100 in for anytime soon.

Correct ...

[gnujoshua]

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

Re:Correct ...

[gnujoshua]

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

As Cantor and Siegal said

[whitroth]

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, Pencil

[protocoldroid]

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.

power to enslave is not a freedom

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

> 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.

Re:power to enslave is not a freedom

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Please explain how am I taking away somebody's freedom by selling them the right to use my code when the explicitly do not have that right to beging with?

Fascetious Tripe

[sam_handelman]

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.

Oversimplified

[wrook]

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.

Freedom in a vacuum

[fossa]

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.

Straw Man and Software Freedom.

[twitter]

His bad history is just a straw man. He's derived it from the intentional confusion created by the Wintel press and others. Shame on him for wasting time perpetuating it instead of making his point.

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.

Software Development Doesn't Scale Well

[breadbot]

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,

A new feature for a software project posted on the internet increases the overall complexity of the project.

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:

• Stick together
• Respect each other's efforts
• Refine the software until it is usable, which can take much longer than achieving basic functionality.
• Be aware of what users really need, and not just what the programmers think they need.

So far, I have seen these qualities mainly in commercial teams, with a few prominent exceptions in the open-source world.

"your" code and society's liberty

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

"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.

all proved wrong in the real world

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

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.