Sun's McNealy Wants Obama to Push Open Source

CWmike writes to tell us that Sun's Scott McNealy is pushing for the Obama administration to adopt a much more open-source friendly policy similar to what has been done in Denmark, the UK, and other countries. "Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government -- particularly Linux and Sun's own products, Solaris and Java -- McNealy believes many government officials don't understand it, fear it and even oppose it for ideological reasons. McNealy cited an open-source development project that Sun worked on with the US Department of Health and Human Services, during which a federal official said 'that open source was anti-capitalist.' That sentiment, McNealy fears, is not unusual or isolated."

Comments

Anti-capitalist?

[Shark4126]

Remind me again how much money Firefox nets each year...

Re:Anti-capitalist?

[TopSpin]

This is McNealy quoting an unnamed "federal official" regarding an unnamed project at some arbitrary point in the past. Feel free to go all pretzel like over it if you wish, but it seems far more likely to me that any lack of progress "open source" (however McNealy defines that...) has made is more likely due to cozy relationships between politicians their favorite vendors than the ideological hang-ups of some bureaucrat.

I've developed software as a DOD contractor. It's a very big government so I can't claim to speak for every case, but my experience was that the DOD doesn't give a flying **** what licenses are involved in their systems. They want it Tuesday. Right, wrong, whatever... Tuesday.

But hey, it's Friday and beating up on fictional government merchantilists is fun.

Washington DC: masters of technology

[MrEricSir]

I've heard rumors on the internets that open source helps unclog the tubes.

Re:Washington DC: masters of technology

[Anonymous Coward]

i read that too. I don't remember the website number, though.

Capitalism vs. Communism

[AKAImBatman]

One of the key issues here is a huge misunderstanding of why the US clings to capitalism. Regardless of anything else, communism and/or socialism in their many forms are the ideal forms of society. If humans were never selfish and always worked for the betterment of everyone, there would be no need for anything like money, wealth, or capitalism.

The problem is that humans are not perfect. Even the best of us attribute more value to our selves or our families than random strangers. Thus a system is required that meets the challenges of an imperfect society. The most natural form of such a system is a risk/reward system where work is done with the expectation of a possible reward. This is, for better or for worse, capitalism. While it may be a long way from an ideal solution, it is a solution that works.

However, just having such a system does not prevent humans from striving for the benefits of cooperation and community strength. Co-ops, condominiums, small towns, and civic centers are just a few examples of ideas which obtain their strength from the community rather than the individual. Open Source is yet another example of such ideals. An opportunity where working together can strengthen the whole.

If there was one way to sum it up, it would be "Together we stand. Divided we fall." Because at some point everyone, even enemies, have to work together if they want to move forward. Open Source just happens to be the technological way of working together. :-)

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Elektroschock]

Just watch the 1960 Kennedy vs. Nixon debate on youtube: Freedom or slavery. It is exactly that superficial view. Everyone was shocked when Bush introduced the terms good and evil in foreign policy.

The American public has been brainwashed with capitalism as a religion while vendors rob their governmental budget.

All nations are today mixed societies, several tools and institutional instruments.

They talk about free market but don't understand market theory. In a free market the license costs of software converge against zero because of non-rivalous consumption. This is why open source reflects a better allocation.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Samschnooks]

Even if humans were never selfish and always worked for the betterment of everyone, communism/socialism doesn't adequately handle scarce resources.

Thank you! The Tragedy of the Commons is a perfect example of what happens when everyone or no one owns a resource. Also, there hasn't been any economic system that has been as successful as Capitalism. And there hasn't been any country that has had a successful Communist political system.

But, the OP posted a brilliant hedge: he italicized "ideal"; which means, all of our posts disputing his claims are for naught.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[evanbd]

There's another problem with communism. Suppose everyone *was* completely altruistic. They all want to do what would be best for society. What should they do? The resource allocation problem is *immense*. The computational resources to solve it didn't *exist* until recently; now that they (probably) do, I don't think we have the mathematical understanding to solve it well even so.

So, how would you decide what everyone should be doing? Enlightened self interest is one answer to the optimization problem. I'm quite willing to believe it's imperfect, but I'm also far from convinced we know how to do better, even starting from the rather fantastical assumption of rational but altruistic people.

I note that this is a problem of scale -- within a family, tribe, co-op, or commune, it's relatively straightforward to solve the problem with reasonable efficiency in a purely manual fashion. When you scale it up to towns, cities, nations, or the world, though, it becomes intractable.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Dolda2000]

One of the key issues here is a huge misunderstanding of why the US clings to capitalism. Regardless of anything else, communism and/or socialism in their many forms are the ideal forms of society. If humans were never selfish and always worked for the betterment of everyone, there would be no need for anything like money, wealth, or capitalism.

Please tell me; why should people work for the betterment of the whole of human society rather than for themselves? Why should people do things that do not benefit themselves?

Open Source just happens to be the technological way of working together. :-)

I would argue against that. At least for my part, when I publish programs that I have written as open source, it is for perfectly selfish reasons.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[AKAImBatman]

why should people work for the betterment of the whole of human society rather than for themselves?

Who said it's an either/or? Communal work usually benefits everyone including the person doing the work. The problem is that the benefits are not always obvious or easy to internalize. Whereas, "I do X, I get back [money|food|power|etc.]" is a very simple concept that very few people struggle with.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Chabo]

I would argue against that. At least for my part, when I publish programs that I have written as open source, it is for perfectly selfish reasons.

Same. When I started FlacSquisher (shameless plug, I know), it was because I wanted a mass-transcoding tool that was aware of what work had already been done. I had installed Rockbox on my Sansa a couple months earlier, and wanted to transcode my FLACs to Oggs easily so I could play them on the Sansa. If I had bought an 80GB player instead of a 2GB player, I would've just used the FLACs, cause I could've fit my entire music collection. Then I never would've written the program. As it was, I only just implemented MP3 tagging a couple weeks ago because I never encoded to MP3, so in my own usage model it just wasn't necessary.

I suspect that most FOSS projects are the same -- driven by a personal need or desire by the original dev for some functionality not already provided by an existing piece of software, and just coding what they'd want to get out of it.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[phunster]

I have to disagree with you. The examples you give are all commercial entities, except of course for small towns which are government entities. Much of America is already running Socialistic enterprises. Lets start with police departments, they are paid for with our tax money and they protect us. When you call the police, they don't ask for a credit card number. Further, all of these alarm companies profit from the existence of police departments, when the alarm goes off the police respond not the alarm company, yet the alarm company profits. Fire departments they don't bill you for responding to a fire at your home or business. Schools again socialized, yes you pay taxes, but the government provides the schools, the teachers, the school itself, athletic fields, etc. Not convinced, what about all the the rural electric companies owned by local and regional governments. I could go on and on.

The point is that much of what we do in America would be called Socialism if it didn't exist and was proposed today. I think the real problem is that so many people are stuck giving "ism" names to things they don't even understand, and then favoring one "ism" over another regardless of its utility to the problem at hand.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[psnyder]

ideal forms of society

There would be a need for food, shelter, clothes, and, some may argue, medical care. So we need a source of those 4 things for our whole families.

We've come such a long way with efficiency recently that many, many people are supported by the few people that farm, build homes, make clothes, and make and administer health care. Everything above that is superfluous and simply adds variety to our lives.

The other things needed in a society I'd like to live in are a system that protects the personal freedoms of my family and friends, and also protects us from mentally deranged people that would physically harm us. Hence, something akin to police and basic laws.

Finally, as with the medical care argument, I wouldn't mind some disaster relief from fires, earthquakes, etc.


It would be nice to see a time when we become so efficient in these things that we'll only need a handful of volunteers (like a volunteer fire department) to run all of these. But that includes volunteers (or robots) to mine materials, repair & build machinery, transport things, make them accessible to everyone, etc. But there needs to be some way to ensure that these systems don't break down or stall due to some volunteer's whim.

As of right now, we live in a society where every individual can achieve these basic things with relatively little effort. The effort is so minimal that many people spend a lot of time and money (the extra value of their work) on things like TVs, computers, fancy (rather than basic) clothes, exotic foods, jewelry, and other things not necessary to survival. In fact, quite often, half or more of people's paychecks goes to things that are not basic survival, or they buy 'nicer' versions of these needs.

If you can easily provide those basic things for yourself and your family, you're living the utopian lifestyle now. However, commercials tell us how crappy our lives are, so we think we 'need' what they're selling. It's a bad part of capitalism, but if we simply don't pay attention and realize how much we really have, it's incredible! Almost all of you, looking at this from a computer, live the utopian life today.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[AKAImBatman]

The Tragedy of the Commons is a perfect example of what happens when everyone or no one owns a resource.

The Tragedy of the Commons happens because of human self-interest and imperfection. Which was the exact point I made. Communal living falls flat on its face because of human self-interest. Capitalism works because it plays to the self-interest of mankind, not because it is a superior way to live.

And yet, how much effort do we humans put into creating "communities"? Perhaps because community is a very good thing, even if we must balance our need for a community against our own self-interests. ;-)

But, the OP posted a brilliant hedge: he italicized "ideal"; which means, all of our posts disputing his claims are for naught.

Or more to the point, because the "ideal" I refer to is simply unrealistic. It would be nice if the universe always worked the way we wanted it to. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So we have to accept that the ivory tower ideal is not the same as the real-world practical. Which isn't to say that there isn't quite a bit of middle ground...

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Dolda2000]

Who said it's an either/or?

To be fair, it is you who introduced the dichotomy; let me quote: "If humans were never selfish and always worked for the betterment of everyone". My problem with that statement is its implication that it is somehow bad when people are being selfish. However, as you yourself write;

Communal work usually benefits everyone including the person doing the work. The problem is that the benefits are not always obvious or easy to internalize.

Which is quite correct. However, when that happens, people work on it together because of their own, selfish interesting in getting done whatever it is that needed to get done. They do not do it for the purpose of "the betterment of everyone"; they do it because they, themselves and individually, benefit from it. To go on:

The most natural form of such a system is a risk/reward system where work is done with the expectation of a possible reward. This is, for better or for worse, capitalism.

You misunderstand capitalism, it seems. Capitalism is not a "system where work is done with the expectation of a possible reward". It is not a pre-planned system at all, to begin with. It is simply the natural consequence of a society where people are free to trade services with each other for whatever purpose and value they individually get to decide. This is the ideal form of society.

You claim that communism and/or socialism is the ideal form of society, and I would like to meet that statement somehow, but unfortunately I cannot, because typically when I ask 10 people what communism or socialism is, I get 15 different answers. I can however assert that people should definitely be selfish, because only then can they move forward.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[TubeSteak]

The most natural form of such a system is a risk/reward system where work is done with the expectation of a possible reward. This is, for better or for worse, capitalism. While it may be a long way from an ideal solution, it is a solution that works.

Capitalism doesn't work.

It briefly flourished in America during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (and was the driving force behind industrialization) because the Federal Government gave corporations all the rope they needed. Then, very publicly, the Government hung the corporations, broke up their monopolies, and regulated the shit out of a formerly free marketplace. Minimum wages, unions, regulations of unions, child labor laws, etc etc etc.

What exists in the USA is a mixed economy that leans towards Capitalism.
If you go back a hundred years and explain to 1909 what the future looks like, they'd say we were all socialists.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[nine-times]

The Tragedy of the Commons happens because of human self-interest and imperfection.

I think it's also worth noting that there's no clear way that the "tragedy of the commons" applies to open source software. It can't really be over-used or used-up by any of the owners. Your use doesn't hamper my use.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Daniel Dvorkin]

But there's more to doing an open source project that just writing the code. You could have written your program, kept it to yourself, and never bothered with choosing a license, putting it up on Sourceforge, etc. Or you could have decided that it was useful enough that people would pay for it, and tried to sell it as proprietary software. If you say you have a selfish reason for doing it as OSS, I believe you, but it's not clear from your post what that reason is -- "a personal need or desire by the original dev for some functionality not already provided by an existing piece of software" doesn't cover it.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[FlyingBishop]

Code is an abundant resource.

Furthermore, in economic terms, code is non-subtractable. My use of code does not diminish your use of it. It is an ideal thing to put in a communal pot.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[rohan972]

Perhaps because community is a very good thing, even if we must balance our need for a community against our own self-interests. ;-)

You don't have to balance community against your own self-interest, community is one of those things in your self-interest. So you balance your efforts at obtaining one thing that is in your interest with the other things that are in your interest. It is in my best interest to have workable relationships with neighbors etc.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[burnin1965]

If you are running a business in the new Capitalist China and you prescribe to the new Greed is Good mentality you suspect that you can get away with watering down the milk and adding Melamine to make the protein count look good and sell more product at a lower price than competitors. Unfortunately the plan backfires and Sanlu Group is bankrupted by the scandal and the one time entrepreneur Tian Wenhua is sentenced to life imprisonment. The communist government tries to cover up the incident and amazingly points fingers at other countries but in the end it was the capitalist entrepreneurs that chose to taint their product with Melamine, not the communist government.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[Dolda2000]

Why should I help a blind stranger to cross the street? Why should I call police when I see someone else being robbed? Why should I tip the delivery boy? Why should I explain some stranger the way?

Because I behave like I would want others to behave. Because I think the world is a much better place to live when people are helpful, generous and . Because I am not a sociopath.

Thank you for proving my point: Obviously, you do it for selfish reasons. Per your own admission, you do it partly because you wish others to learn from your example and reap the benefits of reciprocal action, and partly because it makes you feel good ("because I am not a sociopath").

There is, as I've explained elsewhere in the thread, nothing that prevents selfish action from also benefiting others. The difference lies mainly in knowing that, ultimately, you do everything for selfish reasons, and there's no reason for being hypocritical about it.

Re:Capitalism vs. Communism

[davecb]

Fire departments they don't bill you for responding to a fire at your home or business. Schools again socialized, yes you pay taxes, but the government provides the schools, the teachers, the school itself, athletic fields, etc. Not convinced, what about all the the rural electric companies owned by local and regional governments.

These three services were actually privately provided at first: Benjamin Franklin started a commercial fire company, schools were restrictively private in the old British "public school" system copied by the American colonies, and power companies were often private enterprises in my father's day, even up here in Soviet Canuckistan (;-))

None of them stayed private: the competition between fire companies caused widespread public revulsion, as did the restriction of schooling to only the upper class in egalitarian America, and power companies didn't scale. One died because they were seen as immoral, the second as a conscious choice of the voting (and school-bond-buying) public and the third from technical reasons.

--dave

Re:Oh, terrific

[TheRaven64]

Lord Tebbit once said this to me:

You can judge a man by his enemies. I'm very proud of all of my enemies, and I wouldn't want to lose a single one.

Comments like yours remind me of this. To collect detractors like you, he must be doing something right.

Re:Oh, terrific

[Chabo]

Then Bush must be our all-time best president!

I agree

[DaMattster]

Open source makes for the best way to achieve President Obama's goals of transparency. Open source ensures a standards based method that will allow everyone to access government websites, information, and portals. No longer do you need to be tied into the M$ quagmire to conduct government business. If M$ won't open its software and standards, folks like Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and others will. You will have a choice of products to use.

Scary idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some good examples are IBM's JT400 toolkit (jt400.sourceforge.net), Java and Firefox of course, and some examples like the jtds driver that outperforms Microsoft's own. (jtds.sourceforge.net) Some may argue that OpenOffice is superior to program for as well.

Lets not forget the Knoppix cds that are used specifically for tightening network security.

If the government gets more on-board it will be a great contribution at least for motivation behind Linux. We'd also see some inevitable contributions as they assign their resources to projects like Wine for interoperability, Pidgin for communication, Nagios for enterprise monitoring and starts exploring Lotus or enterprise groupware apps for Linux.

The scary thing would be the amount of potential leverage it could give FOSS for stuff like patent suits. It could actually make the government bias in the opposite direction!

-Tres

Re:It's not just open source that is suffering

[chuckymonkey]

This was fine up until about 70 years ago. People felt better about having a stodgy old politician in office before then because the times really didn't change as much as they have in recent years. That's one unfortunate side effect of the tech explosion of the last few decades, people just cannot keep up, so you have politicians in office that are only vaguely aware that this thing made of tubes called the intarwebs even exists. Most of them do not realize just how much of a game changer it is. The Internet is just one example, look at things like stem cell research, nuclear energy, or other forms of energy and you see a trend.

Anti-capitalist? Sure, why not.

[the white plague]

open-source development project ... during which a federal official said "that open source was anti-capitalist."

OSS is anti-capitalist if when you say 'capitalist' you really mean 'Plutocracy'.

"Anti-capitalist"

[Anonymous Coward]

In 15 years' time, it will be "don't terrorists use open source?"

Re:Well, it's not PRO-capitalism, that's for sure

[QuasiEvil]

Or it's at least counter-intuitively capitalist...

The conventional, straight-forward capitalist thinking is to tightly control access to the resource (software) to create scarcity, and thus control the price. He does this for his own profit, as well as to cover his costs (capitalist programmers, overhead, etc).

The open source capitalist realizes that economic theory dictates that prices of software will trend towards zero, as there are very few barriers to entering the market. Any reasonably trained goon can write software (not necessarily good software, but something that gets the job done). The open source thinkers are searching elsewhere for markets with higher barriers to entry, such as support, customization, integration, etc. - things where the cost of entry is a fair amount of background knowledge and experience.

Re:In today's world...

[AmericanGladiator]

I agree with you in part. Lawyers and software should almost never cross paths. The tag Imaginary Property on Slashdot always makes me smile.

You should read "The Millionaire Next Door". It is a study of high net-worth Americans. One of the shockers is that a majority of them were self-made. I have to prefer a system that is dynamic and allows people to rise and fall based on their own work ethic and risk-taking.

The current economic problems all stem from risk being pushed into the banking system. If banks had to service the loans they originated (this is one major cause of today's problems), we wouldn't be in this mess. They were more than happy to originate "liar loans" because they weren't the ones having to collect the monthly payments. It all became collateralized and the whole system then bore the risks.

Capitalism and risk-taking are good, as long as you are the one bearing the consequence and potentially reaping the rewards for the risk.

Yeah let's put HaikuOS and AROS in the White House

[Orion Blastar]

Let us see if the federal government can work on a 100% open source software solution using real open source operating systems and software applications.

Open source is not Communism, Open Source is freedom and Democracy as our founding fathers saw it. One can be free to choose any OS or software they want and still get work done, and not be tied down to just one vendor.

Push Open Source? It should read more like "Support Open Source" so we don't get confused with Microsoft pushing Windows on us all.

Re:Oh, terrific

[Anonymous Coward]

The meaning of the quote has to do not with the number of enemies, but the type of people who are enemies. The troll is, well, a troll. I'd be glad to count him as an enemy too.

Open source and even free software is very capital

[Jessta]

during which a federal official said "that open source was anti-capitalist."

I always find it strange that people come to that conclusion, it's a very narrow view of capitalism.
Open source and even free software is very capitalist. Capitalism is about an evolving market that is based on competition, open source software allows for a huge amount of competition because it's very easy to get in to the market.

Building a modern operating system requires a lot of resources, thus only a select few large companies have the resources to build one.
But there is a wide variety of things within the development and support of software where companies could compete.

eg. support contracts, patch timeframes, deployment and custom configuration etc.

Development of the software in the first place is a very small piece of that pie and without the source code and the ability to modify and distribute it only one company gets to compete in that huge market, which is very bad for the consumer.

- Jesse McNelis

It's not a matter of capitalism vs. communism

[deanston]

... or idealists vs. realists... all these simple categories are already out-dated. The old scams are failing us left and right, whether they are from the Left or Right. Nobody has figured out the right FOSS business model yet. We need some fresh ideas or at least the Next Bubble.

One thing's for sure, when all the cyber attacks are coming from countries shielded behind custom Unix/Linux variants, the Feds will have no choice but to recruit similar skills to protect the government and consumer systems in the West.

Better summation: Love doesn't scale

[SuperKendall]

Full credit to Eric S. Raymond.

However, just having such a system does not prevent humans from striving for the benefits of cooperation and community strength. Co-ops, condominiums, small towns, and civic centers are just a few examples of ideas which obtain their strength from the community rather than the individual.

Related to the quote above, you'll notice that all those things are examples of smallish groups of people acting together. Those ideas often work great on a local scale.

The moment you step outside the scope where you can easily remember the names of everyone involved, inherently we start to care less about those than the ones we know, and prefer. Which is why socialism simply doesn't work for governments, even if intentions are good.

Re:It's not just open source that is suffering

[Daniel Dvorkin]

This was fine up until about 70 years ago. People felt better about having a stodgy old politician in office before then because the times really didn't change as much as they have in recent years.

70 years ago was 1939. Are you seriously going to argue that the world is changing more rapidly now than it was at the beginning of World War Two?

People who shout about how fast modern technology is changing the world really ought to pay more attention to history. We've been going from one technological revolution to another for a couple of centuries. Pretty much anyone born since 1800 or so has seen a completely different world, technologically and in many other ways, in their adulthood than the one they saw in their youth. And existing power structures have really never been able to keep up.

This is a vendor's current strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

"... a federal official said 'that open source was anti-capitalist."

You should know that a certain vendor is actively, actively pushing this position as we speak. I recently witnessed a high-level official from this not-too-open-source-friendly vendor try to push that perspective in a private meeting with government officials, that they should not use open source because open source will crash our whole economy.

You and I may call it FUD, but I've seen it in action (made me want to puke) and they call it "lobbying." The media says this vendor is "cozying up to open source"? Yeah, riiiighhhttt.

Re:Sun who?

[burnin1965]

Apple.

See where open source can lead.
BSD --> NeXT --> OSX --> AAPL

McNealy should start by looking in a mirror, first

[tmp31416]

Considering how badly Sun is handling OpenOffice & MySQL (and any other FLOSS projects they might be involved with), they should start by trying to *truly* understand what FLOSS is and how be be good citizens of the FLOSS "universe" before they do anything else. I mean, ensuring OO code is purposely obfuscated and almost discouraging external help on the project?

They make Apple, IBM and even Intel look very good as FLOSS developers/contributors.