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Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market
alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity. When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority,' and also criticized Stallman's ideas as 'belonging to the past' where there were no software 'business possibilities.'"
Where's the "idiot" tag?
Complains the author of one of the biggest productivity destroyers in computing history.
Details at eleven.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Someone has to say it.
In California, you play Tetris.
In Soviet Russia, Tetris play YOU!
(thank goodness for burnable Karma...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
from a Microsoft employee?
Just another has-been who can't compete with free.
Of course the irony is that he is from a country where piracy is (and has been) running crazy rampant.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is the creator of Tetris a Microsoft employee (current or previous)?
Translation:
"I didn't get diddly-poop from my program until I started selling it for money,
and obviously the entire world should work that way!"
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Free air is destroying the market for oxygen bars!
Any market that is so easily undermined was due for an adjustment anyway.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I'm sure he thinks so...Tetris is the sort of thing that only has to be seen for a few minutes before you know all you need to know to create your own. OSS people do that, and he sells less copies of his game. C'est la vie. If there were companies that depended on Tetris these days...Well...Sucks to be them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Tell him to look at this link.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
"All you 'free software' freak who made clones of my game and called them different things, or made it multiplayer and then didn't charge anything so there's no royalties to be paid to me, are assholes! Charge for your rip-offs of my game so that I can get money from you!"
Gotta admit, the man has a point... not much of one, but he has it.
When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction", a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at.
In this case, if you can't make a better product than something that is already available to the whole world for free, you're not doing anything productive. Either make better software, or quit whining that people won't pay you for what you do make.
We need a human translation of the article, but he is somewhat correct. If you look at the computer revolution, it only entered everyday home and work life once software became a commercialized commodity. FOSS doesn't have a profit motive, which means you can create what you want, but it also means there's no strong incentive to provide a product that *others* want. Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it. Look at Vista; MS put crap into it no one wanted, and now large numbers of people aren't buying the thing. FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Obviously, Red Hat's and Oracle's (and a number of others not mentioned) business models works, otherwise they would have been abandoned in favor of the more traditional ones. And whether they work is what matters here, not how many have or haven't dared trying something new!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I was discussing with a client today about whether to use a service oriented architecture on a Redhat server supported by an Oracle database, but he was much more keen on using a vertical block model with a rotational function that maximized resources by removing redundant full rows, and had pretty colours and a catchy tune.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
So are we taking economic advice on open source/free software from someone who worked for Microsoft? Which as a company stands to lose the most from a diversified software market. Or are we taking business advice from someone who failed to make any money off one of the most popular games in history?
The vast majority of computer users in the world still use either Microsoft or Apple products...even amongst those that use FOSS, it is very rare to find someone who EXCLUSIVELY uses FOSS.
In a way, the FOSS community could be a huge help to the big corps...imagine if microsoft offered 20 dollars to every person who submits code to help fix issues within Vista. Within a few days, they would have all the code they need to make Windows run damn near perfectly.
Imagine the ingenuity of the Linux devs combined with the endless resources of Microsoft. It would be an unstoppable combination. Of course, it goes without saying that the nature of both sides would prevent this from ever happening, but you get the idea...
Living With a Nerd
However, he shouldn't shit all over one of the greatest software concepts in history. Built a website, (not from the toilet or on my cell phone) using open source this morning.
Let it go and adapt, bitch.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
I remember well when Tetris first appeared on the scene. The landscape was very different from what it is now...shift happens.
And what about all the markets that it supports? Google themselves use a huge amount, probably _every_ ISP has been able to generate wealth with the use of free software. Free Software creates markets and lowers the entry barriers.
"Red Hat and Oracle........ There are always one-offs, you know" {stammers, wipes sweat off forehead} "Haven't you seem Stallman? He resembles the human predators. This automatically implies that the OSS is a thing of our ancient history and shouldn't be dug up now. You are hurting the balance of nature"
He assumes that the largest market for software is in selling packaged, off the shelf products.
Well, it may be for a few things like games and OSs. But for 90% of the computing industry, the real money has always been in customised or semi-customised (based on off-the-shelf modules) solutions. Microsoft and Electronic Arts are anomalies, making good money with COTS products.
Unless you've coded something better than Tetris, you all need to STFU with the wise-cracking and start dismantling opensource and freeware now.
Sheesh!
So because you were part of a failed economic model (totalitarian communism), you feel that its near opposite (capitalist plutocracy) is better. Well that and you make more money here and can buy more cool junk. Wow. How painfully short sighted and somewhat ignorant. This is why people with expertise in one area should not be expected to render cogent opinions in another area.
Though you would hope that most people would see as a civic duty a certain minimal level of competence in civics, the natural sciences, the humanities, logic and math. Sigh.
And that's what really torqued my nads about this: not that Leonidovich embraces that idea that the only real way to motivate people is to progressively increase their wealth past all reasonable needs and wants for yourself and extended family, but that he's so goddamn stupid. If FOSS is a doomed business model and bad for markets, why is it still here? I mean c'mon. If the market is the only thing that is either sustainable or creates progress, why even be worried about this? Its just a bunch of hippy dork college students and a few old guys with personal hygiene problems and poor social skills that make software that no one can use and no one would want to because its crap, right? Just give it some time and it will go away just like other unsustainable fads. Go back to writing video games and put up a link to the don't copy that floppy video on your website, K?
Thanks to Free Software, Tetris continues to be one of the most popular games around. Commercial companies would surely consider it to not be commercially viable because of its simplicity.
I love Tetris. I love the fact that there are so many versions of it available that I can choose my favorite. I loved the C64 version from 1987 (especially the music) and I love many of the versions available today (which tend to have better playability). I thank everybody who has worked on programming them.
Wrong. Increasing profit can also come from reduction in costs.
90% of software is written within organisations and never sees light of day outside of the organisations that create it. This is in spite of many organisations sharing some common problems/needs, even if much is specific/unique to them. Most of these organisations are not in the business of selling programs, they run factories, trains, banks, ...
What Open Source does is to liberate a little of this 90%, the bits which other organisations might find useful and can easily adopt into their IT systems. The companies that release it get: feedback, bug fixes and enhacements. The guys who receive/use the software send their patches back because doing so is less (long term) work than putting the patches into each new release that comes out.
This is how Open Source works. It does not depend on software houses to sell to users, the profit does not come from software sales, it comes from cost reduction by those who use the software.
Yes, there are those who make a living from support, from the big guys like Red Hat to the small ones like myself; but the greatest profit from Open Source is the cost reduction in the users.
I am constantly astounded by the vigor with which some seemingly otherwise intelligent programmers pick up the Open Source banner and run with it.
Open Source is better for the world-at-large. Make no mistake about it. **The world-at-large is more productive for getting software for free.** They can spend the money they would have spent on software on other things.
But how could you think that this is better for *programmers*? I *always* ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"...Well, in the sarcastic wrods of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people _happy_".
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I'm not saying it doesn't make the economy-at-large more productive...clearly it benefits all the people with "business" and "creative" degrees, and since there are more of them than us, it clearly benefits the "larger group", so to speak. But how does it make *us* better off? I'm not so engrossed in matrerialism that I think how much I make is the only thing that matters...but I find the idea that my reward for being part of a highly successful OS project might be getting "recognized" and maybe if I'm lucky getting hired on as a code monkey for some "creative" people that used what I worked so hard on for free very distasteful.
I really tried to embrace the idea of the OS movement, but because no one could answer those questions I have come to regard it, at best, an idea for a perfect society (one where *everyone*, not just programmers, works for the common good) that is tragically ahead of its time and at worst a pox on the profession of programming.
He is 100% correct. Free software destroys the pay-per-copy software market. I happen to think the pay-per-copy software market shouldn't exist, just like pay-per-flush toilet shouldn't exist.
Maybe he wants to pay every time he takes a crap. That's certainly his prerogative.
The wealth created by software companies lies not primarily in those companies themselves, but in the companies that use their software to boost productivity and to create business opportunities that would not have existed before. The software industry could disappear tomorrow without causing much of a ripple, but without the software itself, the global economy would collapse. If FOSS makes more useful software available to more people than closed source software does, then it should boost the economy, not drag it down.
What this guy is bitching about is not being able to make money off the low-hanging fruit. If it can be done by individuals or small groups working in their spare time, then there will be one or more FOSS packages to do the job. There are any number of areas where FOSS is unlikely to make inroads by the very nature of the problem space, but writing software in those areas is a bit more challenging than implementing falling blocks on an 8-bit CPU, a task so simple that I've taught schoolchildren how to do it in BASIC on vintage Apple IIs. Aside from random luck, I'm afraid the road to prosperity involves lots of hard work, and there's no way around that.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
In what other profession do people work for free? And don't mention law or medicine, because in those fields they volunteer services on an individual basis.
Years ago I did quite a bit of work on a large OSS project. Why did I do it? I did it for selfish reasons. To get a bullet item on my resume so I could get a job. I also did it to show off. Today I realize all I did was help push the idea that MBAs now have that software engineers are paid too much and that "it's only typing".
Today what I worked on benefits large corporations that have hijacked and commercialized the project. These very same companies now act like (expect?) engineers should work for less than they are truly worth.
If you read up a bit about the guy you get the idea of a man who once had an idea for an intresting game, that game was mostly made succesfull by others partly because he was behind the iron curtain. Then when the curtain lifted he instantly ran away and grapped the cash on offer (rather then say found a software company in his own country) from Microsoft who got a couple of half-assed games in return.
And now he complains about FOSS destroying wealth.
Better sell my IBM shares then.
FOSS does a simple thing, it changes the flow of money, rather then the author of the software getting the money (or at least the person who owns the software, as this guy himself should know, the inventor/writer isn't always the one who ends up with the cash) the money stays with the user of FOSS so he can spend it on other things.
By NOT buying Vista for my new PC I could instead spend the cash on extra hardware. The local computer store didn't give a shit, I still spend the same amount. The trucking company shifting the goods didn't give a shit, roughly the same size box. The bank handling the transaction didn't give a shit. In the end the only people who noted was a memory company and MS. The memory company ends up with more money, MS with less. Does this matter on a global scale? No. Wealth hasn't been destroyed, it has merely been re-distrubuted.
Mmm, he longer works for MS, I wonder wether he was fired after MS went bankrupt because I used gentoo rather then XP for my file server.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We're Winning!
Both worlds are perfectly valid and can (and NEED) to co-exist. The problem is when we have taliband like Stallman in one band and Job and the other.... THERE we have a problem.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
And he matters because?
Some software, or code, must exist free, since that it the only possible form in which it could be viable.
TOR, Freenet, could have never been created if it were not for open source. They serve a very important purpose.
All closed-source, proprietary encryption solutions are worthless, since the code has to be reviewed independently. Otherwise there *could* be back doors in it.
I can go on, about other situations in which open source is the only viable development strategy for a given technology, but that is all irrelevant really. This author can say it *should* not exist, but it has the *right* to exist. Anybody can write code and choose to give it freely to the world. Some that do are amateurs at best, and the code merely a shadow of the similar commercial offerings. Some that do it, are truly gifted, and it is a dire threat to the similar commercial offerings.
As for it creating competition with companies that create wealth and prosperity and obviously destroying that wealth and prosperity, that is a very weak argument. It just sounds a little bitter and petulant. IMO, that is like a businessman selling bottled water up and down a road for a few years in the desert at high prices. Something, or somebody else comes along and creates drinking fountains alongside the road for free. Or even just torrential rains. He just has to move on to something else. Not that much more complicated.
Point in fact, it won't destroy that wealth and prosperity anyways. Maybe what software companies should be doing is offering support packages on the software, and get their wealth and money that way.
Guy made Tetris and no money of of it because of a government run monopoly at the time. I mean hell, he properly views FOSS as the same thing. You create something, give it away and you starve in an ally behind a crack house. In his case, a Yugo:P
I tend to think the idea of FOSS is more of a generation gap than anything.
That's bad. Or is it? I guess it depends on what you see as the "ends" or the "goal" of software. For most of us, software (with hardware) exists to allow us do more in less time. Or better yet, to reconcile our aspirations with our limitations.
There are others, though, who see software as a business whose ends and goals lay in wealth and prosperity... whose ends are completely debatable but nonetheless attractive.
Where does that leave us? If it were up to this guy, not rich, not capable, but definitely allowed to make him rich and capable.
I normally only lurk here at Slashdot, but I just couldn't pass up this opportunity.
Funnily enough, the fortune at the bottom of the page when I first saw this story is a great response:
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. -- Confucius
Tetris is one of the simplest games imaginable to code. Everyone and their brother has implemented it. Hell, at my university, it's even an assignment for the intro programming class. Google "free tetris" and you'll get nearly a million hits.
Now, the Tetris company still exists and is still trying to make a profit from Tetris, and cease and desisting people who use the Tetris name. I wonder if this has anything to do with his gripes?
I'd say yes, but my impression is that the majority of slashdoters consider outsourcing an evil.
Of course giving something away for free destroys the market for commercial software, isn't that obvious? In my experience, though, free is not necessarily better. People and businesses select their products based on total cost of ownership and support availability and costs play a large factor in that. As a colleague of mine pointed out, your software is only as good as the support you get with it. If your software doesn't work, it doesn't matter what the off-the-shelf cost is. However, if you have good support that can get something working for you in a short amount of time, that's where the real value is. Yes I use Linux and yes I love it, because it gives me personal freedom and it gives my company freedom. We pay for support of course. Same freedoms with Apache, MySQL, BIND, Firefox, etc etc etc. Open standards, interoperability, TCO: these are things that benefit the consumer and ultimately the market benefits.
...and that is of course sad somehow, but he really needs to get over it, bitterness and bitching will get him absolutely nowhere. I know - because I too am an author of a game YEARS ago...come to think of it..it's 27 years by now, I wrote an assembly game when the commodore 64 was released to the public, unfortunately I was a clueless kid just having fun - drooling over the fact that I now had the power to write ARCADE coin-up games in my very own home, just to find out later that I could have earned millions on that, and that I gave the games away for free - for someone else (who actually where businessmen) to steal - rip off...and earn on. Now...you can call me really *stupid*....but think about this...I was 12 years old...writing my own assembly games in 1981 - how stupid is that? It's just the difference between creativity and business - business always wins - but is somewhat dependent on leeching of creative people, unfortunately there is no real symbiosis unless it goes both ways. And yes...that's the moral of this story. I'm personally not bitter, but just kind of like "Homer" saying "d'oh!" years later. Well - live - learn - move on! That goes for you too - my dear Russian.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
everything has a price, everything cost something.. all time spent by student or others on 'free' project, cost something for those who spent this time on those projects..
now, sounds like they can afford to, either because they are rich enough, or they've planned to get something in return, which is not always money, but can be experience.. experience that in turn they'll try to sell to managers, etc..
But so far to be honest.. i see many taking advantage of plenty of students working for free.. at best, they'll gain knowledge, and achieve a degree, through an interesting project. At worst, they worked for nothing, while red hat and others make the full profit.
There is some chance if you maintain a project you would be able to make some benefits (but don't dream too much about it), so far barely only big projects does, but you'll have plenty of starving people (students) working for you (whom don't know much about real life, and what does it cost), and a few knowledgeable, skilled and well payed people, whom will ask for new features or similar things, will providing, now and then a few patch, they would like to fit in.. at best..
Free software / linux, sold you a dream, but so far there is no software which can provide you food, without money..
Personaly i don't want to work for a freeSoftware company, for the simple reason, it sounds disgusting to me, to get a salary, for most part, because of the work of many, and for plenty of them.. they are students, not rich people, whom just think that way they would find a place to settle down and make money. It ain't true, but indirectly it can happen, while in the meantime, those working in a free software company got your work for free.
Why, exactly? At the worst it would mean a return to a world in which corporations had to design their own applications from scratch, and in which expert programmers moved from job to job and moved the skills around. Before long big corporations in different but related business areas would get together and say, OK guys, let's co-operate on designing what we need. I think somebody a bit cleverer than I am wrote a book about it. How did you think those medieval cathedrals got built?
In fact it is difficult to point to a single NECESSARY business or other process which cannot be done with FOSS. It may not be as pretty as with paid-for software, it may in fact be as much as 5-10 years behind but some of us remember there was a fully functioning computer industry 10 years ago.
You may not remember, you may not be old enough, but you could originally obtain the source code to Unix for basically the cost of the media. This actually antedated DOS. You could support the document production and simple program development needs of eight people on a box with a 16MHz processor, a couple of MBytes of RAM, a couple of disk drives and a tape drive. Everything that has happened since, other than networking, has basically been icing on the cake, and even networking is still basically about shipping a clever pattern of ones and zeroes down a wire.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm from Eastern Europe, from the generation that began its conscious life in the end of the 80's, just before the end of the communism era and I can forgive him, because a lot of people from Eastern Europe who are now at the age between 40 and 60 are marked by what happened there. They refuse to accept anything that's not capitalist and they are constantly trying to prove themselves being capitalists by talking all the time against communism or even against any freedom which is not based on money. It is nothing more than a psychological problem of a generation, so let's leave those people live their lives... You wouldn't blame a person for his or her handicap, would you?
No bias there....
I don't expect a 1980s Soviet programmer to understand how to make money off sharing source code.
I also don't expect anyone working in SW since the end of the Cold War a generation ago to pay any mind to what he's saying.
--
make install -not war
They turk are jabs!!!
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Wah! Free Software is communism, Microsoft is so Patriotic. Go George Bush!
Some settling may occur during posting.
I find it odd that free derivatives are making him angry when capitalist have been screwing him over for years. Anyone remember the whole Tengen/Nintendo Tetris debacle back in the late 80s? Anyone remember him getting any money for it?
Free software helps me to keep wealth and prosperity since I don't have to shell out thousands of dollars on software.
He was hired by Microsoft and became an American citizen because of his program. He said so in the Documentary on Tetris that used to be on Google video. Can't find it. I find it surprising the article doesn't mention this conflict of interest.
First, mod parent up, to 11 if possible.
Second, this nonsense can easily be dispensed with: according to the complainer's reasoning, charity should be outlawed as anti-competitive because it impedes the "discipline" of the job market. Another way to think of it: freely-given software is similar to a situation where one country has access to a huge supply of readily-available natural resources. Other countries have no right to complain, they should simply adjust their business models.
From the GNU Manifesto:
I'm reminded of this quote every time I see hospitals, schools, etc. deal with deployments of expensive (usually Oracle-based) database software. There are hundreds of very similar organizations around the country that could get together and commission a world-class, free-software product to fulfill their needs. It just seems like so much waste to pay so many Oracle/Sybase/SQL Server VARs to reinvent the wheel.Free software (in the Stallman sense of the word) comes with the price that you must share the changes you make. That is the cost of the intellectual property license - the changes remain free. That's why it's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
No-one should ever feel guilty about profiting from free software, so long as they obey its license.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Classic, common mistake made by people who don't understand anything about economics (or by leech organisations like the BSA with an agenda).
Free software also doesn't "destroy" any markets given that free software is created by the market and is in itself a kind of market: It isn't an artificial distortion, it's natural, it's people doing what people *want* to do, it's a massive voluntary undertaking. You would have to artificially force free software to not exist with a big stick (e.g. legal system), that would practically be the opposite of the spirit of markets.
In reality, the "free" stuff is not really all that competitive with products that are expensive. The vast majority of people use Windows. Linux, despite an enormous amount of work and evangelizing from the community, is simply not competitive with Windows on the desktop. Sure, they've made inroads and Linux is actually becoming fairly usable for the first time, but generally speaking Linux--as a brand--is getting its ass kicked. The same can be said for most "free" products.
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
Shouldn't we have a better translation than Googles?
I think the translation, while something he is inaccurate, continue like the average rant Slashdot to be so understandable.
And at least D orthography its correctly...
Blank until
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all this week. Don't forget to tip the waitress.
To do list for Windows
FOSS is needed for the simple reason that there are many solutions out there that would never existed otherwise. This culture has also helped pushed the boundaries of computing, since it is often the hobbyist mentality that will tinker, break and remake something. There are plenty of commercial solutions that would never have existed if it was not for open source.
Yes we lose something with open source, but at the same time we gain so much more.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Seriously: M-x tetris and see for yourself.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, open source eliminates markets that might otherwise have existed. This is a good thing.
Every advancement in manufacturing or reduction in price reduces the profits of what were formerly large profitable industries. The printing press destroyed jobs for tons of scribes, the industrial revolution was derided as replacing men with machines. Ultimately though keeping people in make work jobs doesn't contribute to economic growth. It's productivity gains that make us all better off and the change from expensive to free is one of the largest possible productivity gains imaginable. Not only does it make things better for the consumer it frees the people who might have wasted their time reimplementing that same code in various closed source products and lets them be gainfully employed in writing something new (likely still closed source but less redundant)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The "problem" (?!?) with free market capitalism is that someone might underbid you. Whether your competition charges 50% less or 100% less, you're screwed either way.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
He's just another believer in trickle down. He's like that "other guy" who equates free with communist. It looks like they translated to english with a Russian accent. "FOSS destroys market." Well, in Soviet Union maybe.
What?
Do not try to destroy the market; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no market. Then you'll see, that it is not the market that is destroyed, it is only yourself.
And damnit, just reading the title of the article has that damn theme music running through my head!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
As a game developer, free open source software has helped me a great deal. For example, I use the following free software to create games (and I would be a lot further behind without them): NSIS (nullsoft install system), libpng (a library for reading png files), DirectX (for networking and voicechat), OpenGL (for graphics), OpenAL (for sound effects), Audacity (for altering sounds), 7zip (for backups), Subversion + TortoiseSVN (for source control), Filezilla (for uploads to my server), OpenOffice (for writing documents), KeePass (for managing all my passwords and accounts - many of them related to work).
You have to understand that we all stand on the shoulders of people before us. Sure, Alexey might be right that FOSS eliminates the lower level products that would exist, but the fact that I have FOSS means that I have lower costs and it helps me do the higher-level work. FOSS can help us get to a higher-level of software development.
Never leaves a gap
Unfilled
Always pays on time
Always fits the bill
He comes well prepared
Cube top
Squared off
Eight corners
90-degree angles
Flat top
Stares straight ahead
Stock parts
Blockhead
Never tips over
Stands up on his own
He is a blockhead
Thinking man full grown
He comes well prepared
Snake eyes
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Alexey who? So, this guy writes this game in the mid-eighties, consisting of coloured blocks, and then fancies himself some sort of expert on the industry as a whole? Commenting on Oracle and Redhat? Its like asking Albert Einstein what he thinks about the state of american politics.
Hardly Alex, go pick up one of the chairs you just threw and sit back down.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Isn't it obvious why he thinks so?
Open source has the advantage of patching up the holes.
In TETRIS however, when there are no holes, the line disappears...
Therefore well-patched open program will disappear immediately!
You can't argue the logic!!
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity
Actually, that is exactly what should happen in a free market. A hundred years ago, electric motors were luxury items, fifty years ago, color televisions were really expensive, 20 years ago, cell phones were very expensive. Most of the companies that made those items are out of business now, and profit margins are razor thin. And wealth is now being made with completely different products.
Destroying markets is a good thing. And open source is winning because it's a free market solution to bringing down production costs, just like assembly line and the mechanical loom were.
So, nyaaa.
You must be new here....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I hope his mother at least had the decency to take pay for the sex she had with his father that resulted in his conception. That free stuff is nasty!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Is he seriously suggesting that the puzzle games market has taken a beating?
It's a freakin' whole genre of video games.
I mean, Harvest Moon has even been converted into a commercial puzzle game. Where will the madness end?
I can only wish that FOSS had destroyed the commercial puzzlers of the world. Can we destroy Sudoku, as well? Every time I see people paying for Sudoku games, I get that same nasty feeling I see, like wherever I see bottled water sold for a dollar.
Here is the proof: http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=tetris I guess before Foss, there are a multi-million dollar tetris market! Foss destroyed game market? no. Foss destroyed ERP market? no. Foss destroyed dbms market? no (well, almost). I believe Foss just occupies a niche market, like prototype planes and custom cars.
Who cares what some has-been video game designer thinks about open source software? He's hardly an authority on anything related to software development at all. Why is anyone listening to him?
It's almost as dumb as listening to actors talk about politics.
Software wasn't a commodity when computers entered the corporate world, ad-hoc solutions for single client was the norm, even for small businesses. When I was a student, it was not uncommon for us to earn some money doing an inventory system for a local business. I see no reason why the ad-hoc solutions wouldn't have consolidated into more generic solutions under a free software market, with consultants collaborating and competing for the best service. It would have been a very different world though.
With regard to the home world, computers only really became a standard equipment much later with the WWW. The WWW was almost entirely fueled by free software or at least gratis software. The non-free solutions were a reaction, once it was clear that Al Gore's project would succeed. They were never the driving force.
http://wwwfail.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fb%2Fbe%2FAlexey_Pajitnov_-_415117666.jpg
Closed source cannot "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". By definition everything that goes into it is proprietary of the maker and does not move the technology bar upward for society. Where it gains improvements at all, they are for the exclusive exploitation of the maker.
On the other hand open source developers innovate in a way that makes component advancements available to all. Alert developers can mix and match ideas to create (ahem) the synergistic fusion of elements (/ahem) that makes new realms of productivity available not just for the developer, but for all computer users. As the commercial developers incorporate their spin on these enhancements their software improves as well.
For example every class of product offered by the dominant player in software is derived from a prior product, almost all of which were previously open. Operating system, word processor, media player, browser, email reader, email server, Presentation software... these things were not invented by Microsoft -- they only implement their own version of other people's creative expressions.
When open platform people create the market sorts the best of their offerings which then are incorporated everywhere for the benefit of all, including you.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And diesel-electric locomotives destroyed the market for steam.
--
Life's hard. Get a helmet. -Denis Leary
In which country? Nintendo managed to secure U.S. Patent 5,265,888 for the rules of Dr. Mario. The real problem here is that Elorg didn't patent the tetromino game in key developed markets.
(Nit: Only the individual inventors, not their employer, can actually apply for a patent. But in practice, the assignee and its attorneys do much of the paperwork for a patent application, even if it is submitted in an individual's name.)
You've got your timeline wrong. Software had already been a commercialised commodity (aimed at very large corporations) for a long time before computers started entering people's home in the '70s and '80s. And interestingly enough, that's also the time when hobbyists started playing with software and distributing their work for free, first on PDP-11s, later on cheaper home computers.
FOSS doesn't have a profit motive, which means you can create what you want, but it also means there's no strong incentive to provide a product that *others* want.This is partially true, and one of the reasons why FOSS doesn't always conquer the marketshare it could have, but there's also a lot of commercial FOSS software out there that is designed to be what people want.
Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it.The main thing people want is compatibility. They don't care so much about features, they just want to be able to exchange software with their buddies, play the most popular games that dominate the market, etc. That means they want what everybody else has, and that just happens to be Windows. Windows users have hated Windows since just about forever, but there was never a viable alternative that was compatible enough.
Look at Vista; MS put crap into it no one wanted, and now large numbers of people aren't buying the thing.Because it broke compatibility.
FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software.A lot of FOSS is commercial software.
Chord: To work well, markets need to strike a balance, the goal being perfect competition. When there is no competition -- a monopoly -- then the only way to balance it is to create a monopsony.
Except in the case of OSS, there are the idealogues who are willing to produce only for recognition, or just for the sheer joy of it.I've trained myself to pretty much redirect announcements from Microsoft employees regarding anything to /dev/null..much like what I do during presidential campaigns.
If the alphabet weren't an Open Source development, we would all have to pay every time we read or wrote anything. In short most of what has been written would not have been. How many centuries behind in development would we now be?
Its pretty clear that he envies Stallman's superior beard.
http://www.stallman.org/image001.jpg
All hail the 4th member of ZZ Top!
Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
$ telnet wildsnake.com 80
Trying 67.19.186.194...
Connected to wildsnake.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:49:53 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
I was at the IGF awards ceremony last year when Alexey was given the The Pioneer Award. He was surrounded by a the best of both indie and professional game developers. This year, one of the IGF winners thanked open-source software for making his game possible. He thanked GIMP, STL, and lots of other things I can't recall. It's twisted that Alexey stood in front of a group of people who were thanking him for his contribution, and that the next year he puts down the very tools that made it possible for him to be there, and the tools that made it possible for the game industry to even present him with the award.
I have coded something that I think is better than Tetris® in some ways. It's called LOCKJAW Tetromino Game. It starts with the standard rules of everyone's favorite tetromino game, and then it layers on 30 different ways that the player can customize its behavior. For example, if you don't like infinite spin, T-spin triples, and a piece randomizer that allows playing forever, all of which are mandatory in newer Tetris products, you can turn them off. It even comes with built-in scenarios to simulate various Tetris products, from the 8-bit games to the modern western games to the Japanese arcade game in those ridiculously fast videos.
Very nasty people work hard and give away their work to the rest of mankind! If people don't keep their work proprietary, and make others pay through the nose for it, how would organizations like the Gates foundation be able to give away (What used to be your) money?
Translation of complaints about free software:
Rich owner of closed source software gives away money = Very good.
Poor OpenSource programmer gives away his work to anyone who wants it = Very bad.
I've heard numerous arguments that boil down to basically this.
How often do you complaints in other areas of life, where people are freely volunteering/donating their work to others for the good of all mankind? (Like: Those D*mn hospital volunteers are keeping the pay down! Or: Those D*mn Habitat for Humanity volunteers, donating their labor, are making it impossible to charge people to build a house.)
Closed source software should have never existed. It's a mentality of the past, before people had the Internet and the possibilities to collaborate so efficiently through it. Not only that, but closed source software also harms the market for free software.
...but his theory just doesn't fit with the established base of thinking here.
Maybe he should try rotating it 90 degrees to the right before dropping it into place.
Do you buy tires for your car, or do you re-invent the wheel instead? All technology depends on simpler parts. The more simpler parts we have the faster we can build new technology. The whole Economy would collapse without this infrastructure.
I have an x86 PC running CentOS Linux to do my work. I don't want to build a PC, write an operating system, & a C compiler before I start programming. I have a programming job because there is FOSS to ge me started.
I'm not saying I agree with the guys entire premise.
But I do agree that software companies generate wealth.
I mean, you used BeOS as an example. That's a bad example because BeOS was never a terribly _valuable_ product. Sure, there was a large investment made, but very little value produced. This is not endemic to the software industry, it's endemic to Be. Supporting this theory that a large investment produced little value is the fact that THE COMPANY WENT UNDER!
With software, the user-base is equally as valuable as the code. Perhaps even more-so.
As an asset, BeOS was just half done: The code was there, the user-base was not.
This is a bit analogous to a contractor building half a house and going bankrupt. Sure, the half-built dwelling is worth SOMETHING, but not much.
I think what destroyed his market was people got tired of variations of tetris and the like. I mean it gets old after a while...I think open source has not hurt his market. While I am sure his fish aquarium was a winner, it too is about a useful as . . . well lets just say as useful as having yet another tetris variant
So what does it mean that my code is free? It means that I can continue to use it, in whole or in part, if I switch job. It provides me with a much greater degree of freedom than if I did the same work and the software was not released under a free software license.
So the question isn't really what I, as a programmer, gain from the software being free. I gain the same freedom as the users, even more so as I can obviously take advantage of the freedom to modify the software. The question is what my employer gain be making my code free.
To answer that, we first have to get rid of one common misconception. Most people see only mass duplicated generic software, much of it intended for end-user sale. But that doesn't mean that most software created is like that. In fact, it is quote the opposite. The majority of software is created in order to solve a specific problem, not for sale. So your client or employer has not really strong reasons to keep the software non-free, as long as it solves his problem. And there is good reasons to make it free:
1) It opens up for inclusion of code from the world of copylefted software, decreasing cose and/or increasing functionality.
2) It opens up "third party contributions", which may add functionality for free.
3) It makes the programmer happy, since he gets more freedom.
And no, it is not rare. Another misconception is that free software programmers are usually hobbyists or students. But a EU financed study indicate that around half of the developers surveyed are in fact developing the free software as part of our jobs. And if you look at it from the other side, of the widely used free software projects, you will find that the main developers are almost all paid full time to work on the project.
I can say without sarcasm that was the best use of the word "obviously" I've seen in a long time. I have not in fact seen an obscure BBC documentary on Tetris posted on YouTube and I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
"His assertion that Free software doesn't contribute economically is way off base. The university culture of spreading information and freeing knowledge is not a bygone rebellious idea: it is sound principle that is gaining more and more traction as people become more interconnected. Rather than stifling business opportunities, this free distribution of knowledge has been a core enabler of technological and economic progress in the western world."
Well except for the fact that "free knowledge" takes far more work to make anything useful out of it than "free software".
"Besides, the core ethos of Free software is about user choice and promulgation of ideas."
And yet the BSD vs GPL battle continues.
"Having unique life experiences and thus unique perspective is great... but is in no way an excuse for having a skewed world-view."
Everyone's skewed. It's part of being mortal.
Regardless, if companies cannot cope with change, their end is all we can hope for, that's a free market, if we were to protect companies from competition that would be death to our free market and wealth.
I think competition is what keeps the market alive, then he doesn't sound too much like a capitalist to me. Seriously, this guy has created one of my favorite games and all, but this paragraph is quite ridiculous. Has free software ever killed a company? Is free software all about copying stuff? Is free software anti-business? (Let's forget all those companies, even MS making money out of these things...) Does free software prevent innovation (I could say 'firefox' and prove the opposite is true) . Really, this paragraph is so lame, perhaps he thought no one was going to find out he was saying these ridiculous things because it was a Spanish interview, that's about the only explanation for this piece of non-sense.Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
One advantage of open source for programmers in my view is that they don't have to deal with the pressure and deadlines of releasing a few of these products as their lively hood. Tired of that manager who tries to squeeze you for productivity at the cost of clean code? Do you feel good about the quality of software your company produces at the end of the day? Without open source I think that companies would have been trying to reduce programmer salaries anyway, and you would be forced to give away your good code almost for free.
Just because we have open source, it does not mean that all programmers will be out of a job. People still have ideas for software every day and not everyone has the ability to build that software. I do think we need to make sure that open source developers continue to get paid.
It's really quite frustrating to see people fall for that old fallacy. Just because we've seen the money spent in one area doesn't mean that if it we hadn't spent it in that area (closed source development), that what would have taken its place wouldn't have been equally as effective (if not more so). It is remarkably similar to the parable of the broken window where the child breaking a window is said to be fostering the economy by funding the glaziers (the original parable):
The moral of the story is that the money would have been spent elsewhere (generating wealth in terms of the article), the 6 francs ($300 for windows - no pun intended!) that were spent on the glazier (closed source) could have been spent at the bakers (open source).
A former Soviet denizen is telling us that open-source hurts the free-market?
and in the end that's what's important.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
OpenOffice is an even worse example, it was a non-free program (StarOffice) until it was "liberated" by Sun in order to spite a corporate enemy. If anything, StarOffice is an example of the duplication going on in the non-free world. Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where
much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic. The keyword is "I see" because it just tells about the path you have gone. Some of us have traveled a different path, and seen more. The Internet and the Web started from "open source methodologies". The commercial IDE's mostly borrow their ideas from free predecessors. Most of games just add polish to ideas that were tested out with free software.
Not to mention stuff like TeX which have had a huge influence on computerized typesetting (and is yet unsurpassed). TeX is open source, even if not "open source methodology". Like the original BSD (also hugely influential) was "open source methodology" but not "open source".
I don't think you understand what the post you're replying to means by "creating wealth".
Making software creates wealth. Making source code creates wealth. Selling it is just redistribution of wealth.
If a bunch of people get together and produce a word-processor, an open source word-processor will always be around for people to improve, debug, learn from, while a closed source word processor will only be around while the company survives and sells it.
In both cases the "wealth" of a useful product is produced, but in one, the product and its useful constituents (source code, etc.) eventually disappear.
The reason we have copyright and patent law is to give people an incentive to produce public goods which, once produced, are best given away. One of the intrinsic problems with closed source software is that a big part of the thing which IP law is intended to generate and eventually give away for free is instead kept secret and lost.
But that highlights Mr. Pajitnov's real complaint: If it doesn't have infinite spin, it ain't Tetris.Seriously: M-x tetris and see for yourself.
Ok, how about: "Free smiles are destroying the market for smiles."
Smiles arise from people's work. But if people are willing and able to give them away for free, do we really need an industry to be created to give out smiles? Do we need laws that protect smiling, so that you have to pay for the good feeling of seeing someone smile?
Or how about soup kitchens? Do they destroy the market for restaurants? And playgrounds destroy the market for amusement parks? And driveways destroy the market for parking lots? And impromptu campfire stories destroy the market for books?
In software, if a free or Free product exists, I suppose this means that someone can't sell the equivalent thing. The question is: if we have the free product, why do we need them to sell the equivalent proprietary version?
Not that anyone cares about his business practices but this guy only cares about money. His business doesn't bring wealth or prosperity to anyone other than him. What he's done in the past is shady and what he does now is probably worse. If you make a tetris clone, expect to receive a letter from his lawyers. And the letter demands that not only do you cease and desist your services (apparently it violates his rights), but demand that you pay royalties for each time your game has been played. What's even worse is that his company makes and produces games that take content directly from free online tetris games and then use his own games as leverage that the free tetris clones are infringing on his company (so make up a new tetris mechanic... he will steal it and then sue your ass off). I've done the research (and I'm far too lazy to post all of it, nor do I think anyone really cares enough to care). This guy has sent out hundreds of letters and lawsuits to people who have created or hosted free tetris clones online. Unfortunately no one in the field of making a tetris clone has the money to hire fancy lawyers to stand in court and that leaves some people with millions in debt to his company (so if your 16 and you made one for fun, don't post it online or distribute it). Props to him though, he actually practices what he preaches and not many people do that.
What a nutcracker.
Ironic that this Russian is advocating this evil capitalistic practice.
Can't we all just...get along?
The entry of FOSS into any market encourages innovation on the commercial products. Innovation doesn't necessarily have to come in the way of new features, but the commercial software needs to do something that the FOSS alternatives don't.
In this case, the FOSS games are better and more innovative than the commercial game (see Hextris). The reason this happened is the same reason that you could never make money on the original Battlezone anymore. Because BZFlag is so much better.
Do the authors of BZFlag deserve to be blamed for this? Probably not. Is it Atari's fault for not constantly updating their game? Maybe. Should the author be making money off of an idea he had 20 years ago? Probably not. It's like Pong or Breakout. Both were firsts, both started a genre that continues today, but they have seen their day.
Wouldn't it make more sense for this guy to start a company that makes puzzle games?
Blasted charities and all their evil constraint of capitalism!!!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
No, I understand it completely. This is why I gave the example of WordPerfect. The original company is now gone, and the source code is no longer used for anything meaningful. The wealth remains, though. The doctoral theses that were written in WP, the capital generated by the sales and employment of the company, and the education taught in new schools that were built from tax dollars collected from the company, its employees and consumers. All examples of wealth that remains from a dead, closed-source software company.
Please don't misunderstand me by thinking that I believe FOSS is incapable or not equally-capable of creating wealth. I believe in OSS, and love and use Linux. But, aside from using it at home, I use it at work to write closed-source firmware that runs on microprocs embedded in closed-source FPGAs. And, it's making me wealthy. And, it is making our investors wealthy. And, because of the income tax I pay, society as a whole will benefit. Eventually, this company may die, and I'll suffer another layoff. But, the wealth generated by this venture will, in fact continue.
sig: sauer
High-level easy-to-code languages like VB are the most likely culprit. Used to be that only a few people with math and PC architecture knowledge could code up games like this. Nowadays, you could probably whip out a VB.NET version of tetris in about a day.
On another note, "OH NOEZ SOMEONE ELSE NOW MAKES WHEELS! WHAT EVER WILL THE ORIGINAL WHEEL MAKERS DO?!?" If something is dirt simple (like tetris) the only thing making your business model profitable is novelty, platform support or super-efficient process. Adapt or be eaten. Pretty simple, really.
Every time a perfectly good open source product is produced, it ruins the ability of the competitors to charge people for it. This is like anti-monopoly laws ruining people's ability to wring every ounce of your money out of you by preventing you from getting things somewhere else.
Let's take word processors as an example. Open Office is heinously cutting into Microsoft's profits. Simultaneously, it's increasing the profitability of the companies that use it by an equivalent amount, because they get to keep that cash instead of giving it to Microsoft. It isn't destroying profits, it's just moving them around. They also save money on tracking all of their licenses in the bargain.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
These are important life-sustaining materials and should have rigorous quality standards and commercial guarantees in order for consumers to know what they are buying. Neither of these things should have ever been free as it harms the market for these items and ultimately, the global economy!
Down with Free Air and Free Water!!
Neal Stephenson has a great discussion of this topic in "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." He writes about how Free/Open Source developers cause certain technologies to become inexpensive commodities once their techniques become commonplace.
The combined pressures of non-advanced software not being profitable and beyond-bleeding edge technology not being feasible puts a window on software vendors. This is a sort of metaphorical biosphere, not unlike the real one on Earth. The difference is that this biosphere is a moving treadmill and that vendors have to keep up to stay alive.
Some software manufacturers (e.g. Microsoft) try to change the rules of the game by locking customers in with proprietary standards and trying to dictate the pace of the treadmill. I would suggest that this will be a losing battle as users will eventually jump entire platforms to a competitor.
Some new vendors like Google, VMware (n.b. I am a former VMware employee) have embraced interoperability. Those vendors will need to keep pace or die.
On the whole, I think that this is a very good state for the software industry. In the long term, it will award profits to companies that are innovative and kill off companies that are not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This guy's business partner killed himself and his family. Don't know how that's relevant, but it sure is a fun fact: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1998/09/24/NEWS7742.dtl
"destroys the market" ?!? Nothing could be further from the truth, IMO.
To date, FOSS is pretty much exactly the software world's implementation of commoditization. In a larger sense, I observe this as the point when that software is no longer interesting solely as a profit center for any one individual (company or geek). It is often, however, rather necessary for some/many folks to get along (e.g. modern computers aren't very useful without an operating system), and thus is a cost center for these users. FOSS helps to distribute these costs, and it has worked brilliantly for many, many people and companies. Yes, some folks no longer get to make money in the that space, but that's what commoditization is all about anyhow! The silver lining comes when others stand upon FOSS' shoulders to build even greater things. Individuals and businesses have been using, creating, and contributing to FOSS projects across the spectrum for some time now to meet their varied needs.
The only unfortunate part in my view, is that no one has yet figured out a hands-down winning structure for open-source software products plus a business model that is a long-term winner over proprietary development for both end-users (RMS' dream) and the developers' financial interests (the pragmatic need). To reiterate: a model where the end-users have the protections afforded by source-code access, and developers (individuals or firms) can make a living and for some to have enough money to afford top-flight R&D and product innovation.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And Microsoft, one of the biggest software producers, doesn't make it's money on software. It makes it on controlling and selling compatibility.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Wow! We certainly made good capitalists out of the Russians. Too bad they are now so cynical and utterly devoid of idealism. Stallman's ideas about software freedom are just an extension of concepts of intellectual freedom that come from the ancient Greeks. It is inceasingly obvious that Russia is not western civilization.
an ill wind that blows no good
Hmm. Oracle. Hmm. Oracle preach using Linux OS and they have an contract with RedHat for support and RedHat give Oracle RedHat Linux OS in turn. Oracle also acquired Berkeley DB so I wonder why Oracle, a for profit company, would put so much effort in FOSS?
I think that FOSS promotes creativity and open thinking that allow new ideas without the deadlines and restrictions of corporate financial pressures. However without some gentle prodding from management software will not become a useful software. You need some form of leadership that will gently prod and form the product so that will become something that people can use. On the other side having the pressure to create software under a deadline and restrictions you will have buggy and not well tested software that we know that some companies put out and we complain about.
Profit is a good motive to create but when it becomes ends justify the means then you are in trouble. Many disasters are caused because financial justified means so you have either a Titanic or a Enron.
All you see is the desktop, but the desktop is the exception. You mentioned Linux being competitive on the server market, yes, and what about Linux on appliances: wireless access points, NAS, network printers, network cameras, mobile phones, etc ? Linux devices probably outnumber Windows devices by far. The OLPC foundation is going to produce millions of laptops running 100% open source software. Google built their infrastructure on open source software, just like my of their competitors. What about Firefox, (Open)Solaris, Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix. All of these are open-source. And Java (now open source), which runs on 1+ billion mobile phones ?
"The free stuff is not really all that competitive" What planet are you living on ?!
I work as a scientist, and I have released a couple of classes as open source: a C++ implementation of a certain random number generator and a simple but flexible configuration file reader.
I needed these bits of code for my research and couldn't find any existing code that met my needs. Two of those needs were simplicity and portability. The programs I write must run on various architectures and without the installation of other packages. So I wrote them myself, borrowing and adapting bits from other open code. So far the cost to me was the same whether I kept the source closed or open.
Then I released the code for the extra cost of cleaning up the comments and making a simple Web page. In return, users of my code gave me bug fixes, better portability, and speed improvements. They also taught me some better programming habits. All of that makes my scientific code, which I don't give away, better and helps me compete in the field of science.
I suspect that the producers of those open source libraries receive similar benefits. They needed software to perform a certain task, but that task isn't the end goal of their own work. By sharing their libraries they make the rest of their work better.
He thinks FOSS screwed-over his buddy Vladimir causing his software company to go tits-up, causing him to kill his wife and son. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pokhilko http://www.rotten.com/library/culture/tetris/ I read it on rotten, so it MUST be true!!
companies have taken advantage of the free and open source network protocols (Ethernet, IP, TCP/UDP) to make money so I say it's time that open source is finally getting the (good) attention it deserves.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It's tough to be a prey, but hey, most animals are at the same time both preys and predators.
:)
Whether free software create or destroy wealth depends a lot on the circumstances. On one hand, without copyrights/patent it's possible that much fewer software would be written. On the other hand, it's not very productive if everyone reinvents the wheel all the time and all companies have to pay a million bucks for a C compiler.
My advice: get back to work! Slashdot DOES destroy wealth for sure
Cascading computer developments make this an extremely exciting and interesting time in which to live. I think that software copyright and patent protection is wonderful and that the people who reflexively oppose it are unwise. The hope of the grand score is what motivates many people to make wonderful software. These people should get a LIMITED time to have monopolistic total control over the use of their wonderful creations. If the whining crybabies don't like it, let them write their own software (or wander off into the woods to fend for themselves). (The Sonny Bono Copyright Act is an evil extension of copyright, however.)
But that's not the end of it. Patents and copyrights EXPIRE. When they expire, they are public domain. Right now, I can plagiarize Charles Dickens to my heart's content and there's nothing that anybody can do about it. When yesterday and today's cool software lapses into the public domain, our children and grandchildren can use that software to 'stand on the shoulders of the giants' and make even better software. (So long as no evil Sonny Bono seeks to extend copyright into infinity).
We are fortunate to be living at the birth of a new age. Stallman's children and grandchildren will be able to play in the exact wonderland that Stallman is excluded from now. We should be patient. (So long as no evil Sonny Bono, etc., etc.).
The world needs a software library that collects, preserves, identifies, and indexes excellent sequences of code so that no future software creator can ever claim ownership of brilliant code that is really (intentionally or unintentionally) just a rewrite of work done long ago by a brilliant geek or collection of brilliant geeks. I hate the idea of somebody--long in the future--successfully claiming ownership of work originally done long ago by another person. (But I'll be dead then, so my hatred is more cerebral than visceral).
The Sonny Bono Copyright Law is EVIL. Copyright is necessary but it should not not be unnaturally extended to benefit innovation-stifling corporations!
Reading about Alexey Pajitnov calling RMS's ideas on free software "the past" is like reading an article where A Flock of Seagulls calls rap music a passing fad.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
First thing we need to do is require people to pay a license in order to use a compiler, in the same way contractors are licensed! Then we need to pass legislation prohibiting the authorship of software that is given away for nothing!
Then we can get rid of those pesky amendments to the Constitution!
*blinks*
(troll is over, go home)
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Yes and lets look at were the BeOS developers ended up. No the wealth is were it's always been, open or closed. It's the people, stupid!
From what I understand, Tetris never earned any royalties for the mathematician who worked out polyominoes which form the basis for the shapes. Admittedly, a mathematical analysis is not the same as a game, but this strikes me as more than a little hypocritical.
So in other words, all web browsers shouldn't exist because they're free? When the product you're competing with is free-as-in-beer (whether or not it's OSS) then obviously FOSS is a viable model. And no real argument that the "infrastructure" - the operating system - should be open source, otherwise you wind up with all sorts of unverifiable claims regarding security and reliability, like in electronic voting machines ...
I have no qualms with application software being proprietary, if you as programmer come up with some truly novel game then you should be able to make money off of your own Tetris. But to say that FOSS shouldn't exist is to argue that MS should be the only operating system, browser, and office suite company since without OSS they would be.
ilo v e
t e tri s
fos ssu c
S.S.D.D
Having read through the long list of comments here it is my opinion that the posters positive feelings towards free software are clouding their reason.
I love FOSS.
However, there is a very valid point to the man's argument which it seems slashdot is not willing to acknowledge, or deal with, because of emotional reasons.
Simply:
If OpenOffice wipes out 95% of MS Office's profits, Microsoft will budget less to develop MS Office 20XX than they otherwise would have. This will mean less money to pay programmer salaries on the MS Office team in Microsoft.
By induction, as FOSS applications wipe out increasing numbers of proprietary applications, software salaries will decrease.
This is a very simple, very logical argument. It clearly merits discussion, rather than the rubbishing it has recieved in most of the comments so far.
It would appear that because of slashdots affection for FOSS, posters are choosing to ridicule rather than to engage in the debate.
This is not the behaviour of intelligent people.
In more detail:
When an accountancy company uses OpenOffice that would otherwise have used MS Office, less money enters the software industry from the accountancy industry.
As FOSS grows, software companies that used to charge other business sectors money for their products will find their profits falling.
There are a finite number of software applications required to solve critical business needs. Based on current trends, it seems reasonable to assume that over time FOSS will tend to provide more and more of the applications that solve those needs.
If a business can be run on FOSS with neglible software purchase cost, and similiar software maintance costs to commerical software, then the business will simply spend very little on software. This will be good for businesses, and good for industry overall.
But it will be bad for the software industry, as, over time, the amount of money that flows into the software industry as a whole, from other industrys (eg banking, financial services, any business that uses a spreadsheet) will decrease.
The decrease in money coming into the software industry will eventually impact programmer salaries.
Programmers will get paid less money, because they are giving away their labour for free.
Conversely, in a market with a monopoly or duopoly, where service and quality are often crap, FOSS gives a way to set a bar. Similar to the signs at an amusement park: 'Your product must be at least this good to be charged for.'
From an economics perspective, software exists in a special world where the "tragedy of the commons" does not occur. Once a piece of free software is created, it can be copied infinitely many times without ever running out or going down in quality. In fact, the opposite occurs--software gets better and more easily available as more people copy it. Thus, every developer can give a little, and then receive a lot.
Any code that (somehow) gets into the free-software "gene pool" stays there forever, constantly being added into different projects and absorbing improvements from those projects.
At this point, the pool of free code has become quite enormous, which makes it possible to create extremely complicated pieces of software (like an entire Linux distro) with a relatively tiny amount of effort just by piecing together existing modules and writing only enough code to cover any new features that are needed. This makes it extremely attractive to anyone selling hardware, or services / support, which is why you see big companies like Sun, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, etc. paying for code and then giving it away.
For the individual programmers (who write free-ware but aren't being paid to do so), there are other motivations. A lot of people really will give up something small, if it will create a large positive effect for everyone else--especially when the work is already done and the chance of making money is small to begin with. A lot of student projects wind up as freeware this way, as well as things that people write for personal use. For others, there's the ego factor--you can contribute a few little files to a big project, and truthfully say that some huge number people use your software every day (this can also make it easier to get a job).
From the real story of Tetris as told by Vadim Gerasimov (if Pajitnov is the father of Tetris, this guy is the overworked, unrecognized bastard child):
"Pajitnov's efforts to sell the games together failed. We decided to give our friends free copies of the games including Tetris. The games quickly spread around. When the freely distributed PC version of Tetris got outside of the Soviet Union and a foreign company expressed an interest in licensing Tetris, Pajitnov decided to abandon all the games but Tetris. The decision made Pavlovsky very unhappy and destroyed our team."
Pretty ironic that it was only through distributing free copies of Tetris at first that Pajitnov was able to successfully market this infamous game (and completely downplay the help of his buddies who helped him create and distribute it in the process).
People fear that which they do not know and do not understand. What else is new ?
In our company we use tons of Open Source software and do development on some of it. We use Linux, Apache, Python, Java, BugZilla, MediaWiki, Subversion and many many more. It has saved us millions, even if we derived -no- value from the development we ourselves do on OSS-projects, we'd be coming out ahead. But we do, because the reason we make additions and adaptions is that customers of us need it, or we ourselves need it.
We ain't complaining, aproximately 20% of turnover is profit, and profit has been rising continously the last 5 years, along with turnover. We're a small company, only aproximately 25 developers. 22 and a half years ago though, when I started, we where -6- developers.
Over the years I worked at several companies that sold word processors. Each of the programs was closed source and had a following of customers that liked and used the software. In the beginning a word processor was a text mode editor. Later fonts arrived, and word processors started getting features that previously existed in typesetting programs. The point I am trying to get to is that for a period of time I remember clearly, the word processor companies competed on the basis of features. Customers would request features and the developers would add those features, thereby promoting customer lock-in as the business clients came to depend on the features that had been added. One of the benefits of paying for the software is that support was available, and the company was hungry for ideas from clients for new features. Many such features included pleading mode for lawyers, proportional spacing for certain fonts, support for popular printers. There was plenty of work for lots of application and system programmers because Microsoft hadn't achieved their monopoly on basic Windows drivers yet. In the early days, hardware companies would create unique hardware, and drivers would be required to link them into the operating system. Subsequently in the Windows time, once a driver was written for a hardware type, the competition would be to design and manufacture a device more cheaply that could use the built in drivers and hardware companies would not need custom drivers for their hardware. I guess this was great for the hardware companies but it was not so great for the driver writers (including me). The point I am trying to make is that you can't just write one version of something and expect to become fabulously wealthy. It is not quite that easy. You have to work at adapting the product to the needs and desires of the marketplace, and better than the competition, it you want to keep your marketshare and eventually enjoy wealth. Nowadays, if you want to do this with closed source software, you have to keep enough developers working on it to compete with the open source software on the basis of features, quality, reliability, and efficiency. If you are unwilling or unable to do that, you get overrun by the open source software. Thats how it works, IMHO
"the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed..."
... Sorry.
Wow. You'd think the old bastard would be a bit more grateful. Without FOSS people would still be playing Tetris on their Gameboys.
P.S. In Soviet Russia Free Software should have never existed claims you!
Nonsense. In communism, the means of production are owned in common; without common ownership, you don't have communism. (Why do you think it's called "communism"?)
Common ownership of the means of production is certainly not the case in open source: each participating programmer typically owns his computers. So open source is emphatically not communism!
Open source programmers donate the results of their labor, but that is no diffrent from volunteering for some church activity. How is that communist?
Posted anonymously so as to avoid undoing an earlier moderation.
"mommy mommy, open source software is taking my profits, I'm being forced to work harder now but I don't wanna waaaah"
enough said...
I don't know why but I laughed so hard after reading this article. It should go to "It's funny, laugh" section. Anyway, Pajitnov makes a living by selling ideas, what else can he say? So I think his opinion just irrelevant here.
Capitalism is an emergent phenomena that arises when human beings are left to their own devices. It is the economic manifestation of the fundamental liberties that healthy societies embrace and defend.
The open source model is also an emergent phenomena that arises when human beings are left to their own devices. Software programs are not lawn mowers, they are not widgets. They are an abstraction whose utility is not diluted when shared with others. When knowledgeable users are able to modify and improve software programs, thereby increasing their utility, it is all but inevitable that human beings will self-organize into groups to do just that. This is not communism, this is a quilting bee.
Pajitnov's complaints only make sense when one realizes that he comes from a nation where freedom simply doesn't exist. He comes from a country where the government controls the lives of its subjects, where serfdom never really ended. He doesn't understand emergent phenomena created by the voluntary activities of free agents because in the Soviet Union the only free agents were the party bosses and the criminals (but I repeat myself.)
He is in fact arguing for the creation of a coercive authority to prevent individuals from acting in their own best interest.
It is amazing how profoundly stupid some intelligent people can be.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
A typical example of facts sacrificed to feed foolish propaganda. Wealth is determined by the amount of goods produced and consumed, not just sold.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Its the Final Solution to the problem of having lots of geeks making inhouse software, just google for a FOSS alternative! We can get rid of them! We can increase our profits by this! And finally 90% of geeks get what they deserve , dumpster diving for you guys, we get the softwar for FREE ;)
ps. I'm CS student
©God
You are really whining here. You know what, I don't use office and I like the fact I don't use office. I don't even know if my OSS office suite looks like office and I don't care. Sorry if OSS is hurting your ability to afford your house in San Jose. How about this, find another job if you don't like how things are instead of whining all the time. Guess what? Whining doesn't change the way things are. If you want to change the world, start with the man in the mirror. We have a name for guys like you, "whiners". Hey, you know what else OSS does? It gives ME, LaskoVortex, a free office suite that I don't have to pay for. You know what else I like? Gimp. Gimp is awsome. And its free. Free! Free! Free! You like apples? How do you like them apples? Looks like there is a problem with OSS, but its yours and not mine! Sucks to be you.
Just callin' it like I see it.
He's just missing the fact that this is the point of the free market.
One thing every engineer knows is that goals that sound the same often have very different solutions. It seems like "rewarding the deserving" and "distributing capital efficiently" are almost the same thing, but they aren't. It sounds like "innovating" and "solving consumer problems" are the same, but they're not.
What makes markets efficient is that they're utterly ruthless. Ever see a company full of hard working people working on an innovative idea go down? It's gut wrenching. The market doesn't care of anybody. It doesn't reward anybody. Nor does it punish. It simply distributes resources efficiently. If efficiency means you lose your job, your retirement, and can't pay for your child's open heart surgery, the market will do it. Markets don't take care of anybody.
As far as free market is concerned, the open source movement is relatively benign. I don't see proprietary software companies going out of business left and right; I see them adjusting their strategies to the fact that making money in certain ways is harder.
If you lived through the software boom of the 80s, the vision was that owning software was like having a printing press for money. Yes, it was hard to make the software, but the marginal cost of cranking the duplicator was close to zero, whereas the marginal value to the customer was high. Every time you cranked the duplicator, you conjured profit out of nothing. If you step back and look at what's going on, the market is simply reacting to the creation of value out of nothing by cranking the duplicator. Under the open source model, you can get paid for writing software, you can get paid for maintaining software, you can get paid for installing administering, or even explaining software. You just can't get paid handsomely for cranking the duplicator.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
FOSS creates You!
Aside from the obvious reason that I enjoy writing open source software, I also enjoy the fact that I can write the guts of a program and release it and, assuming my program is useful to others, recieve patches from others to make it better. It's also satisfying not to have to reinvent the wheel when I can just make one relatively-minor contribution to an existing project and get a system that meets my requirements.
"With Oracle, the hospital can just call the company and people will fix it."
You can submit a trouble ticket, and perhaps Oracle will find a fix. That is hardly guaranteed.
Does that mean Microsoft and Adobe (are they big enough to count here) are a small minority in the proprietary software? I find it easier to list successful Open Source companies vs. successful proprietary ones. Also, from this guy's comments, it sounds like he simply misunderstood his opportunities to make a profit on this invention - that has nothing to do with proprietary vs. open source software. That's just plain business savvy.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Would you rather someone ran it through Babelfish a few times?
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I'm making money from FOSS and I've never been able to make money for myself doing anything. I'm very appreciative of those in the community who share information. Perhaps thats what this guys beef is. He doesn't want anyone to share information. Schools share information onto students so that students can go out in the world and make a living. Being constrained to only learning a small subset of propreitary information gets no one anywhere. Inventors like myself depend on the ability to access information to make a living. This guys a tard.
... of any software that can be written a couple hours by anyone of even modest skill and experience.
F'r cryin' out loud, Tetris was invented almost 25 years ago. Get over yourself.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Even funnier is what he said about this... that the true reward was being world-reknowned and knowing that tons of people are enjoying something you made. This was covered in either in the book "Game Over" or "1-Up." "Game Over" was the book with extensive coverage of the beginnings of Tetris, especially regarding Nintendo's exclusivity in distributing this for portables and consoles, but also regarding talks between Minoru Arakawa, then head of NOA, Howard Lincoln, then head of NOA's legal, and Alexy Pajitnov.
Twinstiq, game news
From Steve Ballmer ? One wonders.
He seems to think that the 'value' of a product is based on how much labor went into it, rather than it's utility or what other people think of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this basically a marxist definition of value?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I owe my career, and that includes my current salary, to Free Software. Thank you very much. And I don't work for RedHat.
I got my current job, and one previous one, by one of my projects being found on freshmeat.
I write Free Software and customize existing Free Software for clients at work. Our company could never have existed if we couldn't build our work on top of the enormous pool of pre-existing solutions.
My company isn't alone - here in Norway, there is one more company doing exactly the same as us, and countless with different markets/products.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
softwareopensyou ...but i just couldn't...
So the poor little feller thinks sharing is bad, and business should
have natural access to exploit every ecosystem in existence.
He sounds like he's trying to get his balls back from someone.
-- thinkyhead software and media
He wasn't screwed out of money. He created something while working for the state, so the state owned it, since that's how Communism worked. He wasn't upset and surprised by it. That's just how things were where he came from, and he was fine with that.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?