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A Cynic Rips Open Source
AlexGr writes to tell us that Howard Anderson chaired an interesting meeting the other day with senior executives from Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell. The discussion took a look at whether or not enterprise users really want open source. "Naturally, I disagreed -- partially because I am a naturally disagreeable person. Any idiot can make friends -- but can you make some really serious enemies? I disagreed, however, because allegiance to open source depends on who you are. Let me give you an example. If you are No. 1 or No. 2 in your industry, you hate open source. You make your money by selling proprietary solutions: Microsoft and Cisco. If you are No. 3 to No. 10, you look at open source as a way to get back to those serious RSEUs, because they are where you make money."
Let me give you an example. If you are No. 1 or No. 2 in your industry, you hate open source.
What if your industry is open-source software?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
A cynic obviously can't see that there are other business models other than "proprietary-solutions vendor."
A cynic can't see that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, their daytime living would be their night time hobby.
I'm sure the change in the distribution model can be dealt with. CentOS doesn't seem to be driving RedHat out of business. Of course, there may be a rather uncomfortable adjustment period (kinda like the current state of the music and film industries). Perhaps that will a good time to step out of the work force for a bit and get a master's degree.
(IANAL)
There's still a ton of functionality undocumented and unavailable to owners/users, such as the ability to modify values stored in the vehicle's PCM. A great deal of tuning is available in software, but they still don't give that information out.
For example, I have a Subaru with DFI (Distributor-Free Ignition). It's got a waste spark system with two coils, each of which serves two cylinders. And it has crank and cam sensors, and you never adjust the timing. Unfortunately, this also means that you can't adjust the timing without installing a complete engine management system.
(There are exceptions to this rule, for example pre-1996 DOHC nissans tend to have a CONSULT port interface which is basically just a snazzy, externally-clocked serial port. You can bump timing up and down in 0.5 deg increments. But someone figured this out using a factory tuning tool...)
The automotive industry has made it easier to fix cars by making them largely self-diagnosing (if you know what to look for, of course, they're not always correct and "MISFIRE IN BANK 1 CYLINDER 2" doesn't tell you what caused the problem) but they've made it much harder to customize them by moving the workings of the vehicle from the physical world, where they are exposed, to a black box.
If anything should be Open Source, if not Free Software, it is the programs in automotive ECUs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Software itself violates the free market. For an item to have value, it must have utility and scarcity. As the marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0 (its fractions of a penny of electricity), software does not have scarcity. Thus it has no value. The rules of economics don't apply to it (or more correctly, an entirely new model needs to be created, but does not currently exist).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
However, saying it this way makes it more difficult for the average person to wrap their head around it.
To address your argument: There is definitely an exchange in value. If I make meaningful contributions to an open source project, those go on my resume. As the userbase of that project increases, so does that project's reputation, leading to an increase in my perceived value for having contributed to such a project.
There's also the effect of having created a portfolio, in such cases where I'm the primary contributor or motivator behind a project. I've got three projects out there on the Web where I can tell an interviewer, "Yeah. I did that. That's an example of my work."
In short, the monetary value of something is not its only value, nor is it necessarily part of its initial value.
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It existed back in the day when programmers were paid for their time and the software they produced was the result of that effort.
When people started selling software, instead of their services as developers of software, things got weird.
My twitter
The scarcity is artificially enforced through EULAs, license agreements, copyrights and laws, but it still exists. Thus your premise is false, and so your argument is false too. But hey, you got to work in the cool, punchy sounding statement: "the rules of economics don't apply to it".
Question everything
It's also said that 90% (maybe higher, I can't remember) of software is written for inhouse projects and would never see anything outside the corporate intranet. I think that there's more than enough work to keep everyone busy just doing all the custom stuff that everyone wants.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Dealing with ClearCase is a major part of everyone's job there. It was forced on everybody with a top-down executive decision- all version control is handled with ClearCase since they paid for the license. (The "benefit" is that a team in the bioinformatics division can have access to a repository maintained by, say, the oil exploration division.) Everyone who has to use ClearCase hates it. The processes are weird and the tools that you're forced to use are buggy. I've heard people cite ClearCase as a good reason to look for another job. The guy in the next cube had three weeks of work destroyed by a ClearCase update one morning. He smashed his keyboard into 101 pieces on the floor.
There are tiny version-control rebellions all the time- small teams set up little secret CVS repositories here and there- just known to a few guys who then have to keep them a secret from management. Once the top brass inevitably finds out about them, the phagocytosis begins: the team has to stop whatever it's doing and help migrate their entire CVS repository into ClearCase. This was always an abnormally large, painful undertaking for some reason. It was a real tragedy every time it happened- really demoralizing for everyone, even the people in the next row of cubicles just rubbernecking another version control disaster.A cynic might suggest that the people breathing in oxygen are the ones who are exhaling carbon dioxide and destroying the very atmosphere they're breathing. And that if carbon dioxide completely replaced oxygen, these people would not be able to inhale the oxygen that turns into the carbon dioxide they exhale. A cynic would be right.
Well, rather than "artificial scarcity", which applies well to DeBeers' diamonds, I think it would be more accurate to describe the proprietary software situation as "fictional scarcity". That is, it is a scarcity that only exists in the mind of the least attentive and most uncritical shareholder. Any bittorrent user can tell you that this alleged scarcity doesn't actually exist in reality.