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How Has Open Source Helped You Commercially?
Slithe asks: "In the past few years, OSS has proven that sharing one's source code can be beneficial to both businesses and their customers. More than a few young programmers are thankful that they were allowed to learn from professional developers by browsing through and hacking on 'enterprise quality' code. My question to developers of commercial OSS is this: Have you, personally, ever benefited from having the source code to your project freely available and dowloadable, instead of being kept under lock-and-key? Have you ever fixed a bug in your spare time? Have you ever sought outside help (providing source code snippets) on a particularly nasty problem?"
Special Report / Open-source business
Open, but not as usual
Mar 16th 2006
From The Economist print edition
As “open-source” models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent
ILLUS.
EVERY time internet users search on Google, shop at Amazon or trade on eBay, they rely on open-source software—products that are often built by volunteers and cost nothing to use. More than two-thirds of websites are hosted using Apache, an open-source product that trounces commercial rivals. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with around 2.6m entries in more than 120 languages, gets more visitors each day than the New York Times’s site, yet is created entirely by the public. There is even an open-source initiative to develop drugs to treat diseases in poor countries.
The “open-source” process of creating things is quickly becoming a threat—and an opportunity—to businesses of all kinds. Though the term at first described a model of software development (where the underlying programming code is open to inspection, modification and redistribution), the approach has moved far beyond its origins. From legal research to biotechnology, open-business practices have emerged as a mainstream way for collaboration to happen online. New business models are being built around commercialising open-source wares, by bundling them in other products or services. Though these might not contain any software “source code”, the “open-source” label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all.
However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be. The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property.
But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does. This leaves projects open to abuse, either by well-meaning dilettantes or intentional disrupters. Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.
This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule.
The need to formalise open-source practices is at a critical juncture, for reasons far beyond Wikipedia’s reputation. Last year a lengthy process began to update the General Public Licence—the legal document which makes available “free software”, such as Linux, an operating system that poses a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance. The revision will enable the licence to handle issues such as patents and online services. The drafting process uses the same approach as the software production itself. It relies on an open collaboration that has hundreds of contributors around the world. “What we are actually doing is making a global institution,” says Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York and the legal architect behind the licence.
One reason why open source is proving so successful is because its processes are not as quirky as they may first seem. In order to succeed, open-source projects have adopted management practices similar to those of the companies they vie to outdo. The contributors are typically motivated less by altruism than by self-interest. And far from bein
Aside from your wholesale copying and posting of the entire article here---a move which undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of fair use---I will merely point you to this article on Groklaw in which I think PJ deftly points out the the errors in the Economist article, thereby leaving me with little else to say but: troll much?
> Have you, personally, ever benefited from having the source code to your project freely available and dowloadable, instead of being kept under lock-and-key?
:)
Do you mean me, personally, or do you mean the company I work for? No matter, the answer is yes in either case.
> Have you ever fixed a bug in your spare time?
Yes.
> Have you ever sought outside help (providing source code snippets) on a particularly nasty problem?"
Yes.
Ok, that was easy. Next article.
There is one good reason for defining keywords as string constants is that if you later misspell any of them you get a compile error instead of going "WTF?" and wonder why your sql-statement doesn't return the expected data.
Ie, if you do it right it is an elegant solution to catch spelling errors which otherwise might go unnoticed, if you do it the wrong way you get unreadable code.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
As an example, take a look at the functions in the standard I/O library for C. The various scanf() and prinf() variations use much the same arguments, but each one has them in a different order. There's no rhyme or reason to it, you either have to memorize the order or look it up. Not so with the functions Dan wrote! Part of his planning for a subroutine/function package was deciding what order the arguments would go in, and they were in exactly that order every time. (Many of the routines used either the same set of arguments, or a subset of them.) I was working with him because he'd gone blind from diabetes, and in all the time we worked on that package, he never got the arguments wrong because he'd planned it out ahead of time. In this case, there were only three functions that the average user'd need, and the rest were helpers for them. Still, if anybody needed them, they were there, and easy to use.
Now, imagine if this code were being used in a current OSS project. (Unlikely; not only is it in FORTRAN, the problem it solved had to do with command lines and batch files, mostly on a VAX.) Not only would it be easy to use, it'd be easy for somebody else to check the calls and make sure everything was in the right order. Sanity checks become quicker and there are less obscure bugs caused by misordered arguments. He also kept his variable delcarations alphabatized, as well as keeping his functions (except main() of course) in alphabetical order. Made it much easier to find the one you wanted, I can assure you.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
If by "FOSS advocates", you mean "FOSS advocates who still live in Moms basement". The GPL is about freedom, yes, but is not anti money.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
But that's not the real question here. The question is not if you have profited from a specified piece of software, that by chance was open source, but if you have profited from the fact, that it was open source.
So for instance I have profited from the fact that SAP's R/3 software is in a way open source that a registered developer on a SAP R/3 system can not only browse his own code or the code of fellow developers, but also the code SAP provides (very useful for debugging!), and (with a warning that this voids the warranty though) can even change SAP code. If you tell SAP about your modifications, and your project has a certain value to SAP, they will even setup an own system with your modifications at their side to help you hunt down bugs.
SAP's source policy is not conform to full open source though. You are not allowed to distribute SAP's products with your modifications freely (you are allowed to distribute your patches though). But I have certainly profited from the fact that I was able to see, debug and modify SAP's codebase.
ok my next try, a slight improvement but certainly annoying to type :
sql = sprintf(SELECT " col1, col2, col3, " FROM " tab1 " LEFT " " JOIN " tab2 ON tab1.pk=tab2.pk " WHERE " col1=%d and col2 in (" SELECT " " DISTINCT " fkey " FROM " tab3 " WHERE " col4=3);", 1);
Why you can't rely on the SQL logging mechanism I really don't know.
Postgresql will emit all of the sql executed and label is with ERROR if it didn't execute. I doubt another RDBMS can't do the same.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Open source has actually hurt my company. We are a VAR/consulting company. We initially billed ourselves as open source speciallists offering free software as well as the standard fair. The intent was that we would be unique, when compared to the competition, because we offered free/gratis software such as OpenOffice, Firefox, web servers, mail servers, spam/virus filters etc.
We weren't OSS zealots that pushed open source as the only way, if that's what you're thinking. We offered Microsoft and Novell products and services as well as our OSS offerings. We thought that the gratis OSS offerings would be a good hook to attract new customers and we'd make our money from the services. Bzzzt!
It took some time to realize it but, OSS was actually dragging us down. OSS is generally regarded as inferior, if for no other reason than it was free/gratis, and our company's image was stigmatized by simple association with OSS. We were actually losing business to our over priced competitors because of it. When presented with an opportunity to provide a spam filtering solution, we'd lead with a custom Spamassassin gateway. We'd lose the deal to a MUCH more expensive Synamtec Solution. When presented with a file server opportunity, we'd lead with a Samba solution, only to lose it to a much more expensive Windows Server. When this happened, we'd counter with the same Windows Server solution at a slightly lower price and still lose the deal because our image had been "tarnished" by the Samba offering. Talk about a kick in the teeth!
We fought the problem for a long time and couldn't get past it. We then took the OSS offerings off our web site and started leading with high dollar Microsoft and Novell solutions. Business is great now! It's incredible when you think about it but, I can't give away a copy of OpenOffice. But, I can sell MS Office to the same customer for $350! $80 of that goes into my business versus nothing from OpenOffice.
Yes, OSS has hurt my business. But, that's all over now.
Some code (eg. device driver code) is often extremely difficult to trace and debug and the cause and effect can often be difficult to tie togther. In once case I saw a problem where a device initialisation sequence of less than 20 lines was wrong, but very subtly so. The problem persisted for manny weeks. This was cured by a code snippet.
Engineering is the art of compromise.