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No Competition Between Open and Closed Source?
techie writes "MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications. The author writes, 'Is there really the level of competition in the open source world that we see in the closed source world? This is something that has been stuck in my mind lately as I have been told so many times by closed source developers that by opening the code you are creating your own competition. Today, I'm here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it's false.'"
Is there anything worse than those css ads that pop up when you mouse over them.
I submit: No.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
;)
Clicking on the link in the blurb yields a blank page...
What's that supposed to mean in reference to the topic?
What a great article. Maybe one day someone will write a relevant one about how and why GNOME and KDE compete, for example, and why. I'll be looking forward to that one.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
" Mozilla was reported making roughly $70MM for 2006" I'm curious how in the heck did it make that much? More power to them if this is true, but I thought the only way to make money in the FOSS arena was via support lines. As for competition I dont think it's the same as in the closed source world. In FOSS, there might be friendly competition, but that just drives a better product.
If you see a piece of OSS that you want to see X feature in and you're a coder you have 3 options:
- Write a competing piece of software
- Fork it
- Join the development
And people will choose? 3. Exactly. Or, maybe, if they have personality differences, 2. Unless they've looked at the source and decided "this is an unsalvageable piece of crap" they won't be doing 1, and even if they have, the developers have probably done that too, and that leaves options 2 & 3 open again.FGD 135
One group wants free software, the other group wants to pay for support so they're never left hanging. For this reason, they don't compete directly, except in one important market: home computing. It's the home computing people who converted to Firefox in droves, and are installing Linux on their homebrew Core 2 Duos. We need to get all of them to install NetHack ASAP.
technical writing / development
It's just that for pretty much everything except GUIs, open source always wins so there isn't much of a competition for long. Remember in the nineties when there were scores of startups all making web server software? Remember Unix?
How on earth CAN one compare open source to closed source software in any meaningful way when it comes to competition? Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version? I'm not just talking about technical specifications or functionality of the app itself, but also service, support, AND legal responsibility.
Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an equivalent good in terms of the commercial world. Can we say that a program where the creating company is liable for the effects of its software on your system is truely equivalent in the business world versus the exact same functionality but "NO RESPONSIBILITY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART.." yadda yadda yadda.
Note that I'm not saying open source is bad, or that closed source is better, merely that the two tend to be completely different when you look at all sides.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Have you ever chosen between using Apache and IIS?
Have you ever chosen between using MySQL and DB2?
Have you ever chosen between using OpenOffice and MS Office?
Have you ever chosen between using PHP and Active Server Pages?
(IANAL)
It means you need to get a life and stop posting the same old tired "nothing to see here" joke to slashdot.
Ok, I know almost nobody here has a life, but Jesus Tapdanceing Christ! Are we that fucking lame? Go do some drugs and post a wierd troll or something. Sheesh.
Find free books.
Do the new versions of IE have tabs?
Yes they do, they must care about the competition then.
This article was terrible. How in the heck did it make to the main page? It was poorly written, didn't address the supposed topic very well, never really reached a conclusion and sure didn't convince me that the premise that open source has no competition was false.
Umm, no it isn't. The article talks about the difference between the amount of competition among closed source applications versus the amount of competition among open source applications. It doesn't really mention competition between open and closed source applications.
With that cleared up, I had a hard time understanding exactly what the article was supposed to be saying. It seemed like a "Rah! Rah! Linux is Cool!" piece, but without any really well defined thesis. There were statements like "Appealing to the 'Home-sumer.' Hate them or love them, Linspire has proven that OEM can be a sustainable business model for their Linspire OS, based on the Debian code base " in a section entitled "Forget Windows and OS X: Just Try Linux." The weird part of this being, it doesn't mention anything about why a person should try Linux instead of Windows or OS X, just that it is profitable for the company selling it. I'd almost think it was intended as a comment for the OEM crowd, but OEMs have no option to purchase OS X, so that doesn't make sense.
I'd say that was my major problem with this article. It didn't make sense. Sure it made a statement or two that made sense and included some facts, but as a whole it just didn't add up to anything. What was the author trying to prove and to whom?
Does opening your product up risk a competing fork? Yes.
Should you, who wrote the software, be best placed to support and develop the product? Yes.
So does the competing fork stand much of a chance? Only if you drop the ball.
Think MySQL. We could fork it, but why bother?
Of course, sometimes forks do succeed - like Xorg. Which turns out better for the community. And that only happens when there is trouble with the original that can't be rectified.
P.S. Please don't link Matt Hartley articles, he has not been insightful in any article I have ever read. Feel free to look back through his previous nonsense.
The article actually examines whether or not open source projects tend to have competition. It's not a matter of whether open and closed source applications compete, it's whether you create your own competitor when you open your source code. For the most part the author concludes that you don't. However, in many instances this is not the case. KDE and Gnome, for example, compete a lot and fiercely at times. The author's point is that, once a really good app comes out, often it dominates heavily and no competition appears.
and saw that stupid fucking penguin, i instantly closed my browser.
Closed Source is all about competition. If you want to make a new image editor in a closed source model then you are going to end up competing with Photoshop at some point or another. You can compete based on price, features, etc... And lets face it at $600 a copy for Photoshop it isnt that hard to compete in terms of price.
Open Source is admittedly more about co-operation and some degree of competition. This is why you have projects like Gimp which seem to overshadow other OSS image editing software. If you want a feature and you already use a software you are more likely to submit the idea to the project or if they are knowledgeable in coding do it themselves and offer it.
After all Open Source is all about not having to reinvent the wheel everytime you want to build a car.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Not really. I'm currently in the pre-alpha stage of a project to create a racing car simulation. There are two great projects in this area right now, torcs and rars. I've used both and I like them both, I have nothing against them. But I just thought that, first, I would like more emphasis on the physics simulation part that neither of those projects emphasize much, and, second, by starting my own project I would have a much better control on several other parts that I'd like to give more priority, such as network play, for instance.
Maybe nothing will come out of my project, after all I'm doing it in my spare time, but if I do eventually publish it, there will exist a third FOSS car racing simulation out there. OK, it will be more like a sixtieth or so, but most of the other projects are stopped at a rather preliminary stage. Take a quick browse through sourceforge and you'll see that there is no lack of competing pieces of software in the FOSS arena.
From TFA: Why try to take existing code, only to duplicate it with minor changes? Unless you are starting a company around an operating system, there is really little motivation to do so, even from a financial perspective.
Nice shot at MS there.
My
No competition? Mentioning Mozilla as an example? Hmm, let me see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers_ for_Unix/Linux There is plenty of competition. During the last year I've switched my distribution of choice more times than I switched web browser ( yes, that includes the browser version number ). You just don't do that with closed source software. You don't just try out a Mac for the evening and use the package manager to download the latest version of Office for it. When you switch between closed source software you plan to use the alternative for a while, or otherwise you just wasted the license fee. Compare that with a free distribution. With open source you could set up 4-5 partitions and have a quadruple boot with Debian, Fedora, OpenBSD and Open Solaris and with a fast broadband connection you could have most of your favorite software running on each of them within a few hours. This means you have very strong competition between projects. That some projects appear to have more or less a monopoly is mainly because they work, and people don't feel the need for anything else. Where you do have demand for alternatives people will either write it or get existing software to support it.
The linked-to article is web spam. Meaningless gibberish laden with sponsored links. I'm not even convinced that it was written by a human.
Check out the evaluation guidelines for the Web Spam Challenge (final results to be announced tomorrow) and tell me that you would not say the article is spam.
Of course there's competition, and it can be quite fierce. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comes immediately to mind. These projects have developers and users that are in fierce competition with each other. See also emacs vs. vi, Apache vs. Lighttpd, Python vs. Ruby. The difference is that Postgres "stealing" MySQL code would be pointless... it doesn't fit in with the project direction. This is why the vim project hasn't eagerly taken all of GNU's emacs code and rolled it into their latest realease... "vi - now with emacs!"
In the open source world, the competition is to create the most useful product for any given niche.
In the closed source world, it's (generally) to drive out all the competition from your niche, to increase your market share and thereby your profitability. This is why they're paranoid about their source code falling into the wrong hands. Oracle is a prime example of a company that doesn't really understand this distinction - yes, they "stole" a Linux distro to get into the Linux service provider game. Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell are giving a collective yawn - they're in business to provide the best product for a given niche, and by engineering it, they know customers will come to them before they go to a "me too" distro vendor for support on a codebase they didn't even engineer. Oracle would have done better for itself if it decided to adopt one of the non-commercial distros like Debian or Gentoo and advertised support services for it rather than trying to gain a "jump" on Red Hat by swiping their distro. Not only does Red Hat not care, they're likely to clean up by competing with Oracle as the best service provider for Oracle's own produic. (Whether or no Red Hat =is= the best service provider, or is rusting on its laurels is not within the scope of discussion.)
SoupIsGood Food
...that you're competing against yourself, all the time. Sure you have competitors, open and closed source, and closed source can feel it too but then there's planned obsolesence. If Windows or Photoshop or whatever stopped innovation today, they'd still be printing money by selling copies for quite some time. With open source software, you're dead in the water if you don't offer upgrades, service and support. Most companies like to come to a point where they have a solid product, keep updating the polish but in reality selling the same code over and over and over again. The most obscene example is probably EA Sports, which keeps rehashing the same games with new players each year and people buy it every time. If that was open source, someone would hack together a new player file and you couldn't do that. Right now Ubuntu is all the rage. If they made a couple of crap releases, how long before one of the others distros took its place? Not long. Whereas Windows can sit around for years screwing around with Vista, and still hold on to their market. Ultimately I think that is the key to OSS success, you can't stop because there's always someone nibbling at your heels. I think for most companies that is healthy, they need that drive anyway to survive in the marketplace. But they won't ever get to be fat and lazy, which of course investors would like but consumers wouldn't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Open source tends to be far more collaborative. There is less need for directly competing products. This model tends to be far less wasteful.
Does this mean a lack of diversity in OSS? No! If anything it means more diversiity because instead of many teams all making "me-too" products, OSS teams tend to focus on adding real value and focussing on differentiation, rather than reinventing wheels.
For a very clear example of this, look at file systems. All versions of windows support only a few file systems: FAT,TFAT, NTFS, ImageFS + few custom third party file systems for use with WindowsCE; being generous here - less than ten. Linux supports at least... well you count! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm much more interested in the competition open source government is beginning to present to current, very-closed governments.
a) getting 'nothing to see here, move along'
2) the actual link being a blank page
D) the article supposedly being about the 'lack of competition'
was funny because it was a blurb about nonexistent competition referencing a nonexistent article with a nonexistent thread to discuss it. That doesn't happen nearly as often as the 'simple nothing to see here joke'.
You're reading Slashdot, aren't you?
Without reading the article, I have _no_idea_ what the article is about. Despite there being a topic line and a paragraph description, it seems this article is about 3 different things:
...
"No Competition Between Open and Closed Source?", "MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications."
Ok.. closed source software and open source software aren't competing very much. But.. wtf? openoffice/abiword/MS office, IE/firefox/opera/safari/konqueror, gaim/aim/msn/trilian,
"The author writes, 'Is there really the level of competition in the open source world that we see in the closed source world?"
Ok.. so the article is about there being competition between closed-source apps, while there not being any competition between open source apps? err... wtf? This seems completely opposite to me. I can name postgres, mysql, firebird; mozilla, konqueror, dillo; abiword, openoffice, kword; the list goes on.. all competition in the open source world. For closed source, I can name.. office.. IE/opera.. MS SQL/DB2.. very few items per category. It seems that the closed-source world is lacking the plentiful competition of the open source world.
"I have been told so many times by closed source developers that by opening the code you are creating your own competition."
So.. the article is about people forking code? whaaa? I can't really think of very many examples of this off the top of my head. I suppose the big one would be XFree86/X.org, but it seems there's always a main branch that lives on strong. This also speaks as though competition is a bad thing.
So.. what the hell is this article talking about? *sigh* guess I have to go read it. Can't rely on the summary any more, even for a vague hint of what the article's about.
Talking about the Church of Emacs, Richard Stallman was asked whether it was a sin to use vi.
No, it's a penance
A software product satisfies some need for some target users. This is a very different motivation comparing with business driven development and thus leads to different kind of software and innovations. Because the most of the developers of open source software products have only as targetgroup: themselves. These developer-users have at some point a piece of software that is uniquely fitted for their own purposes. It might too technical to the not-developer-user to find interest in such software. But at that stage the unique fit for purpose is the idea, and for those users there it might be the case no other closed source software has this unique fit. So for them its better. The unique value might be just that it's free as in freedom or it's free as in beer. Community service might be just perfect for these types of users.
And when these projects attract more developers it attracts more not-developer-users. The more recognized a project comes the more diverse the user base becomes. At some point not-developer-user interests become more relevant.
Closed source software is not always a perfect fit for some specific purpose. Some small niches might not even be profitable enough for companies. And for these small niches there might be some open source products which have no closed source competitor. The author that placed the article maybe has no interest or awareness of such small niches.
A lot of open source projects take longer to mature than for example linux. And a lot of effort is put in starting development of products of which no open source counter part is available, so that you have at least something to use in linux so you don't have to boot Windows or use/pay for closed source products. In some cases the developer does it only for the challenge itself.
I think it there are still so many general purpose programs to be made for which no open source program is available. And there are so many existing open source projects to evolve to the level of a mature closed source competitor. I think that after most needs are covered, there is more need for really new software programs which have no closed source counterparts.
Closed source market isn't so innovative either. A lot of products first start as some recycled and enriched idea, this goes for closed or open source software packages. There are some software pieces which are earlier in picking up ideas. The Vista 3D look, was later to market than some open source projects. As long as people make first software for themselves the innovation will be much more in the features or unique software to developers.
For the real desktop user, linux will become more and more attractive over time. And than maybe we will see software for the more not-developer-user which he might recognize as a unique product for which no closed source counter part exists. And it might take ten years more before it gets noticed by the not-developer-public.
The author states:
"Today, I'm here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it's false."
You simpy do not go into an examination of a thoery with a bias and expect to come up with any significant
objective findings.
Gawd... could you imagine Microsoft running the government?!?!!
No. No open source project offers service that's even remotely close to the piece of shit that all closed source projects offer. Any open source project has, at least, the source code available to anyone who wants to do some effort to solve his problems. All the source closed versions can offer is the standard disclaimer *every* contract has. "We are not responsible for yadda-yadda, etc".
Open source service is *always*, without exception, better than any closed source equivalent.
don't forget licensing as a reason for choosing #1. if projects a and b are gpl, project c might be started just because the gpl is too restrictive (or too permissive, depending on your point of view) and released under creative commons, bsdl, etc.
Sounds like somebody needs a hug.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
And it sounds like somebody with the user id of 957941 needs to slash his or her fucking wrists immediately.
4. Do nothing because X feature isn't important enough to interrupt your quest for survival (this doesn't apply if you're living in your parent's basement and they handle the survival part).
"And even when some of you wish to exclaim that this is not that cut and dry, one thing that no one can argue is that their effort behind the notion that open source cannot be profitable."
Can someone please parse this sentence for me? It seems to be short a verb.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
if you're a heterosexual that's just the way it is. if you're a linux fag, sucking them dicks, we forgive you but you're still just a linux fag.
The problem is, people are over-analyzing the open/closed source debate. We've had...uh...about 5 articles like this in the last few days. All discussing statistics on open source, the don't do much good. The topic is drained of content, so why bother with it??? Practicality is the real issue with open source, but writing more redundant articles isn't so practical either. Numbers only work to a point. So, instead of just blasting this article, blast the overused topic.
What about inability to interoperate with a color printing press? Use of Adobe software in prepress work is way ahead of G* or K* software, in large part because unlike free software, proprietary software such as Photoshop can implement the patented PANTONE algorithms for consistent prepress color.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of copyrighted entertainment works? There's no way in heck that the DVD CCA would license CSS for use in a copylefted software product.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of set-top entertainment hardware? There's no way in heck that Nintendo would give its digital signature to a copylefted game for the Wii console.
Sounds like somebody is having a case of the Mondays!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
As I see it there are lots of competition, and whether the source is open or not doesn't really matter. It is easy to see open source software as something closed software would leach of off and steal code, but I really think it is more about stealing features. Like first opera comes with tabs, then mozilla then microsoft internet exploder comes with tabs. It's not about stealing code, but ideas. And it happens all the time. Just look at the MMORPG scene where everyone steals features from eachother (WoW and EQ2 is basically the same game, except EQ2 has real graphics.) So, the competition seems to be about who can steal the most features from the other or invent new features faster than the competitor.
The best replacement for Corel Draw on Linux to date is Xara Xtreme. It is also available for Windows and Mac OS. It's very fast and beats Inkscape in features. Of course neither of these three is a match for Freehand or Illustrator.
Both the abstract and the article are very poorly written. Basically, the subject of the article is the cash flow, not competition.
There is competition between CS and OS of course. That is obvious. THere is competition with OS, and that is obvious too.
Lame as lame goes. Bad submission, ScuttleMonkey. Very very bad.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Wouldn't free software that implements CableCARD have the ability to leak the plaintext signal? This is why CableLabs requires DRM in all PC implementations of CableCARD systems.
And what about set-top video game consoles? PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii use a lockout chip business model. Most people aren't willing to buy a 27" PC monitor or a second PC for the TV room so that they can fit four players around one PC to play a multiplayer PC game, even if it could be the next Bomberman or Smash Bros.
Apple refuses to license thier Fairplay DRM scheme to anyone other than themselves and a few Cell phone providers. Is it therefore fair to say that it is an inherent limitation of operating systems with blue user interfaces that they cannot play iTunes music, or is that simply a correlative factor? Would you think it useful to discuss this limitation of OS's with Blue UI's or do you think it more circumstantial that it is simply an effect of the current market and maybe it is possible that someone will convince Apple to license their DRM to a company selling an OS with a blue UI?Your analogy breaks because DRM is protected by law (17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts), but blue user interfaces are not. To put these on an even footing, imagine that blue user interfaces were subject to a design patent. In such a case, if there were a strong demand for blue user interfaces, then the inability to implement design-patented interfaces would be a weakness of free software.