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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Then the fact that most software is still written in C/C++ should cause a tear or two.
The Unix way of doing things is extremely powerful. It's not the only way, but I haven't seen too many alternatives.
I too am dismayed at the efforts of the Linux community to clone Windows. Right down to the icons. Ugh! Let's innovate, people!
...laura
curl -i 'http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/' | head -2
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.
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
Eclipse is a fully mature, OSGi-compliant tools platform that just happens to be, in its default form, a self-hosted Java IDE. However, Eclipse itself can be transmogrified into anything you want it to be, including application servers, games, smart clients, and software that helps run both the Dutch railway and NASA's Mars rovers. That seems pretty innovative to me.
The
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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
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...