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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.'"
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"
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.
Sorry, but I think you're being close-minded. If we take operating system for example, ther's one big glaringly obvious idea that has been much talked about but never fully implemented system-wide - the idea of a virtual file system that would replace the file/folder metaphor with something resembling the filing system of email clients, with virtual folders, tags, etc. Object in a computer - single emails, files, whatever - should act the same. Why can't I file my pictures of cousin Larry along with my emails from and to cousin Larry in the same place? The entire desktop metaphor should also be ditched in favor of something else and serious improvements are required in the area of error recovery - for example, why won't the OS auto-save each document I'm working on every 1-5 minutes so I can recover from mistakenly overwriting a file or saving it when I intended to discard changes? Why can't they put an undo button on the desktop and file manager? Microsoft tried to do some of it with WinFS and failed. OSX now has "time machine" to recover files but they could go further. There's this innovative Linux-based project, Symphony OS, but it suffers from lack of volunteers. Anyway the OS has a lot of places where it could improve and I bet other apps could too.
Look at malware for one. Look at how many jokes revolve around software crashes of some sort, for another.
These are certainly problems that Windows has, but I don't see the relevance to modern unix-like operating systems. A modern alloy wheel with radial tires isn't the same as an old wooden chariot wheel, but they're both round; that's the essential "wheelness". Microsoft still hasn't figured out that an array of spokes works better if connected to a rim, they're too busy trying to figure out what color spokes work best.
As for the work you describe, it bears about as much relation to real-world operating systems as anti-gravity research does to wheels. Yeah, sounds wonderful, it'd be nice if it worked, but there are some fundamental reasons why it won't.
-- Alastair
Java. MySQL. Qt.
Particularly with the last two examples, sometimes a dual GPL/Proprietary license helps things. The GPL is viral, so if you're selling a library, you can sell it to people that want to sell things