Slashdot Mirror
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
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)
Find free books.
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.
Do the new versions of IE have tabs?
Yes they do, they must care about the competition then.
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.
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.
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
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.
The same way that 90% of the articles make it to Slashdot: by making broad, controversial claims sure to spark click-through and reader responses which in turn garner more click-through and ad revenue. Most people don't read the articles anyway, so each new article posted is just a chance for people to regurgitate the same old arguments they've already had thousands of times with the same people winning with the same ideas.
Talking about the Church of Emacs, Richard Stallman was asked whether it was a sin to use vi.
No, it's a penance
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).