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.'"

Comments

Sure, right, yeah...

[palegray.net]

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. Everybody knows there's not a shred of original code or thought on such sites as SourceForge. Nobody ever visits sites like Apple's development center. After all, they despise open source developers, right? And let's just completely write off sites like Open Source Alternatives, because they've never listed any software that showed promise or included innovative new features. Microsoft and companies like them are the only true source of innovation on this planet, and always will be.

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.

The Author is a Fucktard

[Aardpig]

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?

NIH syndrome

[Jherico]

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.

One word rebuttel to TFA

[rs79]

Apache.

Re:One word rebuttel to TFA

[Eli Gottlieb]

But "UNIX" doesn't rebut TFA, it reinforces it! The article's whole point is that OSS has done little besides copy the work of closed-source innovators, with GNU/Linux copying Unix being the chief example!

It's because trying to lead open-source developers is like herding cats. Unless you're holding their can of food, they won't go where you want. And if you can't make all of them focus on the single project you want accomplished, you don't get anything done without a huge mass of so many people that everyone can do what they please and you'll still have enough people going your way. But the only way to get that size a mass of volunteers is to work on a "sure thing" project with an established design that moves towards a goal everyone can already see -- to copy an established product.

For example, wasn't the OpenMoko team supposed to have released a user-ready package of hardware and software by now?

Re:One word rebuttel to TFA

[AJWM]

Best word

wheel

There are certain ideas that are hard to improve upon beyond minor cosmetic and detail changes. There are a lot of things one can do to improve wheels -- materials, suspension, etc -- but changing the fundamental shape isn't one of them.

(And yes, one can invent radically new concepts for transportation -- e.g. wings -- but they don't solve the fundamental problems that wheels solve.)

Unix/linux, word processors, spreadsheets, etc solve certain fundamental problems. You want radically different software, look in radically different problem areas (as some other posters have noted).

There are certain shapes of non-round rollers that work fine, and even lumpy wheels work, but after continued use they'll both wear themselves to a circular wheel shape. Twenty years ago Henry Spencer's sig said "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly", and Microsoft (among others) has been proving him right.

Re:One word rebuttel to TFA

[Eli Gottlieb]

This is precisely why there are companies who gladly hold the food by paying salaries to developers of open source software, so you can lead them where you want them to go. IBM, Redhat, Sun, etc. all make an excellent living guiding open source software where their business needs it to go. Sure, sure. But that doesn't encourage any actual innovation in software, it encourages adding another crock onto a heap of old hacks built by badly implementing 30-year-old standards, all of which runs just well enough to keep a small IT department employed (who, coincidentally, keep choosing to run this stuff).

I would actually hand the prize for OSS development to Ubuntu Linux made by Canonical. They got around the "good, cheap, fast: choose two" dichotomy by using philanthropic funds, and the result is a system that manages to almost not betray its decades-old foundations. DISCLAIMER: I am an OS X user, though I can fully understand how Apple obviously takes the path of "good and fast" by throwing "cheap" out the window.

Open source software greatly lowers the barrier to entry into the market which, imho, increases innovation in how business is done. Very probably, in fact, almost definitely. But TFA spoke of innovation in software and in computer science, and all the copying (and then the subsequent touting of a copy of a 30-year-old system as an "alternative" OS) hinders innovation in software engineering and computer science. Whether the trade-off is fair, I leave up to you. I think we should at least be fostering real innovation in academic CS and hobby programming, even if the market won't support it in business.

I mean seriuosly, I don't see closed source software making amazing technical breakthroughs either. Plan 9 from Bell Labs. The iPhone's multi-touch interface. Bluetooth. The Nintendo and Sega games that actually make good use of the Wiimote. VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Portal.

I believe what the original author is seeing is the waning of the industrial revolution in which we're seeing an extensive slow down in technological wonders. Sure computers are getting smaller and with slightly different/better interfaces, but going from steam engines to cell phones was a VERY rapid ramp up... we just don't see that kind of thing anymore. Since I have a huge hulking Dell desktop sitting a meter to my left that was, in 2001, only two steps down from the bleeding edge, and since I'm typing this post on a Macbook Pro (made in 2007) that outstrips that Dell in every possible way due to Moore's Law and the increasing capacity of hard drives while providing several capabilities, like the iSight camera and motion sensors, that weren't even available (at least not cheaply) in 2001, I'd have to say technological development is not slowing down. Maybe it has stopped accelerating, but everyone knows that exponential growth can't continue forever.

I'd say we've reached the point where people problems hold as back more than actual technological problems. If OpenMoko got their shit together (I really wanted one, so now I love to use them as an example of a failed project.), we could all be running mobile phones with multi-touch interfaces, cheap service plans, WiFi internet access, and best of all, software at least open enough to let us program the device. Such a device would, if sold cheaply enough, put established mobile phone and the less savvy mobile video gaming companies out of business, and we have the technology to produce it. It's just the people causing problems.

Re:One word rebuttel to TFA

[IamTheRealMike]

You just made the authors point for him, bravo.

To say that UNIX is a "wheel" is garbage. UNIX (and Windows, which is based on similar concepts) is a moth eaten dirty piece of cloth. It's got giant problems. Look at malware for one. Look at how many jokes revolve around software crashes of some sort, for another.

Before claiming that UNIX is like a wheel, go read up on modern operating system research. Seeing as you have a low opinion of Microsoft, might as well start there - try reading Singularity: Rethinking the software stack from Microsoft Research. They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection. There are no traditional processes, or syscalls. Instead the basic unit of software is a "Software Isolated Process" or SIP that is statically verified and compiled to machine code at install time. SIPs cannot be arbitrarily modified after installation. The whole thing is a single address space microkernel, except without the performance problems that scuppered previous microkernel attempts (because there are no context switches). A new security model based on verifiable type systems, state-machine based messaging and pre-declared intents allow for the construction of systems that are far more resistant to malware and unstable 3rd party extensions than today.

And they only just got started.

New for news sake!

[redelm]

I have a serious problem with observers criticising something for being old [un-novel] without being more specific about how "new" might be more advantageous.

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.

Re:New for news sake!

[jesterzog]

I have a serious problem with observers criticising something for being old [un-novel] without being more specific about how "new" might be more advantageous.

He's just come back from a research conference, and his point is with how new ideas get developed in a research environment. Right or wrong, he's not saying that open source isn't great, more stable, or a good choice for businesses and individual users who want something stable, reliable and useful. What he has said is that from his own observations, OSS is not a great model for fostering creativity and encouraging people to innovate and try radical new ways of doing things.

I'm not sure I fully agree with his view as he's stated because there are certainly some innovative ideas out there that have benefited a lot from OSS. He does have some merit with his arguments, though. Many of the popular OSS apps tend to be the ones that re-engineer ideas from closed source products.

What came before

[leereyno]

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.

Someone remind me

[jjohnson]

Why I should pay any attention to Jaron Lanier.

His name pops up every six months on Edge or ./ 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)).

Re:Apache

[Bill Dimm]

I wonder if he uploaded his shit article on an apache server.

curl -i 'http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/' | head -2

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Zope/(Zope 2.9.6-final, python 2.4.0, linux2) ZServer/1.1 Plone/2.5.2