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Long Live Closed-Source Software?
EvilRyry writes "In an article for Discover Magazine, Jaron Lanier writes about his belief that open source produces nothing interesting because of a hide-bound mentality. 'Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.'"
I'd like to say that the author of this article is completely clueless. Perhaps he should define his position more, and say something like "Open Source interfaces aren't creative" or "Gnome isn't creative," rather than paint a vast category of software, including quite a bit of highly creative non-Linux software, with a single brush.
Just look at Java opensource software. Eclipse, Spring and Hibernate are some of the most innovative opensource projects, massively used by the biggest corporate giants to boot.
Yes, I'm keenly aware I'm preaching to the choir. This article is the most flame-baiting piece I've seen on the front page in a long, long time. I have to admit, it'll be good for driving traffic, and unfortunately the author is probably going to make a bunch of money on it. He won't get my clicks, though... I flatly refuse to read TFA.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
This is a new one. "You know what's wrong with Linux? It's old." Linux bashers must be getting desperate.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
And you probably have to wait another 10 years...
I wonder if he uploaded his shit article on an apache server.
And you failed it from the time-stamps! ;p
Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth?
What, the same closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop that built a complete, adored operating system around BSD?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
This is a retarded sentiment. I'm a developer and I understand the call of the wild, the desire to reimplement everything from the ground up using 'new technology' but this really falls into the trap of thinking that new is automatically better. The older software is, the more mature it is and the fewer bugs it has. Sure, if there's new hardware to take advantage of or some new radical shift in methodology then there might be a reason to go back to the drawing board, but 9 times out of 10 if you're implementing something in closed source, you're duplicating something that's already available in open source and more mature to boot. My own company is having a difficult moving away from an entrenched custom build system, and an entrenched web based page navigation framework and UI framework and data access layer that is all homegrown and closed source and we're spending more time doing that than we would have if we'd just gone with Struts or Spring or Hibernate in the beginning. Not only does closed source end up making poor copies of open source functionality half the time, but one of the number one reasons to use open source is that you can hire people off the street who have extensive experience in whatever you're using. Try doing that with closed source technology.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Apache.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Such remarks basically insult practitioners for a lack of imagination without giving any substantiation. "Who know how much better it could be" is an impotent whine [whinge]. The commentator reveals themselves.
Attaching open source to these statements clouds the issue. Serious innovation isn't being supported anywhere, except perhaps in Universities. Even there it's hard because the interesting stuff is at the fringes. Businesses aren't interested in it because that won't make them money any time soon.
OS creation isn't that interesting to most people, because once you know enough about it, you realize that while the Unix paradigm may not be perfect, getting to a current Unix's level of capability and stability would take decades.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Windows which is now discovering these new things called micro kernels and moving things out of ring0. Linux is up to date with usb and proc filesystems which are object oriented and beryl can do things that make Vista look primitive regardless of the fact that yes, /, /bin, and /usr are 30 years old. How old is the c:\ prompt?
http://saveie6.com/
It would be easy to point out projects that are not only attractive, but used by a large number of people. The problem with this guys reasoning, the stuff "from the 70s" that the OSS people follow is the stuff you want them to follow. You know, the tested technologies that lead to very high stability. Microsoft is currently the only living vender that I know of that tries to reinvent the wheel as if somehow magically of the mess of code they have will rise something so stellar as to bury all competition.
There's nothing wrong with new. Again, there are many OSS projects that work on very new and solid ideas. Those are too numerous to list
The problem with many OSS projects, in terms of getting grandmas to buy it, install it, and use it, is that the coder is typically done when he/she and their friends can use it. Case in point, Gnome and KDE. Both of them are older than the GUI for OS X and both are light years behind OS X in terms of the grandma test. Both are useable, but have been "nearly desktop ready" for like five+ years. That's a problem.
OSS typically doesn't have a problem with being stuck in the 70s. It's not. If you're going to criticize something, make it valid and don't just blow out of your ass.
Burn Hollywood Burn
we only have a couple left, but that's better than none. may as well load up a store bought game or two & pretend everything's just ducky.
no small order. curious why we're so hell-bent on self-destruction.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071229/ap_on_sc/ye_climate_records;_ylt=A0WTcVgednZHP2gB9wms0NUE
is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in.
for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it?
we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster.
meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html
the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'.
the creators will prevail. as it has always been.
corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7
as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way.
the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable. some of US should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate. it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis. concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order. 'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more
Everything that has been created is build upon what came before.
The Roman alphabet is far from ideal when it comes to reading and writing English, but we use it anyway. The spelling of many words in English is far from phonetic, but we continue to spell them that way just the same. The benefits of moving to a different set of symbols or a different spelling of some words are vastly outweighed by the costs involved.
This is what is known as a path dependency. The grass may be greener on the other side, but the price to be paid for moving there is profoundly prohibitive.
The same is true when it comes to computer science.
A reinvented wheel may be better than what it replaces, but the cost of its development does not justify the effort, assuming you can get anyone to adopt it.
It is easy to be creative when you don't have customers. When you don't have people who have come to use a particular product, or work within a particular paradigm, change is easy. Without these other people clogging up the way, it is easy to jump to a new way of doing things.
If no one used the Roman alphabet, finding a new one would be a snap! If the spelling of words wasn't standardized then implementing new phonetic spellings for things like "knight" would be easy.
Needless to say, this isn't going to happen.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
If you assume that Linux is the only open source stuff being written.
There is some very innovative open source stuff out there that has nothing to do with Linux. Including a few next-gen operating systems.
In fact, I think that the fact that open source programmers have gotten so much out of Linux that a 70s platform is *still viable and thriving* in 2007 says quite a bit about them - and the opposite of what the article was saying.
There are some legitimate criticisms of open source - this isn't one of them.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Lanier's own "research" isn't all that creative. In VR he spent a crapload of money doing things that people would do anyway once the hardware gets cheap enough.
Aside from that, he tends toward a limited-understanding kind of bloviating. It's the worst kind of fluffy futurism. It wouldn't be so offensive if it weren't coupled with his oddly oily smugness.
The Neo Open Source movement is a latecomer to the field, so yeah, a lot of is "let's copy this commercial software!". But there's often a "it's good enough" mentality. For years, CVS had problems, but the prevailing wisdom was "it's good enough". There's svn (et alia) now, but would it exist (or be as popular) if closed source (perforce, bitkeeper) software hadn't pushed the edge?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It is worrying that at the application layer, the most popular (or at least most common) designs are re-implementations of some really crap Windows applications.
Then the fact that most software is still written in C/C++ should cause a tear or two.
Why I should pay any attention to Jaron Lanier.
./ or somewhere else, because somehow he got certified as a smart guy (TM), but for the life of me I can't think of anything interesting that he's done or contributed that would deserve that appelation. All I've ever seen of him is a bunch of tech punditry that's either obvious or empty speculation (which is supposed to be significant because he's a smart guy (TM)).
His name pops up every six months on Edge or
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It may be true that there are some interesting products coming out of the closed source market and that open source software library has a lot of older practices applied but considering the rate of open source advancement vs. closed source advancement, open source gave closed source a ten year handicap and that was in part caused by Bill Gates yelling Piracy.
The argument that one way is right and the other wrong, is misguided. Its not about right or wrong but making things better and more right.
Open source is a step up from closed source in many ways and the only thing supporting closed source continuation is that of economic system that provide a mechanism of reward for closed source practices.
But these both are just stepping stones in an industry the is still yet young.
What the next step? We have actually been thru that cycle before when we converted over to better mathematical systems to eventually have the hindu arabic decimal system we have today, that does NOT require mathematician status to use.
The next step in computer programming is to go beyond the open/closed source babel by following through with the core purpose of programming, that of automating some level of complexity to provide the users of that complexity with a simplified interface that they may use and incorporated the complexity into their programing. And being a recursive act, this of course leads to Auto-coding.
At some point we will reach auto-coding simplicity of such a degree that programming will be as easy to use as a calculator capable of processing abstraction beyond the but including the math based abstractions we use today. And this is the degree of ease that you can see for your self by testing how well you can do math by hand in comparison to using a calculator. A lot of people can not do by hand, math they do with a calculator.
Ho Hum. I have been in this business for over twenty five years and it never ceases to amaze me. People that think software design, new computer languages etc are actually the transformational engines of creativity in this industry. Show me just important piece of software were it truly mattered what it was written in to the end user. It only really matters to the people writing it. It is true that new paradigms and languages have made certain programming activities more productive but usually at the expense of efficiency. This general sloppiness on the part of programmers has been compensated for by cpu speed, ample memory and disk storage. The true mover of this industry has been Moore's law and will continue to be in the near future. There are very few truly new and useful ideas that haven't been floating around for a long time. It is only when they become economical for the mass market that we see them implemented in ways that can be used by consumers. My humble advice: Get A Life
The guy is clearly wrong.
Apple and MS tried to improve the OS - Apple had to go back 10 years to unix-like NeXT - now Unix certified OSX.5.
MS maybe haven't learnt yet.
Just because it's old doesn't make it backward - in fact NeXTStep was ahead of it's time, so we've just finally caught up with it.
As best I can tell the only difference is closed source software is even less innovative. Companies don't want to take risks. So any new people who want to make something new that is actually really innovative will have to do it for them selves, and there is no reason it can't be open source.
Obviously thats just not true of all open source software. However, with some OSS, like Open office, I just can't be bothered, because they're trying to replace closed source software, not making it in their own right, just copying it, no creativity just coding for the sake of it being open source and giving them a warm fuzzy feeling inside. For me, using Open office at the moment is like stepping back to ms office 10 years ago, why would I do that- ms office came with my PC so it hasnt cost me anything (it did, but not directly) and more importantly in businesses the users aren't charged anything- it's just an office expense. The guy does have a point though: it's no longer enough just to be open source, to be accepted you MUST be open source and useful. I think it's a step that was missed when the OSS developers started looking for larger distribution to people who weren't intereseted in computer ethics.
Every piece of significant Internet technology designed, developed and deployed over the past 25-30 years has been open-source. Offhand, I could list everything related to Usenet and NNTP, Apache, perl, gopher, python, PGP, BIND, Firefox, archie, AFS, NFS, X, LDAP, MIME, majordomo and mailman, ruby, RCS, CVS, subversion, BSD Unix, Linux, sendmail, postfix, courier, exim, P2P and associated tools, IRC, a bunch of ASF projects, etc., etc., etc. These are the building blocks of what most people perceive as the contemporary Internet -- and I'd say that creating that has involved some serious innovation.
The biggest obstacle to innovation isn't open-source: it's software patents and the associated legal thicket that's being constructed to strangle innovation and thereby preserve the profits of the incumbents. I note with interest the the overwhelming majority of those engaging in this anti-innovation practice are vendors of closed-source software -- who are thereby admitting that they can't compete on merit, and so have to resort to unethical legal maneuvers to quash their competition. Oh, and the occasional open-source-is-bad propaganda piece.
...not. Same for Cinelerra and Kino and Jahshakah and Firefox and Wengophone and apt-get and dvgrab and transcode and ffmpeg2theora and Annodex and YouTube and Facebook and, oh well, you get the point.
As it so happens, I am producing a distributed film with FOSS called the Digital Tipping Point, and our community would never have been able to create all these great BASH scripts to automate the process of capturing, compressing, and uploading the video to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection without the freedom of FOSS. Oh, and coincidentally, neither the Internet or the Internet Archive would exist without FOSS.
This guy clearly does not know what he is talking about.
From the article:
He's not saying that Open Source isn't great. He's just come back from a conference of researchers, and is saying that from a research perspective (which is not necessarily production), innovation and creativity doesn't tend to come through in open source projects, even if it is only the 1 in 10 closed source projects that actually have something new. You've just claimed that you don't care about innovation and creativity for the production software you use in your business, but would rather have something stable. I don't follow why you have a problem with his opinion -- there's no relation.
Long Live Closed-Source Software!
There's a reason the iPhone doesn't come with Linux.
by Jaron Lanier
If you've just been cornered by Martha Stewart at an interdisciplinary science conference and chastised for being a wimp, you could only be at one event: Sci Foo, an experimental, invitation-only, wikilike annual conference that takes place at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There is almost no preplanned agenda. Instead, there's a moment early on when the crowd of scientists rushes up to blank poster-size calendars and scrawls on them to reserve rooms and times for talks on whatever topic comes to mind. For instance, physicist Lee Smolin, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and I talked about the relationship between time and math (touching on ideas presented in my October 2006 column).
The wimp comment was directed at me, and Martha was right. I hadn't stood up for myself in a group interaction. I've always been the shy one in the schoolyard. Back in the 1980s, I was drawn to the possibility that virtual reality would help extend the magical, creative qualities of childhood into adulthood. Indeed, the effect of digital technology on culture has been exactly that, but childhood is not entirely easy. If Lee hadn't forged through the crowd to create our session, I never would have done it. What made Martha's critique particularly memorable, though, is that her observation was directly relevant to what emerged from Sci Foo as the big idea about the future of science.
It wasn't official, of course, but the big idea kept popping up: Science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of "Web 2.0," becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux. And that goes double for synthetic biology, the current buzzword for a superambitious type of biotechnology that draws on the techniques of computer science. There were more sessions devoted to ideas along these lines than to any other topic, and the presenters of those sessions tended to be the younger ones, indicating that the notion is ascendant.
It's a trend that seems ill-founded to me, and to explain why, I'll tell a story from my early twenties. Visualize, if you will, the most transcendentally messy, hirsute, and otherwise eccentric pair of young nerds on the planet. One was me; the other was Richard Stallman. Richard was distraught to the point of tears. He had poured his energies into a celebrated project to build a radically new kind of computer called the LISP Machine. It wasn't just a regular computer running LISP, a programming language beloved by artificial intelligence researchers. Instead it was a machine patterned on LISP from the bottom up, making a radical statement about what computing could be like at every level, from the underlying architecture to the user interface. For a brief period, every hot computer-science department had to own some of these refrigerator-size gadgets.
It came to pass that a company called Symbolics became the sole seller of LISP machines. Richard realized that a whole experimental subculture of computer science risked being dragged into the toilet if anything happened to that little company--and of course everything bad happened to it in short order.
So Richard hatched a plan. Never again would computer code, and the culture that grew up with it, be trapped inside a wall of commerce and legality. He would instigate a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, program: the Unix operating system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could control software culture. Eventually a kid named Linus Torvalds followed in Richard's footsteps and did something related, but using the popular Intel chips instead. His effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded open-software movement.
But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code
And Gnome. And the media players on X. They're either superb copies of old tech, or they're just running behind whoever-sets-the-trend. It's also very untrue with regards to apache, perl, python, webbrowsers (who's running after whom in this game ?). But operating systems need an overhaul, that's for sure. Not that old micro/monolithic debate (that I couldn't care less about), but currently a whole lot of tech is ending up in userland where it doesn't belong: virtualization, network-distributed/scaled filesystems, network-distributed/scaled services. And APIs. I mean, by now, transactions on a filesystem should be part of your standard C-API; read, write, oh sorry, I didn't mean that: rollback. Why isn't it ? Standardized APIs with regards to shared memory, synchronization devices, events; the UNIX crowd seems to find it very acceptable to rely on backward compatibility here. Why ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
They are still using *round wheels*. They are bound to the philosophy of millenia ago. A superbly polished copy of the original wheels, shinier, but still defined by it.
I think it's really not intelligent to argue that using old concepts is bad *especially* when citing Apple as a shining example of what's *good*, considering they are using a BSD at the core, with an evolved Step based API/interface. The innovations of the GUI have nothing to do with what Linux copies of long ago. What Linux copies from long ago is what every other modern platform copies (save for Windows, which I don't think people hold up as an example of stellar architecture). The GUI portion happens to have the X protocol at the core, but the APIs and behaviors are largely dictated by higher-level toolkits that are nowadays pretty much the same across the board. Compiz is a good example. Yes, there is some blatant rip-off of visual effects from other platforms, but there are new ones as well. Also, they extended the concept of expose to have window title search, which is nice. Yes, it's all an implementation with unix-style paths, with X protocol at the core, but that's a moot point, since all the innovation happens outside that arena across the board regardless of platform.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So what? There is lots of stuff that is new and innovative. We aren't going to get to use it for another twenty years. It hasn't made it out of the lab yet.
The trouble with new innovative stuff is that the framework to use it doesn't exist yet.
An example is digital signal processing. The math was invented two hundred years ago. Nobody could take advantage of it until about thirty years ago when computers became powerful enough.
Many of the new hot things on the desktop existed on the mainframe in the 1960s. In fact, stuff that existed as mainframes now exists as microcontrollers. So do we complain that microcontrollers aren't sufficiently innovative?
Lanier is up to something, but he's missing the point. In the 1960s and 70s came up Tenex, Unix, the Smalltalk system, the Lisp Machine, the MESA system, full systems built from scratch.
Today, most of the software people, be it in Academia, in Industry or in the Free Software community, are designing building blocks -- pieces of software that are designed to fit within an existing system (Unix, Windows, the web, whatever).
Or, as Rob Pike put it, systems research is irrelevant (PDF).
FTA: I seem to hold a minority opinion. I've taken a lot of heat for it!
I think that's because the argument doesn't make any sense. The author is saying that open source projects suffer from some sort of ADD, and therefore they don't (implication: can't) focus on one idea long enough to make it good. The thing is, open source is an enabler; it allows for the free exchange of ideas. However, it is not a source of inspiration in and of itself. It's just a methodology. A jigsaw isn't going to help a person with no skill or imagination to create a work of art from a piece of wood. However, a person with imagination and creativity will be better able to create that work of art with a jigsaw than with just a chisel and a hammer.
In the closed source world, profit is simultaneously the inspiration and the cause for lack of inspiration. If investors see potential in an emerging market, they will pour money into development of an innovative product. But if there isn't sufficient profit motivation, innovation won't happen. There is not a singular source of inspiration in the open source world. I think mostly what we are seeing up until now is the motivation of replacing proprietary software. That results in the development of a lot of clones with similar functionality and interface design. If somebody were to come along, though, and say, "Here I have this awesome idea. Come help me out with it," open source allows that to happen much easier than closed source. There is some of that out there already. They just aren't among the high profile projects. Niche ideas are going to get minimal attention until other people discover them. That is one thing that proprietary software will always do better because their business model depends on it: marketing.
Open-source doesn't magically always lead to succes, but neither does closed-source: OS/2 and BeOS are two commercial, 100% closed-source operating systems that were very ahead of their time... and died. Why? Well, largely (and this is especially the case with BeOS) because they couldn't INTEROPERATE with all the other things that were already out there that most people used. And why couldn't they interoperate? Everyone, all together now...
Two: open source developers would love nothing more than to create the next great thing, and they are more than talented enough to do it. Why aren't they? Oh, right: they've got to spend their time reinventing the wheel, reverse-engineering all those wonderful CLOSED standards--Office file formats, SMB, video codecs, etc. Imagine how far ADVANCED we'd be if we didn't have to spend man-decades reverse engineering crappy-but-dominant things. If asshole companies would have worked with open standards in the first place, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess. Outside of a computer science class, it's a waste of time to solve the same problems over and over and over again.
One of my favorite quotes of all time: Craig Southeren, co-founder of OpenH323 Fucking-a right. Why are there so many IM protocols? (Formatted text over a network--are you fucking kidding me?!?!?*) And why, relevant to Open H323, don't we all have videophones yet? Same reason.
From TFA: "Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world--like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe's Flash--the results of proprietary development?"
There are MANY reasons, but a lack of creativity on the part of OSS developers is NOT one. It is a fact that secrets DO have some value. If you know something good, and you aren't willing to tell someone for free, they'll probably be willing to pay.
PageRank and Flash are his shining examples of "sophisticated" and successful code?!? Ha! Let's see: PageRank is a weighted ranking algorithm Ooh. It exists (and is closed) because people are assholes and are constantly trying to game the system. If fucking asshole spammers and porn sites didn't fill up their pages with bogus META tags back in the mid-to-late '90s, PageRank wouldn't be the necessity it is. If they didn't continue to do everything possible to defeat honest ranking, its methods wouldn't have to be secret. And Flash? Are you fucking KIDDING me? It's a vector graphics format that handles animation, can play sound in sync, and has gained the ability to play embedded movie files. Those are all DECADES-old technolgies! And Adobe bundled them all together into one plugin... ooh, that fucking REEKS of innovation.
This guy was on a panel with Lee Smolin (a physicist) and Neal Stephenson talking about "the relationship between time and math" so I'm sure he's smarter than I am in many ways, but I can't help but feel that this article of his is way, way, way wrong.
* yeah, I know there's more to it than just text... but not fucking much. Not enough to justify the existence of AIM and MSN and Yahoo! and all the rest.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I think that open source has been surpassing closed-source software by leaps and bounds. I mean, tell me if OSX or Windows has something like BlueProximity (http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueproximity/). The only "old" thing I'm seeing is the security model, but it's a good model to keep because we're seeing Microsoft starting to take a few pages from the Linux playbook.
It's really handy that I can open my World Wide Web browser, and using TCP/IP, navigate to discovermagazine.com which uses PLONE running on Linux to serve an an HTML document telling me how useless open-source software is.
(cite: http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine)
The author of the article is apparently entirely unaware of the many creative open source projects out there. But there is just one thing: maybe open source people need to think more about standardization when it comes to user interfaces, installation and configuration mechanisms, and also, ironically, marketing. Nothing sells, or gets propagated freely, by itself. -- you can bite my ass for saying this, ppl, but deep inside, y'all know it's true.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
I'm sorry, Pulseaudio fucking rocks. I love having every application being able to have a different volume setting. And that's just what tickled me most recently. This asshat believes that innovation comes from economic stimulation because he defines innovation as that thing that Microsoft is doing.
If you instead note that Microsoft has seen greater economic benefit by holding back the state of the art, it becomes easier to see this idea as a load of horseshit, or is the author still waiting for Cairo and Longhorn?
Red Hat clearly recognizes this, as their core business model comes from them hiring experts in Linux. Ubuntu might be philanthropy, or it might not, but it has experts as well, and experts competing to advance the state of the art is what makes Free Software the best system for the development of the information industry.
What has Jaron Lanier produced? Is this fellow famous for being famous or has he actually done something closed source against which we can compare our efforts?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There are innovative and creative OSS projects, but one does need to do more work to find them because they are not going to be popular, and because few people, relatively, have a need for them.
Google, Adobe, and Apple have invested a lot of money into those projects, and like it or not, but the success of a software project depends more upon the money invested into it than many other factors. Something that I would consider to be highly innovative OSS, but lacking the money for publicity to succeed (among other reasons), is Tor, but it's not as though the EFF has much money to be spending on getting more people to use it. Of course, there aren't a whole lot of people that need to be that paranoid with their identity.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
How brilliant to call someone a fucktard and to point to BSD Unix as a poster child for innovation.
To think I was once a subscriber. Recent years they've been big on the creationism "controversy", had "Why Kids Love Big Brother" as a cover story, and interviewed Newt Gingrich and the "end of science" guy at length. Their editorial policy couldn't be more clearly directed toward driving the magazine into the dirt.
So getting dissed by Discover is _good_ advertising taking the source into consideration.
I find it interesting how all the comments which are bubbling to the top express more or less the same view. It's pretty much a vindication of TFA's point.
Let's think about this rationally for a second. Successful open source is generally software produced by committee, in the sense that everyone's input is taken into account to varying degrees. Even in a project with a "benevolent dictator" like Linux, there's far too much going on for any sort of micromanagement to occur.
So what we end up with is converging on the "wisdom of the commons," which is generally not going to be something innovative, but something tried and true. You're not going to beat your own path and try and invent something better than the POSIX API, you're going to try and figure out the best way to implement that. There may be innovations in the details of how you achieve that, but your overall design is still boring and unoriginal. (Which is good when it comes to operating system kernels; I'm not arguing against that.)
Now, having said that, I wouldn't say closed source is better about this, either. Successful closed source is also generally software produced by committee. Innovation still occurs in the small, not the large. Closed source is generally managed in a hierarchical fashion, which does make it more open to (probably misguided) "strategic direction" ("Hey, let's convert all our apps to run over the Web using AJAX, it's the next big thing!"), but when it comes to real innovation, it's about as unlikely.
Where innovation really tends to come from is some guy (probably just out of college) with a nugget of a new idea, or perhaps an old idea whose time has finally come. He works on it by himself, and demonstrates the basic concept works.
This is the point where open source becomes valuable, not before. This is the point where that vanity SourceForge project is taken up by others, where all that experience and collective wisdom really becomes useful, and the central idea is turned into something really great. Where open source really shines is how it allows anyone with a good idea to attract talent, not just those who can attract VC funding to hire programmers. Open source is what allows the equivalent of a thesis project like Linux, or SSH, or BitTorrent, or Unix, or the Internet, turn into a global phenomenon.
But don't think for a minute that open source actually produces innovation through the wisdom of the commons. The wisdom of the commons is, funny enough, common. Open source is an enabler, but a committee, whether being paid or not, favors the tried and true over the innovative almost every time.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Yes, but it's currently competing with other OSs defined by the same antique and so it can't afford to be radically different; soon however, that competition will be won and the door will be open for more radical change.
Having used all of the above, what's especially innovative about any of them?
Why was invited Martha Stewart to a meeting of scientists and other intellectuals? She is the last person I would expect to see at google headquarters.
In its day, it *was* a poster child for innovation. That's why AT&T tried to steal it.
Claiming that, today, BSD is innovation free is like claiming that Casablanca is full of cliches. Technically correct, but completely missing the point.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Or perhaps he should start by defining what's "creative". Is it making something better, or is it making it just different from what already exists? Let's say, like square wheels? That can be later "improved" to "triangular wheels (C)(TM), ONE LESS BUMP PER TURN"?!...
I don't even know why the editors even bother to post articles with pro-closed source viewpoints. Posting such a thing on Slashdot is akin to advocating Hilary Clinton at one of Rudy Giuliani's rallies. The articles won't be seen with much credibility.
Wow. Words almost escape me.
I could talk about the software that open source has created all along, but others have made posts far more complete and eloquent then I could.
That statement is just so ridiculous it's insane.
I guess this guy is getting paid very well by his propaganda piece. I'm just curious about who the heck is this guy? I could see Balmer spewing this retarded mess out, but this is coming from a relative nobody.
Why are we listening at all?
Open source software could never make something like Mathematica, and if you refer to Maxima or R then you clearly have not studied Mathematica deeply enough. The organization of this software is so supreme that despite it's enormous complexity it is often one of the first major apps to be ported to new environments, and the recent upgrade to version 6.0 is simultaneously the largest and smoothest upgrade I have ever seen for a 20 year old application.
First, how many really creative software programs are there out there? How many of them have become commercial successes?
If you look at some of the best engineered programs of their day (AmigaOS, REBOL, etc) they have almost universally been excluded from the market by market forces. While these have generally come from closed source environments to date, they have also universally languished in isolation. Nearly everything we use, open or closed source, comes from environments which are not conducive for great software engineering. Hence the market pulls us to mediocrity and conservatism (to the extent that we are largely still running UNIX and VMS clones over the vast majority of both the desktop and server markets).
It is also true, however, that there have been a lot of interesting ideas to come out of FOSS. While HURD seems to be the main open source challenger to the title of "King of Vaporware" (currently held by Duke Nuke'em Forever), the ideas in the operating design are certainly creative and in many ways unparalleled. Of course HURD has organizational issues which more or less have doomed it to a perpetual pre-alpha state. Similarly, in the web server market, TUX has come (and largely gone) as a creative approach to solving certain types of http server performance issues. Similarly, I thought HESIOD was far better thought out than LDAP (HESIOD being open source from the beginning, LDAP not being)....
However, there are a few cases where open source architectures have proven both creative and successful. The major ones I can think of include Kerberos, X, Jabber, and others.
At the same time the article has a point-- that "the masses" generally suck at software design. This is why most successful FOSS projects manage the core engineering of the program through a transparent process (subject to review and feedback from the users) but one which is also closed to everyone except a few core architects. This is the case with PostgreSQL, Linux, LedgerSMB, and most other successful projects. Hence the point of the article is a cautionary one for FOSS project leaders, not a blow against FOSS per se.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
While I agree with the author that the software development model (open vs. closed) can affect the psychology of the coder and hence the quality of the code, I think the conclusion he reached is upside down and backwards.
I've done both open-source and closed-source software development for 30 years. I've seen a lot of bugs. While every coder and every project is different, I have noticed some trends in the type of bugs found in open vs. closed source code. At the risk of sounding airy-fairy, I've found that good coding is usually based on good information flow. For a simple example, if a piece of code encounters an error or other unexpected condition, it is essential that the condition either be dealt with or passed along. This applies to blocks of code, subroutines, applications, and even operating systems. Writing code that is easy to read (with appropriate comments) is another kind of good information flow. IMO clean information flow is the essence of good software.
I've noticed over and over that open-source development tends to produce code with better information flow than closed-source development. I have no proof, but I believe this is because, subconsciously, closed-source developers are intent on restricting information flow and this affects the code they write. I've seen similar problems when people (especially relative newbies) use what Larry Wall describes as bondage and discipline languages but that is an entirely different flamewar.
I think this simple model (closed source development leads to unnaturally restricted information flow in code) goes a long way to explaining the reaction to Microsoft's products by the computer literate. Most (but perhaps not all) of the really good technical people I've known have tended to hate working with Microsoft products even though they have often been unable to precisely articulate what drives them batty (sometimes they say the products are too paternalistic). I think the conflicts arise because the techies have a certain set of reasonable expections of what good software should do based on the code having good information flow. Microsoft, because of their closed-source mentality, defied all of these expectations. On the other hand, the general public did not have any expectations about information flow and so were not immediately turned-off by Microsoft's products.
As others have probably pointed out, the author need only compare Microsoft's Vista with FOSS development over the same period of time. The open-source community has made great strides forward while Microsoft appears to have made a step backwards in many ways.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
How many of those are open-source knock-offs of a superior commercial system? How many of those only became open-source once their creators had milked everything they could out of it as a closed-source product, and then released it so it would live on?
PGP was originally "free for noncommercial use only". Ruby (I'm a Ruby programmer) is basically the new Smalltalk. Subversion is just CVS without too many of the more blatant flaws, which in turn is just RCS plus
Some of those, like Perl, are open-source and have always been. But for some reason that doesn't seem like a great argument in favor of open-source.
From a different point of view, look at what Xerox PARC created: laser printing, ethernet, the modern GUI (including the mouse, icons, windows, and color computer-generated bitmap graphics), and object-oriented programming, to name a few.
Sure, if you're running 4 mail servers and 2 mailing list programs and 3 version control systems on your Linux-and-BSD box, then it looks like open-source is everywhere. But if you're using a mouse to click in a window on a bitmap display to use a program written in an object-oriented language and will later print it out on a laser printer, it looks like you're using a modern Alto, which was incredibly innovative, and not developed as an open-source project at all.
Open-source has a rich history and is responsible for a lot. But so does closed-source. It's just as foolish to ignore one as the other.
I've created something new. It isn't earth shattering, but it is a new use of technology created by combining several different kinds of existing technologies. Several of these technologies are open source. In fact, without the open source software I'm using, I could not have gotten to the point of having a new thing under the sun. The cost and complexity were just too prohibitive for the solution to be viable.
Linux & Asterisk as software, and MANY open protocol stacks (TCPIP, IAX2, SMTP, DNS, ASCII, SSH, FTP, HTTP, mu-LAW, GSM, -- etc, etc, etc) are all directly tied to the open source community and are all key parts of a solution I've come up with that is helping save lives.
I'm making a business out of what I've built, but I'm also adding back to the open source pool by releasing any changes or additions I've needed to make back to those projects. Some are useful, some are not. Who can say which?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Some of the youngest, brightest automotive minds have been trapped in a 1770s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old carriage designs as if they were facts of nature. The Rolls Royce Silver Phantom is a superbly polished copy of an antique four horse carriage, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Nice template for flamebait. If we could only get all the major magazines to accept this template, think of how much agonizing research and anguish over choices of words it would save their editorial writers.
Hey, where are those flying cars??
MIT Kerberos, X, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. would be examples of open source projects which have been extremely creative for long periods of time and been quite successful.
OTOH, Perl6 and HURD seem to be waiting for Duke Nuke'm Forever to be released.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
UNIX - a closed-source OS, reimplemented as Linux and BSD.
Web Servers - started closed source, now we have Apache et al.
Development IDEs - started closed source (Borland, Microsoft vstudio, etc), now we have Eclipse etc.
Photoshop - closed source Photo editing, reimplmented in Gimp.
Media players - Started closed-source, now have many open source reimplementations
Databases - System R, DB2, Oracle, all closed-source, inspired MySQL and PostgreSQL open source
Java - started close-source, later became open-source
Mono - reimplementation of .NET close source software
Office Software - (Word, excel, Lotus etc) all closed source, reimplemented as Open Office etc.
Where are the brand-new software ideas that never had closed-source inspiration?
The FSF doesn't do anything "open source", that's a different movement with a different set of values (values that lead directly to wondering if developmental efficiency consistently producing better software is a lie). The FSF exists to promote software freedom, the freedoms to study, share, and modify computer software so we can organize society around increased social solidarity. The free software movement is a social movement which is not about "innovation", it's about freedom.
If you want to learn what the free software movement works for and how it differs from the open source movement, you should read Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software. The free software movement appreciates the support members of the open source movement show it (members of both movements they work together on practical projects, and the OSI and open source advocates use FSF-written licenses such as the GNU GPL/LGPL/FDL), but the free software movement has a different philosophy which leads to radically different conclusions about proprietary software. The free software movement does not wish to be lumped in with the open source movement.
Of course this doesn't mean free software hackers strive for less powerful or less reliable software. But instead of waiting for some proprietor to fix things for us, we all have the freedom to learn how to fix/improve the program ourselves or get someone else to do it for us (even commercially). By contrast, all proprietors are monopolists. The philosophy of software freedom says that it is better to improve a less reliable, less powerful free program than to use a more powerful, more reliable non-free program to do the same job. Proprietary software is anti-social and therefore proprietary software should be obviated. Open source advocates disagree, seeing software development not as a social activity with ethical ramifications but instead as a technocratic act to be done in the most efficient way that benefits businesses first. So open source advocates have no problem advocating for software that would not qualify as "open source" such as proprietary software.
Digital Citizen
I see Jaron is taking a lot of heat for his views. That's OK, he pretty much predicted he would, but I think some folks are throwing the baby out with the bathwater in dismissing the entire article as "mere flamebait" with nothing interesting to say. The fact is, Jaron has a point, though perhaps not the point he actually made. The real point is that innovation needs both fuel and focus to truly thrive.
That fuel can take many forms, of course, but a steady paycheck (and all the qualities of life it enables) remains one of the most reliable forms of fuel yet devised. It's not a bad way of providing focus, either. In a functional commercial organization, you have very specific vision and directives for everyone to follow and the fact that developers don't need to go elsewhere to find ways of paying their mortgage means they can devote themselves exclusively to the task(s) at hand. Contrast this with the general directive to "do whatever floats your boat" in the open source world (modulo whatever organizational goals the thought-leaders may be trying to set) and the fact that, with regrettably few exceptions, its developers still need to put 40+ hours a week into making money some other way. The fact that innovation still occurs in spite of this is highly admirable, but it's definitely like rolling a marble uphill by comparison.
Another point that Jaron failed to make is that the open source world resists change, largely due to the sheer number of opinions on which direction to go in or what constitutes a good or bad idea. In order to topple an existing paradigm, you need to conform to the 10X rule and that's hard. In a closed system, all that it takes to effect change is for one person in a position of authority to say "do it!" and, within reason, it will be done. Even Linus Torvalds saying "do it!" doesn't mean it will get done in the Linux world unless he does it himself, and there's only so much one person can do. Contrast this with the commercial world, where you can have hundreds (if not thousands) of people working in concert on a single goal. Whether the goal is the "wrong" or "right" goal is academic (and largely in the eye of the beholder) - you get on board or you look for another job. Should it subsequently transpire that your goals were wrong, well, all you've wasted is some time and money. If they were right, however, then you've just created something innovative which will have a significant impact on the world at large.
The open source community spends a lot of time arguing itself to a standstill, by comparison, and that's hardly conducive to innovation, which is perhaps the point that Jaron should have made.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
I pretty much disagree with the whole premise. "Good" engineering and invention come from building on the prevailing framework, lest there be people unfamiliar with the "shoulders of giants" quote. What open source does for "creativity" is provide a "prevailing framework" for free and allow people with fewer resources to compete on a level never before possible. Linux may be a polished version of an antique idea, but some ideas survive because they "stand the test of time." The UNIX design has stood the test of time, coming from MULTICS, it represents some of the product of some of the best analysis of the subject of operating systems. Using a well tested "great" design is usually better than coming up with something new. It is always only been when what exists does not work does something new come into existence. Currently, the UNIX type computer OS model is surviving because something new has not proved to be better. The wheel was a great design, it is still the leading device used to reduce the effects of friction in the motion of objects. The "arch" is still the leading design in efficiently distributing weight of suspended structures. The transistor is still the building blocks of computers (embedded in ICs of course), the list goes on. Using the old technology that stands the test of time can be creative. Using it in new ways *is* creative. Creating *new* for the sake of new isn't always creative, sometimes its called capitalism or stupid. (Did someone save Vista?)
That's why the scheduler and other parts of the Linux kernel have just been chucked right out the door entirley in favor of newer, better versions. You see that sort of thing aaaaalllll the time in closed-source stuff, right?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Amarok.
Qt.
I rest my case.
After reading the article, I do think he has a point to some degree. I've seen comments on here that refer to Unix as like the wheel - Linux is simply polishing an already near-perfect idea. This can't be further from the truth. Look at what the article said -- he was disappointed that Stallman chose to pursue an open source version of an OS that was already at the time recognized as being not only old, but flawed. Age isn't the issue - it's idiotic to toss out an idea simply because of age. But flaws and technical reasons are definitely a cause to reconsider things, such as Unix. It would have been nice if he had chosen to open up a more revolutionary idea and push the field ahead instead of stalling it somewhere in the early 1970s. This isn't a unique sentiment. Rob Pike said a similar thing a few years ago at a talk in Utah (http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf) where he lamented that the fixation on Linux/Unix was leading many people to have blinders restricting them to thinking about the world in a very limited, closed-minded way. Rob happens to come from Bell labs where the original Unix creators realized that more was possible than what the Unix model provided, and they created Plan9 and Inferno. The open source model, while good for code freedom, seems to breed more than anything an irrational devotion to specific technologies simply because implementations of them exist for free. Why are people unwilling to consider that there could be better ways to do something, and that Unix/Linux is not the pinnacle of perfection in operating systems and software? I use Linux every day and enjoy it, but wouldn't blink an eye if something better came along and Linux got tossed off my machine.
His reasoning is specious.
Software fills a need.
Let me repeat that: Software fills a need .
Sometimes, for example, when you need to get a bunch of disparate, differently built systems talking to each other, open source software fills that need much better than closed. Extending the authors example, look at the difference between the iPhone and the Internet:
Sure, the iPhone serves its purpose, but its purpose is to make Apple money. It's closed source, and it does that well. The Internet, OTOH, serves its purpose well, too - its purpose is to be a global communication network.
So closed source is appropriate for some situations, but not for others. But the primary difference between the two is that while closed source software benefits the creators of the software, open source software benefits the entire public at large. I would chance to guess that the total societal benefit from open source software is far greater than the benefit from closed source software:
Of course, I don't have the numbers to back up my hypothesis, but the point still holds: closed source software must perform substantially better than open source software to be a net benefit to the world, all things considered. Because proprietary software is limited in its distribution by its economic model, it has a very difficult time producing the same net positive benefit that open source software achieves with ease.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Certainly a lot of the points mentioned are cases of open source clones of previous closed source apps. In that regard they are hardly innovative. LDAP, for example, is just X.500 over TCP/IP (but it still requires insane levels of OSI stack bits to be reimplemented, such as ASN.1).
At the same time, I would ask: Would you consider Kerberos and X to be innovative? These were open source achievements by MIT which have been extremely important industry-wide. What about Zephyr (of which AIM, etc. are basically commercial clones)?
Now, I would argue that: X does exactly what you describe in that it allowed a unification of information management (since the UI is now only loosely coupled to the actual computer). Kerberos did the same thing in terms of network security management (to the point that the authentication in Active Directory is largely an inferior copy of MIT Kerberos-- inferior because of the way AD handles service principles).
Good innovation comes from a few people seeing a problem and coming up with a solution. Open source can do this. Closed source can do this. It is just about the group of engineers, usually with user input.
Bad innovation (Clippy, Bob) are driven by the desire to be innovative. Solve problems and let the innovation happen on its own.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Basically Jaron Lanier was a "cool" "hip" guy from the mid to late '80's who hyped Virtual Reality as the next big thing. He claimed to have coined the term (which he didn't) and hyped VR as the second coming, with holodeck level VR anytime now (back when 486's were hot stuff). His company VPL cratered and Thompson Capital grabbed everything. In a last ditch effort to keep VPL he announced that we had to keep VR "out of the hands of the military" despite the fact that the DoD and NASA had developed the basic tech ages ago.
So he's a has-been shill from the '80's who was notable for putting his face on a new trend and crashing badly. And he wears dreadlocks. Vanilla Ice. (apologies to Vanilla Ice who has aged better and is still memorable enough to merit disses from Emimem.)
As for the remarkable innovation of the iPhone, basically it's a less capable spiffy implementation of the Palm TX with massive hype.
As for innovation in open source, when FOSS innovates, it is either dismissed as "requiring retraining" or the subject of innumerable lawsuits. The fact that you can mix and match just about any interface or software in Linux is usually put forward as a failing point.
This article is without doubt a troll. I would love to hear how closed-source is any different. Of course we build off older principles: newer isn't always better.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
That actually looks like a pretty cool approach. One could also attach it to RFID tags used in ID cards and.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What's happening with Open Source is that software development takes on more aspects of engineering, and sheds some of the aspects of radicalism and creativiy.
Engineering is like that: in tackling a problem, any problem, you first look at what worked before in a similar situation and then you try to stay as close as possible to it. Just ask people who do structural design for bridges for commercial construction companies. They have some piece of software (that no-one understands and no-one is allowed to change) that they enter a few parameters into (span, load etc.), and it generates the complete design for them, right down to the component lists. They typically aren't allowed to change even the tiniest screws or nuts for fear that their adaptations would result in a design that isn't certified anymore. If it's clear that the conventional design doesn't scale, then it's called a specialist job and it will be outsourced to a specialist firm which employs a lot of MIT graduates. This approach doesn't exactly promote a rapid evolution of bridge design, but what it does do is to spit out lots and lots of bridge designs that are unexciting, safe, proven, easy to build, and which can be budgeted to a nicety.
The same thing is starting to happen in software engineering. You generally don't start building something in C anymore, all the while rolling you our GUIs, coding your own mathematical subroutine libraries, your own sort routines, your own database engine and your own network drivers. Even today's software engineers understand that, and that's why you see people using things like widget and component libraries, high-level languages, and third-party applications. As soon as that happens, your design and your system architecture will be impacted by the capabilities and design of your components.
When using closed source using ready-made components is always a bit of a risk, especially if you don't completely understand the design logic of whover built the library/widget set/class hierarchy/whatever in the first place. Why?
(1) Because it's very likely that your project will somehow run into trouble when you try to use the tools you have as *you* understand then, rather than as whoever built them would have used them had they been in your place.
(2) You are likely to have to spend a lot of time trying to understand the logic of your tools and components compared to actually using them
(3) High quality components don't usually come cheap and sometimes come with nasty royalty clauses. Therefore people tend to look more favourably on software engineers who come back from their feasibility study and say something like: "We can meet 80% of the specifications just by sticking together off-the-shelf components, but if you want 100% we will have to custom-code X,Y, and Z." If that is acceptable, it usually turns out they will have to custom code U,V,W as well to meet performance benchmarks and R,S,T if they are to accommodate that senior VP's last-minute "really essential" add-ons *plus* a lot of glue code to make everything work together. If the "does 80% of what we want" solution isn't acceptable, then custom-made coding orgies are guaranteed.
With Open Source software, the situation is subtly different. You can often find actual code that does parts of what you need done. Code that demonstrably works, can be modified if needed, and which can be used for free. You'll often find yourself trying to hunt down components that do as much as possible of what you need. And even if such components don't exist, you'll generally stick to platforms and environments that you can test before you commit yourself.
In doing that I'll admit that people who develop strictly using Open Source software will tend to use tools that are unexciting but tried and trusted, will use libraries that have been around for some time, and will constrain themselves to use GUI's that are supported by the (somewhat unexciting and mainstream) widget
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I have a very difficult time believing the writer has anything to do with computer science. In my university, and all other universities I know of, practically all new projects are open source. Computer science as a branch of mathematics has ALWAYS been based on open source, and it will always be that way because that is the nature of science.
If he wants to discuss products, that's another thing. Yeah, not all open source products are "polished". So what? Product by themselves are not innovative; they're built upon years of research which is innovative by itself, a lot of which is published in papers that are open to all (at least in this discipline).
Oh, and name me a better closed-source network scanner than Nmap or a better wireless browser than Kismet, or a more capable remote execution system than OpenSSH. Would you really say that Amarok is not an innovative media player? How about Plan 9, which is a hell of an innovative, open-source operating system? The closest thing closed source has to ZFS is the Veritas File system, and with ZFS being free there's no reason not to use it.
In my original post I did write how I was quite surprised to see an article like this in any science related magazine, even one that is more aimed at the masses. I myself love open source both in its theory, and in the real world programs that I use every day. My initial thought was to write an email to the author, but I figured that would likely get tossed away and forgotten... or I could post to slashdot. I figured posting to slashdot would make a bigger splash and hopefully get some attention. I think I was right!
Some guy, who has written a few academic papers but has produced what exactly?, thinks that Stallman and Torvalds' world famous software is boring.
That is like me (skinny web developer) saying that I think Tiger Woods is a boring golfer or David Beckham should be more creative on the pitch.
Where is this creative output from computer science that is better? Writing a paper is useful but it is not engineering. Where is the code?
My little Linux and tech blog
Get off your high horse; I've read it all. They are, in effect, the same (thus the apt term FOSS). They may have different motivations, but the FSF is just another aspect of the whole movement that likes to think it's different. And in all your prose you still didn't rebut the main point-- that FOSS doesn't lead to better software, just a "lowest common denominator".
E pluribus unum
I really wish the author had qualified his claims a little bit more. Is he talking about Linux simply as a kernel or all desktop software associated with Linux, such as Gnome and KDE?
Sure Gnome and KDE may not represent the state of the art, but I don't find them to be that far behind what you find in Windows or OS X. The examples he gives also seem poor. The article mentions Web 2.0 and the Google Page Rank algorithm, but what serves as the foundation for all of these technologies? Open source software!
Part of the reason, I'm convinced, that Google and other companies have been able to innovate so quickly is because they have a wealth of open software at their finger tips.
Also, there is innovation in open source. I'm typing this on a Nokia n800, a device which is certainly unique and innovative.
SIGFAULT
Last time I used Vista at a friend's place, I was quite happy to get home again and fire up my Linux-only laptop and get back to Gnome / Compiz Fusion. I'm not sure what part of the OS is supposed to be 'dated'. My experience is the opposite. Each incarnation of Windows feels dated to me. My Linux ( Gentoo ) is constantly evolving. There are a plethora of examples of this. On the printing side, the last year has seen major improvements in CUPS, gutenprint and ghostscript. On the display side, the last year has seen major improvements in Mesa, AIGLX and EXA ( and of course Compiz / Enlightenment etc ). That's just a few examples off the top of my head, as and end user.
As a programmer, there have been significant improvements in GTK+, MySQL, and of course my own collection of Perl modules ( at http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis - I'm about to release another round early in the new year ).
I think the problem with the article is that it's written by a tossbag who can't get his head around any software, but is at least claiming to understand closed source software, because of his frustration about not being able to run a Linux desktop like his more intelligent friends. Whatever.
I was expecting a sharp upturn in articles like this, not because the John Dvorak style trolling and baiting out desperation for hits but because there is so much positive going on in the Open Source world. The proprietary shops are working overtime to outspin the obvious benefits, and there will be much money spent on 'targeted advertising' (aka known as 'bought editorials'). The SCO case has already shown how easy it is to deceive, or buy. In other words - I expect much press noise because it's the last effective resort of failure.
Linux is making mincemeat in the server market, and even the desktop is now viable with projects like OpenOffice taking barriers away even in the Windows world (don't underestimate the bridge value of alternatives on the 'traditional' platform). Microsoft has screwed up royally with Vista, and the shenanigans to push their proprietary format as ISO compliant have so visibly damaged the ISO organisation that that will be visible long after the marketing guys have plastered it over with spin. Zune has tanked, Xbox has added to the arsenal of total failures known to Microsoft product users and in general the exposure to anti-monopoly legislation is also driving up 'operating' costs.
OLPC is proving that vision, initiative, creativity and ethics can make heavy inroads into the corporate domain of Microsoft and Intel, their agressiveness (and lack of ethics) clearly demonstrates that they are challenged. Moreovere, that's just on a like-for-like basis and ignores the HUGE added value the innovation in OLPC has brought to the computing world. If you want TRUE innovation you need plenty of ideas and an open mind.
"Open" is is a state of mind. An open mind.
Insert
A railroad is a little more than an extremely hard and smooth road to minimize rolling resistance. What makes the railroad practical is the flanged wheel (with the flanges on the inside) - See the first chapter in The Railroad, what it is and what it does by John Armstrong.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Yeah, producing CLEAN antique LONG-LIVE code.
Not craptacular Java junk, that lives on quicksand.
So where's the "closed source established product" of... what you have under your nose?
Maybe it hasn't enough mass of volunteers? Make that ruby on rails, then.
Open source ends up copying established products because:
1) it's easier to get an audience that way. Users are lazy.
2) often there is little reason to change. there is no pressure to make people upgrade or get used to your paradigm as in closed source packages competing with each other.
But that doesn't stop never seen before stuff to come out. See debian packaging system, iolanguage, étoilé, wagn, countless others.
Last but not least, a reality check:
Linux may have the same old "ls" and "chmod" stuff you see on a vintage VAX, but the kernel is getting faster, configuring it is getting painless, and packages are growing in number.
On the other front there is the innovative Vista failure and the "let's put the good 'ol' macos GUI on good ol unix" Leopard.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Closed source software is very important to how people use computers, even if they tend to use OSS. For example, if, say, Windows XP or Mac OS X were fully open source, would you really choose Linux over them?
In a nutshell, the point I'm trying to make is that closed source software can be very good. True, that can't be said of certain products, but Windows XP wasn't all that bad, Office 2007 (ignoring OOXML) is excellent, and since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple have always made a brilliant example of how to create good software; I'm typing this on Mac OS X Tiger now and it's excellent. True, its kernel is open-source, as are the GNU tools, and several of the APIs, but the rest of it is closed, and I truly don't mind using it.
While it's good to have something for free, it will take something enormous to get open-source on almost every machine in the way, say, Windows is. For example, a real innovation that makes open-source software dead simple to set up, and different to anything before it. Because - let's face it - Linux is a jargon minefield for the inexperienced user, and while Vista is no better, XP and Mac OS X are dead simple - two editions, that's it.
That said, I do have a problem with fierce monopolisation of software using closed-source, which makes Vista my case in point. So my case briefly is that I don't mind using closed-source software if it's good enough and reasonably priced. If it's open-source, that's the icing on the cake.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
- dunno why /. bothers with these tidbits... as soon as i see something like the summary it's a good warning not to click the link...
- just move on, folks... not worth the time...
Feel free to hack
Lanier invented gloves-and-goggles virtual reality. I tried his original VR system back in the 1980s (novel concept, terrible lag), and met him back then. Lanier tries too hard to be cool, but he has done real work.
He does have a point about the Unix/Linux/open source ecosystem. Face it, Linux is pretty much like Unix, which dates from the 1970s. The Berkeley stuff from the 1980s (notably BIND and Sendmail) is still in use, buried under layers of cruft and still breaking. C programs are still crashing all the time. C++ didn't help much. X-Windows, which was never very good, has survived all its successors.
I never dreamed when I started using UNIX in 1978 that thirty years later it would still be a major system. I thought the future of operating systems would be more like Multics, with rings of protection, on cheaper hardware. Or like Tandem, a transaction processing system where the mean time between system failures was measured in decades. Or like UCLA Locus, where distributed processing really worked. But no. It's just minor variations on UNIX, forever.
That's what Lanier is pointing out. We have roughly the same problems at the bottom we had thirty years ago.
Wasn't MS supposed to have released Lamehorn aka VISTA three--or was it four--years ago instead of last year?!!
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
The point that Jaron makes about the importance of encapsulation when he gets into the ecological soup metaphor was what stuck with me the most and I think its important. When you think about it, isn't organization the thing that makes or breaks all models of software development? Sure Linus Torvalds can't get people to do things but OTOH he doesn't have to include their code either. He also has a group of trusted subordinates to help him wade through the latest code and to help set the priorities of the project right? Gee, that sounds like elements of a closed-source dev project doesn't it with a "gatekeeper" present to moderate the flow of the project (and possibly the information...)? The characterization is naive, I know, and on the greatest abstraction level possible but that just means the differences are all in the implementation, right? So the Linux project has encapsulated the world's open source programmers and the project's source code together into a big box where information and ideas can flow as freely as the beer does. But what goes out into the world in the final product is highly regulated by the core project members, so it is there that the openness gives way to the closed. A project by Microsoft on the other hand is encapsulated in a much more finely grained fashion with much more restrictive regulation of the flow of information. To me it sounds like these two projects have started from the same starting point but have merely diverged in the organization (implementation). I think this is a point from TFA that is missed by the majority of the posts. Too bad, I think its pretty important.
I had a professor that stated Microsoft has set back computer science at least 20 years. And I think he may well be right. The reasoning being, Microsoft took over a lot of the market, and basically took until the late 1990s to catch up to the point "big" systems had gotten to by the late 1970s or so. Systems research nearly halted during that time. And, even now, there really is quite a bit of open source software that is developed specifically to look and act like Microsoft products; it's not a zero-sum game so I won't claim these people would be working on new software instead, but some probably would.
That said, he wasn't claiming things were still totally stagnated -- this was the late 1990s, and it was clear research was finally starting to pick back up.
Before Richard Stallman was even born, we had the university. In fact, as this seemingly much maligned article mentions, RMS was working on the Lisp Machine at MIT. It was here that he gave birth to the child of his angst and the beginning of these petulant debates about what is The Good or The Right Thing in the world of software. All too often these debates present a simplified view of a polarized world of blacks and whites, Open vs Close source. I don't think it would be too brash to claim that most of the advances in the realm of human knowledge, at least in this century, have come from people somehow associated with the university sytem. I recognize that there are notable exceptions. Unless I am mistaken, Thomas Edison did most of his work at an industrial research lab, Menlo Park. But there are many others deeply involved in academia. Issac Newton may have worked on calculus, optics, and his laws of gravitation during a period when Trinity College, Cambridge was closed due to fears of the plague, he was a member of that institution. Marie Curie studied at the Sorbonne. Einstein's stint as an examiner in the patent office are famous, studied at ETH Zurich, he was awared a PhD from the University of Zurich, held the position of Privatdozent at the University of Bern, among others. Alan Turing was a fellow at King's College, Camberidge when he invented the Turing machine and John von Neumann was a faculty member at the Institue for Advanced Study at Princeton which is, I belive, when he was working on EDVAC. Open vs Close source is in its infancy, both in its newness in the history of intellectual endeavors and the all too often infinitile tone of the debate. It seems to me that to study the true source of creativity in Western civilization, one has to understand the role of university, which has always been a comingling of an open discourse on shared information and the rather closed interests and financing of powerful governmental and corporate entities. Both Neumann and Turing were working on secret government projects which fueled some of their greatest insights into computing, for example. The internet grew from the seed of the ARPANET, funded by the US DoD. (I'll pause here to let some smart ass make a joke about Al Gore having invented the internet.) To ignore the role of either one or the other is to sacrifice history on the alter of ideology.
His actual complaint is computer science is maturing. In all science and engineering fields the big, dramatic changes and gains are in the early days. When any science matures, you start seeing the incremental, not the revolutionary.
Is he also upset that other than cosmetics as new materials become available, bridge design hasn't changed much since the Romans? Is he upset that thousands of years later, the wheel is still round? Wonder if he's noticed we're almost all still stuck on the x86 archecture that's, what, a quarter century old or so?
I see the Wiki says he's a "pioneer" in "virtual reality". Oh, yeah, that's a hot field.
(not)
I'd say that something like ALE ("ALE is an image-processing program used for tasks such as image mosaicking, super-resolution, deblurring, noise reduction, anti-aliasing, and scene reconstruction.") is pretty creative:
http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/
Sure, there are some closed-source applications out there doing one or more of those things and ALE isn't the most user-friendly and intuitive tool out there, but I'd still say that it's not very much a clone of any existing application.
As an example of somewhat more commonly used OSS tools, I'd still consider PanotoolsNG as rather creative. While creating panoramas in itself isn't something really new, PanotoolsNG already includes pretty much anything needed for creation of panorama images and seem to be gaining new features at a pace that seems hard to match. I doubt that there are many closed-source panorama-making tools that are significantly more innovative. More information can be seen at:
http://wiki.panotools.org/
Of course, there are a lot of more 'cloned' OSS applications out there than the truly creative ones, but then again, the same can be also said about closed source...
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
All those video programs you listed are a great example of non-innovative software. I've played with them, Jahshakah in particular, and they are fine and all, but nothing I haven't seen done better and earlier in closed source video editors. It's wonderful that there are OSS video editors and compositors out there but please let's not play make believe that this is where the technology is starting. They are trying to replicate things that the commercial software already does, often things it has done for a long time.
That's an example of non-innovative software. There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing wrong with saying "You know, I'm going to do what these other people have done but cheaper, faster, whatever," however don't confuse that with innovation.
"Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique" WHAT? Have you actually looked at any of the linux source code? It's a complete mess with different styles, coding conventions and comments. It's a mess, at best. You want polished? Look no further than BSD. They pier-review the code (polish) on a regular basis. Now thats a real OS.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
...has long been riding his own virtual coattails, and rehashing his same old tropes, or otherwise rambling incoherently about things he can't or won't bother to fathom. This case, is the latter.
About the only thing of merit he has done in ten years was play a series of obscure wind instruments during a Living Colour show in San Francisco, which at least showed some moxy.
Seriously, does anyone think he has made a serious original insight in his career. At best he is creatively speculative within areas where he can operate in essentially total obscuram (i.e. his days with VPL), but has a hard time with anything of hard consequence otherwise.
Me not being a kernel developer, how is the guy wrong?
I'm thinking it's because while the basic concept of the Linux kernel is, well, the same kind of thing Linus put together all those years ago, based roughly on UNIX and all that, but he's wrong because the kernel code would have been completely replaced by now?
How different is the latest kernel from those that have gone before?
How does it compare to Windows, which has completely changed kernels (DOS to NT) through it's lifespan, adding 386 instruction support etc etc? Surely Linux has adapted to newer x86 hardware capabilities as they've become available?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
"Is this person in a position to authoritatively make the stated claims."
Two things which are the linchpins of Jaron's argument appear to be:
1) Jaron is in some way the person who gets to decide what is creative technology and what isn't: This gets implied over and over when he compares things like the iPhone and page-rank algorithms to Linux. Why does he get to call one creative and the other not? At best 'creative' seems difficult to define.
2) Jaron's sampling of these two types of code is representative: Assuming that by 'Linux' he's simply referring to the OS/Kernel not the hundreds (if not thousands) of programs included in an average distro (If he does mean these then it makes it highly unlikely that he has examined enough of them to have an authoritative opinion so we need not pay any more attention to him). Even so I would argue that the Linux kernel is pretty large and to say there is no creative code in there (or none on par with the iPhone) seems a lot of work and if he has investigated the code to that extent he seems to have spent less-than-zero time demonstrating it. The only other exception would be that 'creative code' can be judged solely on something entirely absent from the Kernel. I.e. graphical bells and whistles. Even so one only needs to look to projects like Beryl/Compiz Fusion to see the OSS crowd producing UI that gives apple a run for it's money. Furthermore even if, on every level the Linux kernel could be considered 'less creative' than an iPhone. Is either representative of the body of open/closed source software? Again this seems difficult to determine given the size of both software bodies.
At best Jaron's authority on these subjects is unclear and at worst he's talking though his ass.
By standing on a giant's shoulders, you can see that his corpse is decaying and his theories only work in the classical limit.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Perhaps, but Syllable isn't. Might help if he looked at more than one open source operating system.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Ah, slashdot, I love you.
"Open-source is not innovative." "Yes it is. Look at these Java tools!" "That's not innovative. We had better than those 20 years ago." "Senseless Java bashing!"
(And the "senseless Java bashing" kneejerk response is rated higher than the observation that we had great tools 20 years ago.)
Gee, 60% insightful, 20% flamebait, 20% overrated. That really pulled an SICP here. There should be a *bonus* for that.
It's amazing how pro-Java slashdot is. If I was to claim that Microsoft was innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, I'd be modded to -1 in a New York minute (or maybe +5 funny). When somebody says that Java is innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, it shoots up to +4 insightful, and counterpoints get modded flamebait.
Peter Seibel was right: programmers are just as emotional as anybody, and they care more about looks than functionality, even in programming languages. Unix geeks like Java because it looks like C -- admit it! Other more powerful languages, don't. You can pretty much measure the popularity of programming languages by how much they superficially look like C: on this list, how many of the top 10 languages *don't* use C-style curly braces? I count 2: VB (the primary way to extend apps on the most common OS in the world), and Python (and despite not looking like C, I think the indentation thing makes it obvious that Python people care about aesthetics as much as anybody!). (Disclaimer: I'm a former Python programmer.)
With respect to Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the year 2050 will look like, but I know it will have curly braces.
Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world--like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe's Flash--the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth?
Re: search engines. First off, there *are* OSS search-engines out there. However, they are not tuned to Google-size because that is overkill for 99.9% of all organizations. OSS has to be tried and tested in a live environment. Google-size is not such an animal. And, Google is an organization, not a software product. It is comparing apples and oranges.
Flash? Well, it's true that OSS tends to be poor in the graphics/GUI area in many ways. Why this is the case, I don't know. Perhaps because Flash knows how to make things pretty and polished, while geeks focus on geeky features that may not impress regular users as much. Geeks tend to be behind in fashion. But, flash is not particular innovative either. None of its ideas are really novel.
I-phone? Well it has nothing particularly novel about it either. It's just good packaging of existing ideas. Plus, its mostly a hardware project, so comparisons to OSS aren't really valid. Apple is a good packager, just like Flash. They know what to put in and what to keep out, and how to make it clean and pretty. Perhaps geeks are just poor packagers of EXISTING ideas.
And OSS does have innovations, such as Wiki's, as mentioned in the article. Morphing was open-sourced by NASA/JPL if I am not mistaking, including a lot of 3D graphics/rendering technology in general that ended up in proprietary software.
Overall, I think the author is mistaking packaging for ideas. If you argue that OSS developers lack ideas, I would disagree. If you argue they fail to integrate ideas in a customer-friendly way, I may indeed agree. Geeks tend to make tools for other geeks first before focusing on non-geek users.
Table-ized A.I.
is crap: see Apache and MediaWiki. The closed-source model has never produced anything nearly as radical, important and innovative as either of those two projects. The iphone's interface is laughable in comparison.
UNIX was open source from the beginning (and quite innovative for its day in terms of simplicity) because AT&T was forbidden from making money at it due to their consent decree.
At the same time, we haven't seen any really innovative ground-up OS's be developed lately because the market can't support them. What ever happened to AmigaOS anyway (the original version, not the new attempted reincarnation)? Hence we are stuck with largely incrimental developments from three old operating systems: CP/M (-> DOS, Windows95-ME), UNIX (Linux, AIX, etc), and VMS (Windows NT, XP, Vista). To be fair there have been attempts at innovation in the systems world (HURD, BOB, etc) but they haven't been successful for market and/or organizational reasons despite bringing really creative ideas into the field (sometimes, for example re: BOB, that creativity really should have been bridled-- but hey, Malinda the project manager came out ahead).
As for FOSS development-- it works as does closed source development by attacking real world problems. My job as a leader in the LedgerSMB project isn't to hold a can of food, but to get other users to do that so that there is more work to go around. I then get to help people coordinate and structure their contributions so they can get it in.
From a creative invention perspective, the *vast* majority of software, closed or open, brings little new to the table-- software engineering in any environment is usually a matter of paying attention to the details and trying to solve well understood problems a little better than anyone else. However there are exceptions. I would suggest that Asterisk and Bayonne as telephony application servers are innovative in the sense that they provide an open framework for telephony application development. I would suggest that PostgreSQL is innovative in a large number of ways, but then it was originally designed to be a research platform.
Being able to make useful new inventions is a rare trait. I don't believe that FOSS will kill that off. Instead I think that it just changes the economic rules of the game.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The invention of the wheel is nearly universal-- we see them all over the world. In fact there is little about them that needs explaining. People all around the world have built wheels.
Now, what made the wheel especially useful? The invention of the spoked wheel. This is why wheels in Precolumbian Central America were only used for toys. The spoked wheel allowed people and light draft animals to pull carts of reasonable size, while solid wheels required heavy draft animals (for example oxen).
So yes, there are great breakthroughs in that area historically and some of these were responsible for making the wheel reasonably useful.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of my wishes for this New Year:
Everyone who sells software and you do not include the source, I hope you rot in red ink.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
So, definitely not a reimplementation.Dig deeper
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
So far, I haven't seen any posts with a long list of examples of OSS innovation.
And where's the long list of proprietary innovation? None of the proprietary items listed in the article present any revolutionary idea, they are just good packaging of existing ideas (as I argued elsewhere - msg #21861012).
Table-ized A.I.
...but I think one of the greatest advantages is that you can have a very good piece of software, but with a small flaw and someone can make a small patch for it. Without having to reinvent the wheel and everything up to the internal combustion engine to improve how you adjust the rear-view mirror, to use a car analogy.
My experience with making minor enhancement requests to closed source software is that the overhead of arguing and documenting the use case, making a business case and getting approval for someone to work on it far exceeds the value even though I know this is probably something that could be implemented, tested and documented in less than half an hour.
As for innovative my needs aren't that innovative, but you can sure do it in innovative ways. For example, to install Kubuntu I actually boot the whole OS from a CD which doubles as a compatibility test, triples as a portable OS and quardruples as the most userfriendly recovery tool I've ever seen. Would you care to tell to tell me if that was copied from Windows, OS X or any of the oldies? I don't think so.
Fulfilling a basic need in an excellent way is innovation. Making things simple yet powerful is probably one of the hardest problems there is, far more than making some technical showcase. For example "Uhh... the colors in this photo don't look right", if you can easily guide the user to figuring out what the problem is (hue, saturation, contrast etc.) that's a much bigger achievement than making a hue filter with a hotkey. Really.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Did I read that article correctly? WTF is Martha Stewart doing chiming in on this? Why is anyone listening?
We aren't talking about the same K-Mart towel hawking, insider trading person are we?
-- Posted from my parent's basement
...and then their economy became the second largest economy in the world when they improved what had otherwise been explored, but not optimized.
I see your point, but you were a bit off the mark. Digg and Slashdot and YouTube are entirely new. They have shifted the power a bit more from the center to the fringes of the information network. So you might have a point if you say that the Cinelerra GUI is not as spiffy as the Adobe equivalent; and yet the high cost of Adobe Premier Pro limits what a community-based project can do with the software on a large scale, due to the prohibitively high cost of per-seat licenses.
Toyota is gaining on GM as the world's largest automanufacturer because they addressed the wishes of customers who were overshot by GM's offerings. They took simple things and made them better, and, as a result, they are gaining on GM. Almost all movies made today in Hollywood are rendered on Linux because of the stability and reliability and the scalability. So I guess it depends on what you mean by innovation. I don't see anything in the proprietary world as successful as Slashdot or Digg or YouTube, all of which run on Linux. It is the modularity and flexibility of the code that is the basis of innovation with much of the FOSS code out there. Our Digital Tipping Point BASH developer, Jonathan Grindstaff, has said that he is sure he would not have been able to get as creative with his BASH video glue tools with proprietary software as with dvgrab, transcode, and ffmpeg2theora.
Here's another way to put it. Adobe Premier Pro is really excellent at facilitating the user to manipulate video within the offered feature set. But if you want to go outside that feature set, you are out of luck. The end user of Adobe Premier Pro looks at the feature set, and asks "what can I do with these tools?" Jonathan Grindstaff was able to ask, "what do we need to do?" and then go find FOSS tools to create his own feature set.
The real issue is that RMS's political issues (expelling Bushnell for speaking out against the GFDL, for example) mean that HURD, while quite innovative at its core, is doomed to take over the "King of Vaporware" title from DNF.....
Actually, the trouble with the HURD was that they tried to build a microkernel starting from Mach, which started from BSD, which started from V7 Unix. It's possible to do a good microkernel (see QNX), but not that way. After a decade or so, they realized the problem and tried to switch to L4, which in theory is a good idea, but nobody cares.
Getting the architectural decisions right for a microkernel is really hard, and if any of them are botched, the project never recovers. If you get them right, very solid systems result (IBM's VM, for example). But the open source process hasn't done well on tough architecture problems. Open source does "features", and this isn't about "features".
They left off the most important machines, comprising well over 0.1% of the market! Where's the Commodore 64 version? The TI99/4A version? Timex Sinclair? And I can't even run it on my Krups Coffee-mate 2000!
They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection.
One point: it's really weird that Freeman Dyson articles never seem to be featured on slashdot. I can only infer that the slash kiddies don't have any idea who he is.
Another: it's by no means clear that this analogy between species differentiation and software does what Jaron Lanier wants it to do. For one thing, evolved, biological systems are famously, incredibly crufty: there's all sorts of crud in there that no sane designer would want to live with, and yet it does it's job well enough that there's apparently no great evolutionary pressure to remove the crud (first example that comes to mind: the human eye has light absorbers mounted behind the wiring, so the wiring interferes with some incoming light, hence the "blind spot"). I would argue that this is very much like the state of open source software, where we make do with some clunky decisions made with Unix and X Windows, because "starting from scratch" just isn't worth the trouble to fix the problems.
The notion that "innovation" requires slower release cycles, or perhaps, a looser connection to external feedback is interesting, but here again it's not so clear that the closed-source world has such an advantage... yes, proprietary software typically has some deep pockets behind it, so that it can at least try to move quickly in a desired direction, but the (usually) volunteer open source projects also have some advantages in that they can move without having to demonstrate a business model, and can continue for years without much external encouragement...
Closed source = Collusion
Open source = Competition
Slashdot = Sarcasm
And just as open source. Plone is a CMS framework built on the Zope application framework, built on Python. As other respondents have noted, it's open source from the top to the bottom of the application stack.
Zope is something far, far different than anything else I've worked with - incredibly innovative in places, frankly bizarre in others, and has a bit of a learning cliff before you can really get working with it, but very good for some data storage tasks that are a stone bitch to implement in a traditional table-based database. In the hands of a competent programmer, you can get moderately complex active-content sites set up in a small amount of time, with HTML and CSS skins. search interfaces, access controls, and a fair bit more.
Zope was built out of some closed-source products, but the current Zope platform (3.3.1) is almost unrecognizable compared to its closed-source antecedents, and the Plone CMS was open-source from the start.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
whatever it means.
Looks like he fundamentally misunderstands what's going on.
"Science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of "Web 2.0," becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux"
Does Jaron Lanier do science? Is he involved in research, writing papers, peer review, conferences? Science has always been Web 2.0. That's the whole point of how it works. This is just applying new buzzwords to an old phenomenon.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
It's funny that Jaron is using iPhone as the example of innovation in closed source. iPhone runs OS X, a blend of UNIX, Smalltalk, and C, all 1970's technologies and none of them invented by Apple. Much of the software on the iPhone is derived from open source software (BSD, Mach, GNU C, KHTML, etc.). iPhone's model of mobile computing is what Palm and Handspring pioneered a decade ago, with graphics copied from Siggraph demos of a decade ago. The iPhone is a very nicely designed phone, but the only innovation is that it sucks less than other phones in the US market.
Actual innovations in mobile computing have recently come from OLPC and Android. While they are also based on Linux and Java, they have genuinely new ideas in user interfaces, networking, and software architecture. Oh, and both happen to be open source as well.
Jason Lanier is NOT of interest because of his LOW-bound mentality.
FireFox is going like gangbusters.
Linux Distros like Slackware and Gentoo, and Ubuntoo? Feroda?
"They Stomp the terra" -Lord Buckly.
If only he had ever used Compiz-Fusion, he wouldn't have been talking about a "lack of creativity" in all open-source software.
Remember, OS-X is running on top of commie-bsd ...
So this guy hates UNIX-like systems because they are not innovative and are "a 1970s intellectual framework"? The sole reason why there are still UNIX-like systems today is because of the technical and intellectual merits of the UNIX philosophy; it sure as hell isn't because of the immense business acumen of the UNIX companies. It is quite possible that there are many systems and ideas that would make for a more user-friendly and altogether cuter operating system, but UNIX was never designed for unskilled users, it has always been a system for those who are highly skilled and mostly interested in the technical side of computing.
Thus we have a system that emphasizes logical consistency, technical flexibility, ease of programming, efficiency, portability etc. By lucky coincidence it turns out that these qualities are also an excellent basis for building more user friendly gadgets and systems, which is why more and more companies choose to run Linux on their appliances: NAS boxes, DVRs, mobile phones and a whole lot of other things.
Nobody is forcing anybody to stick with the UNIX idea, but I challenge anybody to come up with a better system.
Have we learned nothing in two millennia of font design? Would we be better off starting from scratch? I suspect that project is far harder than it looks.
As much as I hate the "nite lite" lexical forms, I increasingly dislike the semantic ambiguity between light (bright) and light (weight) when I'm reading at my most intense. It's extra work my brain doesn't need. I could make peace with a future where light comes from the sun, and lite defies gravity. But we already have "lite" meaning "reduced" (or is that "vain" I'm not 100% certain).
OTOH, if you are proposing replacing threw and through with thru, I think I'll thro up.
Our most painful elementary school experience is the spelling test. Twenty years later as adults we are still putting forward spelling reform as an aspirational nirvana, even though a literate person reads 100x as much as he or she types. Reading is a mental process where conceptual hints embedded in English orthography matter far more, I suspect, than phonetic triviality.
How much does English orthography harm or assist written communication? Since we refuse to raise communities of children with arbitrary languages to test this kind of hypothesis, it's almost impossible to answer. Reverse engineering some critical processing pathways in the brain might provide some tantalizing hints. For now, we can only guess.
Reading a deep thinker with a dense and reflective writing style, it sure ain't the letters holding me back. The circuits holding me back are empathy, insight, comprehension, and creative recombination. Unfortunately, on slashdot these days you have to read 10 to 100 highly moderated to get even one of those lights to sustain rather than flicker. Slashdot is where I visit to expose myself to what happens when people don't think all that hard, because that in its own way is stimulating too. To escape a rut, first you must understand it.
Lanier is a problem case. He's halfway deep, halfway twisted. His main trick in this essay is stretching the word "creative" out of all proportion. He's intending it to stand for creativity in its more rarefied form, knowing full well that the open source crowd will leap to the defense of their own creativity and innovation thinking they've been maligned. It's creative work of the highest intensity to carve your way out of a badly designed VM subsystem; but not creative creative in Lanier's sense.
I don't think that open source has ever been *about* creativity in that rarefied sense. I think open source has been about establishing the intellectual autonomy to create.
I have on my desk Hans Christian von Bayer's essay "Identical Twins". He talks about bosons and fermions. And then he gets around to Cooper pairs. Electrons are fermions, and thus prohibited from "cooperating" the way bosons do. But a pair of electrons, at a low enough temperature, can form where the pair behaves cooperatively in the manner of a boson, and thus give rise to low temperature superconductivity.
That's a far better analogy for what open source has always been about: establishing the autonomy to cooperate. We cooperate *because* we have created for ourselves the autonomy required to do so. What act of creativity exceeds defining a new social order?
In Lanier's case, this appears not to be a form of autonomous computing he finds impressive.
Lanier also seems to suffer from auteurism. Kurosawa could have created an iPhone. Lanier applauds that form of creativity. No right-in-the-head auteur could have founded Wikipedia. Lanier doesn't much like the commingled mediocrity of Wikipedia. Yet the Wikipedia has succeeded at something few of us suspected, and personally I find that more interesting to contemplate than Lanier's iPhonesque auteurism.
The term FOSS doesn't indicate that the two movements are the same. The term FOSS indicates that one doesn't care to choose between the two movements (which implicitly means that one recognizes a difference). From Wikipedia:
I did (you didn't read closely enough) and that's not a free software argument. That's close to what open source proponents argue, but stated in an unclear way. Yours is a hard point to defend in part because the term "better" is too vague to discuss. It takes more prose to be clear in what you're trying to communicate. If you define "better" you can talk about something real and see how that argument fails.
If by "better" you mean more reliable and powerful, there are a number of proprietary programs which are more reliable and powerful than free or open source programs which do the same job. What I wrote about is how the two movements react very differently to that reality. So the free software movement likes to think it's different than the open source movement because it is.
If by "better" you mean free to be modified and shared as the user sees fit, then free software is certainly better for users because freedom beats dependency. People should be free to work together and improve their lives.
Finally, I don't know why you're quoting "lowest common denominator" nor do I understand what you mean by that. I find the "insightful" moderation on your post to be inexplicable.
Digital Citizen
If you had a bit of wit, you would not be asking that question....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
AS400 (and predecessor S38) has been using these concepts successfully in a commercial environment since 1978.
This guy's view of the forest is obscured by a big fat three in front of him.
While he is staring at technological innovation only (or so one guesses) he is missing that people working with Open Source innovated in the way the software is made.
Innovation in the process but not necessarily in the products (a point which is itself highly debatable as the discussion shows). This new way to develop software has permitted us to have who knows how many distributions of an operating system, each one with multiple choices about configuration, software available and support options.
In a market that lacked much variety, OSS developers offered just that. At th time that one single company was intending to monopolize anything related to a computer (I still remember how Windows NT was going to kill UNIX in the mid 90s) the most innovative decision of the time was not to play the closed source game.
Given how much closed source development has stopped the advance of computing, people devoted to developing open solutions were bound to make up for the time lost by providing open equivalent solutions.
That phase of the game is almost over. With the Eee PC selling like hot cakes, Ubuntu being a perfectly usable desktop, Google creating applications that could not care less about the underlying OS, big companies releasing substantial pieces of software under the GPL and other open licenses, the era of "just copying" (lets homour the author, without really conceding the point) is reaching its natural end.
With behemoths like IBM, Sun, Red Hat and many others firmly in the side of Open Source, it is just a matter of time before technological innovation that is hyped to high heavens comes from developers releasing their code as Free code.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Java. MySQL. Qt.
None of them are innovative and Java wasn't developed in an open source context. Java is a poorly designed rehash of Pascal, MySQL is just another relational database, Qt is just a kit for building GUIs that have been around (though incrementally enhanced) since the seventies.
Back to the drawing board. Surely there's at least one white crow—some ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in open source? I can't think of one, and no one here seems to be able to either, but that doesn't mean none exist.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
"The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things."
The only example I could think of for a very turbulent and unfocused process that produced highly original things is evolution. But the author is right - seriously, what is life compared to software development?
Nothing in Singularity is new. It was completely described in Per Brinch Hansons book.
Those who do not study the history of computing and computer languages
are doomed to re-invent it, poorly.
Sounds like a Microsoft employee.
Nothing you said is valid because it is an assumption on your part. That being to cease gpl for something else. It is a bullshit statement. Irrelevant. Prove your point don't just toss out yout hypothesis.
There's no value in what you said and your opinion doesn't hold water.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The OS/Application paradigm works because it allows the general purpose computer to fulfill it's requirement to be a general purpose chunk of hardware.
The purpose of the OS is to provide a basis for the applications to interact with the hardware. File structure, hardware interfacing, interprocess communication, multi-task scheduling, and memory management are all isolated from the individual programs & collectively handled by the OS. This does 2 things, it frees the developers of the applications from having to re-invent the wheel every time they start, and it isolates individual programs from each other - thus helping protect them from rogue software.
If you create a single-purpose device, then by all means use a different paradigm - the GP/Multi-tasking one isn't appropriate. But if you are creating a GP/Multi-tasked environment, then the OS/Application paradigm provides you with flexibility, robustness, modularity, and a host of other advantages.
Of the top of my head, this isn't an exhaustive list:
Kioslaves, does away with the differences between where a file is and how can you get it or what can you do with it.
Also kioslaves encoding of music using virtual folders.
Video preview in kde's file dialog.
Gimp's machine vision for extracting objects from the background, probably the first use of machine vision on desktops outside of OCR
Gnome's integration of evolution and the clock applet (before windows any way, another OS may have prior art)
Gnome's fast user switching applet (prior art any?)
KDE's and Gnome's categorized (and fully localized) application menus. Yeah sure they didn't invent the start menu but anyone that has used these menus can see how superior they are to the vendor based ones.
Live CD. I don't think MS nor Apple are even going to attempt this. QNX had it befroe but QNX is far from a general use desktop OS. Special mention to puppy, which is capable of writing back changes to the CD even in non RW discs
Sabayon, WYSIWYG kiosk configuration.
The WikiWikiWeb. Wikipedia being the poster child.
Tomboy, wiki based stickers.
Thunderbird's bayesian filtering of spam (prior art?)
Lots of little but addictive details, like the the screen color capture tool in the color pickers in Gnome and KDE applications, KDE's even include multiple palettes.
And there are of course a lot of backend stuff that the author will choose to ignore including his CMS, Plone as others have pointed before. And let's not forget about all the closed source applications that depend on open source tools to innovate like youtube which despite being closed source is still a triumph of open source software *use*.
But... the future refused to change.
I'm not a heavy linux user, but if I had to choose between that or the lightly polished turd that is Vista, I know which I'd choose.
As it stands, XP Pro does all of what I want without me having to hunt around to find where the settings got hidden, or at the other end of the spectrum go hunting around to find what to execute at the cl and then figure out an arcane set of switches to go after it.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Perl -- whether you like it or not (I'm not particularly a fan), it was certainly an innovative language in it's day.
Ruby and Python, to a lesser extent.
Ruby on Rails.
Those are just the first few that came to mind. I'd argue they were more innovative than most commercial language/development products.
Of course, all of these are development tools and not end-user software. It's probably true that open source doesn't produce a lot of innovative end-user/GUI apps.
I can't come up with a long list but I can suggest a few. Didn't bittorrent start off open source? I still like rsync and it's method of transmission. I considered compiz and its wobbly windows to be innovative when I saw it. Doesn't the GRASS GIS software have features not found elsewhere?
When someone says innovative I often wonder what they mean. Is it innovative taking an old idea and making it popular? Is an idea still innovative if you put it out at the same time that several others? How different do you have to be from what went before to be considered innovative? If you independently reimplement something isn't that innovative? Is it relative to - does it simply have to be new to an individual?
I do wonder if innovation is overrated though. Being first doesn't always yield the most benefit in the long run (Wordstar isn't in common use). There are loads of innovative computer science related pieces of software out there but much of it is very niche based so as not to be usable by the vast majority. Additionally I'd argue some innovations have landed their companies with customers who were upset because people are inherently suspicious of change and it is rare to get things right first time.
I think the people who clamour for the most innovation are those who have seen the most products. If you see every last incremental improvement continuously sooner or later nothing will seem new.
The innovations to which I referred in my original comment all share something in common: they are recombinations of basic building blocks. The genius of FOSS lies in its simplicity and modularity. Most proprietary software is an integrated solution. It is presented as a package which can NOT be readily altered. Not only is it illegal to alter the package, but it is probably not desirable to do so in most cases, as altering one package will break a dependency elsewhere.
The brilliance of FOSS is that it can be bolted together in nearly infinite combinations and still work. The brilliance of Apt is not just what it does, but the community surrounding it. There is a strange and beautiful symmetry in the modularity of the packages and the willingness of the community to work together to create something like the Debian pool and Apt, a package manager that allows us to use seemingly unrelated packages created by groups of people with no command-and-control central authority. And yet it all works. Most of the time.
So the emphasis of critics on the lack of "new feature sets" in FOSS is misplaced, because the emphasis in FOSS is not just complex feature sets, but interoperability, which is the most important feature of all.
And, coincidentally, look at how smoothly some of those tools I mention function. dvgrab is elegant. It just works. transcode manages to decode and re-encode a wide variety of video files. Annodex, a tool for annotating and indexing continuous media, is simply brilliant and very forward-looking and innovative. Look at the brilliance of the Digg GUI, built out of ordinary tools, and yet it is revolutionizing the media with its ability to hand editorial control of the news to the masses. Digg is nothing less than game-changing. And it's all FOSS.
Ruby on Rails was a fortuitous side-effect of the design process (genius?) at 37 Signals. It wasn't an open-source project, it was a project that became open-sourced. To phrase another way: it wasn't innovative open-source, it was innovation which was open-sourced.
Apache, Bind, Sendmail or openGL. Not everything innovative or open is end-user oriented.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
If you read the article you'll note he's simply just using pre-existing science to explain what he believes is an issue but he's just copying what they researched and published. He's not doing anything other than what he claims the OSS community is doing. He's lame. It's sad. He, in his own field, does exactly what he's claiming is bad about OSS. We shouldn't even be giving him any credit.
As far as polishing copies he's completely off base. He is spewing forth feldercarb. He hasn't said anything. For instance, he doesn't seem to understand that even in the closed source world all that is happening is copying and copying of copies.
One important question that hasn't been asked of him is this: if open source is not innovative then is open source? if so, then demonstrate where it has been innovative.
The answer is that neither is innovative. They both copy. Every product is a polished product of something else. If one could say it was in cell phones, tiny laptops (Eee PC), etc.
Come on. This guy just drolled on. He copied everyone else. He just rehashed and polished is view. Frankly it was pathetic. He was trying to add celebrity to his name.
He's just saying that products like LISP were produced that were highly innovative. No new product has come from Open Source such as that.
He's really dis'ing Stallman. He's attempting to smack the face of the open source movement to get them to innovate instead of copy. But he's really saying nothing because nothing he says doesn't apply fully to closed source. If open source accomplishes what closed source does and open source is free then open source wins, regardless of the fact that NEITHER is innovative. And, I have been in this industry for a long time (over 20 years). I can tell you that closed source is NOT in any way innovating, period.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Yes, efficient is a part of the fundamental problem that wheels, and Unix, solves. For wheels, the fundamental problem is: "efficient land transport over many and varied surface types." Find me something better that fits all those criteria.
Now, we have different transport problems, such as air or water. But in an OS, the fundamental problem is simple: schedule available resources efficiently for the processes that need them, and protect resources from processes that shouldn't have them. That is ALL an OS should do. It is a simple problem, like the problem of land transport, and does not lend itself to wild innovation, but to stepwise refinement.
Pray tell, what sort of innovation do you see that supersedes this definition? What do you envision an OS of the future doing? Not the applications themselves, but the OS?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And let me be one of the first to jump in. He was an early booster of "Virtual Reality." Not really much of a developer, just a fanboy of the tech who wrote a lot. He cultivated a 'Cyber Surfer Dude" persona and not much else. He's written a few predictions of future tech, and one interesting rant about the future of media, and that's it. He is an elitist blow-hard who has frequently criticized the "wisdom of the masses." He always struck me as one of those hypocrites who don't feel like anyone else should have the power to tell them what to do, even if it's everyone else in the world saying it; but he should have the power to tell every lesser being (i.e. everyone) what to do.
In short, he's the Eric Raymond of VR.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...of whether innovation happens in closed-source software anymore.
"Surely there's at least one white crow--some ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in open source?"
Software in general has been rehashes and refinements since UNIX, CP/M, VisiCalc, Mosaic, Mac System 1.0 and Wolfenstein 3D.
Name a single ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in the last 10 years. Try it, it's harder than it sounds...
0 1 - just my two bits
Yep but there are some innovative FOSS projects.
Minix3 is very interesting if some what immature.
But for the most part I am also tired of FOSS just making copies of off the shelf software. Probably the most "innovative" popular FOSS program is Firefox. The plug ins are what makes it innovative but even that has parallels.
The real truth is that I havn't seen any really innovative software in years. Open or closed source.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Here's a scary idea: There's room for both types of software.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Hello, um, economics of bringing a new product to market?
The crux of his argument seems to be thus: Most new and innovative products (iPhone for example) come out of closed source shops/companies/organizations, therefore closed shop is more likely to produce innovative products.
When you find me an open-source organization that has the resources of Apple to throw at an open source version of an iPhone, gimme a call. But until then, the economics of the situation makes comparisons between what apple or HTC or "fill-in-the-blank-company-who just-produced-an-innovative-project" and what open source types do is an apples to oranges comparison.
Saying "because most products that are innovative come from closed source shops therefore closed shops are by definition more innovative" is like saying that men are smarter than women because Newton, Darwin, Gauss, and Einstein were all male.
Just because something has always been a certain way in the past, does not mean that it is necessarily so, by definition. It just means that, up to this point, that it's been that way.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
This rests heavily on how one defines "notable originals". I think Linux and GNU qualify as notable and original in that they are the first piece of software of their kind to be so powerful, flexible and open and free. Those characteristics make it hugely notable, original and innovative. Obviously Linux has been greatly influenced by past works, but it's originality lies in it's sum, not it's parts. I don't buy this. The development of GNU for 24+ years or Linux for 17+ years is not focus? And even so, I don't see a correlation between duration (of development) and highly original things.
Many comments are debating whether this or that is innovative, but I think they're missing the point of what it means to innovate. To innovate is to alter something or create something new. That's it. Better or worse, it's still innovation. Even so, I don't think his argument is about innovation. It's more about how best to create what he calls "notable originals" and whether science can benefit from a more open source, community process type approach. Can it? I don't know. But I do feel he's shafting OSS with some narrow definition of what notable and original mean.
I think two more interesting questions are as follows. First, to date, which has generated the most notability, originality and innovation, OSS or closed software? Secondly, which model has the most potential for notability, originality and innovation, OSS or closed source software?
No copyright protection for any close source thing.
Sorry. What could I have been thinking?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Open source advocates disagree, seeing software development not as a social activity with ethical ramifications
That we have different priotities than you doesn't mean that these are non-ethical. I have priorities in delivering value to end users. Software and licenses is just a tool. I see the GPL as non-ethical license because it denies end users freedom to choose by denying the building of some of the things the end users would want to choose between.
In practice, this denies marginal end user groups the freedom to get rid of risk by purchasing pre-customized software off-the-shelf, where the risk of doing the customization has been taken by a software developer (including time risk and acquisition cost risk - ie, having the entire group go together and split the costs of development is not a viable replacement).
In other words, I see proprietary derivates of free software as creating a social benefit. I see it as a social activity.
Anyway, What is scarce in a free software economy is developer time. To increase freedom through free software, we need to increase choice - which means to produce more software, with free software having a higher value than proprietary software. However, proprietary software has a higher value than no software at all, and proprietary software derived from free software has a large chance of feeding back to the free software it is derived for, thus adding value at two points. This means that the freedom to create proprietary derivates creates values in two forms: Both the software (and thus utility to users) created purely proprietary, and the developer time it gives back to the free software original. In my experience, the deliveries back are substantial - for instance, both the SCSI subsystem and the netgraph subsystem of BSD was given back by proprietary derivates. When I did a proprietary derivate of FreeBSD (delivering an ISDN router/web proxy/UUCP mailer to customers), about 90% of the changes we did were contributed back. The last 10% - and the possibility of keeping other changes if we had needed to - worked as pay for the rest, and would only have been relevant for a direct competitor (as they munged FreeBSD as a general system - I messed up the tty code to make other things work).
The GPL, by contrast, gets extra developer time the following ways (and that's all I have found - I would be glad to hear of more):
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I'd recommend you read the articles at gnu.org/philosophy/ because many of the arguments you raise are discussed there. Most notably the ethics of proprietary software, defining one's work as bringing "value" to "end users", how the GPL creates free software (nobody is ever required to distribute their derivative, and when NeXT tried to distribute a non-free GCC derivative the FSF stepped in and made NeXT comply with the GPL thus causing an increase in the amount of free software), and the myth of the "freedom of choice". You could probably read any of the essays there in any order, but I'd recommend starting at the top and working your way down if you want to understand what the free software movement stands for and why.
If you prefer to watch or listen instead of read, there are a lot of recordings of people (Richard Stallman, Brad Kuhn, Eben Moglen, to name a few) talking about why free software exists.
If you don't want to license under the GPL, that's your power. But it's not a GPL licensor's job to let you get something for nothing by distributing non-free derivatives. Go write your own software and use the power of licensing to set down terms you think find amenable.
I wouldn't mind discussing the issue with you but they do a very good job of covering the basics of why free software exists and I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to good explanations. Sadly Slashdot cuts off discussions after a while, so there's not much time to discuss what they said here. I've got a real email address listed on my Slashdot profile, if you'd care to discuss free software further we could take the discussion there.
Digital Citizen
I love that you take all the time to write shit like this up, but no one gives a flying fuck about you, because you're a pathetic retard troll with negative karma. It doesn't get any better than that.
My issues with the essays:
For "Why software should not for have owners", in this the argument against the creation of value for end users is based on the notion that proprietary software is bad therefore having incentives that create more proprietary software is bad. The "is bad" part is based on incidental issues (too draconian enforcement, delivery as binaries, etc).
In "Why software should be free", Stallman assumes the edge case (proprietary software vs no software) does not exist. He calls the argument about the edge case - which is what is interesting - "begging the question". At least today, and for me since the late 80s or early 90s, it is obvious that there can be free software for the mainstream things, where "mainstream" is defined by programmer interest. He goes on to create unreal ethical constraints (a la "if giving your salary above $20,000 per year to the Red Cross is better for society overall than keeping it, all ethical programmers would give it to the Red Cross"). He constructs a bunch of arguments for how keeping software locked up is bad for society, with these three as a core:
I've also heard Stallman speak on copyright. Here, I noticed what I see as a strong inconsistency: He wants copyright to be optimal for everything but functional works, and then he goes off with a completely different argument for functional works: "Can be made to work".
If you have something specific that you think counters my views, by all means point it out. Just know that they're worked out over more than 15 years, including having been a fan of many sides of GNU and later having changed my views based on careful thinking about what influence what. I've been both much more pro-GNU than I am, followed by an anti-GNU period, followed by my presently more relaxed stance towards them. I still dislike their rhetoric and use of force; and I feel that if we were to use force, then a more appropriate use of force would be to force release of source code after a period of time (e.g, 3 years) instead of immediately.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I don't know what "generic software" is but there's nothing stopping you from paying developers to hack on free software to meet your needs now. What requires "draconian" enforcement isn't just about payment for software licenses, it's about keeping users from doing things neighbors and friends do with each other—sharing. There's no draconian enforcement of free software licenses. Just 2 years ago at the Plone Conference, Eben Moglen, lawyer and longtime GPL enforcer, said much of his GPL enforcement work was done quietly and that Stallman given him a directive of pursuing compliance, "I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance." (movie in various formats, transcript).
I don't see free software copyright compliance threatening rape (as Stallman says the lobbyists for proprietary software development firms has done in countries outside the US), putting language in free licenses to try and get physical access to your computer to do license enforcement (which is how the BFA justifies raids on their client's customers), or stopping commercial redistribution of the software. Proprietary software developers and their agents do these things.
By defining a user's freedom in terms of "programmer interest" ("mainstream" essentially means what this privileged class says it means) you're placing one set of people's priorities above another. The free software movement rejects this because it is interested in equality amongst all computer users—we should all have the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify software and our computers at any time for any reason we deem necessary. Note that they discuss freedom (permission), not skill. What you're willing to spend time learning is a restriction you place upon yourself, a restriction of skill, not freedom, and that ability is no justification for another user's freedom.
I also don't know what you mean when you say that Stallman "wants copyright to be optimal". Two years ago at the FSF member meeting (which anyone can attend, by the way, one need not be an FSF member) I asked Stallman to describe how he would organize copyright and he gave an explanation consistent with what he had said before about granting a blanket non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution permission and then an increasing set of restrictions depending on the type of work (functional works being one such type). The reason everyone should be free to share and modify functional works comes right from his perspective on free software.
Digital Citizen