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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.'"
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
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)
I haven't seen an EULA yet, closed or open source, that didn't waive any and all responsibility or fitness for any purpose.
Then again I've never reviewed any of those for life-critical applications.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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What? Beryl is by far the finest window manager available, and window management is separate from widget sets on all major operating systems (you can use custom widgets all day in Windows if you want) so I have no idea what you're talking about. Certainly Ubuntu with Beryl has been no less reliable than Windows or OSX (I have both here available to me, in fact surrounding my Ubuntu system...)
Beyond that, it's not true at all. Blender is neato but there are several commercial packages that do more. CAD/CAM is another area owned by proprietary software. (I'm not even aware of a Free/free feature-based 3d modeling package.) Whatever else you say about Microsoft and Sun, M$ Office kicks the crap out of Open/StarOffice in more ways than it falls behind. There are other examples, but I'm bored.
Remember Unix? Yes, I use it today, in the form of Linux.
Linux is not UNIX but it is Unix. And if you don't know the difference between the two then you're not qualified to complain about me splitting hairs; if you DO know the difference between the two, then you will surely agree with my statement. Unix is to UNIX as Open Source is to the Open Group. Or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Better to know the bias than have no clue what their bias is. Everyone is biased, might as well know up front what theirs is.
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.
Legal responsibility? You mean that big blurb in every EULA about a page long which says in so many words that they will never, ever take any responsibility for anything this product may or may not do? Show me someone that's gotten a dime out of a bug in any off-the-shelf software that fucked their business. They're there so the PHB can blame them, but they'll never pay damages. At best you get some free help so you won't make a stink and/or keep drinking the kool-aid, that is all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sure, take a look at Linux. You can buy support for an embedded Linux project from the same company that will sell you support for several closed source embedded OS's. There are plenty of projects with commercial backers who will sell you support and service contracts including taking on legal liabilities.
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.No two of anything will ever be equivalent in every way. OSS tends to have restrictions attached to redistribution of the code, while it also provides a guarantee of competition in future bidding and an emergency exit strategy.
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.Actually, open source code is simply a feature of software. There is nothing inherent in OSS that gives it any negatives compared to closed source software, although a given offering from a given company or organization may well have negatives compared to other open and closed source offerings. They are inherently different, but only in that OSS has a feature that closed source offerings do not.
Ummmm, Apache vs. IIS? Is this a trick question or something?
Service and support: the best and worst I've gotten were on commercial products; the free software I've used has tended to have good support, and you can buy service and support for free software. With proprietary software, either you can get support from the vendor, or you can't get support. Moreover, an organization selling support for free software needs to do a good job to stay in business, unlike normal commercial customer support, which is usually considered a cost center by the software vendor.
Legal responsibility: to the best of my knowledge, all software is equal here, in that nobody will accept legal responsibility. If you think any commercial vendor accepts responsibility, you've never read an EULA. The most I've seen one of those accept responsibility for is that there is, in fact, enclosed media, and the floppy or CD-ROM or whatever will remain such for sixty or ninety days.
Software has its own characteristics, and there are good reasons not to accept legal responsibility when distributing it. They apply both to free software and proprietary software.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any software where the creating company is liable for its effects. This means that this is a false comparison. One could just as well claim that unicorns are more suitable than horses for commercial purposes.
I don't know about every piece of software in the Universe, so if somebody could point me to a piece of software that is sold normally (as opposed to requiring a written and signed contract for distribution) that accepts responsibility for any problems, I'd be very interested.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
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.