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Open Season On Open Source?
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at the possible future of open source. The article's conclusion is that it might be grim. From the piece: 'Software giant Oracle Corp. has acquired two small open-source companies and is in negotiations to buy at least one more. Many experts believe this is the beginning of a broader trend in which established tech companies scoop up promising open-source startups. While the validation is thrilling it's also unsettling. Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.'"
The young idealists who let themselves be bought are the only ones affected. Everybody else can still fork if they have any kind of major problem. This is a non-issue.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
> Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.
:)
If they realy care about idealism, they won't sell. I think if M$ offered RMS a billion dollars for the FSF, he would refuse. (Mostly because he is slightly insane, but in a good way
My other car is first.
N3P offers a two-year college level training in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur in Open Source or Project Entrepreneur in Omni Communications. Our students will learn not only the technical possibilities, but also how to exploit new business opportunities, manage profitable ideas, and create flourishing businesses.
Each year, N3P admits 80 students-20 at our classrooms in Stockholm City, 20 through a system of advanced distance learning and 40 at our new classrooms in Malmö/Copenhagen. There will be two new classes each year 2006-2008, with the possibility to expand the concept into other regions and markets.
The typical student is between 20 and 30 years old, driven by one of three motivations; 1) the desire for prosperity, 2) independency or 3) to radically innovate. N3P will carefully screen the applicants for doers, not talkers, while persistence, passion and the ever so important ability to sell, are other important criteria.
The training in Stockholm will focus on how to generate business using open source. The training in Malmö/Copenhagen will focus on how to generate business with Omni Communication.
The future will show a great demand for individuals that have the ability to implement necessary changes. They should be entrepreneurs, fluent in new technology, project management and marketing. They also should excel in sales and development of new products and businesses. N3P identifies them as "Project Entreprenerus".
Most of our students will form their own business before graduating, and it is our expectation that many will be very successful.
More interesting stuff at http://n3p.se/en.php.
Students even get free iBooks (the school is run by BSD people), a domain of their own, web space and are encouraged to start doing business immediately.
According to the school, there is an shortage of project managers that knows open source but also how to make business. By releasing 40-80 new project entrepreneurs fluent in open source each year, this will result in a huge push for open source in Scandinavia.
Now you're complaining? Millions of poets, the world over, would kill prose for such an opportunity.
People do charge money for "tested" Linux distros, but only because they think people will pay for it. There are plenty of "tested and stable" Free distros, like Debian GNU/Linux. If you don't know Linux, though, it's cheaper to pay RedHat to support it than to have an in-house Linux guru.
It may look like Microsoft and Mac OS X are easier to support, but that's not the case. All of the major OSes will cause you trouble if you don't know what you're doing. You're screwed no matter which you pick.
What?
I guess you could say that. The business model of other software companies (in your words), would be "to bait people with overpriced software when their software isn't as good as it could be" and then charge you oodles for support, too. Look at Microsoft Windows. $200 a seat, and it's total shit. But since everyone else uses it, everyone uses it. That's a good business model... almost as convenient as having money rain on you.
However, the point of open source software is that you can pay whoever you want to support the software. Want to add a feature to Firefox? You can pay the developers, maybe, but you can also hire someone else (with perhaps a better price) to do it for you. Compare this to having a feature added to Internet Explorer, which just plain won't happen.
My other car is first.
Maybe you should surround yourself with capable IT persons instead of the crap you work with now...
It could be of course that you are a troll...
Plagiarised without attribution from:l .3.178798.34
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joe
You are a troll or plainly incapable of running an OS.
This is not MS kiddie stuff you are used to.
Real programmers don't care what OS and what computer system they work for.
Computers are computers...
Dude, don't waste your time. It's a troll, seen this exact piece being posted several times now. Just flamebaiting...
Real programmers program in assembly, right?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I thought the last step was always "Profit!" ... what do we do next if we don't profit?
"let themselves be bought"? Perhaps they just finally realized ideals dont pay the bills, or feed the family. Just because you goto work for the man, doesnt mean you sold out your ideals.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Folks on slashdot are always talking about how it's possible to make money on free/open source software, and that F/OSS is the wave of the future. Well, if you *really* believe this, why are you shocked that large companies agree with you? Or that people who start open source projects agree with you?
My guess is that a lot of the people who talk about making money off of F/OSS don't really believe it in their gut. They really believe that F/OSS is always going to be a volunteer activity, not a business model.
The whole thing is just "blah blah, we don't understand open source and refuse to learn". The only thing unsettling is that "journalists" are too stupid to read.
Wrong. Real programmers program in Verilog.
"We are moving aggressively into open source," said Chief Executive Lawrence J. Ellison at a Feb. 8 investor conference. "We are not going to fight this trend."
EvilCON - Made Famous by
There's nothing wrong with people paying for open source as long as the GPL'd code remains available to the public for free. That's exactly how it's supposed to work. What's wrong with companies paying for GPL'd code? Nothing. Kudos to all involved.
It's not like they can take the code and make it private. It just doesn't work that way. So where's the problem? By paying open source developers for their work these companies are simply reinforcing and feeding the power of open source.
King of getting off on a side track, but this is not that different from another hot issue in IT which is consumer privacy in the use of file trading. Ironically, the same rights holders who would like to squash privacy in order to prevent file trading are themselves totally dependent on privacy enhancing technologies to do their own business. You can't have it both ways. Essentially, the effort to destroy privacy results in destroying the whole basis of private capital. If a business insists everybody's data should be publicly available they're put in the position of advocating an extreme form of socialism.
It's similar with the GPL. By "buying it up" they're simply reinforcing its strength. There is no loss to the community.
Companies like Oracle are seriously threatened in the long term by open source software. I would see such acquisitions more as sensible business on behalf of a company like Oracle. As their traditional business model is threatened, if I was a shareholder, I would want to see some attempt to build alternative revenue streams through growth in to new areas. Oracle must find work in selling consulancy services. Revenue from pure software sales will not last for ever.
Buying a company that develops an open source product to kill it will not work. It takes only the slightest problem over violation of an open source license agreement to kill a version with an unsuitable license. Look at what happened to XFree86. Nearly overnight, all the developers moved to X.org.
There's nothing new in this. Big business is always trying to beat down the small guy by saying that "You won't succeed without our money and expertise. Give up now and sell to us or you are doomed." Open source is just the latest arena to get the treatment. Sometimes true, but often corporate bureaucrats prove far less adept at running a concern than the small guy who's become tough and shrewd because he's had to live by his wits with sod-all in the bank. Corporate bureaucrats are very good at overpaying, though, and you can hardly blame anyone for taking a fabulously absurd sum if it's on offer.
As for Mr Ellison, he can't have it both ways. In the interview on which this article is based, he first paid homage to open source which these days is about as controversial as calling for fresh air and clean drinking water. He then affected to find Mysql to be so small as to be beneath his radar but curiously knew all about it. That Ellison should find a company a tiny percentage of Oracle's size such a thorn says more about his tender ego than anything else. There's absolutely no guarantee that Oracle's "aggressive" buying spree will do it any good. The moment they think they've plucked out one thorn, another will appear in its place.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
They don't know what they're buying. They think if they buy an open-source company they're getting "open-source". They don't get a free community unless they understand it. They dont get the product they think they're getting. Software companies have been trying to make their customers be unpaid beta testers for years and frequently they think this is a cheaper shortcut to that end. They waste the community's effort. This isn't just the case with FOSS, it's generally the case with most company acquisitions, it's just more obviously idiotic with FOSS.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
That is a sad story. That is definately not what Open Source is about. Unfortunately it is a result of you deciding to select Redhat as your first Linux Distrobution. Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
If you want an easy to use, polished Linux Distrobution that *Just Works out of the box* with a thriving community I recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/). You will like the Ubuntu difference (http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu):
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
In fact they will even send you a copy free of charge (they will even pay for postage):
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
You can safely use/deploy Ubuntu knowing that you will never be caught in an expensive update cycle. Ubuntu is tailored for the Desktop and as a result offers a superior Desktop experience than 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' which is more tailored for servers anyway.
Also you will always be able to get Firefox from the firefox website (http://www.getfirefox.com/ absolutely free of charge (although they do welcome donations). Firefox strives to be a free, standards compliant web browser that aims to work on many different platforms (i.e. ensuring that you don't have to buy Windows in order to surf the Internet).
How about "[...] Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves successfully infiltrating it, and changing the landscape as we know it."
Software is becoming a commodity. The business is heading in the direction of services. Once Oracle has reached market saturation - everyone who is going to use Oracle, is - the only way they can grow is by selling people their knowledge on how best to use Oracle. And the fact that Oracle is dipping its toes in the sea of open source only goes to show that at some point, the commodity itself will retail at its actual cost of (re-)production: the cost of the bandwidth for downloading it.
/or so sayeth the idealist
yes, we have no bananas
And a prize to the first one who can tell me the octal code for a NOP from memory. No fair Googling.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Let me get this straight, people are spending big money to buy up open source companies left and right and because of that we should be concerned about the future of open source?????
..... once people figure out that they can make companies that are pratically guaranteed to get bought out at over valued prices or become profitable open-source ventures if they dont. And even better, chances are that 90% of the of the software they start their base off of is likely already developed. I wouldn't be supprised to see a nuclear explosion in the open source software industry bigger than the dot.com and the PC boom and the integtrated circuit boom combined.
How about an alternative view
The author of the article is clueless. Free software has never been against commercial use, or against business, or anti-capitalism. If big companies adopting free software means that free software is becoming "part of the establishment", then I welcome that new "establishment".
"Agree with them now, it will save so much time."
I always assumed the goal was to have people getting paid to work on open source. And in the reverse to work on open source projects and based on merit to get sponsored by a company to continue your work. It makes programming more academic in nature.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
If Oracle et al were snapping these companies up for pennies on the dollar, THAT would be grim. Since they seem to be paying good money for them, the most likely effect is for them to attract new developers who have the basic business plan of
1) Write open-source software
2) Sell out to The Man
3) Profit!!
Of course, for most of them Step 2 ain't going to work out and Step 3 will be a mirage in the distance, but open source still benefits from Step 1.
For decades, the only people who cared about open source were the geeks who stayed up for all hours swilling Jolt Cola and writing code.
I'm sure he means that in a good way. Suits can't stand open source. It makes no sense to them that innovation is driven by creativity and passion, not hierarchy and the bottom line.
Let's not forget, Oracle has contributed to OpenSource. They donated plenty of code included some clustering software. I find Oracle to be fairly "Open". Their software runs on almost all OSs. They allow the download and use for development of ALL their software. They now give away JDeveloper and OracleXE (Oracle 10g limited in CPU, RAM and DIsk). But I think the most important aspect is their vast amount of documentation (45,000 pages by some estimates).
I can see the writer focusing on Oracle because of thier recent purchases and Oracle''s dominance in the industry. I have just been noticing a lot of one-sided stories, leaving me with a sense that they writer (or company behind the writer) have another agenda.
First: If you can't afford to buy your software, you might reconsider whether you should be calling yourself a "good business woman" - just a thought.
Second: http://www.us.debian.org/ http://centos.org/ (RedHat clone). Both tested, stable and production ready. Many others, use a search engine. I'm sure your IT Consultant can tell you how. However, if your IT Consultant told you there are no production Free/Open Source operating systems, you need to find an honest one.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
It's open source. So they buy a company or two. The source is still the source, and the cannot buy it. It remains... [drumroll]... open source. Methinks both Business Week and the companies making such purchases are unclear on how the whole thing works.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
about the benjamins, baby!
Oracle is buying out OSS companies because they want to smooth the inevitable transition to a mostly service oriented revenue model. If there is any software CEO that has gotten what OSS is all about it's Larry Ellison. Getting OSS all lined up is all about standards in Data and Clients. That's why Oracle is extendending their DB (MySQL) and Client Technology (XUL/Mozilla) base.
How this is supposed to be grim for OSS is beyond me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You dont mod something troll because you disagree with it. That being said, parent post, try CentOS - read their site for details of why.
There is nothing in RedHat or the other "unfree" linuxes that would signify bait and switch - simply a more conservative approach to the same software with value added - like support. The difference is that some distributions are concerned with cutting edge technology while others are focused on stability. Perhaps you need a newer feature or driver for specific hardware, you may have to use one of the less stable distributions - like Fedora Core - in order to get those features. You should be buying your hardware with OS in mind, so this really shouldnt be an issue anyhow. If your just running a mail or web server or maybe your a developer and want stability - go for Debian or CentOS which focus on stability. I haven't seen the Mozilla Corp. try and sell anything and just because some of us dont understand their business model doesnt justify an alarmists stance. Expecting things to stay the same in software, id say thats a unrealistic goal regardless of operating system.
The moral of the story is, if you can get the job done with free open source products and your staff - save a buck, if you cant - pick an unfree alternative and understand that its the cost of doing business. Note that open source means you can download the source code - which means you can build it and run it in most cases - even RedHat, but this requires that you have some expertise in-house. Also, remember instances in which your software doesnt do what you want it to, where OSS really shines - you have the source code, you can change it - something closed source shops will either refuse outright or expect big $ to do.
As far as your consultants are concerned, if you dont like what they do for you - get new ones. If they sell you Linux as a solution, it should work the way they provide it to you, it should accomplish the tasks you asked for and it should come with a price tag that you can compare to competitors. There is no such thing as a free lunch: it will either cost you time, money, external/internal expertise or all of the above to get the job done.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Anti-establishment businesses and groups BECOMING the established?
What else is new?
This is how companies WORK, folks. Someone starts something new and exciting, and it creates a fan base- and then a following. It's good, so people want it. Then, it gets bigger, because the owners want to bring it to more people. Then it gets sold (or starts selling stocks) and it becomes a corperation. Ford, Microsoft, Apple, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Ebay, PayPal... these are ALL companies that started "in some guy's garage" and have grown from there into major corporations. It's how companies are MADE, mostly.
Works in music, too- anyone heard of They Might Be Giants? You can buy their CDs at Barnes & Noble now, and at Wal-Mart. How about Nirvana? or Elvis? both were major anti-establishment artists in their day... and are now being used in advertizements and on television.
It happens because the young and hip grow up to be the middle-age businessman, and they take their businesses and music tastes with them. Simple enough.
The question is- will these corporations take these little open-source businesses and keep them good- like Ben & Jerry's... or will they make them evil, like Paypal. Only time will tell.
by killing the entire concept of a paid programmer altogether.
:)
Theoretically speaking, that is.
If Firefox continues to improve in quality, it will become so superior to the likes of Opera and MSIE that it'll be the biggest and nearly only game in town. At some point, who wants to buy a browser when they can get the free and super secure Firefox version for, potentially, every platform? At some point MicroSoft falls so far behind with MSIE that they cannot afford to continue hiring programmers here or abroad to update it, and they may sell off or close down the MSIE line.
Now if Open Office improves similarly, MS Office could be endangered. Why buy MS Office if you can get an equal ROI for free with Open Office?
Perhaps Linux gets tons of hyper consumer grade (as in, your grandma could use it without breaking a sweat) facelifts, while holding onto its power user underpinnings. Easily done, actually. If all programs are written as procedures in shared object libraries, you could make both command line and graphical user front ends to call them, and a really crazy coder would give the user a 'command line equivalent' submenu option for the GUI version so the wanna-be power user could see how the command line version would have done the work. That would result in perfect scaleability. At some point, Linux catches up with Windows in Suzi Office Worker appeal, and its privacy, anti DRM, etc. advantages, drives Windows into irrelevancy. What's left of driver support problems are resolved, and whammo, MicroSoft finds itself losing sales at a catastrophic level.
Offshore and domestic coders of *any* app could theoretically be, despite their cheapness, be put out of work by a wetware beowulf cluster of hobbyist coders and volunteer testers tired of paying for any software, period, and who are hell bent upon matching the functionality of current for-pay software.
There are a number of factors holding back open source, though, not the least of which is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, aka pro-Commercial Software Propaganda.
But if these barriers fall, open source could theoretically force many, many offshore and domestic software manufacturing companies to compete against FREE and BETTER software. This is very bad GNUs for their bottom line.
At that point the market weighs far more heavily toward providing services instead of selling software, and then a lot of that involves face to face work.
The math says that offshore outsourcing stands to lose a heaping mountain of money as Open Source moves further into maturity. Of course, domestic IT has already suffered; out of work domestic coders have great potential to inflict spiteful vengeance by producing a GPL'd product that provides the same functionality as the software being written by the people who took their jobs, and then convincing companies to go with the free product instead.
LOL, even if this post gets modded down, the cat is now officially out of the bag.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
OSS does have a good business model -- for the inner circle of coders who can sell their services. It will not support layers of management, marketing, and investors that the purchasing companies add to it. So the problem here is that we have a mini-bubble. Investors will lose billions on OSS acquisitions (from code forking, community abandonment, users declining to pay), these losses will be reported in sensational terms, and then anyone who even mentions OSS will be derided. This will not kill OSS -- I don't think anything could do that -- but it will not help it in the long-run, either.
Dude, just don't bother. It's somebody masquerading as somebody else, in order to give a false impression. I know, I have done it quite a few times myself, but for other reasons.
;-)).
You can easily notice the deliberate naivété. The clueless-seeming (un)logic, the deliberate misspellings. Hey, I'm giving away my secret here! There might also be a gender switch (although I haven't tried it myself
So, the motives are ulterior. And thoroughly stupid in execution.
-clueless
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
the subject says it all. Why do you even bother to keep such trite on your computer/bookmarks?
Oh, well, suppose it's all part of the wondrous world of pissing people off.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Lets be realistic for a second- with the exception of some big projects (kernel, KDE, GNU-sponsored projects) and corporate projects (such as Inter7's vpopmail funded by its own customers, or uw-imap being funded by a university), most of the smaller or lesser-known open source developers are doing something that they enjoy and gaining experience. They're adding a line on the resume, and fulfilling a need which they have (I need a program that does ____) or that someone they know has.
Given that, this is experience. It's a way to make a name for yourself, perfect your skills, and give back to the community. That doesn't mean these people are against closed source, but they feel that their product will get more exposure if it's open and freely available.
Most developers aren't in the "it has to be OSS" mentaility, but rather in the "this project could be bigger if more people contributed", and of course that project is their baby- their time, their effort.
Again not to say that this is all of the cases, but without direct benefits, there's always something- be it credit, fame, or experience.
Now some bigger projects doing it is what this article is speaking of, but the general statement on open source is bogus! Open source simply says "this could be of value to someone else, and admitedly, they could probably reproduce it anyway by starting from scratch".
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
... how no matter what amount of attack Open Source suffers in the way of libel it just keeps on going and going and going.
Haven't those attacking yet realized the essence of why it Open Source Software got a name and a community persistant it developing it?
Its simply "CONSUMER CHOICE" of those consumers that have the talent to create and share their own choice. Motivated by perhaps those who don't or refeuse to provide an acceptable choice to those consumers.
And is the character of those attacking Open Source Software, one of providing a consumer acceptable choice?
Now who is really to blame, if there is someone to blame, for Open Source Software?
The answer sould be obvious to anyone with even half the intelligence of the libel criminals.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sounds easy, but damn near impossible. Especially if someone signs an NDA just to feed their family.
You don't just find yourself part of a tech establishment. It's a decision. You're not tied to the OSS project such that you have no choice to be scooped up (unless an agreement is signed). You can always quit too. Rather, I think it's hard not to become part of a money-making machine with a steady paycheque if you've been working on a successful open-source project for a while. I can see the mindset could easily change from "well, I've put in my time and done good for the OSS community", to aftwards "I deserve to reap some rewards". It's rare that anybody gives up an opportunity that deals with money. We all need money to live.
You can't buy opensource. Once it is out there, it is out there. If it is true opensource the code doesn't even belong to a single entity that can be bought. If you contribute some code no matter how small to a opensource project even though you do it under the GPL it still belongs to you. In fact that is what the GPL is pretty much about. You just give everyone else the right to use it (within certain limits) as they wish.
Yes you can hire the developers away from a project in the hope of killing it but why would this be a worry to opensource alone? EVERY project, commercial, political, social can be killed by its enemies by luring the people involved away. It can be very upsetting, just ask Ballmer.
It is nothing new. In fact several opensource people even started working for the beast. The gentoo guy for one. Except he left again pretty quickly.
And that I think is the reason opensource in fact has less to worry about then commercial projects about being bled of its developers. It is a huge difference to work on your own time for a volunteer project and to have to work for your salery on markettings whims.
Most of the bigger opensource projects are done for free by people who wouldn't have any trouble at all doing the same thing for money. In fact most do. There is one thing business week doesn't get about developers. They love it!
A developer will happily work all week coding to support himself to code in weekend as well. People like that can be tempted with money but not for long. When someone is willing to work for free they obviously think that a salery is only there to pay the bills.
But of course, it makes a nice headline because a handfull of companies with opensource projects are being attempted to be bought up (mysql refused didn't it?). Opensource is about as death as socialism. Just check you paycheck how much of your salery goes to social security.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I am not being facetious here. I am asking this question because I really want to understand the assertion, which I have seen repeated ad nauseum on Slashdot. It has always struck me as a FUD attempt or something.
Yes, I have heard he wore robes to a meeting or something. Other than that, all I know about him is that he ardently supports free software, which to me is an indication of sanity, not its converse.
So, can anyone list some cites or examples which support this FUD-painting that there is anything wrong with RMS?
If not, can you please shut up and stop doing the devil's (Microsoft's) handiwork?
Perhaps, as a small business woman, you would have better luck running Linux on the desktop if you got a taller chair?
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
Larry Ellison is definitely NOT an honest man.
Even if he were, corporations are evolving systems-with-chaos, and nobody can predict their future actions with accuracy, not even the CEO.
I think every FOSS 'entrepreneur' should 'cash out' when it suits them. Take the $, spend the 4-years in indentured servitude required by the contract, then go do it again.
These are people with ideas, and the experience of dealing with large companies will be very good for them and for the rest of us.
FOSS is also an evolving system-with-chaos, in case you all missed it. Most of the comments here tend to be static analyses, not dynamic systems grok.
Lew
What's left of driver support problems are resolved
Much easier said than done. Do you have any idea of how this would come about if Microsoft continues to promote "the world of applications and devices that run on Windows" on national television?
...is that it is speech. But it is speech unlike any speech that has ever been before. Never before has there been speech that one could speak into a machine and alter the reality of that machine. It is far more powerful than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater (that being an example of reasonably restricted speech) with the advent of the modern internet it seems silly to think that you can keep this powerful speech in a bottle and sell it. In many ways it is a bit like trying to put the genie back in the bottle...
Yet that's just what commerical software is all about. Bottling speech and selling it in crates. And there isn't anything wrong with that. That's what commerce is all about. Yet, things eventually become commodities and you lose that limited monopoly after a while. Just as light-bulbs are made by many companies now and some people would pause before buying a lamp that required a special light bulb.
Interestingly people buy lamps that require special bulbs... some times even bulbs that are patented and only made by one company. Some of these lamps provide brighter full-spectrum light, some provide a more pleasant shade of light. And other people find having a violet tinge in their light simply not worthy of the extra expense... and they buy lamps that take standard light bulbs.
I firmly believe that this will happen with software. And if you read the article you can garner the same points. Oracle buying OSS startups or Microsoft hiring off Distribution maintainers only causes a delay in the development of the inevitable. That delay is not without its profit margin. And the act of slowing the adoption of the OSS mind-set in the general public may be a necessary evil to allow humanity to adjust to this new powerful force on the face of the planet.
OpenSource empowers outsourcing in India and China as much as it empowers rural US and small European Universities. In time the natural market forces will shift finding a new balance in the world. Wages in India and China will equalize with those in the US. However, the rate of this shift can be controlled... I'm not sure if it is better to slow down or speed up this shift... but I know that those who are successful in today's world have an incentive to keep the world the same. Oracle and Microsoft for example did well in a world of bottled genies and they want that key to their success to stay the same. It is only natural.
OpenSource on the Internet means that someone who couldn't afford to do a thing before can now do that thing (see Nagios from the article) and leverage the talent of all the other people in the world who could not climb over that initial barrier to entry. OpenSource on the Internet means that the Software playing field is flatter. If you can get an OSS person to help you and you can afford their salary... you can do nearly the same thing as the really big companies. If the rest of your business runs well, technology need not be the biggest of your concerns.
Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have built their very lives on technology being a big concern. And all that cash they have means that they can sway the direction of technology onto paths that benefit themselves. Eventually, however, just as relationships with the light bulb maker doesn't drive the central concerns of most businesses today, neither will software in a hundred years.
In one hundred years what will matter is that this was a time of innovation that generated technology that changed the course of history. Just as pop. culture is confused about how much Edison really did to invent the light bulb and electrical grid they will also very likely decide that Bill Gates was the inventor of the Personal Computer and the Internet. With a little luck they will find it silly that we used to buy software in boxes. With even more luck they will find it a silly idea to pay for software at all and instead will have established a concept of "commissioning software" to be created by those talented in the "craft" an
[signature]
that was the later found slumped dead over his keyboard at his Redmond apartment....
what a tragedy indeed!
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
When you filter out the noise, an open source project comes down to...
- A handful of developers who know what they're doing. They, like everyone else, have a price.
- A number of smaller developers who tinker with tiny bits of the code, but produce nothing meaningful.
- The majority who just use it.
Of course closed source companies can't buy up all the OSS developers around a project, but they can definitely slow it down until new ones find their feet and continue the free development. It's that gap that allows the behemoths to breathe a bit longer, and at the end of the day that's all Ellison and his ilk can do, but they have deep enough pockets to keep doing it for some time to come. If all else fails there's always USPTO manipulation.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
...you hire the important contributors/talent in the project to sit around and do nothing. Or better yet, let them use their newly-acquired large salaries to take long vacations, and TA-DA. Suddenly the open source project isn't really making significant progress, is it?
It's always like that with idealists. Look at history for lessons. Doesn't matter if it's art, or science. Even Michelangelo or Da Vinci did things for cash. Why open source heroes shoudn't ?
Troll or not, only three minutes passed between the posting of the original article and this response. So, either this Anonymous Coward thinks and types really, really fast, or maybe it's just more canned material from the FUD factory?
Much easier said than done. Do you have any idea of how this would come about if Microsoft continues to promote "the world of applications and devices that run on Windows" on national television?
The same way that IBM and other companies have signed onto Linux and ATI & Nvidia make *cough* drivers *wheeze* for Linux *choke*.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"IT has already suffered; out of work domestic coders"
Only ones with severe personality problems. There is officially another IT boom in the U.S. going on right now. If you don't have a job, it's probably because you either suck, or people think you're an asshole.
The question is who is changing their standards to accomodate the other, and how much. If big money is recognizing free software and spending money on it, that's a good thing.
This has always been happening. Look at the original Mosaic browser, that ended up in IE code. Or the LDAP team hired away by Netscape after releasing their first buggy code. It took years for the free versions to recover - LDAP isn't quite there yet.
So after having a miserable experience with one distribution - on top of objecting morally to the whole idea of FOSS to begin with - you actually had the tenacity to try out five more distributions. Well, I for one am impressed with your tenacity (if not your honesty). But with your ability to learn and figure out simple things, not so much.
I'm an excellent software engineer
I'll bet you're an excellent driver, too. Glad you don't work for me if you couldn't figure this stuff out after years of trying, though.
Of course once you have made your fortune its easy to go back to idealism albeit no longer quite so young.. ;)
So wanting your family to be able eat and have a roof is selling out?
No wonder our society is in the trash heap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For starters, there are two major types of software, general tools (such as an OS, browser, etc.) then there is custom software that businesses, scientists, etc. need. I remind you that software started out with the later.
I think you were getting to this with the statement:
"At that point the market weighs far more heavily toward providing services instead of selling software, and then a lot of that involves face to face work."
But, no one in the FOSS world will develop custom webpages, database systems, etc. for company X, in fact, as far as company X is concerned (assuming X != a software tools company), FOSS means business as usual. (Also, I wouldn't give free tech-support to a company, even if I wrote the software they decided to use, I'd much rather develop more software and just get bug reports from them. If they have any problems they can a) hire me b) get support from someone else or c) go to the forums like everyone else)
So, FOSS doesn't destroy all software markets. Now, I leave where offshoring fits into this as an open question.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
No, really. This is the way the world works. If you're not some kind of living-in-the-basement schizophrenic crackpot demanding that the world change to fit your screwed up worldview, and your revolution actually *works*, then of *course* you become the establishment. It happened to the Communists in Russia even in spite of themselves, it happened to the environmentalists, and it happened to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
There's a saying: "You can go from being a liberal to a conservative in 30 years without changing a single idea." It's so very true.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
So, why aren't these face to face support jobs not possible for closed source software?
..
.. expect "penny support" companies to spring up everywhere.
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Presumably
a) closed software doesnt need support because it's of high quality (LOL)
b) the support is outsourced over the phone to some guy in Bangalore
So now, let's say open source software becomes better and replaces the closed source software.
For the face to face jobs to become needed
a) Open source software has to suck
b) It has to be non phone supportable (ie, it has to suck so bad that techs need to come to your house or place of business to fix it)
If the software can be supported over the phone
Let's say Open Office Support Inc offers a deal $30 a month and your business is covered for phone support and if required a tech will come over.
This can be offered with commercial software too! At least with commercial software the somebody got paid, and instead of writing the GPL software the developer could have worked in construction where he got paid a mad amount.
More pro free trade here: http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1791
start-ups are the cheapest way to get innovation. The established companies have to hack a lot of their entrenched bureaucracy along with gathering the talent and protecting them from distraction and letting them do threatening things to the technical or market underpinings of the companies existing success....so sure, the big guys will buy up open source start-ups. They don't do it to kill competition in all cases but they find the threat to business as usual is just as hard for other departments and divisions to swallow when it is coming from inside the walls as from outside. The purchase saves money and fills a gap in a product line. What I don't get is how the purchasing company determines whether or not taking its fork of the OS code private and perhaps adding value to the product by further development or by integration to the companies existing product is going to pay off. I mean what did they really buy? it certainly isn't the proprietary advantage of buying a company that has IP assets. And how could you judge the deal without knowing what sort of talent retention the merger would achieve?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
underemployed programmers with talent, or
software companies wanting to break into a difficult market, or
closed source suppliers abusing their customers
...the GPL is the best answer when you DON'T want to get eaten up by a big corporation. If you use the GPL, then predatory criminals won't want to touch you with a ten foot pole. They might try and work the legal angle and try to bring software patents to bear on you, but that's only because of recent boneheaded legislation that was created by companies run by predatory criminals (see: Darl McBride).
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You mention Open Office and Firefox. The relationship between these products and "open source" is mixed at best.
Open Office isn't really an Open Source project, it's a commercial product that was open-sourced after it was Gatesed to death.
Mozilla/Firefox is an odd beast. Mosaic out as semi-open-source and benefitted from the same kind of feedback as real open source products. The relationship between Netscape and Mosaic and whether "Netscape Mosaic" shared more than a name with Mosaic aside, Netscape's product was at least a reimplementaion of Mosaic, and Mozilla/Firefox is yet another reimplementation, funded at first as an upgrade for Netscape using the power of the Open Source model... and the result isn't unequivocally good.
Meanwhile, Microsoft started out with the Mosaic code base to produce Internet Explorer.
The relationship between open source products and commercial ones is complex, but theer's damn few FOSS projects that have produced top notch products that appeal to people other than the software developer crowd that haven't a goodly portion of commercial development involved.
"Yet in recent weeks the open-source community has been thrown into tumult."
Well they got that part right, though essentially nothing else. Of course it is tumultous laughter . I have no doubt that I was just one among a vast and far reaching multitude of people that could be considered to be part of the Open Source Community that was ROTFL after hearing that Larry Ellison and others have the folks at Business Week (and presumably current and potential stockholders) convinced that buying an Open Source company is the equivalent of purchasing the software base and the dedication of the involved talent.
Backhanded kudos to Ellison for out-Gatesing Gates!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Lets see...Not everyone is under the impression that they are going to write software, and end with Profit, like the Underwear Knomes... If they make money, it is usually by supporting the free software, or by consulting to deliver a custom solution based on free software. I think that the only folks who thing this way, are the ones who are not writing F/OSS software. Oh, and as far as the linux thing goes...WHO NEEDS YOU!!!! I run winders, but I also run Linux/UNIX, all have their place, or serve a purpose, or fit a need, don't damn something just because YOU did not find the value in it.
These new jobs you're talking about are for people with 5-10 years' experience in the industry. Newcomers will not get these jobs.
First, if you had such a tough time getting used to linux, even after all this effort, I am not sure if the trouble is with linux or somewhere else.
Now back to topic:
Open source is here to stay, but the open source *FAD* will die out.
Its not a silverbullet/snakeoil which can be used as excuse for writing shitty code which is not good enough for people to pay for it (which makes for majority of open source). But as a development model, it has its advantages which only a fool will ignore.
Its the business model part where I agree with you. The effort should be paid for. Open source is great and working for open source is cool, but...
What hurts is not getting paid for the effort. Or worse, seeing someone else profiting from your efforts without you getting a fair share. The whole "moral obligation" thing doesn't clicks with me. If coding is what I like doing, I want to make a living out of it.
I will, by all means, prefer to work for open-source. But not without being paid for the efforts. Here pay doesnt has to be money, it can be just the pleasure of watching people use what I coded. I guess this just depends on "how much effort". For something I did in a few weekends, releasing source would make sense, but for something which took months of hard work, I will expect more materialistic returns. If this makes me a bad guy, I would prefer being that.
I would have requested others also to stop working for free, but my guess is that not many people do that anyway.
ps. plz do not give "support" as an answer to money question. IMHO good software shouldn't need too much support. As a customer, I won't like a business model which promotes making software which will need more paid support.
Sachin Garg [India]
http://www.sachingarg.com/
"Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
Scott's a dick
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
If developers for Open Source, and even "Free" Software packages are being bought out and brought in house, no biggie. The truly "Free" software will live on, and if the community wants it, they will find a way to make it happen. If not, it may languish a bit, but maybe that's okay.
Just remember that Open Source != Free.
So what if a current developer/proj leader sells out? It just opens up the floor for someone else to either fork or start something else. Open source can be an incredible environment for leadership training. What really matters is whether the developer base for a given project follows into working under the corporate umbrella (paid or not) -- that takes away from the braoder talent base.
I wonder what percentage of Oracle users actually have technical justification (based on a missing feature that they actually need) to buy Oracle instead of just using Postgres or similar.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
Fedora, on the other hand, is an excellent distribution as long as you are aware of and comfortable with what you are getting.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.