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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."
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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.
...and now the seasoned veterans of sarcasm and IT acrimony at ./ will rip him back! Enjoy the rest of the thread!
:)
u-bend
From TFA:
Open source is not a movement; it's a religion. It is a set of principles and practices that let everyone share nonexistent or semi-existent intellectual property.
Nonexistent intellectual property? Semi-existent intellectual property? WTF?
Any article about whether enterprise users really want to use Open Source software that starts of like this isn't worth reading any further. The guy isn't a cynic. He's someone with an axe to grind.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Enterprise (end) users don't care one way or the other about open source. All they want is something that is:
1) Reliable
2) Doesn't (ever?) change its user interface (in part, because they "develop" screenshot-based training materials too)
3) Etc.
It's only the enterprise I.T. technicians ("administrators") that care one way or the other, and then (in most cases because they're spending other people's money) because budget, deployment or licensing disputes are making their job more challenging that they feel it should be.
then
So, open source guys are Republican Communists?
I don't think this guy's a cynic. I think he's a schizophrenic.
RSEU: Really Smart Enterprise Users
From TFA. Didn't you know?
*finds felt tipped pens*
...and the lack of oxygen really affects them. The environment where I work is very Cisco-heavy, and fairly MS-heavy, and most people's grasp of what open source even *means* is tenuous at best. I do a lot of coding for the tools for our web-based reporting, and what *I* do is all-too-often called "open source". These people are too concerned with margins to learn about things like technology.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
I RTFA just to find that out. That's what he calls a "Really Smart Enterprise User"
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Is it just me, or is this guy throwing the baby out with the bathwater? While it's understandable that some of the fanaticism and philosophies associated with the OSS movement might turn him off, that shouldn't stand in the way of the fact that there is quite a bit of great OSS software*. Perhaps tellingly, much of that great software has no ties back to the GNU philosophies. Mozilla, Apache, BSD, etc. have become the underpinnings of the market without directly supporting Stallman's vision. Even Linus takes a cool approach to his ties with the GNU, speaking against decisions when he disagrees.
:P
The truth is that if this guy is as cynical as he's making himself out to be, then he's guilty of the very fanaticism that he's accusing the OSS community of. Because no OSS means no Firefox, no OpenOffice, no Apache, no PHP, etc. If he's really extreme about it, then he can forget about buying products from big names like Apple, Cisco, or Novell. Even Microsoft would be on his list for having dabbled in OSS!
Will he really cut his nose off to spite his face, or will this cynic turn hypocrite?
* Doubled up just to annoy the grammar nazis!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Since time immemorial the Yankee Group has made its money pretending to be smarter than everyone else in the room. They literally make up shit out of whole cloth in order to be the only guys with this 'new' idea whatever it is. The fact is that Yankee group gets paid by the largest customers and the largest vendors. Are they unbiased? Sort of, not really. They know full well who their own customers are. If not for the myth of self anointed 'expertise' not only would there be no closed source, there would be no market analysis consulting firms like Yankee.
To their credit though they're at least not a PR arm of Microsoft like Gartner.
Well said for someone with expertise only in sales and management and clearly the technical capacity of a bumble bee.
Who cares if you don't think a company should use Open Source.
If you might allow me to somewhat anthropomorphically impose an opinion upon an abstract concept: Open Source doesn't care. If we assume corporations are legally individuals with a sociopathic need to make profit and thus process as many customers as it can then open source is a person who just doesn't care if you use or if you don't. So if you don't want to use it and have nothing to lend to the technical discussion... please stop talking.
Whether my FC5, FC6, Xubuntu, openSuSE and Gentoo installations, my Apache webservers, or any of the approx. 80,000 packages on my 7 machines are "nonexistent" or "semiexistent"... whichever they are, they're chugging along pretty well.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Open Source software can allow some enterprises, even at the top of their industry, to focus on their core business. Take for example IBM (or SGI, or Sun). IBM is primarily a hardware manufacturer. Thus they NEED an operating system, but having to devote a lot of ressources to maintaining it is not the better way to go. It is better for them to devote SOME ressources to help make Linux better, and more importantly to make it usable for THEM. Less effort wasted on something which is not their core buisiness for the same results, and a good conscience as a bonus.
WTF - is Jack Welsh* a contributor to SlashDot now?
Anyway, if you're #3-10 in your industry, you're ranked there because of market share or total sales, not because of IT expenses or even profitability. Just cutting licensing costs may get you a pat on the back and a promotion, but in the infinitely more complex context of running a business and competing in the marketplace, it's really not that significant unless you already spend an inordinate** amount on IT.
* ICYDK, he's famous for a "if you're not #1 or #2 in your industry..." mantra while CEO of GE.
** For any Yale grads out there: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/inordinately
The guy is clearly trolling-for-dollars. And some fools at Slashdot are giving it to him. Ignore the article.
This article is chock full of misconceptions. Cisco hates open source. (Wrong, just look at http://www.openfabrics.org/. They have developers contributing to linux kernel full time.) Open Source is a religion. BS. Open Source is a way of developing software. Open Source developers do it for a nightime hobby. Wrong again. Most linux developers I know do it for their day job.
Thanks for posting a very poor article.
He wanted to make enemies. Posting his poorly thought out article here is making his wish come true.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
MS is a software shop they fear free software as it cuts into there margins. Cisco is mostly a hardware shop with enough software to glue things together. OSS is not going to replace core network routers anytime soon. The other side of the shop is support and there is no OSS that is even close. Granted smaller shops will use OSS products that work as well or better. I'll take OpenNMS over whats up gold or whatever Cisco works is coming bundled with for real time monitoring. But I still want CW for it's other functions. Cisco even sells OSS compatible products take the Mars platform it works with there IDS and a pile of others including snort. Cisco might fear somebody coming up and replacing there software bits with OSS kit but that is taking a long time to mature it's not an itch that many have to scratch.
No sir I dont like it.
Time to once again introduce the old comparison with the auto industry. Every auto manufacturer automatically makes and sells full shop manuals for their vehicles. They accept this, and understand that if they didn't, they wouldn't sell many vehicles. Few customers would want to buy a car that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer. Granted, they might not want a shop manual themselves, but they expect that their friendly local independent mechanic would be able to get one.
So why would computer customers be stupid enough to buy computer systems whose inner workings are hidden and inaccessible to anyone not working for the manufacturer? This doesn't make any sense, and we should expect that eventually users will wise up, as they long ago did with vehicles.
It's especially baffling that people are purchasing software that is so full of "exploits", and when a new bit of malware appears, users have to wait for the software's manufacturer to come out with a patch. You wouldn't tolerate this with other purchases, why would you accept it with software? Just as you expect your local mechanic to have repair information available, you should expect that your local software hackers would have access to the information to fix problems. That is, they should have access to your software's source.
It's especially baffling that, if I want a failing gadget to be fixable, someone would call my attitude a "religion". If the term applies at all, it should be applied to the people who accept the idea that "there are mysteries" behind their purchases, and we mere mortals shouldn't be permitted access to the inner workings of the universe. That's what a "religion" is. The idea that things in our world should be open to examination by us isn't religion; it's rationality and science, which is the opposite of religion.
Or, in the case of manufactured articles like cars or operating systems, it's just good engineering.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This guy had a deadline to fill up a few column inches, and said the first 6 or 7 incoherent things that came to mind ("open source reminds me of communism/religion/Woodstock/whatever"). This is the worst article I've seen linked from /. in a long time.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Just another neo-con who wants us to think laissez-faire is communism. If OSS is communistic then this guy is the reincarnation of McCarthy.
It's sort of like ROUS - Rodents of Unusual Size.
It's Rodents Seriously Endangered Usurped. It's what happens when the industry lobbies get one over on the environmentalists. You must have seen the protests?! "R...S...E...U....get them before You!"
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
He's founder of the Yankee Group. Yep, since the didiot is completely disgraced at this point, they're pulling out the big guns. Well, at least the bigger guns.
He says nothing in the article, and doesn't really understand what he's talking about. Just like a certain underling.
Nothing to see here....
Do you have ESP?
I first read this article on an Australian site (http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;8103 29453/) last week and it has been syndicated and is doing the rounds. This guy, Howard whoever he is, clearly has done zero research and has no facts to back up his comments - especially the finale.
At the end of last year the EU Commission released one of the most comprehensive reports on the impact, spread and use of Open Source, around the world. They found that, in actual fact, only around 10% of those who contribute to Open Source projects (the software engineers) are employed by proprietary vendors - the overwhelming majority are employed by the enterprises Howard so cynically believes are using FLOSS purely to beat down the cost of proprietary systems.
You can download the entire report from the EU itself here: http://flossimpact.eu/
There are many other reports from major research organisations that are concluding similar things. Forrester research has recently found that over 50% of large enterprises are using FLOSS in mission critical applications and this is growing.
A quick Google would lead Howard to many of these findings.
Alanhttp://www.theopensourcerer.com/
Though I give him points for being a paid troll. The article itself is worthless. I wish I could get paid to write pointless drivel, instead of giving it away for free on /.
we will end no whine before its time
Redundant of what? Stupid troll mods.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is actually a pretty insightful article - half of it is, anyway. The cynical view of large companies, as they interact with "open source" (Free software) is correct. They talk the talk, and manipulate it in other ways, self-interestedly. The article would have stood pretty well if he'd stuck to Microsoft, Sun, Novell, and Cisco and their motivations.
However, his curt dismissal of Free software is blinkered. Open source ran, and runs, a huge chunk of the Internet. Take away bind and Apache and what have you got? AOL. Try to imagine how Google could have grown so big, so fast, if they were paying Sun for every CPU they deploy - the bill would be astronomical. Not only are the motivations of Free software creators and users pragmatic, but they wield great power.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Okay, there are open source religious zealots. Just like the proprietary-software zealots. But neither is representative of the mainstream of users in either category.
What particularly irritates me is the suggestion that because a company has some open source offerings, that they've given up on their proprietary business. It is more likely that said business is simply attempting to capitalize on the open-source movement. It gives them an additional revenue stream where none existed before.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem prudent to me that any company would ignore open source. If your customers are going to be using open source software anyway, you might as well get something out of it.
And this whole open vs. closed debate is likewise pointless. In most businesses, software is chosen for a given task based not on the licensing model, but on how well it meets the particular needs of the business. If you look at the state of office software or multimedia integration on Linux, it's not difficult to understand why most businesses and home users pick Windows. If you look at the security and reliability of Linux, it's not hard to understand why businesses use it for file and print and web serving.
In the end, it comes down to a question of utility. Sure, a distinct minority - those of us who are computer saavy - can take the high road and pick software based on the license terms. But for most people, choosing software is a matter of getting a particular job done, and they could care less about the licensing terms. In the end, people often pick software for its strengths, not its weaknesses. I see no reason why pundits find this so difficult to understand.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The entire article can be summed up as "crappy OSS copies wonderful proprietary inovation, and is going to lead to all programers being unemployed". It's like we're in 1999 all over again.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
Open source and free software have nothing to do with money (or business)! It's a typical misconception and this guy only proves it...
You can better think about it as freedom to use (as you see fit), freedom to change it, freedom to do whatever you want (almost) - all of this doesn't exclude a price tag but it includes what you get for your money...
Users want to use what works, and is cheap.
Integrators and developers decide what that consists of, and deliver it to their customer (the user).
If the Integrator picks correctly, he succeeds, and is more likely to get repeat business.
If the Integrator chooses poorly, he fails. This failure can come in the form of a steep bill due to bundled licensing, or due to unreliability and other hidden costs due to architectural constraints (license servers, vendor lock in, copy-protection, and other issues not related to engineering a product that focuses on doing the user's job). Or, a commercial, closed-source solution could bring nice things to the table like UI-cohesiveness, or canned-integration that just works, etc.
Sure, there are advantages to closed-source in some cases; sometimes money attracts talented developers, and you get a good product that offers features that outweigh the consequences or negative aspects.
But those of us who have worked in this business for years or decades have all seen situations where you get painted into a corner by artificial restrictions and trade-offs related to product licensing, or compatibility issues that ultimately resulted from a vendor resisting interoperability for the sole purpose of attempting to control a market through vendor lock in. We've all run into those situations. They suck. Open source can alleviate those problems, but it can bring other problems with it. Right now, I think the dynamic is leaning heavily in favor of open source solutions - but each situation, each system is different.
Honestly, I think the most successful integrators are those who can look honestly at both alternatives, weigh the options, and make the best choice, without religiously choosing one side or the other.
Though, it's compelling to religiously stick to open source, because one can easily imagine a world where that choice has been abridged, through the power-politics of money-financed legislation (ie. things like mandated DRM, "Trusted Computing" - flawed policies like the DMCA, etc.)
Closed-source is a religion too. And the compulsion there is an ideology that folks who come up with an innovation should have the right to OWN the profits from that innovation. This is a compelling ideology too (especially to an innovator - and especially to a middleman who is positioned to profit from others innovations). But it is a flawed ideology. And bundled with that ideology is an engineering philosophy that systems should be closed, and users access curtailed, in order to preserve this legal ownership, and protect it from infringement by others. This runs counter to the entire purpose of computers in the first place. As a tool for humans to automate the management of their information. Open engineering allows this. Closed engineering prevents it.
This conflict is summed-up nicely in a line from Disney's 1982 movie, TRON.
In a discussion between the computer scientist, and his corporate boss:
Dillinger: I can't worry about every user request that comes in here.
Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for!
Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!
End of Line.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What do you term "exchange?" When I submit any GPL code, it allows everyone to use it. In trade, I get your GPL code.
It's not a direct hand-to-cash deal but there IS a return on open source/free software. If you can't see that, this late in the game, then you MUST be brainwashed.
ps. Nearly all "significant" OSS/GPL/Linux software is developed by paid programmers. If you're a programmer, you will have a job even if OSS becomes the #1. Besides, the vast majority of code written today is for in-house use, not for sale.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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?
Well, duh! It is a market because they are exchanging goods and services. Just not ones you would like to be exchanged. Rather than trading their hours for money like in a historical market, the open source developers, testers, and users are trading their efforts for lower costs. Sort of like being speculators in a market. There are many more types of exchanges than labor or goods for currency.
Without open source, pricing for web hosting would be far higher. Because hosting has become a commodity, with little or no proprietary lock-in, it's cheap and getting cheaper. So every business can afford a web site. Open source made that possible.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I don't really care about the article and I haven't RTF'd it. I take exception with this kind of shite, though:
If I start walking around town wearing a sandwich board that says "LESBIANS MUST BE HANGED FOR THEIR WICKEDNESS" (randomly selected), I will rapidly make a large number of quite serious enemies, without making any further effort. If instead I write on that sandwich board "I AM NICE AND LIKE PUPPIES", I am unlikely to make a correspondingly large number of friends.
A friend is someone you have built a relationship with over time. It implies understanding and trust. It is an ongoing thing. An enemy is someone you have pissed off. They are generally reacting something you have done, not who you are. You can make a lifelong deadly enemy in a couple of seconds with literally no effort whatsoever - say by accidentally running someone's child over while drunk. You can't build a lifelong friendship in a couple of seconds.
As I say, I don't really card about the article. It just annoys me when people trot out meaningless little soundbites like this.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
No, your parent post is correct because the "free" part of market entails natural competition, which he was trying to exemplify. In any free market you are able to compete with other enterprises while you may be prohibited from competing with your own. As for the exchange of goods or services, software is both a good and a service, and you can always consider the OSS industry as a competing non-profit enterprise in a worst scenario, although God alone knows how Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Sun and the others are surviving in your view of the world.
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
Oooh, no wonder! Maybe they're not a PR group for Microsoft, but I sure remember how one of their analysts (was it DiDio? I forget) trumpeted SCO and it's case against IBM.
No wonder this guy is such a dumbass troll. Nothing to see here, folks, just some wanker trying to get a rise out of us all.
"He is also founder of The Yankee Group.."
Surely you all remember miss Didio and her corperate horse whispering.
At this point a few naysayers are sticking with the notion that there is some value exchanged by adding all kinds of indirect/psychological benefits.
1. I go to www.libpng.org
2. Download library source code.
3. Use libpng.
I didn't have to give the libpng library copyright holder money for the software.
I didn't have to trade something I have for the software.
There is _no_ exchange of value when acquiring libpng software. Zero. Therefore, the term "market" cannot be applied to libpng and other free software like it.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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
The marginal cost is how much it takes to create any additional product. After you've written the first copy of the software, there are no man-hours required to write the second copy.
Oh my. Back to Marketing 101.
Value = Benefit - Cost or if you prefer: Value = Benefit - Cost - Risk (if you don't consider risk a cost)
Free (as in speech and beer) only speaks to the Cost portion of the value equation.
If the software provides benefit, such as a reduced time to perform a specific task, then it still has value, even if it is zero cost.
Not to mention, the open source aspect CERTAINLY has both positive aspects to risk (you are not dependent on the survival of a single supplier) and negative aspects to risk (witness Microsoft's threats about patents).
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.
There's still an R&D cost. The same thing is true in the pharmaceutical industry - most of the products cost a remarkably small fraction of their retail price to produce, but the R&D is crucifyingly expensive.
As with pharma, the R&D is substantially more expensive for a product which attempts to solve a "difficult" problem, or one which hasn't already been solved. I don't think we'll see the death of proprietary software any time soon for exactly this reason - though I wouldn't be too surprised to see the majority of proprietary software become custom-produced, either from scratch or on the back of Free software with suitable licenses.
This shouldn't be too concerning because a large number of the world's developers don't work on commercial software which is likely to be commoditized by the Free/Open Source movement for one reason or another. If you don't, well, there's never any harm in having a few months expenses tucked away in a savings account.
And since "The scarcity is artificially enforced" then there is no free market, which was the parent's point. His last sentence may be wrong, but his point still holds.
The GP stated that the _marginal_ cost is 0, not that the entire cost or even the amortized cost is zero. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one extra unit. Your development costs are the same whether you sell 1 license or 1000 licenses; therefore the additional cost of those extra 999 licenses is zero. Thus the GP is exactly right, and software itself breaks the current economic model.
I'm sorry, his argument doesn't make sense. Especially the ending of 'The only people who really USE open source are universities or people with no other option'.
I work for Large Wall St. Financial (tm). All our core systems are Linux. Lots of Java (now open source) and C++ (using gcc) here. The majority of the C++ code uses boost and a number of other open source products (Berkeley DB etc).
I'm pretty sure the company COULD afford to beat their vendors over the head and get the price point they want, but the fact is, using Linux systems and these open source products give them two things the vendors so far have not seemed to come through with:
1. The resulting products are faster.
2. If there is a problem, they can debug the entire system, even the code they didn't write (the open source).
These are the top two reasons open source is taking hold, nothing to do with price. The only people switching to open source because of price are governments and such. Most of Corporate America's open source use is simply because the open source product is a better product at this point.
Thats not to say there is not proprietary software in use too, there are some challenges that open source just doesn't address, or is behind on because the domain is complex and a company that can pay 50 people's full-time salary to work on that specific problem domain are going to make a better product than a few open source guys working on it in their spare time. But any large open source product (with a big contributor base, say a few hundred) will usually end up surpassing any vendor product.
I call grandstanding.
You are sodomizing a number of economic terms to reach your conclusion.
1. It doesn't matter if software is a good or service. If I don't have to exchange something for it, the term market does not apply.
2. There is no such thing as "natural competition."
If you are trying to refer to the notion of a perfectly working "free market" then please, please stop. Humans do all kinds of things to capture permanent advantages like capturing all of the output of all suppliers, coordinating pricing with their competitors, legislating barriers to entry. "Free markets" only exist in textbooks.
3. The notion of "non-profit" is a social (tax) contrivance and is not related to my original point, the definition of "market" and "free market" in particular being abused. It's this kind of lazy magical thinking that harms society.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
there are a lot of products where the R&D costs are well above the per-unit cost and the R&D expense is spread over the sales of the line.
How else do you sell software? Do you charge the first guy $1million and everyone else pays $1.50? That's retarded!
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
I would disagree that the "marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0," when you take into account the man-hours required to create the software in the first place. No, the jewelcase/cardboard/CD/DVD/Bandwidth costs are not that intense, but the time required to create that software has value.
You need to look up the definition of "marginal cost".
In neoclassical economics, where value is measured relative to supply, you may be correct. However, there are other definitions of value (which is part of why this thread branch has gone around in circles)
However, if you go back to classical economics and then to Marx, you will find the concepts of use-value and exchange value. Software would generally have a non-zero use-value (because using it creates economic efficiency and therefore produces benefits to the user) and an exchange value (the cost in money) that should approach zero (to your point about marginal cost of production).
However, we find that isn't true (go look at the cost of Microsoft Office). This is true due to the cost of performing a transition to a new software program (file compatibiltiy, training, etc.). Due to these costs, Microsoft (and others) can value price their product. As long as the (classical economic) value provided by their product is greater than that of an open source/free solution, companies will continue to purchase Office.
On the other hand, I agree that we need a new model. Classical economics handles software just fine; it's just that neoclassical economics (heavily dependent upon scarcity) doesn't handle software well. It's not that classical economics doesn't have its own problems... so I agree there is a place for a new model.
No it doesn't. Artificially limiting the distribution of software via copyright, might, but software itself does not. Software development as a service (as open source business models use it) is classic capitalism. It is only capitalism as it applies to services (programming) as opposed to a commodity.
Thus it has no value.Having a clean floor has no inherent value, but still capitalism accommodates the selling of cleaning services, just fine.
But the marginal costs to support an additional user are extant.
And building a product that works for a bigger audience is also more expensive. Design and test for a product with a single user is a lot easier than for a million.
My video compression blog
Value = Benefit - Cost - Riskn omics) Is the wikipedia dead wrong?
In the field of economics, there is no such formula for value. Value is defined as the exchange value (price) of goods or services. That is the common definition of value. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(eco
You are avoiding development expense,
You are still taking something you exchanged nothing for. (libpng) Trying to shift the argument to developing expenses has no effect on the original action. You acquired something for nothing, and that is not the definition of a market.
Please note carefully the original grandparent post because it's a non-obvious but very important point. I urge you to develop more discipline in the field of economics. I am no different or better in what I don't know, so please take is as a recommendation.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
There may be 5 media players. And 5 CD reading/writing packages.
BUT
Guess what all those 5 media players have in common? FFMPEG. _The_ way to encode and decode audio and video.
Guess what all those CD burners have in common? cdrdao, cdparanoia, mkisofs and cdrecord. _The_ ways to do low-level CD/DVD copying, ripping, mastering and burning, respectively.
That's the DNA in common.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.
If the world really moved over to an open source model rather than a proprietary model (presumably because open-source software was more compelling), then the world would still need software, and so would still pay for it. And there would still be a lot of in-house projects (which account for a lot of development jobs).
So I don't think there's any danger of programmers coding themselves out of business - just a danger to a particular software business model.
Hmm, I'd be careful with the word 'rely' here. Open Source software will only work as long as someone maintains it. Many an Open Source project has fallen by the wayside. I understand that someone COULD still be maintaining it because the source is available, but you mentioned a scenario where a company was just a user of the software.
I strongly support OSS, and advocate it *when appropriate*. I personally don't think it is always appropriate. It is no panacea by any means.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The production costs for software were never hard to account for in the old system, it's distribution that's hard to account for, as reproduction, and with network, transmission, tends down towards zero.
Software production however, is always for the original, not for the copies.
I would disagree that the "marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0," when you take into account the man-hours required to create the software in the first place.
You're partially correct. The cost to develop a piece of software is called the sunk cost. It's a good term, just what it sounds like. You sink money into development and it sinks out of sight. It's gone. The cost to duplicate and distribute the product after that is, essentially, 0.
Not like a car. You have sunk cost in auto design as well, but the bulk of the cost is in the components. Cars have intrinsic value as any chop-shop can demonstrate. Software does not have intrinsic value. It can be duplicated for nothing.
Many economists disagree, but my opinion getting away from an economy based on making things with value and relying on things with no intrinsic value is a really bad idea. An economic Pearl Harbor. Maybe we won't be around long enough for something really bad to happen, but if it ever does it could well be an unimaginable disaster.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Would you like me to show you how to get to the Linux command line on some of the latest Cisco products? You'll feel right at home, I guarantee.
Software doesn't violate the free market. The owner of proprietary software creates the scarcity. These days it's through copy protection schemes.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
OK, let me give you young 'uns a lesson in cynicism.
The view of the things expressed in the above block quote is unsupportable, and I can demonstrate that the author knows it. If you read carefully, he's using weasly language to make the claim in a way that cannot be attributed to him: it's the opinion of an unnamed "cynic". A real cynic knows the odor of BS, which smells like evasion. This guy stinks with it.
In any case, even if his opinions about the self interested motives of second tier companies in supporting Open Source, it doesn't matter. It's a free country and one of those freedoms is creating free software. People aren't required to have noble intentions when they exercise their freedoms, and its a good thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Personally, I've never heard of any economists disagreeing that a production based economy is better than a service based economy. (Note: production in this case meaning producing ANYTHING, software, cars, houses, etc).
If I pay you $100k to build me a house, you get $100k and I get a house that's worth $100k. Wealth is created by converting human energy into value. If I pay you $100 to clean my toilets, you get $100, but my clean toilets hold no value to anybody but myself.
This is econ 101. Many economists acknowledge the inevitability of developed economies becoming more service-based in todays world, but that doesn't mean they like it.
And finally, getting to my point:
This, and talk of allegiance smacks of marketing by social engineering. Are you my friend or enemy? Do you want free box seats at the local stadium? Membership in that exclusive country club? An invite to the Big Dinner at Bill's mansion?Open source fans tend to be technology geeks, not potential members of the good old boys club. They select a solution because it is technically more sound than some other solution, not how many prostitutes the sales rep. provides. Well, maybe I went a little too far with that last point. If you want to 'rip' open source, or anything else, do it on its merits. Not loyalty to some group or vendor.
Have gnu, will travel.
Software itself violates the free market. For an item to have value, it must have utility and scarcity.
Those economic models were developed before the advent of many of the more recent technological advances. They refer to consumable goods. Software is not a consumable good, but that does not mean that is is not without value. That value comes in when you consider how it enables a user to accomplish something he/she could not accomplish without it. I think it's very misleading to suggest that just because software doesn't share the scarcity of a consumable resource, that it doesn't have value.
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.
Concentrate on the first exchange.
I pay $50 for a book about a certification. I've exchanged $50 for a book. That exchange occurs in a market because I gave something I valued ($50)for a book. Economics says that this transaction occurs in a market.
Let's say the publisher gives that book away and I take one. Economics says this behavior falls outside market behavior. There was no exchange. Just one person freely giving and another taking.
Trying to do more than one transaction, especially something as intangible as a certification is difficult to simplify.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And apparently you need to look up the definition of civility.
I'm a writer, not an economist, I'll acknowledge that I missed the specific meaning of the term, but I would still argue (and agree with the other poster in this discussion) that continuing support after purchase should count toward the "marginal" cost of production. Even when a piece of commercial software exists in the wild, neither development or support for that product ceases.
If this concept "breaks" basic economy, then basic economy has been broken for a very long time. There are any number of pre-information age services that break this definition.
Shinma
"Any idiot can make friends -- but can you make some really serious enemies?"
Hmm, so does this imply that Trolls are intelligent? In my experience, some of them are intelligent. Others think they are smart, but really have infuriating cognitive blind spots.
However, it is good to remember Abbie Hoffman's old idea: "If someone ever gets your goat, they struck gold!"
What one does in that situation reveals one's character. Let trolls be trolls. Learn from it and get on with life.
Why do anti OSS guys always compare Linux to communism? I could see if all software was required by law to be open source, but it isn't required, and it generally isn't in practice. The way things are today, it's much more like public property. The most mature, basic elements of computing are those that are most likely to be open sourced - things like the operating system kernel, the WebBrowser and the other things that are too vital to healthy economic and social function.
When it comes to less mature, or less vital software, like various very company specific IT needs, or VOIP tech, or entertainment software like 3D engines, these things tend to be proprietary technology, and there are still OSS stuff playing catch up with them.
Also, there are real financial benefits to opening up the source of a very large, mature proprietary code base, that removes the religious aspects of any argument against OSS. Does it really make sense for Microsoft to spend $6 billion on what ended up being a very incremental update to Windows with Vista? They could have opened up some or all of the source, and turned it over to their partners, customers and the OSS "community" - all of whom have a great vested interest in the success of the platform(s) - for maintenance and spent that money on some real advances in tech and R&D, rather than just on the great deal of overhead it takes to maintain such an enormous code base. They could probably even keep their support contracts with the various OEMs out there, and maybe attract some new OEMs with that new tech they get from all their new R&D. There's nothing "religious" about that argument, not that I can see.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Ahh, Open Source and Creative Commons, combining the best parts of both capitalism and communism. Gotta love it. :)
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
In a free market artificial scarcity is a factor that should be taken into account. Not something that makes it a non-free market.
If you want to posit that any artificial market factor invalidates the free market status, then you're going to have to rule out control of supply, DRM, DMCA and all other artificial means, like owning politicians. For example, diamonds (DeBeers), music (RIAA), movies (MPAA)...
A free market is anything that isn't regulated or monopolized. Everything else is fair game.
Something has value if and only if you can get anyone to pay or exchange something else for it. Therefore software has value. One need not go further than that.
Question everything
A couple of points:
"Thus the GP is exactly right, and software itself breaks the current economic model."
Incorrect. This problem (large average cost, low marginal cost) with software, pharmaceuticals, etc. has been known for a long time. That's a large part of the reason why the whole patent system has been put in place to mitigate the problem. It is also the basis for some government monopolies and regulations.
Open source is already deeply embedded in enterprise roles at just about every major technology savy company in the world. I've often wondered what its like to work at a company like Microsoft for example, and be required to only use Windows. I'm not sure how sys admins would get anything done.
For example, out of the box (clean install), how would windows give me a list of all directories spread out through multiple volumes that haven't been accessed in 7 days, and oh yeah, there is 100TB of info. Point and click? That stuff is easy with linux. What is even easier would be to split the work up by volume and rsh the command to different machines, so you could utilize idle processors on the network. Can you rsh commands to different windows boxes?
What about rshing/sshing a machine, lauching a program and having the gui show up on your machine, without any additional software? Xwindows does this automatically. I actually run eclipse on a spare workstation nobody is even logged into.
There is no awk, no grep, no decent cron server, a shell that can do anything useful. I don't know anything abotu Windows so I don't know. Maybe someone who has at least 1000+ windows machines and at least 2 or 3 netapp filers can comment. I have a feeling it requires a lot more proprietary software, even more vendor lockin.
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.
Bullshit. For an item to have value, it simply must be of value to someone. This usually comes in the form of it being useful. There is no requirement for it to be scarce. There's not even a requirement for it to be useful - some things are valuable to people just for aesthetic reasons, not practical reasons.
Where exactly do you get this strange idea from that things have to be useful and scarce to be valuable? Reality contradicts it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
Programmers, which are considered human capital, sacrifice time and labour to produce open source software, as does the enduser, who consume time learning the software. The marginal costs can go on and on for some software projects, as additional labourers join the project on their own time and dime to make revisions and minor bug fixes. The utility also increases as programmers improve the software and users master the software, producing great new products because of the software.
Flagship Open Source softwares like Open Office, NVU, GIMP and Clamwin anti-virus have no value? Open your eyes!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
For example: The Second Life client is open source. The server is proprietary, and there really only are their servers, and really only can be -- there'd be even less point in setting up a competing server than there is in setting up pirate World of Warcraft servers.
But also, it really helps when your entire platform is open except you. If Oracle wanted to ship on Windows, for example, they'd have to either trust Microsoft to maintain Windows, or they'd have to pay an insane fee for "shared source". Since they ship on Linux, they can even roll their own distro -- essentially, they are your OS vendor, and if ANYTHING goes wrong with your Oracle database, on ANY level, they have the source code to it, so they can fix it.
So, I would say the only people who don't benefit from open source are those selling off-the-shelf, proprietary software for which there is a viable, open source alternative.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... so my team try to manage a 3 months bug for C10000 That's the arrogance of being n.1 ou n.2...
Economics. Perhaps you should study it.
If utility was the only measure of value, the most expensive thing on this planet would be air. We need it to live, in large quantities. Going without it for even a minute can cause massive brain damage or death. Yet this extremely useful resource is free. Why? Because it isn't scarce. Scarcity is a necessary component for something to have economic value.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
His faulty assumption is that the day job is not itself open source.
The simple way to disprove this is to look at the OSDL contributors. My guess is, they're not just contributing to get their name on that list. I'm guessing that rather, many of them contribute because they really do want Linux to succeed, because they have a business model which is pretty fairly committed to it succeeding.
What I see as probably the most important point is the completely random one he throws out there, with nothing to back it up:
Why does it scare the crap out of you? He doesn't say.
I'll tell you what, proprietary software scares the crap out of me. If I built a business on Windows, and I suddenly needed Windows to do something it couldn't do, I'd be entirely at the mercy of Microsoft. What company in their right mind wants to be so completely at the mercy of a single vendor?
Whereas if I built a business on Linux, even if I was selling proprietary software (like, say, Oracle), I could fix it myself, or pay someone to fix it for me, or contribute to the OSDL and send mail to the LKML and hope they fix it. The difference is, with a proprietary vendor, only the last option is viable, which is why we've seen things like Windows 98 Second Edition -- essentially a service pack for Windows 98, but you have to pay for it. With open source, if one vendor is charging you too much for a bugfix, you can switch to another vendor.
And really, you have this kind of power in all kinds of other markets. I know it's been said before, but why could you possibly be calm and confident when buying a car with the hood welded shut, even if you're not a mechanic?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So how is it that (for example) this article is not tagged 'flamebait'?
Has anyone else noticed that the article tags have been purged of all the 'yes no maybe haha itsatrap' stuff? Did I miss an anouncement about this? They're kind of boring now, I preferred them before.
While I think the article makes some valid points, I don't know how he got through two pages with out really mentioning why I think many choose open source. It's not because we want to see the code & it's not because we want a free ride- it's because it works better, is better supported and is more likely to adhere to standards that future proof our decisions. The fact that it's free does make it easy to score a higher ROI, but I think many of the FOSS solutions out there would still be a better value even if they cost something comparable to their proprietary counterparts.
But not entirely wrong. It's just simpler: you (never mention|bagatelize|fight) the next one down. Coke never mentions Pepsi, and depending on the area you're speaking of, MS never mentions Apple (when it comes to desktops) or Linux (when it comes to small middleware servers). In turn, when it comes to desktops, Linux gets the Mac fanboys quite upset. And so this little cynical game trickles down; Linux users tend to think they have a superior system to FreeBSD (they don't), etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Like Tom Lehrer used to say: 'And everybody hates the Hurd'. Oh no - he didn't say that.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Marginal cost is the cost to create one additional unit of product. The cost to create a copy of Windows is the cost of copying the files (not quite 0, it does require some electricity. But small enough that its virtually 0). The cost to create Windows in the first place is a fixed cost. While it needs to be accounted for in pricing, it doesn't effect the issue I'm talking about.
But on a related note, as others pointed out- software is not scarce, but the resources needed to create the software (programmer hours) is. Software creation has economic value, and can be governed by the rules of economics. Software sales cannot- without scarcity, there is no value. You can attempt to artificially enforce scarcity (copyright), but by doing so all you do is add a deadweight loss onto the transaction, harming the economy as a whole. The correct solution is to force companies to sell what does have value (software creation/customization) instead of propping up a broken business model.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
No, a market requires that more than one product exists. Free software handily creates that condition by eliminating the key advantage that natural software monopolies can exploit: immunity from market competition pressures.
You don't even have to use or like free software to benefit from this effect.
Important free software by itself undermines the value of proprietary network effects and makes software more like proper commodities.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why do you think every OSS advocate in the world says to sell support, not software? Because support does have scarcity- there's a limited number of domain experts with a limited amount of time available. Thus support has value. So sure, you could sell support and give away the product- many companies do. But that doesn't make support a part of the marginal cost of production- support is not needed for production.
The problem with software isn't just that its marginal costs are far less than the fixed costs- its that the marginal costs are so close to 0 that they're indistinguishable. Before the information age, there was no product like that- drugs, books, musics, etc all did have some marginal cost, since distribution was physical. Before the internet, costs were low (a floppy), but distribution was difficult. Now with software and digital movies, books, music etc, over the Internet the cost is down to basicly 0 and distribution is not an issue. This is a new situation, and it does break economic models- we can give everyone in the world a copy of a song for almost the same price as giving 1 person a copy. Economic theory is just not set up to handle that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The premise he puts forth about a lack of exchange and hence an issue with the market is based on a false assumption. That assumption is that nothing gets exchanged when you give something away for free.
There is an exchange and you get value in return. Not every exchange has to have an equal value or a value for more than you put into it.
What he fails is in the idea that the exchange of value has to be immediate. For instance, those programmers giving away their code for free gets to learn more from what is returned back to it. H/She gets to see the flaws, and how other programmers might have addressed the same or similar issue. He also fails to see that the exchange comes in the form of other services. For instance, companies like Red Hat, Novell, etc were making money off the products those programmers are producing. Some of that is in the form of support dollars, support contracts, etc.
These companies can't have a valuation in the markets if they are not producing something to generate income to pay those programmers.
If there was a qualifying factor that you must get something immediately in return of greater value then the XBox and XBox 360 would be communistic approaches to marketing. They are loosing money in order to gain market share.
There's a false presumption that all open source code is developed in the basements of some obese unclean unshaven juvenile-minded 42 year old virgin. This isn't the case. Businesses such as IBM make contributions, produce products and income off Open Source. Companies such as some of the major car manufacturers make money by saving dollars on large investments in computers by using Open Source. To this end they produce a product (a car/truck/whatever) at a cheaper cost. It also provides jobs to those that support those systems in house. NASA contributes, our US Military and other sectors of our government use Linux.
So it is very disingenuous to say that no value is exchanged. That programmer sitting at home learning from the mistakes he makes that others correct that he learns from gives him the potential to build better products and to make money off the support of that product or to take the learned skills (not the code) to his regular job.
There is no loss to jobs from Open Source. There are significantly greater lost jobs in the US due to out-sourcing to other countries.
Another false presumption on his part is that *all* governments of all nations are designed like the USA. This is not true. There are democratic countries that have very successful economies that are not purely capitalist. There are plenty of jobs for people in those countries and plenty that have great opportunities that they may never have had if they'd never had the chance to look at the source code for an open source project.
The benefits of Open Source significantly, by massively huge margins, outweigh any potential loss of a job due to free competing with commercial in any given market. In fact, that very alleged conflict creates a stronger free and commercial market.
This is just more Microsoft diatribe from a potential paid blogger (even if he did participate in some open forum). Frankly his participation in that forum has direct correlation to free vs. commercial markets. His ideas could be sold as a think tank response but instead he puts it out there for free. He's a Marxist for doing that. He's giving away free ideas which conflicts with the commercial markets governed by the commercial organizations that make money postulating these very things to the corporate world.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
This is an economics discussion. Value and valuable are technical terms. If you don't understand that, stop reading now and pick up an econ textbook- you won't understand the discussion, and will only drag it down. Using the common term valuable (which is roughly equal to utility) is like trying to discuss computers and calling everything a "thingie".
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There are a lot of interesting aspects to TFA. In particular, I thought the analysis of the current state of the industry was pretty insightful.
However, I make my day-time living writing and supporting open source software. The implication that the money goes away just because the software is priced for free is wrong. Instead, the money simply comes in differently.
When you sell proprietary software, you invest time and energy, and money (if you pay other developers) to write the software before you sell any of it. Then you (hopefully) make that money back and then some by charging licensing fees. The smaller the market, the more you have to charge.
If that is your model, and you cannot imagine it any other way, then you would think open source has it backwards. Instead, usually something is offered that does not do the job entirely 100% the way you want (because everyone uses the software slightly differently, and NO software does 100% of what you want it to the way you want it to). Then the customer pays the developer money to add the functionality that they need. In essence, open source software generally works by charging for development on demand, and up front, while proprietary software generally works by charging for development in arrears.
Where the author is wrong is that he doesn't get this point or its corollary: cash-strapped start-ups love open source while large established players hate it. The reason for this is the economic model I mentioned above. I can't afford to hire a developer to write the next version of LedgerSMB. So I have my customers pay for that as we go along. However, Intuit could not just open up Quickbooks tomorrow because they are entrenched in the proprietary bill-in-arrears model.
Finally, knowledge and quality engineering are unlikely to be commoditized. The software can be commoditized, but there are likely to be only a few really great companies to go to who know the code in and out and are able to do quality engineering around it. So you can't think just in terms of sales of licenses. You have to think of the entire (broadly defined) technical support structure as well. Technical support here does not only include help using, installing, and fixing the application, but also making it work optimally for any particular business. I.e. it includes consulting, advisory servcies, custom development, and the like.
In the end, open source supports community property, but unlike Soviet Communism, decentralizes the economy. In other words, I do not think we will ever see an open source Microsoft. However, we may see open source software through multiple vendors displace Microsoft software.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Software itself can be redistributed ad infinitum at very little cost, but the scarcity comes from the expenses required to develop it.
Proprietary software charges in arrears for this development and creates scarcity. Open source typically charges in advance for the scarcity of the development work, but shares that freely with others. This is the case whether or not the programmer is paid to do inhouse work, or paid externally to develop the software.
So yes, there is scarcity. You just have to look beyond the 1's and 0's. Think of it this way. If Windows could be puchased for a small premium over the marginal cost of production, Microsoft would go out of business fast and the software would disappear. Instead, you have this tremendous economy of scale because of the development cost that is accrued before the product even hits the shelf.
Open source simply represents a better way to distribute the cost of development.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you want to posit that any artificial market factor invalidates the free market status, then you're going to have to rule out control of supply, DRM, DMCA and all other artificial means, like owning politicians. For example, diamonds (DeBeers), music (RIAA), movies (MPAA)...
Exactly, every thing you listed involves a non-free market.
That's why all of those things are such huge problems.
After all, wouldn't an employer require their programmers to sign a noncompete clause which would inherently preclude them from participating in OSS projects that compete with their employer's products?
Not necessarily. Mine specifically states that working on OSS even if it competes is not considered working for competition because they (my employer) can still use it. And yes they are a name most here would know. Of course it doesn't mean you can take proprietary info and put it in an OSS project, but that's true regardless.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The truth is, the author quoted in the article clearly states that they are a troll and that what they are writing is intentionally flammage. The only value in discussing the issue is in using the examples people are giving to extend their own knowledge of what is being done and by whom. That is valuable - far too many Open Source people are ignorant of the scope of their own field - but there are better ways to achieve it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You, my friend, need to build yourself a MegaSquirt. You can build the whole thing by yourself for about $200, and the code is GPL. You can interface with the box using a serial cable, and there's a version of the code that lets you control both fuel and spark advance, as well as things like turbo wastegates and even nitrous if you want to go that far. Take a look; I learned things about cars I never knew just by building and installing one of these.
when i'm at home, i often code for fun. sometimes, i code because i have an application that almost does what i want, but i need some feature that it doesn't provide. and sometimes, i code because i just can't find that one application that i think it would be cool to have. if what i write is even somewhat useful, i release it GPL; after all, if it was handy for me, maybe someone else might want to use it. and if i've made a mistake, then it's likely to be caught. in which case, perhaps someone will learn how not to do something. :D
what i'm getting at is pretty simple: not everyone codes with your bottom line in mind. if you don't like what someone releases, either improve it or don't use it. if you do want to use or improve it, more power to you - sourceforge and friends will be happy to provide a mirror for you to use to download it.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
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).
A simple pencil or pen for example. Niether are scarce and both have trenedous utility. Without one:
- your paycheck could not be signed and/or endorsed
- you couldn't sign up for direct deposit either
;)
- the bill of lading could not be signed for the printer your check is printed with
- you couldn't take the SAT/ACT or any other written test
... and on and on ...
In fact I'm willing to bet that ANYTHING you could come up with can be countered using this simple pencil/pen example. So your hypothesis returns false.Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
But that's the point - it has to be artificially increased in value. This doesn't change the argument any.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
This is the point I was going to make.
TFA specifically mentions Cisco as a "leader" which, according to his bullshit, should reject Open Source, but it's one of the biggest corporations releasing open source stuff. Screw Oracle and their so-called "support" of Open Source- Cisco actually releases its own software open sourced! A friend of mine built a business around their open Linksys routers. Sounds pretty American to me.
Further all the "anti-marxist" bullshit in TFA ignores the fact that Open Source is not communist in the least. Nobody works to provide for "those who can't". In fact, it's very much based on self-interest, just not the cut-throat competitive self-interest that proprietary development firms utilize. Few and far between are developers who will code something they don't think is a good idea.
I don't actually consider that a huge insult. I don't believe that pure capitalism is the one "true way" and it can bring out the very worst in society. I do believe there can be a balance.
You're also assuming that I care if someone else is making money. I don't. As long as I get what I need, it really doesn't matter.
Perhaps I don't aspire to be a big shot rich bastard that sold my soul for the almighty buck, like you.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Then you charge to recover the labor and distrobution costs the product is involved in. Which is basicly covered under the GPL license. --chris
Well we are talking about the Yankee Group, employers of the fabulous anti-FOSS zealot, Laura DiDio.
A ballmer is a powerful thing because it only affects those people who make decisions. Those people who actually do the work see them for what they are. Unfortunately, they are not paid enough for their opinions to be valid, as senior management often only believe people who are as or more powerful than them, or those who they have paid lots of money to have an opinion.
Slashdot seems to fall prey to ballmers far too often (or indeed gets ballmered) and while it's useful for us to see these stories just in case the CEO suggests to the CTO who suggests to the IT Manager who mentions to your team leader that Linux may have a greater support overhead than Windows and might not be a good idea for that thousand server deployment that's being planned, we shouldn't take them as an indication that the sky is falling in and they should be tagged as such.
This article, good people of Slashdot, is about a ballmer as it is possible to get, without throwing a chair.
How else do you sell software? Do you charge the first guy $1million and everyone else pays $1.50? That's retarded!
Not if the first customer (or group of customers) have paid you that specifically to create the a program or package of programs to do a specific task they require. If this costs you significently less than $1million to do then they have cause to complain about being overcharged. If doing this costs more than $1million then the customer got a bargin and you have no business sense.
Note that most software still tends to be written/adapted to fit a specific case. The issues tend to come from pretending that software is a secondary (manufacturing) industry, when it better fits with a tertiary (service) model with the slight quirk that duplication is trivial.
Oh. That's how a poster convinces people to RTFA - by inserting a random TLA (or FLA, in this case) from TFA. I shall use this technique at soon as I have a chance!
Now, if that just worked to get mod up...
Having a clean floor has no inherent value
Well, technically it does - at least if the floor is ever in use. You can calculate the hygiene and accident risks associated with having an unclean floor (effeciency reduction, sick leaves, lawsuit costs, etc.) and the value of having it be clean is presumably the absolute value of the cost of that risk. (Or something like that - I'm not a bean counter so don't know the correct jargon.)
sigs are hazardous to your health
Google is #1 in a terribly competitive market, utilizing conceivably the largest non-governmental single enterprise in existence, having kept a number of powerful old-school competitors at bay for quite a few years now. And it is OSS-based. And IBM is #1 in many unpublicized markets...and is also very OSS-oriented.
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
By the same logic, you can estimate the same financial risks associated with having or not having a given programming service implemented for some purpose. The point is neither has any inherent value, only value as we assign it or as we assess it in regard to other financial concerns. To take the analogy a step further, think of wallpapering services. Does having wallpaper on your walls have an inherent value in dollars? You might estimate you'll get more sales because you business looks more upscale, but that is simply a related risk/reward. I'm not trying to make the business case that programming or wallpapering or plumbing cannot lead to profit. It certainly can. I'm not trying to make the argument programs or wallpapered walls or functional pipes cannot increase profit, as they certainly can. The point I'm making is that there is no inherent value in the result of the service, such that it is an exception to traditional capitalism.
I've never seen a definition of capitalism that specifically excludes services. I have seen definitions that refer to "goods and services."
yes, but in those days software was tied to proprietary hardware. You still see that in today's market - you buy a mac, you get MacOS X. Software upgrades of MacOS X are basically a paid maintenance contract under a different model. You're still paying for all the dev time spent on the software, that cost is just bundled into the hardware cost or maintenance fees. Apple could just do away with OSX's cost and say if you want updates, you pay a maintenance contract, but I don't think that would go over well.
Cisco of all people shouldn't bash open source - they own LinkSys and LinkSys uses Linux in their routers. I've seen LinkSys routers in businesses (albeit not at the enterprise level, though I haven't been to many enterprise level offices), and therefore if their workers are doing hobby work on Linux, their company gets a direct financial benefit from it. This is, of course, the R.M.S. idealized model - software should be free and you should only pay for hardware. However, I don't completely agree with the model - it doesn't say who should develop the software, but instead idealizes a model where companies that want a specific software group together and pay engineers to develop it and then make that software free for anyone that wants to use it or look at it - companies don't want to and never (ok, RARELY) will invest in something they will hand over to competitors to use. Ever play a multiplayer game where someone joins a party just to go afk (away from keyboard) for shares of gold or exp (or have a bot do it)? They're called leechers, and people HATE leechers, but that's exactly what the idealized open source model invites - have someone else pay and just reap the rewards. The model might work if the number of investors is significantly large to keep costs minimal, or if the model specifically excludes designs used by competitors, but again, that's a bit idealized. I'm not trying to bash OSS or the GPL or even hacker culture - I just think it's idealistic and not practical. Work on a project under whatever license because you really love doing it, not for "religious" reasons. Hopefully by sharing your work, you can help teach others and make their code better (I do share that ideology with RMS).
I totally agree, because one of the issues I've had with propietary software is the fact that often the algorithms utilized for a given problem (Video editting, account management, DB management and so on) is exactly the same as the F/OSS version. The difference is that one has a piece of legal paper that says, "pay up or else." And the other says, "Just post the code additions/changes, please, when distributing."
Personally, I like the latter, because it allows me to keep track of the development of a piece of software and know if it's any good, whereas the propietary software has no method as to know if it's any good other than word of mouth, which can be faked by sock puppet blogs and the like.
-- Brede
Yes, I have. But economics isn't the only force in the world. People who only think in terms of money are very narrow-minded, and come up with crazy ideas. besides, much of economics is bullshit.
Yet this extremely useful resource is free. Why? Because it isn't scarce. Scarcity is a necessary component for something to have economic value.See, you just proved my point. Just because it isn't scarce, doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Economic value isn't the only type of value. The post I was responding to did not specify "monetary value." It's people only thinking in this way that is larging screwing the world up. The best things in life are free, as the cliche goes.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Huh? This is a discussion about some guy's comments about Open Source. "Value" has many other meanings apart from the economic meaning. In fact, it originally would have not been an economic term. Who are you to dictate that we can only talk about economics in this thread?
... and then they built the supercollider.
The point is neither has any inherent value, only value as we assign it or as we assess it in regard to other financial concerns.
But then, this is true for pretty much everything. My computer has no value beyond what we assign to it. When I assign a value to my computer, it is based upon a subconscious calculation of perceived benefit (monetary or otherwise) much in the same way that a bean counter could calculate the risk of having a dirty floor.
As an extreme example, if I were to somehow be able to transport my computer back to the 800s it would presumably be completely useless and so have no value to the people who were to happen upon it (even if they knew how to use it, they'd have no power for it). Where, then, is its "inherent" value?
The value of any item, service or even situation (e.g. "having clean floors") is entirely dependent upon the setting they exist within and cannot be determined except by some calculation that involves, among other things, the needs and desires of the people involved. Risk assessments very much have a place in these calculations.
The point I'm making is that there is no inherent value in the result of the service, such that it is an exception to traditional capitalism.
While I may be mistaken, I do not believe that capitalism concerns itself much with "inherent value". Rather, it concerns itself mostly with supply and demand. If there is a demand for having clean floors and there is a limited supply of people prepared to turn dirty floors into clean ones, then having clean floors will have an easily determined cost and so be completely amenable to capitalistic considerations. I'm not sure if capitalism says anything about what its "value" would be.
sigs are hazardous to your health
I know that the ISV my wife works for sells an accounting package. Even though most of the code is there for the next client, it still needs a lot of work to adapt it to their needs, so it's not just a copy and paste install. Also the first client didn't pay the full share because the company knew it could (and would) sell to more clients. It's not that the first guys got a bargain and the company has no business sense where in fact business sense tells them that they can't charge different prices to different clients or the first client thinks (and should) that they got ripped off.
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.