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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.'"
Details at eleven.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
from a Microsoft employee?
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.
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!
Tetris was originally designed as a training tool for late Soviet-era transport interests. The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
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.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
You use Steve Jobs as the extreme for closed source software?
Are you sure you can't think of someone more...qualified?
Actually I can answer it simply: it makes my job as a programmer easier. I'm one of the vast majority of programmers who do not work for a company writing software for others. I write software for internal use at my company. We aren't going to sell it. We aren't going to give it away. It's never going to leave the confines of the company. And F/OSS gives me easy options. I need an HTTP library? Grab Curl. I need a SOAP library? Grab gSOAP. SSL? Grab OpenSSL. Printing? CUPS. XML/XSLT parsing/processing? Xerces and Xalan. And having gotten that utility software out of the way, I can proceed on to the business-specific stuff that my company really wants me to be working on.
Yes, we could buy commercial libraries for all those things. But those commercial libraries come with hefty costs for things we aren't going to use, have license restrictions attached like how many copies we can have installed that have to be managed, and have very poor support when it comes to bug-fixes and support for exotic hardware/OS platforms. F/OSS simply gives us far fewer headaches and costs us fewer dollars to use. When we need it somewhere, we just install another copy and we're good to go. All we have to watch out for is redistribution of our software outside the company, and that's easy since it's not supposed to happen.
Yes, F/OSS is very bad for programmers who make their living selling software commercially to others to use. But that's like saying that the advent of the automobile was very bad for the people who made horse-drawn wagons, carriages and such, and the people who bred and sold horses to pull them: it pretty much meant the end of most of their business. But those people were a small minority compared to the number of people who merely used wagons and carriages, and now trucks and automobiles, to move cargo and people around.
This joke is never obligatory! Will you people finally let it go?
I for one welcome our humorless overlords.
Farewell sweet, sweet karma
I like my beverages with warning labels!
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry. Obviously you didn't see the BBC documentary on Tetris (it's available on YouTube - can't provide a link right now). Alex created it as a variant of a popular board game with a couple extra twists according to the documentary. It then started selling, and only later did the USSR find out about it - after it had already swept through the USSR and other countries wanted to buy it. The USSR's software group ended up sole-sourcing the market to Nintendo through some interesting twists, which through Atari for a spin as they had already pumped a lot of money into their own version of Tetris since they thought they had licensed it for the PC. Quite a good documentary.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.
I'd figure the easiest way to do that would be to get rid of all the L-, T- and S-shaped shipping containers.
The enemies of Democracy are
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever