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Open Source Community's Double Standard
AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"
This is human nature and it does not just apply to computers.
Example: If a girl is a real bitch then people expect her to be a bitch and if she is suddenly nice one day, then people say "Wow, she's so nice today". But if someone is nice all the time then one day gets angry people say "What's wrong with her, sheesh."
Its not a double standard, its human nature. Nuff said, discussion over.
Praise for companies moving towards our goals, opposition to companies moving away from them..
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Shocking. The open source community wants software to be open source, that seems pretty consistent to me.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free?"
Why are they pushing this misconception of what open source means? AFAIK, it doesn't mean "give everything away for free" it means "the source is open".
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
It's double penetration.
The open source community wants to penetrate throug the business worlds, and throught the personal world. This is why the open source community has adopted a double penetration strategy.
We can only hope that the double penetration strategy is successful.
I mean to put it in a more exaggerated analogy, thats like saying abolitionists would have had a double standard for praising states that started giving up slavery and crying foul when a free-state adopted some slavery.
The open source community wants open source. They'll applaud when a company goes towards that goal and they'll get upset when a company moves away.
I don't think that qualifies as a double standard.
It's a collection of individual entities all with their _own_ voice. The Open Source community is not like the Borg Collective.
Not everybody in the community will roar on the same topic, so you will always get mixed results when you summarize the comments.
In one case, things are getting worse, and in the other, things are getting better. The former is damned while the latter is lauded. Simple.
Companies that are moving towards being more Open are praised.
Companies that are moving towards being more Closed are denigrated.
Where's the problem?
Can I get a 'Duh' ? I knew I could.
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
After all the GPL only requires you to give source when you give executables. I think this is perfectly fine. And as long as you get a devcent version of the product for free, having a "special" version for paying customers is also fine in my book.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They're not the ones complaining. It's the Free Software Foundation fanatics who complain. They've never liked open source and they never will because it's not "moral" enough for them.
It's that simple.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
who open up a little bit, but damn free states, who begin forced servitude little bit?
The issue is not a "double standard" unless you use the current "mainstream media" Orwellian definition of "fairness."
The predjudice is for freedom, openness and opportunity. When you compound closing of source by the inclusion of earlier community contributions, testing and evangelism - you then reduce freedom to a marketing tool.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...but it's posted by kdawson.
Corporations and the community are not one in the same. A corporation may contribute to the community but it is certainly not representative of the whole community. The 'double standard' assumption for the whole open source community in this article is flawed.
What double standard? Don't look at it as "A goes in a direction opposite of their normal direction" and "B goes in a direction opposite of their normal direction", look at it as "A moves towards openness" and "B moves away from openness." Makes sense to me. That's not a double standard, that's a single standard. By his logic, all standards are double standards if you look at them with the right perspective.
This is like the riddle about the three guys who pay $30 for a hotel room, but the manager meant to charge them $25, so he gives the bellboy $5 to take to their room, but the bellboy gives each man $1 and pockets the other $2.
- men paid $27
- bellboy has $2
- $27 + $2 = $29. Where did the other dollar go?
This is like an optical illusion... nothing more.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is this really so hard to understand? As a parallel, consider the following statement: "Why do we praise countries that ease up on censorship a little bit, but damn countries that impose a little bit more censorship on its citizens?"
Many people in the Open Source community believe that open source is the natural and correct state of software -- indeed, that it is equivalent to free speech -- and that closing it is comparable to throwing political dissidents in jail. Naturally, every move toward it will be lauded, and every move against it will be demonized.
You could get free music on the internet for a few years, then that so called "birthright" was removed. A big group of ingrates have been bitter ever since, shouting information should be free really meaning "I'm too cheap to pay for anything, I got it free once, now it should be that way from here to eternity".
Grow up folks. Shit costs money to make and it's going to cost money to buy. The whole RMS vision is not a business model. It is now failing and failing fast.
Its quite simple.. Its the mindset most everyone has about nearly every opinion they have... You will allways get praise making steps towards a certain point of view from those who share that same view.. But if you make a step away from that view, depending on how strong feelings are you could be shunned by that group for even the slightest step away from their point of view.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Like it or not, companies rely on solid sources and suppliers. A supplier that does not have a reliable revenue stream just can't be relied upon. And not every company has the resources or desire to staff up and do all its own software development in-house. Commercial, for-profit software has a serious role in business. And that means all involved in it need to make money. Giving away everything - for free - puts a big crimp on that.
When I work with some of the big boys in the consumer electronics market to qualify a new factory, they don't just audit the floor, the QA department, and the PMs. They look at the suppliers, they look at financials, they look at receivables, they look at other customers. Because if they are going to rely upon this new factory, they want to know it's got a future outside of just them. It's got to be stable.
It's REALLY HARD to make that case when your products are available for free, and you're trying to rely upon pure support as your only income stream...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A double standard is when you are inconsisent.
There is nothing inconsistent about praising people for opening up a little bit, while condemning those that close down a little bit. We praise ANY move towards openness, and condemn ANY move away from it. How is that a double standard.
Allow me to illustrate using the oft neglected fruit analagy:
I gleefully watch my strawberry plants grow little fruit that ripen into perfect sweet strawberries, but watch me complain when my delicious strawberries start rotting and become ever less their original strawberry goodness.
Why oh why do I praise the things as they become ripe, but criticise them as they rot! I am such a hypocrit. Hmm.
When RH changed their business model it hurt a lot of people because prior to that, there was paid support available for the free product. We felt waylaid because we used RedHat Linux as the foundation for our critical applications. We knew we could pick up the phone and call (for a fee) if we were stuck and we felt secure with a reasonably long life cycle of security updates and support.
For example, a product my company created required 80+ hours of testing for minor version changes in critical software components. With 5 people on staff, that was an incredible expense, therefore we craved stability. Then, RHL was gone. *poof* just like that. We thought we could count on them and they changed the game on us.
I don't dislike RedHat's new business model, but I felt that after such a sudden and unexpected change in their support policy I could not trust them any longer. Later that year Ubuntu came out and I began experimenting with it (and debian). Now I have Ubuntu LTS which is supported by the vendor for 5 years, and I can call the nice guys in Montreal whenever I have a problem.
The open source community is full of misguided evangelicals. If open source is so great it should stand on its own merits, not need some political figures shoving its virtues down our throats. When I installed Ubuntu(which I love, btw) on one of my boxes that happened to have an NVidia card I was confronted with a message that talked about how bad closed source drivers were before I could enable them and get a good resolution for my display. If some notice needs to be there due to licensing that's fine, but don't try and mold my views or express your personal beliefs in place like that.
If the NVidia drivers really are so hard to maintain, then they should break in the future... if closed source software really does run slower with more bugs then I should notice it.
I'm all for open source software, and I can identify with the ideals of the FOSS movement, but I also see that there is sometimes a need for software that works well, even if it is closed source.
I would rather have a closed source project that worked perfectly than an open source product that is a work in progress.
Linux has grown by leaps and bounds and is perhaps one of the best examples of open source does right, but the political figures in the linux world, while entertaining, do nothing but hurt the product with their constant bickering and injection of personal politics into a product that should be "free".
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
When a closed company opens up a little bit, they're moving in the right direction, so they deserve praise. When an open company starts closing off their software, they're moving in the wrong direction, so they're condemned. Where's the double standard here, now?
Liberty in your lifetime
How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free?
You really don't have to go that far to be annoyed with Red Hat. How about the people that paid Red Hat for a 1-year subscription for Red Hat 7.3 updates (Red Hat Network) only to have them shut off the updates, due to switch to Fedora, before the year was up?
With RHEL it was an issue of fulling giving up a portion of the software to the OSS world and then including their own proprietary developments in the paid version (along with the benefit of every enhancement having been well tested in Fedora first).
MySQL has knowingly weakened the codebase. Urlocker says that MySQL "wants to make sure the Community version is rock solid," but admitted that the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities."
Red Hat was attacked unfairly for their actions (at least that's how it can be seen today...when it happened, the situation looked different), MySQL can be very justly untrusted as they are rigging the situation and putting the free users at a disadvantage beyond just the lack of business class management tools. If the MySQL team was simply turning the paid for product into an extension of the free product, nobody would need to doubt their actions.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
(I normally RTFA before posting)
The problem here is: IMHO (and RMS's opinion) non-free software is unethical, because it's basically a scam: making software is a service with value; making copies of software is of (marginally) zero value. So, the GPP is right on the mark.
If a company that makes (unethical) proprietary software starts making some (ethical) Free Software, it is (1) improving its act and (2) contributing to the pool of Free Software.
If a company that makes Free Software starts making proprietary software, it is (1) starting to make unethical things and (2) contributing less to the pool of Free Software.
So, that's the reason why we praise non-free-software companies that open um and we boo free-software companies that close down.
Putting it like the GPP: would you praise a country that permitted slave labour and then passwd a law freeing some of its slaves? (like mine did in 1871...) And would you protest a country without slaves that passed a law allowing for some to have slaves?
HTH.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
more Open Source=Good
Making $$$ off Open Source=Bad
It's quite simple really!
I think most of the slashdot community feels Open Source software should be free as in beer. When people make money off of what is free then that is morally wrong, but when you decide to make a paid product free then that is considered a kind deed.
Aren't companies, like Redhat in the example, just out to turn a profit like everyone else?
Companies have to do what makes sound economic sense in order to please the stakeholders. If it weren't for those stakeholders, companies producing Linux distros on a large scale, like Redhat in the example, would have never proliferated as well as they have.
I applaud them for having a business model that isn't just anti-"the man" but also ensures the company's longevity so that they can keep getting better. The prices on the enterprise/corporate editions are reasonable compared to Windows. I say show your support for a distro you believe in and get the enterprise/corporate edition.
The game.
One's a step in a direction we like, and the other's a step in a direction we don't like. Next question.
RedHat still provides the source for free. They're only charging for support; they just don't provide you with the build formats you may want of the binaries they built and tested.
/. community yelling at you, but you're free to do it. Or not.
You can get it all for free, and build it yourself, or get it from someone else who does just that (still for free), such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. You could even get the source, build and test it, and do the same thing RedHat does for less money. You might be hard pressed to make a living that way, challenging the big gorilla, and you'd have the
The GPM doesn't require you to give away binaries or support.
Personally, I think this is a positive move for them. It's a positive move for the technology community as a whole as well. When my team looks at investing in technology for our business, we usually like to have a positive feeling that the technology will still be relevant 5 years and 10 years from when we purchase it. This move will make it easier for me to deploy MySQL in the enterprise, as I can now say to my review comity - "Look, they have a revenue source. They'll be around 5 years from now, and they'll be there to honor any support contract we purchase from them". Whereas in the past, I could only argue the point that they've been there a while, they should still be there a while from now. So, positive move in my book, not just for them, but for the technology community as a whole.
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
...the tail! and all that implies!...
I have never understood us, them; it is like I live in a strange dystopia, like a Brazil(movie), where I cannot ever understand the rules because I don't share their perspective or indoctrination.
They may have said a lot of things in their youth, but it has been documented profusely how they lost that innocence long ago.
If anything, there's too much misguided "fairness". Decisions that bring more freedom are praised. Decisions that reduce freedom are denounced. This is good, when all other things are equal.
The only double standard is that some people are willing to give bad actors more credit than they deserve. They are deluded and servile for thinking that M$ and friends will be around forever and must be placated. The bad actors are easier to see through the lens of freedom than they are though the purely functional fog of "openness". DeCSS and Tivo are examples of openness failing to bring real freedom.
Overall, the issue is unimportant because freedom and performance are linked. Eventually, all free software users understand the benefits of real freedom and shuns non free. Non free software is harder to obtain and keep up. Each owner a system has is a brittle point the user must work around. A non free video driver, for example, still performs better than a free one because of the games card makers play. That single piece of non free software might be justified by a game or some other visualization task but it makes upgrading the system painful. Add enough of these non free pieces and you are close to the Windoze experience.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are other databases which is way better and yet more *free* In my eyes, MySQL is in the same database league today as Windows 3.1 is in the OS league. It's time to move on, lets fork SQLite, add networking and support for multiple users, release it as GPL and name it MySQLite.
The funny thing about OSS is how many people it involves. You increase the amount of people and you increase the amount of chatter. Add to that a little politics and you get exactly what you'd expect. But the beauty of the OSS movement, like anything, is the diversity of the pool. Calling it one way or the other is unjust. There are lots of people on both sides of the fence and all imaginable variations of between.
We fixate on the polarity because it makes news. Because it's interesting. Because people who feel strongly about an issue tend to speak louder. But that doesn't mean a lot about the OSS community en mass.
Quack, quack.
First, RHEL did cause a fairly big splash. A number of people were fairly vocal, and called for the downfall of RedHat. However, there is one critical difference: RedHat freely gave away everything needed to build RHEL to anybody who wanted to show up and use it. It sure sounds like MySQL is not giving away the source or binaries to anyone. They are following the letter of the GPL (which is very good!). But they are not playing in an open space. To the best of my knowledge, RHEL didn't get particularly upset if you gave away the binaries (as long as you took the time to strip off their trademarked materials), and were clear that it wasn't RHEL. I don't really understand why MySQL doesn't just put the source out and let folks build their own binaries (which I think would cause most of this to go away, as there'd be a sourceforge project that distributed the binaries). In the end, their client license will ensure they get paid by folks who use their software in any non-Opensource project (They GPL their client, which is a problem for anybody who uses it in a proprietary application). That is however, their right, and I support them to do it. I just don't use their database at work for anything because of it. (I have a historical preference for PostGres over MySQL, and the change from LGPL to GPL on the client has made it a moot point to re-evaluate the technical merits).
Kirby
What it's easy to forget sometimes, is that -- thanks to the GPL, and the combination (BSD licence + lots of hard work) -- Open Source is forever. Once a product has been released under an Open Source licence, it can never be closed up again. Even if they try to change it and make it incompatible, the Open implementation can always be adapted -- and general inertia is enough to buy the canny developer time in which to do this, since many people choosing the "closed" option will actually continue using the "old", "open-friendly" version for longer than it takes to get the "open" version speaking the new protocols. For instance, there's apparently some sort of closed-source SSH implementation; only nobody actually uses it -- everybody just uses the OpenBSD one.
..... same phenomenon at work.
..... er, I mean, debugging tools. (Chop-and-swap analogue TV encryption is trivial to defeat nowadays from scratch -- i.e. finding the chop-and-swap points in each line just by comparing successive lines -- with even fairly ancient kit ..... whoever thought in the early 1990s that CPUs would ever hit 100MHz, let alone 1GHz? Even Java or Perl probably would be fast enough to do it.)
The nightmare of someone taking something that was always open, changing it a little and locking it up -- the official reason why it took so long for Sun to open up Java -- so far mostly hasn't materialised. Because, and this is something else that's sometimes easy to forget, Open Source developers are smarter, and harder, than Closed Source developers. Fact is, it takes a lot of guts to Open Source something. What you're saying to the world is, in effect, "Look at this! You couldn't do anything like this in a million years. This is just so good, I'm not afraid of you knowing what's inside it; it stands on its own merits, and I don't have to resort to craven behaviour like locking you out of it!" You wouldn't dream of calling a Scotsman in a kilt a sissy
History will come to note the "closed source" phenomenon as a blip, an anomaly that lived and died and was not missed. It's really not worth getting het up over. Progress depends on sharing, and the Open development model -- as long as it's done properly -- is demonstrably superior to Closed development. As for DRM and the like, that will cease to be relevant with the development of improved hac
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Whenever an article about open source and companies' policies is posted, moderation points fly by, so this must be a good article to get karma :-)
I don't have anything insightful to say so I'm shooting for informative. Here's what the mysterious future brings (yes, I bought 1000 pages, I wanted a few frist potss but turns out you can't post before it's released to genpop, WTF)
"A team of four Thai students beat out 10,000 competitors to win the $25,000 prize in Microsoft 2007 Imagine Cup. Their project is text-to-speech software in which computers read aloud typed and handwritten commands. The software will allow people who can't read to interact with a PC. Imagine Cup judge Rand Morimoto has been blogging on the whole experience -- from his video of the opening ceremonies to how contestants swilled free Cokes to keep themselves awake during the 24-hour, no-sleep phase of the competition."
There.
I'd rather hear a resounding "Doh!" from the idiot that wrote the article! And, no, gee, guess what, I don't care what the writer's history may be. It was a stupid article no matter who wrote it. :)
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
...what you think it means. Double standard that is, in reference to the author. Here's your standard: open source is good, closed source is bad. When source opens up this is good, when it closes up, this is bad. This is one standard. Please to be explaining where second standard is? Really, this article was tripe if you ask me. It accuses people of hypocrisy and double standards when that's simply patently not the case.
If you want to argue that commercial software is necessary for the industry, fine. That makes sense, and I can understand the argument, but don't try to hide it behind some ridiculous red herring argument of hypocrisy.
Steps in the same direction...towards a similar business model, one with a enterprise branch and a community branch.
So how do you laud one and condemn the other? Because of where they started, not because of the end result? Is that not akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face?
because we are leenooks zeelots. we jerk it when a new kernel is released. fap fap fap.
Give executables? Close but no cigar.
m l#UnreleasedMods).
1) MySQL AB always seems to avoid the license question (ref their really lousy answers on their forums. At best refering to FSF for definitions or that you could just buy a commercial license to be sure).
2) That FSF considers making a Web site public to be distribution, at least that seems to be what was intended. (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.ht
3) Yes, the client libraries are also released under GPL (not LGPL!), so linking (static or dynamic), pretty much requires that you are either releasing under GPL or one of the (by MySQL AB defined) compatible licenses. Thinking you should not pay attention because you access the driver through another API? Think again, it still ends up in the same address space. Extend this with some really misguided effort to keep others from creating alternative implementations, by releasing documentation and the protocol under GPL (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover the FSF's thoughts on this move).
So the questions becomes? Using MySQL to back a publicly accessible Web site? Got a nice link, where the source code can be downloaded?
As always you fall into the trap of thinking people (normal people, you know, out there in the real world) somehow subscribe to your unquestionable religious techno babble rather than simply wanting to use their computers to get work done. "Freedom" as promoted by people like you must be absolute, expressed in pure black and white. Reality is much more complicated than that, and the more you "evangelize" this type of argument, the less people will sign up for your nirvana.
As for your always tiresome prediction that "M$" is about to go under, good luck. It's going to take a lot more than silly little lie-infested lists and wasting your time preaching to the choir.
Why don't you spend 1/10th of the energy you expend on FUD'ing Microsoft by lobbying OSDN (or OSTG or whatever it's called this year) to open up the software that hosts the vast majority of free software projects in the planet? Now that would be a worthy cause.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It makes an absolutely crucial point: there may well have been howls of protest, but they were from people that either wanted to spread confusion or else were completely ignorant. There's another point: Fedora is the basis of RHEL not the other way around. Fedora is a very aggressively moving distribution that tries out new technologies. Red Hat looks at how succesful those are in Fedora and rolls any that work out well into its supported product: RHEL. It's in a good position to do so because many of the engineers that it hires are involved in the Fedora Project and so know intimately what features are stable and easily supportable. It galls me that Red Hat as a company is so open, adhering in both letter and spirit to the ideals of Free Software, makes money from selling support for that software, re-invests the money in hiring top-notch hackers that contribute Free Software for everyone and then are shit on by people that know that they're doing this work and yet a company like Canonical with a non-Free "launchpad" are fawned over. Feh.
Where's this alleged huge crowd of people whining about Redhat and MySQL?
"Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit?"
The former is taking a step in the right direction and the latter is taking a step in the wrong direction. Simple.
Hey wait a second. If I contribute free patches, fixes, analysis, testing, or what ever and you are going to sell it, where is my compensation?
Now, I have no incentive to support your open source code at any level.
Thank you very much, F**K OFF.
(ding my Karma down again, cuz i know what i dont like)
It's because FOSSies are hypocrites.
A majority of Slashdotters not only are not programmers, or ever will be programmers, but they also never have any intention of being programmers. It kind of makes one wonder why they are so obsessed with source code when they have never looked at a single line of code... but that's because they are more interested in the "free".
The problem with "free" is that such people are crafting the GPL, which grows progressively more and more hostile to commercial interests, as well as to businesses who would be interested in using FOSS. Your average FOSSie not only has no experience in a large enterprise environment, but they resent such interests having any influence over FOSS.
Teh Lunis has criticized GPLv3... and he is the FOSSie God. If teh Lunis can't change their minds... it's pretty obvious the cause is lost. FOSS is dying from thousands of self-inflicted wounds. When they started letting non-technical people make decisions for them, FOSS was dead.
But look on the bright side: there will soon be a thriving community of MS-OSS, which embraces the enterprise, commercial interests, and businesses. And even better, it will be covered by Microsoft's excellent support structure.
...not about the distance traveled or position relative to center.
When someone opens up, we cheer because it's a step in the right direction. When someone takes a step in the wrong direction, we jeer. It's very consistent.
Me! Me! Me! It's all about Me!
It even shows in your post, you try to make it seem as if baby boomers have been the only generation to protest. You discount the contributions of the current generation not because they haven't done anything, but because they aren't you, and thus are profoundly uninteresting to you self-involved boomers. Therefore, you have no idea what they may or may not have done, but simply assume they couldn't possibly be as great as you.
Maybe it's because I was raised by you selfish boomers that I despise your smug, arrogant, self centered and perpetually lazy attitude.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why do we praise little Billy (who is playing in traffic) for moving a little closer to the sidewalk, but at the same time scold little Suzie (who has been playing on the front lawn) for moving a little closer to the curb?
I think it's great that MySQL has been successful enough to keep growing.
I also think they should maintain a community (free) version for everyone to use
If it wasn't for the OSS community having free access to MySQL, it would not be nearly as popular.
If you want enterprises to use your product, you need to provide enterprise support.
Support staffs cost money. You need more than donations to make it work.
I think Linux is bigger in enterprise today because of Red Hat. If there was no support model, I know my company probably just would have gone with Solaris or AIX.
Big Companies don't rely on Wiki's and message boards. They need tech support 24/7.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
maybe if you all started to treat software as software, not religion....
I just wonder why the topic intro gets into the debate. Whether the author "makes a really good point" is the matter to be discussed.
Matt
I'm was generally a "good kid" in school. If i did something wrong , immediate and harsher punishment. Meanwhile..the assholes were getting rewarded each time they did something normal and less punishment for something they did wrong..because they did it often.
Double standard means judging the same action by two subjects in a different way.
We have here judging opposite actions by two different subjects in an opposite way. It's not a double standard.
Can someone give a car analogy, for the benefit of ./ readers
As for me, I know where I stand:
- increases pool of software everyone is free to run, study, modify, republish: good deed
- decreases pool of software everyone is free to run, study, modify, republish: bad deed
Isn't it consistent and proper education to praise good deeds and criticize bad deeds? To call this standard and good behavior a double standard, is mischievous at best. It's trying to turn reality upside down, appealing instead to people to have a double standard.Besides, isn't it a bit Gonzalish to do:
- increases pool of software everyone is free to run, study, modify, republish: good deed
- decreases pool of software everyone is free to run, study, modify, republish: good deed
hmms? hmms?Just because a project is open source does not mean it's a 'good' project, or make the developers good people, and similarly because it's closed source doesnt necessarily mean it [the project], or it's developers are 'evil'. This is personal to me because I've spent the last 4 years writing a grand application for small business, which I've been paid for, but not very well, it's more a work of passion than a way to make money, right now. When the project is finished I plan on selling it, yes I will make simple copies, I can't reasonably give something away I alone took 4 years to make, and that's what open source software professes: take a lot of your time making something and then give it away for free. Some people have the interest and help of the community and in that case they should be obligated to remain open source. But if you are closed and by yourself, as I am, you should be able to remain closed without incurring the moniker 'evil'. I've spent thousands of hours working on this project, it's not something I just want to give copies away for free. It cost me thousands of dollars to make this program and I'm going to try and recoup that money, and then some, and that is not evil. If someone makes film would you expect them to give it away for free to everyone just because making a copy is so easy? Or what about a book? The idea that software developers are expected to just give up the fruits of their labor is just straight up communist, people should be rewarded for their efforts with cash, or there is no incentive to do it [write software]. I'm not making a program so bill1717@aol.com can give me props on sourceforge or make a happy face on IRC, it's a damn job, and unless we're going to start paying plumbers and doctors in emoticons I'm going to continue to ask for money for the software I write.
http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy
Who's "we"?
Another notch for this entry...
Aside from that, though, I don't get it. What's inconsistent about praising moves toward openness and criticizing moves away from it?
Opening up software is good. Closing software is bad. Why is this difficult for some people to understand? It isn't a double-standard, either. If Microsoft GPL'd or BSD'd a part of its system, it would be a good thing. If Microsoft started closing their software even more, by, for example... well... if they managed to do it, we would dislike it, just like we disliked it when XFree86 went non-free.
In summary,
opening == good
closing == bad
Any questions?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit?" Simple. The closed source companies who are opening up are moving towards what we want. The open source companies closing down are moving away from it.
I remember when you could download Counterstrike for free while it was being sold on store shelves. People were still buying it.
... Open is good, closed is bad. So when proprietary companies open something up, we praise them for moving in the right direction. When OSS companies close something up we criticise them for moving in the wrong direction.
Yes it is typical human behavior. We like more those who are consistent and commited. Mr. Cialdini has nicely put it.
I for one, praise the action of opening software, and damn the action of closing software. Whatever the company is.
Its called shaping. Psych 101.
:P
An oversimplification is "reward behavior resembling a desired behavior, and punish behavior that does not. Then become more specific in what you reward for a given subject."
Its one way how you train rats, dogs, and people to do things that are not part of their normal behavior but have predecessor behaviors that can lead to the behavior.
So, reward projects that become a little more open, thus encouraging the behavior, then reward it more as it becomes more open.
Punish becoming less open to discourage it going farther.
Basic carrot and stick
I'm certainly not onboard with MySQL's decision... but as for Red Hat, they technically do make all their source available: ftp://ftp.redhat.com. It ends up being the foundation for CentOS, as well a host of others. How is that not playing nice?
It looks scummy when you get the crown jewels (the kernel) slap a few patches and libs and then say that you can't afford to share your "work".
On the other side, you will always look bold and sophisticated when you start revealing your own jewels.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
To all Slashdotters,
Your comments are appreciated and we take your input seriously. Just to make sure that all facts are correct: we have not closed the source. MySQL continues to be GPL as before.
We have only made a change in relation to binaries. Community binaries are available as before, MySQL Enterprise binaries are provided to our customers. We are highly grateful both for those who count themselves as users and those who count themselves as customers. And the binaries are produced from GPL source code so of course you are all in your full rights to modify, compile, redistribute etc. as before.
The rapid innovation rate in and around MySQL is very much a reasult of the product being licensed under the GPL. Look for instance at MySQL Cluster and MySQL Proxy which are innovations from us, or at the SPASQL modification made by Eric Prud'hommeaux: http://www.w3.org/2005/05/22-SPARQL-MySQL/XTech
I look forward to more of your comments and suggestions.
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
The OGP had started out by saying that they wanted to produce hardware that worked well with Free Software, but due to certain copyright issues, they wanted to keep some of the hardware design locked up. They got no end of flak for that. This was absurd, of course, because the OGP was offering to be far more open than any other graphics vendor had ever been before. It wasn't until Richard Stallman himself said that it would be necessary for the OGP to keep some of the hardware design closed that they received some vindication.
Conclusion? That many people don't understand the principles behind "Free Software" and think it just means "give everything away for no money."
Shaping doesn't work when:
a) you have no real power
b) there is a third option, to do nothing at all
c) what is the reward? In business it is money.
It is not called Shaping.
It is called Zealotry.
Shaking hands with your supposed "enemy" for a token gesture and then hanging your "ally" for doing something they see will allow them to survive in the marketplace. Something that, ironically does nothing to further your supposed "cause".
You moralize while simultaneously forgiving the large abuses and crucifying the small; rewarding the token gestures and ignoring the large sacrifices.
When companies that are closed open up a bit, they're taking a step in the right direction. They're helping the community. And there is a good chance if things work well that this will continue and they'll be a model for others in the industry. But when companies that are open close up a bit, they're moving in the wrong direction, and creating an example for other companies of a place where open source didn't work and another reason for them to stay away from it.
It's not how open they are overall that matters, it's what direction they're moving in.
Novell is an intersting case of a closed source company gone open:
Suse Linux 10.2 is open source, and free to download, install and use. It's sources are easily available and updates are provided on a semiregular basis, and support is through a free community.
Novell also sell Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Suse Linux Enterprise desktop. These are commercial packages that are older versions of Suse Linux, but distributed with specific packages and minor changes to some system settings to optimise them for certain roles. You can download for free and use for 30 days before you can no longer recieve updates from their official repositories. But once signed up, you can still download the sources for every piece of software they distribute as part of this OS.
What you cant get is the source for edirectory and Novell Open Enterprise Services, such as Groupwise. These are binarys that are installed on SLES (and I think Red Hat is also supported) The source is closed, you cannot download it or modify the Groupwise system or any part of eDirectory for your own use. You cant supply patches back to Novell if you wanted to fix a bug.
The thing is that often times ypu just want something that can relay smtp mail, and Groupwise is overkill, so you may use sendmail instead which is free (and Libre) as it comes with the OS distributed, or you can download fresh source and compile yourself. What ever you want, it's free.
The thing I see is that as Libre software gets better and better, it requires less support for common installations, so fewer people will pay for support and update downloads.
Would I advise one of my customers to bet the farm on an open source product with no support? No way. On an open Source product with paid and relaible support, No problems. Closed source with good support, no problems. What ever does the job.
linux is still for fags.
Your points just your example isn't great. It's just about taking a step forward. Open is seen as the positive, Closed the negative. Or a vegetarian eating meat. If someone starts cutting back on meat, its seen as a positive. But if a Vegetarian starts eating meat, it would have the same reaction. It's going back on a belief they have, or a moral standpoint.
The more sensible thing would be...to use PostgreSQL which has a better license, and is more ANSI SQL compliant anyway? The "everything for free" on MySQL's case is a bit less than truthful, anyway.
You basically only get it for free for use with non-commercial GPLed software. Anything other use is effectively verboten under the 'community' edition, similarly to the way Qt is licensed (though Qt also requires that anything that licenses Qt officially, for several thousand dollars, is also proprietary, for-charge, and closed source).
Personally, it doesn't make sense to me that a 'common library' be licensed under GPL because obviously, that mostly undercuts things that don't have GPL license, such as BSD and CDDL software which isn't allowed to link to it. It's not surprising that MySQL is making it 'more closed'. They did it before when they changed from LGPL to GPL "because people were static linking and stealing the server code", and they thought the LGPL allowed that, or at least that was the excuse given at the time.
PostgreSQL, on the other hand, isn't owned by a faceless corporation that is trying to restrict your use of their software. Why suggest all of the effort of reinventing the wheel via SQLite when there's obviously an already existent, and free, alternative and equivalent to MySQL? The whole point of SQLite, as far as I understand it, is to be able to use SQL without all of the setup or server requirements, so you can dump a single file to store all database data for a single program.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
"you have no idea what they may or may not have done"
So fill me in.
WTF is this dork talking about?!?
OK - everybody at once now, just shout out the answer: What is the most reactionary major news aggregator when it comes to open source?
If you said, "Slashdot", go get yourself a cookie.
Back? OK.
What were the two most popular tags on the MySQL story?
Let's jump in the wayback machine.....
Ahh yes, "misleading, badtitle."
Gee, yeah, there's a bunch of people bashing MySQL. No, this reactionary open source community said, "Nope, that's not right, MySQL is just limiting downloads of the premium product to their premium subscribers." Ferfucksake, if you're going to bash a community for doing something, at least have the decency to bash them for doing something they've actually done.
Dumbass.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Let me see...there is a direction I like to see businness move...some moving in that direction slow down or turn to the other side...I dislike that.
On the other hand, some of the people going int he opposite direction turn around and start moving on the direction I want.
What is "double" about that?? TFA seens to be quite brain dead.
-><- no
Because going in the right direction is good, and going in the wrong direction is bad.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
What idiocy.
You reward behaviour you want and punish behaviour you don't want.
Whether a dog normally does what you want or not doesn't mean you say "good dog" when he doesn't do what you want.
How difficult is that to understand? Even dogs understand it.
Go ahead mod me flamebait, but what I'm saying is true.
What's news is that the guy either doesn't get it, or pretends he doesn't get it.
I appreciate you so honestly characterising what is in reality the attitude of a lot of people developing open source.
Read closely here, people...because this more than in many other ways is the tyranny of Richard Stallman.
Said developers often actually want to make money themselves, but working on GPL licensed projects, feel as though socially speaking, they're not allowed to...so they work on something GPL licensed in order to be politically correct, but because that isn't what they really want, heaven help the poor soul who decides to attempt to capitalise on said code themselves.
As an idea, try contributing to a project under a non-GPL license, so that you can then not only contribute code of your own, but also sell the entire project outright if you so choose, in order to gain economic compensation. Good form suggests that you donate some of your profit from doing this back into the project as well, but you are under no hard legal obligation to do so either.
By contributing to say, a BSD licensed project, you can both feel like you're doing the right thing, and receive economic compensation for it if you so choose, without any of the GPL's attendant legal complexities whatsoever.
If you try using it, you'll discover for yourself that in practice, the BSD license is a better license. Fear however can be a very powerful motivator, and the GPL has fear on its' side. Fear of Microsoft, fear of the legal system, fear of the rest of the corporate world. Fear, fear, and more fear. The GPL also has Stallman's army of cultists behind it, to socially/politically enforce its' use.
We praise countries like Libya when they say that are going to stop supporting terrorism, even though they are a long way from being free democracies. This support and removing of embargoes encourages other countries to move in the same direction. At the same time we criticise our western democracies for removing freedoms, increasing surveillance, etc. This is not hypocritical, it is just that they are moving away from the ideal rather than towards it and we expect them to maintain the high standards.
>people are getting to dumb these days
Pot, kettle...
Man, the one time I need mod points and I don't have them. I consider my programming to be artistic expression; sure, it's an expression that fills a need, but the process in creating it is a lot like the creative process other artists use for more traditional media.
Some people give away their music or pictures for free, and others charge for it. People have no problem with either practice (if we ignore technical measures that try to enforce them). It's denigrating our own art form to tell us we can't make the same choice.
SIG: 11
Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit?
Well... very easy: The question entails a falsehood: If something is OK (freeing/opening closed source software), then the oposite should be OK as well. This is absolutely nonsense, Matt: that is because the desirable thing to happen is for closed software to become FREE/OPEN and not the other way round: If you see someone opening something that had been hitherto closed, you see it like a contribution to the community, and socially diserable, whereas closing something that has hitherto been open, is depriving the community and the society of a shared, common good, therefore you are taking it away from everybody, and it seen as the beginning of a backwards trend towards the same old tiring closed proprietary privative software world.
It is altoghether different if a company offers a mix of closed and open versions, whenever the open versions are fully functional and contributes new features to the upstream/community.
this is sort of like a hooker giving away her services for free vs. your wife starting to charge you.
Yes, kudos to all things open. Happy? Boo to all things closed.
The community is completely consistent. They applaud movement in the direction of open source and condemn movement towards closed source. Absolutely no hypocrisy here -- it's consistently pro-open.
And yes, once an individual or a company gets the clue, they're supposed to keep it without a stroke every 10 minutes, so the rest of us can go on and encourage some newbies.
It's time to move on, lets fork SQLite, add networking and support for multiple users and relational integrity, and strong typing, and ALTER TABLE, and a date type, and nested transactions,
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
We are happy to see everybody move to being more open!
My own personal experience includes volunteering with Food not Bombs and Homes not Jails in San Francisco when Mayor Frank Jordan was trying to pull a Giuliani and get rid of the homeless, and getting beaten down by riot police; volunteering with Earth First on the Headwaters campaign and getting chased through the forest by loggers with chainsaws right after Judy Bari got blown up; volunteering with the IWW on the Borders Books and several other organizing drives; working with Greenpeace; and protesting the first Iraq war in DC. Amongst other things.
But I'm just giving the boomers a hard time because I feel sometimes like they are a bit self centered and don't want to acknowledge the contributions of other generations. They did some great things. My mom and dad were college hippies and went to a lot of protests too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's all good. I wish there were more of you. Iraq protests aren't well enough attended. Where's the outrage?
Don't mistake an unshakeable belief in personal liberty and individual freedom for greed or "Me Me". We changed things by not caring what people thought about us and that has stuck. I hope you do the same.
Now I have to go wax my Beemer.
I'm not sure who yet, but it's definitely some else's fault...
Well, back in your day you still had an unbiased media willing to report on protests without giving 'equal time' to the five person counter-protest in the name of 'balance.' So you don't hear about it as much. Also, people see that and feel that traditional methods of protest are not reaching any kind of mainstream audience anymore, so they don't participate as much. Don't forget, the vast majority of young people in the 60s never went to a single protest. As important as the counterculture was, it was still a very small minority. Even in the day, if you weren't part of it you wouldn't hear much about it.
And let us not forget the motivating power of self preservation. There's no draft today.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I do not see this as a double standard at all. If open or free is good and secretive or proprietary is bad, anybody that tends toward openness and freedom should be encouraged, and anybody that leans toward secrecy or monopolism should be punished -- or at least insulted.
How is this inconsistent?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
There's no double standard here. Organizations are praised for moving towards more openness. Opening a little is movement in the right direction. Closing a little is movement in the wrong direction.
People are just looking at the rate-of-change, not the absolute value... which is quite logical.
In other words, if a closed-source company open sources something, it's a step in the right direction. If an open source company closes something, it's a step in the *wrong* direction.
Besides, open source projects that close source usually get beaten out by competitors or forks. (cf. Ethereal / Wireshark)
The free market is an inherently wasteful system- instead, what we should do is create a pool of government funded money that goes towards manufacturing, and give everyone a vote for which manufacturing products they think are important. Just think of all the waste that goes into manufacturing- all the products made that no one wants, and all the waste that entails.
The problem with pure socialist ideas like yours is that they never work in the real world at any significant scale. This is what would happen in your system:
1. To get paid, software makers need to convince people to fund them. This means multi-million dollar ad campaigns designed to convice people to 'vote for allocating $1Billion to MS Vista Plus'.
2. There's little incentive to have working software, since you're not selling a product, you're selling the 'service' of making software. The longer it takes to make the software, the more money you'll make.
3. Big projects and special interests groups get all the money.
4. End result for me: I pay more in taxes and get less for my money than I do in the current system. Of course I'm going to oppose such a system.
Get out of your mother's basement, get a job, and read some history. Unless you're going to reward software writers based on the quality of their software and the number of people using it, your system will fail. And if you're going to do that, why not just keep the current system in place which does exactly that?
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Why, hello again!
:D
Read closely here, people...because this more than in many other ways is the tyranny of Richard Stallman.
Yes, the tyranny, let's all gather around.
Said developers often actually want to make money themselves, but working on GPL licensed projects, feel as though socially speaking, they're not allowed to...
Utterly false.
so they work on something GPL licensed in order to be politically correct,
You paternalism is amazing... developers are senseless idiots who can't seem to chose a license by their own, they're "forced" by some invisible hand and, almost forgot, the tyranical forces of the Dark One. Seems like you have a low opinion on thousands of developers out there.
but because that isn't what they really want,
Yes, because as per you previous point they are idiots.
heaven help the poor soul who decides to attempt to capitalise on said code themselves.
More BS. At the present moment I would say that more people capitalise on GPL'ed software than BSD one, although only because of the ammount of code and Linux popularity.
As an idea, try contributing to a project under a non-GPL license,
Because for you the border is not in, say, non-free code and free one, copyleft or not, but between GPL and everything else. Interesting world view - although a rather lonely one, since BSD developers are not like that.
so that you can then not only contribute code of your own, but also sell the entire project outright if you so choose, in order to gain economic compensation.
Poohh pooh, here comes the clue train, last stop is you: the main problems concering the selling of the software are the same for any code added to a GPL or BSD project, especially so since as the author one is always allowed to change the license. BSD code also gives access to the source and reselling habilities to anyone else (as the GPL does) so in terms of "comercialization" the problems are the same for someone who volunteers code to a project.
By contributing to say, a BSD licensed project, you can both feel like you're doing the right thing, and receive economic compensation for it if you so choose, without any of the GPL's attendant legal complexities whatsoever.
As I said above, your main point is completely false, and now you're just throwing around adjectives and FUD. Wasn't expecting that from you
If you try using it, you'll discover for yourself that in practice, the BSD license is a better license.
Yes, because nobody knows about the BSD license or the other 10e234 free, non-copyleft license out there. And you're selling a license like it's a vintage automobile: it's a bloody license, and people know the main difference between copyleft, non-copyleft and strictly prorietary licenses by reading them, no need to "get the hang of them".
Fear however can be a very powerful motivator, and the GPL has fear on its' side.
Oh... the dark plot part, good.
Fear of Microsoft, fear of the legal system, fear of the rest of the corporate world. Fear, fear, and more fear. The GPL also has Stallman's army of cultists behind it, to socially/politically enforce its' use.
Yes, let's call them "The Enforcers": they surprise geeks in the basements ate night with flashlights and program their brains with a mind control device written in Emacs Lisp.