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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.'"
Complains the author of one of the biggest productivity destroyers in computing history.
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.
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!"
"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.
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!
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.
OSS shouldn't be about reverse engineering good ideas and making them freely available. OSS is supposed to be about innovation and new ideas. Sadly, for most OSS apps that I see, it does appear to be a way to skim the main parts off of products that cost money and redistribute them for free. GIMP and OpenOffice are perfect examples. Does the world really need another app to do the jobs that their proprietary "cousins" do? No! Some folks just think those programs should be free! I can't tell you a single thing, other than freeness, that those apps have provided the world.
The spirit of Open Source is the belief that making the code available to anyone makes the product better, because anyone with a bit of inventiveness and some time can make the product better. 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.
Your comment "...Sucks to be them..." strikes the core of the problem with open source. It's not supposed to be about screwing "The Man"...it's supposed to be about making better apps. Unfortunately, too many people see it your way.
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.
If I want to use a tool, and am willing to make one myself so that I can use it, and then I put that tool out for everyone to use, what exactly is the problem with that? Should I be forced to buy the expensive tool from the big tool company, even though I have the skill to make it myself? Should I be forced to charge for my tool when I don't feel any need to do so?
If I like tetris, and make a tetris variant of my own to see if I can do it, am I then forbidden from showing it to anyone?
No one owes Microsoft, Macromedia, and Adobe a living. If their products are superiour, then they'll do well enough. If not, then they deserve to go out of business. End of story.
And it's not just about "free". If it were only about free, then no one would have bothered writing an alternative to the existing commercial stuff; we'd have just pirated it. The amount of work needed to crush security on any copy-protected media is trivial compared to the amount of work required to create an alternative.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yeah, I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL, and free market competition can be pushed to the max. I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software? Does the government provide an income to the limited few software suppliers allowed? Do you get your software license coupons each month and have to stand in line to get software? Does it eliminate value judgments and class? (No, actually, it's highly competitive and the best software "wins".) Does it preclude everyone from ever selling their programming labour? I'm just missing the connection, I guess. FOSS 'creates' wealth for everyone, in the direct form of the benefits you get from using the software, and in the indirect form of lowering the cost of production of other products (e.g. a retailer using Linux as PoS can offer cheaper products).
In my experience, code being free is not enough to make it reusable.
The original author of the code has to *actively want* his code to be reused, design it modularly for reuse, and provide useful documentation to other programmers on how it can be reused. Anything else is a just an enormous hunk of code that substitutes cost in money with cost in time.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Money is what you use when you have scarcity instead of wealth, and you're trying to figure out who should get the short supply.
Artificial scarcity, which includes all intellectual property law, is about destroying wealth so you can force people to work like slaves and fight over the scraps.
It's reminiscent of the wealth burning parties of primitives, intended to prevent the accumulation of wealth so the people would have to keep making more in the service of the tribal leaders.
Basically, Alexey Pazhitnov Leonidovich doesn't value wealth, he values leverage over his fellow man, which he can only have if people are systematically kept in a state of deprivation.
It blows my mind how many people defend a system that keeps them impoverished, not because they don't understand what it's doing to them and their fellows, but because they think they're going to be the man on the top one of these days and they want to be the beneficiary of all those systematic imbalances.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
That makes a good argument for the notion that software generates wealth. I don't think you've established that we need Microsoft, or proprietary software from any vendor in order to have these benefits. You could make just as much money supporting free software. Granted, the ubiquity of Microsoft products means that your customer base is larger for MS kit, but that still doesn't make proprietary software a necessary part of the business model. And the office automation you describe can be done as well using free software solutions.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
No. An automobile is wealth. An airplane is wealth. A book is wealth. Income is just an IOU based on your contribution to creating wealth.
"Creating wealth" is all about producing things of value. "Free" software is wealth if it has value. The fact that people use it demonstrates nicely that it has value. The fact that it costs nothing to use is irrelevant to its "value".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce. That is the point of FOSS - we don't need to apply the old models of how to divide up resources to knowledge.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
> No. An automobile is wealth. An airplane is wealth. A book is wealth.
Actually those are just things of _arbitrary_ value. If someone can't use it, it is worthless for _that_ person.
Wealth is the ability to _generate_ income.
If you own a house are you wealthy? That depends -- does it COST you to have it (thus it is a liability), or does it GENERATE revenue for you (thus it is an asset)?
Open Source is the perfect example of the new "monetary" system that humans are progressing towards. It is not about the "things" that will determine wealth (since in the future everyone's basic needs will be met), but about what you can do for others.
--
Money is in invention that represents time & skill.