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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.'"
from a Microsoft employee?
Oddly, I see FOSS as an extreme example of capitalism. Reductio ad absurdum with a twist.
In a given market with profits, more competitors will enter until profits are driven down to the point the cost of entering just isn't worth it. With software, this set point is a bit lower than many industries, because less capital is needed for production. FOSS lowers it further by reducing the barriers to entry (you get to reuse older code). Some people derive a non-financial benefit (and sometimes financial) that exceeds the cost of contributing, so there is a negative cost (a benefit). It's still worth it to them to enter the market no matter what. So even assuming no profit, you get plenty of competitors.
The capitalist version of superconductivity. Against the rules except in unique circumstances.
What this guy misses are controlled markets with barriers to entry.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
His point non-existant because you can't patent a play mechanic. so long as the marketing is distinct you can clone the mechanics. See bejeweled vs Puzzle Quest.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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?
Not only that, but his complaint about software companies generating wealth is mostly bogus as well. They are able to generate income, but that is much different than wealth. When a software company goes under, typically the code is sold of at rock bottom price and then forgotten about. Look at BeOS as an example. Open source generates true standing wealth.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
When he says that companies like Red Hat are in the minority, well he's right on technical grounds, but one of the biggest hardware developers in history, IBM, has done all that R&D and sales for the past half century because the real value isn't in selling the mainframe or supercomputer, but rather in the deliciously monsterous support contracts.
What does a company like IBM care who develops whatever open source products it markets (and we all know it has, for many years, given a good many utilities away for nothing, even before Linux was a dream in Torvald's twisted, geekish mind)? What it needs is software solutions and hardware solutions (preferaby coupled) so that it can collect support fees.
What Open Source isn't going to do is to keep a specifically software-writing house going. But I don't see a lack of proprietary software out there, so this guy sounds like a complete idiot. "Look, I'm the guy that made Tetris, and open source is BAAAAAD!"
Fucking moron.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Microsoft's [...] products make many within the company wealthy.
That doesn't prove that Microsoft creates wealth. Drug dealers products make many in their supply chain wealthy. Protection rackets make the mobsters running them wealthy. Casinos make plenty of people wealthy, most of them casino owners. None of them create wealth, they just harvest it -- same as tax collectors.
-- Alastair
I disagree. At a minimal level, what FOSS does is put pressure on the non-free products to become better. You gave the example of MS Office. You are correct that OpenOffice.org (arguabley) doesn't offer much more to the user other than just being FOSS (dont' forget it runs on Linux too). However, what it does do, is put pressure on MS to justify their high price tag. If you are going to charge me $300 for an office suite that I could otherwise get for free, it better be worth $300 more. It also puts the pressure on MS to bring the price down. Is Office really worth that much money? Considering there is a free alternative, no it's not. The extra features I will get for $300, is not worth $300 to me. Maybe to some, but not to me. That's for the consumer to decide. Just look at the latest version of Office. It's the most radically different version we've seen (for better or worse). This is a direct response to OpenOffice.org.
Firefox and IE7 are another example of this. IE didn't have any significant improvements until Firefox came along, and now IE is being very actively improved upon. It took five years to go from IE6 to IE7, yet now IE8 is already being developed. However, in this scenario, the FOSS product was actually a major improvement over the existing non-FOSS product. Many want all software to be FOSS. I'm still not completely sold on that. I think everyone should have the choice and sometimes it takes a well payed developer to get the job done because its hard to find someone to volunteer their time for a rather uninteresting (yet necessary) application. Right now, I think the two complement eachother. FOSS creates competition in areas that otherwise would be dominated by monopolies. FOSS makes applications available that would otherwise be too expensive for a single person or a small business to afford. This is quite empowering. Think about it for a minute. Thanks Apache or MySQL the singular person with modest budget can implement an enterprise class web server or database. The playing field has just been leveled.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Linux is losing the desktop for reasons unrelated to FOSS. Windows was already a firmly entrenched monopoly before anyone bothered trying to push Linux on the desktop. For comparison, both BeOS and Apple are not FOSS, and have been only marginally (at best) more successful than the Linux desktop.
I strongly suspect that the market can only accept one platform solution on the desktop. It takes far too much effort in terms of customer service or code portability to support more than one at a time. Therefore, we may simply have to live with the fact that the Windows monopoly is permanent. Of course, the market may end up marginalizing the desktop without Microsoft being able to make serious inroads on whatever replaces it.
In any case, FOSS has been wildly successful at creating tools-to-make-tools. If you work on embedded systems, you'll almost certainly use a GCC cross-complier, for instance.
What a lot of people on both sides of this discussion forget is that the majority of programmers don't write software that ends up in retail stores. They write software specific to a single business (or a class of businesses). Their code may be so tied up in specific business rules that it wouldn't make sense to transfer it to another shop, even if it was legally viable. FOSS can provide good building blocks for this type of software, even if the final result stays within a single organization.
Not a typewriter
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).
He really never was anything.
He made a great piece of software, that then was stolen, and he didn't get a dime.
He might be a bit insane because of it.
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".
Agreed - the real value in a good business systems (read: internal) programmer at most companies is knowing *the business* and seeing how software/hardware can be applied to solving *business problems*. Quite frankly, little of what I write is all that technically challenging. Most of the algorithms are quite simple and time-tested approaches to solving problems. The hard part is figuring out what the business behaviour should be, what data needs to be gathered to drive it, and how best to interact with the users.
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
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 ?!
They must have did what Google did in China concerning, for example, "tank man".
Because those videos are still on youtube for me.
Geoip is fun. Who cares are human rights when you can safely hide things for some, and hide that you have hidden them for others. Now excuse me while I'm going to search for my tin-foil hat.
Software creates wealth.
Business model determines who gets that wealth.
FOSS gives all wealth to the consumer.
Proprietary software give some wealth to consumer and some to producer.
When I first started with computers and programming, it was on Unix systems mostly, where software either came preinstalled with the OS or was free. Lots of free games proliferated on USENET, or DECnet tapes, or other user group distributions. Then I got an Amiga computer, and there was a huge amount of free software, of all varieties. No one ever said "free and open source", and RMS was just the Emacs guy. When there was shareware it was almost always of the "pay what you feel is appropriate and can afford" style.
Then I got a PC and everything changed. The lowliest application written in BASIC that didn't work might come with a Shareware README file that said "I learned how to program by writing this utility, please send me $15 to compensate me for my time." Then there was cripple ware, nag ware, and all sorts of obnoxious stuff, much of it buggy and difficult to use. No one seemed to write programs as part of a community or to have fun or to share stuff they wrote as a hobby; they all seemed to program because they thought they could make money at it. There were exceptions of course, but often they seemed like ports from other platforms. In short, the "community" just seemed a lot more selfish and greedy on average.
Over time I just branded this as the "PC mentality". So now I'm lumping this Tetris guy into the same camp.
Open source and free projects are great when you benefit from them and really suck when your a business selling something that others give away for free.
:)
In many domains it only takes 10% effort to create an implementation useable to a large portion of people who are happy to pay nothing for it. The remaining 90% of the implementation effort represents very hard work necessary to win the smaller subset who absoultely need quality implementation, scalability, configurability, ease of use..etc.
For example MySQL works great for many people and in many different scenarios everyones happy with it. Having said that it doesn't hold a candle to the MSSQL, DB2 and Oracles of the world on technical merits. Those companies loose sales to inferior products because many people just need that initial 10%. It works out in the end because many of the 10% people have no money anyway and those needing the 100% solution happily give hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I compete on a commercial basis with several open source projects directly and we are successful by providing a technically superior product which also happens to be much easier to use and install. We would be rich if the FOSS competition didn't exist
There is a give and take in everything but ultimately open source, especially public domain codes are better for the world because they push commercial companies to produce products faster, cheaper, better and at the same time shared knowledge and standing on the shoulders/work/whatever of others is the only way technology can progress.
What was established as fact was the tactics MS used to prevent Be from getting drivers for hardware... among other things MS did to kill their competition. You really should read the finds of fact ruling for the MS trial. There's a lot of eye-openers in it.
Well, I see it as related to Communism. There is no private ownership of the production tools (that is, code), and everything is released to the public. It is not the same as what you had in USSR for two reasons:
1) Software, unlike most valuables, can be reproduced at practically no cost, there is no need for coupons...
2) The USSR economy was to Communism what MS practice is to Capitalism.
Of course, it is possible that as I'm a Communist and you're a Capitalist, I see free software as Communism and you see at as Capitalism...
Alas, I made the mistake of picking a few expensive examples. I should have used things like "a fountain pen" or "a pair of hiking boots". Wealth is THINGS. It's not money. "Creating wealth" is MAKING THINGS. Whatever you make - software, music, steel, bricks. All of them are wealth. Selling something is NOT creating wealth, though.
Yes, not everything is of value to everyone. If I'm starving on a mountaintop in Canada, a Hybrid Prius will do me little good, if any. Unless its upholstery is edible. But a bag of wheat will mean quite a lot. But, all in all, wealth is about THINGS.
Income, on the other hand, is about IOU's. Which can be redeemed for things, but which aren't things in themselves. Note that high income doesn't imply high wealth, though the two are closely tied in a "normal" economy. In a place like Zimbabwe, the two are almost completely disjoint - all the income in the world can't buy non-existant maize, gasoline, anasthetics, etc.
And if all the factories that make things stop doing so, all the income in the world won't stop everyone from becoming neo-neolithic savages.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"