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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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?
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?
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.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.
You must be new here....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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"
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).
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.
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?
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
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 ?!
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!!
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..."