FSF Suggests That Google Free Gmail Javascript

Phoe6 writes "Apparently, FSF is calling it a 'JavaScript Trap' and wants 'useful websites' such as Gmail and others such as Twitter, Facebook to release their JavaScript code under Free Software License so that users can trust their service."

Comments

In other news..

[LordStormes]

FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.

Re:In other news..

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, except for Red Hat, which last I checked was neither being bought out nor in any financial trouble.

Re:In other news..

[h4rr4r]

And why redhat makes a billion a year, oh wait. FOSS had nothing to do with Sun going under. Sun was dieing long before that.

Re:In other news..

[characterZer0]

Java was not a failure. Monetizing Java was a failure. The difference is significant.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Java itself is quite successful. It was the horrid mismanagement of Sun that was the failure.

Re:In other news..

[hduff]

FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.

Yes, "free" as in the concept of freedom or liberty, not software at no charge or profit.

You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it.

Oh, I see you're in marketing . . .

Re:In other news..

[LordStormes]

Java is still a thriving community today, and Android ensures it will be for a long time to come.

Re:In other news..

[the linux geek]

Yeah... after all, it's only the most widely-used programming language in the world, having passed COBOL a few years ago.

Moron...

Re:In other news..

[abulafia]

That's not informative, that's completely wrong. Sun was open source friendly from the start. Just for starters (I think this was the first large one) where do you think nfs came from?

Re:In other news..

[gstoddart]

Comments like that really call into question whether anyone should ever believe anything you post. Redhat's latest financials reported $107 million in earnings for fiscal 2011.

That's profits I believe. In terms of earnings, I think it is close to a billion.

Depending on what context, it is valid to say that Red Hat "makes a billion a year". In terms of revenue, it's getting there.

Re:In other news..

[MozeeToby]

It would go a long ways in these conversations if people would switch to 'Libre' and 'Gratis'. "free != Free" doesn't really explain how he is wrong, libre (freedom) != gratis (no charge) at least makes the difference between the terms more obvious.

Re:In other news..

[brit74]

FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.

Yes, "free" as in the concept of freedom or liberty, not software at no charge or profit. You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it. Oh, I see you're in marketing . . .

Or maybe you're the one in marketing. It's completely obvious that the phrase "free as in freedom, not free as in beer" is a flat-out false statement. It be accurate, it should be restated as "free as in freedom, AND free as in beer". Here's what the FSF says:

"When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”"

Notice the phrase "to redistribute copies" - that's "free as in beer". The FSF wants to paint is as a "freedom" issue when they're also smuggling in "free" under that banner.

Re:In other news..

[dgatwood]

Yes, "free" as in the concept of freedom or liberty, not software at no charge or profit.

That's a nice theory, but it doesn't work in practice. There is no way to make software that can be easily bug fixed by the end user that cannot also be easily enhanced by the end user, and commercial software fundamentally relies on being able to get money from the consumer for new features.

This basically leaves support contracts as the only practical revenue stream. That works fine if you are writing software for businesses (who want someone to sue). That also works fine if your software is so poorly written that you can make money on technical support, at least up until the point that somebody writes new software that doesn't suck or releases patches that fix your mess.

In general, though, once you give up the source code, you've lost control. From that point on, if you don't make the improvements that the customers want, they can go to someone else for improvements, and you no longer have a revenue stream from upgrades.

Thus, in practice, "Free" software is almost inherently "free" as in beer. The alternative is simply unsustainable, no matter how much the propagandists try to claim otherwise. RedHat and a handful of others are simply the exception that proves the rule.

Re:In other news..

[dgatwood]

Actually, free is a proper superset of Free. By definition, all Free software is free, but not all free software is Free. The freedom to redistribute freely ensures this. Even without that freedom, however, it would still be largely true in practice.

Re:In other news..

[h4rr4r]

That is profit, try looking into revenue.

Comments like that really call into question whether anyone should ever believe anything you post, since you probably already knew that.

Re:In other news..

[the_hellspawn]

You know red green. That Canadian guy that shows up on PBS. Funny guy he is.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, "free" as in the concept of freedom or liberty, not software at no charge or profit.

You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it.

Oh, I see you're in marketing . . .

Actually, you embarrass yourself by sounding like a high school sophomore who just learned the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech and now can't wait to find some way to show off his newfound knowledge.

Re:In other news..

[calzones]

So what?

Really... so what? Red Hat is stable and exists as it does perfectly fine. This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.

Red Hat and Apple can exist at the same time regardless of size or popularity. All that matters for Red Hat is that they make enough money to support keeping it's employees working and the business around to keep offering what makes its customers happy year in and year out. Suggesting that they are somehow less valid because they are not as big as Apple or Microsoft is a non-sequitor in the context of the preceding discussion.

What is relevant to the preceding discussion is the question of whether making a living by being in the "OSS industry" can be a viable practice. The answer is clearly "yes."

Re:In other news..

[nstlgc]

Are you saying COBOL is not a failure?

Re:In other news..

[h4rr4r]

Because money is the only goal in life?

Re:In other news..

[ivucica]

Sometimes it's hard to make a distinction.

I'm always looking for ways to be supportive of FSF's stances, but they are a puritan organization. As such, they present views that they know won't gain mainstream acceptance but that's ok, since something more reasonable will gain it. And that's where I stand: I don't consider words of FSF to be holy, but I will support a more "secular" view.

Same here. It's unreasonable to consider an offering "libre" to be truly possible without being fully "unpaid". Not because they are linguistically indistinct concepts, but because they are not to be expected. Licensing schemes, as they exist today for end users, typically allow software that costs thousands to develop (if not monetary, then in food) to be available for lower prices. "Splitting the cost."

Software needs funding before it exists. It's unreasonable to offer people a "donation jar" to fund software that doesn't exist yet and is unproven. Rare examples of success are not always truly success. Most software is funded a-priori in good faith that somehow one can pay it back. How? By selling a-posteriori. Selling software that must be freely copyable by the recipient is possible, and explicitly supported by FSF, this is rarely feasible nowadays if developing software is your primary work in life. This is because you will rarely have the success of Blender in order to sell other merchandise. A lot of work done under free software platforms is done by volunteers, but a lot of highest quality work is done by companies that have other means of earning money. It's really hard to get quality software written fast when it's not your primary thing in life and with free software, it's hard to make it a primary thing. And if you can't think of writing free software as of a profession because you don't have the financial backing to write free software, FSF bluntly says you shouldn't think of it as your profession. I can't dig it out right now, but it's either somewhere on FSF's site, on GNU site, or on Stallman.org.

It's easy to pretend "libre" isn't followed by "unpaid". It's also easy to see that it's just a pretense. Let's hope that FSF's list of high priority projects does prove me wrong, that you indeed can stick out a donation jar and expect the money to flow a-priori. Because then I will indeed dedicate myself to working on tons of free software projects that I've either started already, or just wanted to work on. I want to work on a good blogging tool for GNU/Linux and Mac. Can I get a-priori funding for that? Or is it easier to dismiss pride and ideals and just sell on the Mac App Store, not opening the source since something like this might happen?

Re:In other news..

[nstlgc]

Explain to me how to make those things "free" without making them free of charge.

Re:In other news..

[rubycodez]

NFS was very flawed and no suitable for serious business use until very recently, so a token release of such source code doesn't make Sun "open source friendly" when 99% of their code base was closed tighter than a clam for decades. Sun was 95% open source hostile for most of their existence until the too little too late finally stopped bad mouthing Linux and stopped making deals worth millions with SCO Group, and tried to get on the train. They richly deserved their utter failure as the dot-com boom of late 90s made them cocky and slack off

Re:In other news..

[Nerdfest]

That's it. Some people don't seem to believe in the concept of 'enough money'.

Re:In other news..

[Mazzie]

Free as in free to turn you car in to a hot rod and re-sell it to someone else if you feel like it. Closed source software is a car with the hood welded shut that you aren't allowed to fix if the engine dies, or resell if you need the money to buy movie tickets.

Re:In other news..

[kangsterizer]

Except unlike you, FSF is actually making sense - of course, the apps will not get open source, but it will sensibilize the people a little more, each time they do such "PR" announce.

Eventually enough people would realize that open source is good - that's FSF's goal - and some of these apps could be built open source instead.

Now if you like open source or not is another story, of course. I'll just mention that RedHat is doing extremely well. Proprietary companies are going down every single day. Some open source companies too. Some other succeed. Some being open source, some being proprietary, some a bit of both. Film at 11.

Re:In other news..

[dkleinsc]

GP also seems to be ignoring IBM, which is doing just fine.

Re:In other news..

[geekoid]

Are you saying it is? Because you would be wrong.

Re:In other news..

[Gaygirlie]

I personally love F/OSS, both as a movement and as software, but even I acknowledge that F/OSS way is simply non-sustainable for most companies. You said it quite well, but allow me to say it differently: you need to be constantly pushing out features and upgrades in order to stay afloat, and the more popular your software gets the more there will be competing projects with eventually more developers than you can afford to hire for your own team, and that's when your income plummets.

Red Hat for example is ages old and when they began their work it simply wasn't as easy as it is now for people from all parts of the world to download stuff and collaborate. But now if you get in the business and release your first, single product out in the open it'll most likely be picked up by atleast some people the same instant. Ie. Red Hat had the luxury of really good timing to get in the business and nowadays they are big enough to be able to sustain themselves; a small newcomer simply doesn't have the financial status or market weight to get themselves moving and sustain it nowadays if they plan to go F/OSS route.

Re:In other news..

[geekoid]

And that doesn't also mean corporation can sell it.

Re:In other news..

[bjohnso5]

I'm not sure how you could consider COBOL a failure, as many of (at least Canada's) biggest financial institutions rely on it to keep their back-end mainframe systems running. Just because something is old and unwieldy doesn't consign it to the equivalent of the Walmart bargain DVD bin.

Re:In other news..

[alienzed]

Java is just so damn slow. Otherwise it's no better or worse than the languages it sought to replace. Software portability is the jack of all trades, master of none. What people really want is the master, that's why Microsoft is losing ground in every core business segment; they keep trying to be everything to everybody and so they are satisfying no one in the process.

Re:In other news..

[TheReal_sabret00the]

Sun was the victim of the horrible management of a sub-par business model. Releasing the JS from GMail doesn't affect the business model because there is none other than reaping in maximum profit from displaying ads inline. Look at Mozilla, that's doing just fine and in fact expanding well within it's means to create a larger sustainable business model that is competing against larger more financially capable businesses.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

To my knowledge, it's mostly failed now, since it's not used for anything new any more and is being phased out of most places. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a success. It was widely used for a very long time. By the parent's logic, the Ford Model T was a "failure" because no one uses them any more, even though they revolutionized affordable automobiles and sold many millions.

Re:In other news..

[dkleinsc]

Software needs funding before it exists.

Not necessarily.

Unix, Linux, the GNU Project, Apache, and gazillions of other very useful bits of software were created without specifically funding them. In most cases, the software came first, the funding later. While the early developers of each of those packages used resources that had to come from somewhere, most of those resources were scrounged and repurposed stuff. All of them operated on a "write working code now, worry about logistics and organization later" system very early on.

Re:In other news..

[schnell]

This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.

I see this all the time on Slashdot but I don't see why it's a bizarre idea that companies want to grow. Many companies want to grow because it makes them more efficient - better economies of scale, better leverage with their suppliers, etc. But the main reason is just math and investment 101.

All companies are not required to grow, but public companies typically do because it makes their stock attractive. Public companies are owned by their shareholders and have a responsibility to maximize the value for their shareholders. Shareholders have their choice of companies to buy shares in, and they will pick the companies they expect to provide them the best return on their investment.

Why does growth play into it? When you buy a stock, you have paid money for it, and the way you get money back (your return on investment) is if a.) the company pays a dividend per share, or b.) you sell the stock to someone else.

If a company pays dividends, then the return on that dividend is always paying the shareholder back and provides a baseline value for the share - but dividends by themselves don't mean enough to make a huge return ... companies that don't grow but pay dividends are more like buying a savings bond, and are usually don't offer a very good long-term return. If a company doesn't pay dividends - and many tech companies don't - the only way you make money is if somebody else is willing to pay you more for that stock than you bought it for. The only way typically THAT happens is if the company grows and increases in value. Even companies that do pay dividends want to grow so they can likely grow their future dividend payments in order to provide a greater return to shareholders. At a minimum, if earnings don't grow faster than inflation, they are actually shrinking. Hence the push for growth.

So in (oversimplified) summation - growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.

Re:In other news..

[LordStormes]

I'm an active FOSS developer, so I'm all about making software free. As a director of IT for a $6M/year company, I've moved us almost 100% from MS to CentOS and other free stuff. But going to companies that makes gazillions of dollars on their proprietary software and publicly demanding they open-source their stuff is pissing in the wind, and these feeble attempts by FSF undermine the credibility of any real work they do.

As a FOSS developer, I know I only get so many hours a day to fool around with my FOSS projects, because I need to spend most of my day on stuff that pays the bills. FOSS, unless you're one of a tiny (and shrinking) handful of successful FOSS companies with powerful backing or the ability to sell support contracts (which work fine until somebody writes good docs for your stuff), doesn't keep the lights on, and that means it doesn't get the kind of dev resources it needs to compete with proprietary apps.

IMO, FSF should, in addition to cheerleading for the handful of high-profile FOSS projects that are successful (and being embarrassed by RMS acting like a complete loon and telling people to stop carrying cell phones, driving cars, or buying groceries), collect money from individuals and companies alike for the purpose of buying small companies with valuable tech (or buying the pieces of tech from them), just so that software can then be FOSS'ed. Companies that have interest in stuff being open-sourced could then contribute, with the goal of creating open standards, protecting against patent trolls, or simple innovation.

Re:In other news..

[LordStormes]

Releasing the JS from GMail doesn't affect the business model because there is none other than reaping in maximum profit from displaying ads inline.

Which is how Google makes 80% of their revenue.

Re:In other news..

[Bieeanda]

Besides Red Hat, how many other companies are in the 'OSS industry'? RH is a golden example of success, but how many others can claim to be more than merely scraping along, or haven't completely folded? One successful company isn't an industry, it's a niche.

Re:In other news..

[rtfa-troll]

This is an understatement. We continually hear that "Sun was OSS friendly"; "Sun contributed more than anyone else" etc. etc. The thing was, they did put stuff out, but they almost always did it in a way that meant they didn't join the community. Their choice to put out Solaris under the CCDL was deliberately done to make it incompatible with the Linux community and the FSF. They took ages to open up Java, and a truly GPL Java only came about because of the efforts of RedHat and others on IcedTea.

The thing about RedHat is that they manage to be consistent (even boring). They make some money related to non open source, but they always try to move in the direction of FOSS. This means that gradually, steadily more and more people start to trust them and build solutions on their stuff. Red Hat even manages to get away with not opening up things for ages simply because everyone knows they will eventually (I'm talking about their own software; not license breaches). Sun could never manage more than two months without an about-face. Look at the difference between Ubuntu and RedHat and you can see that ever since they took on their idiot former COO, Ubuntu have been losing credibility. His hire was probably more a symptom than a cause, but you could see immediately that he started blogging for open-core Ubuntu started to lose devotees.

Sun was actually worse than Oracle. With Oracle it's pretty clear where you stand. Make it financially worth their while (==Millions minimum) and they will negotiate what you want. Otherwise give only exactly what you agree to give and only in return for exactly what they promise. You are never going to end up in the situation of being screwed over by surprise.

<\rant>

Actually, as a person who remembers 6800 Suns, I just remembered what it was. The bastards who killed SunOS to inflict Solaris on us. Why couldn't you just free the source. Sun Management; AT' Never forgive. Never forget.

<\rant>

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

This basically leaves support contracts as the only practical revenue stream. That works fine if you are writing software for businesses (who want someone to sue).

This seems to be working just fine for Red Hat and others. Why waste time with individual consumers who are fickle, stupid, and above all, cheap, and are going to copy everything on BitTorrent anyway? Trying to sell something that can be copied trivially on the internet is a losing proposition, unless you also provide something else that can't be copied (like support), or make it much more convenient than trying to get it on BT. The MAFIAA still hasn't figured that out, but they've shown that the only way to sustain that business model is to use the court system to make money. This is not sustainable in the modern world. The RIAA is really hurting because it's so easy to copy their shit on BT; the MPAA is doing much better, but much of that is because movies take up FAR more space than music, especially at HD resolution, so it's really a PITA to copy them on BT and easier to just buy/rent the DVD/BD. Not so with CDs.

In general, though, once you give up the source code, you've lost control. From that point on, if you don't make the improvements that the customers want, they can go to someone for improvements, and you no longer have a revenue stream from upgrades.

Ok, and how many times has that happened? Again, this is something that sounds good in theory but doesn't work out in practice, as you pointed out yourself. Diving into someone else's codebase and trying to get a handle on it and start making nontrivial improvements on it is pretty hard, and time-consuming. It's a lot easier, faster, and probably cheaper to just hire the people who wrote it to make changes you want. If the people behind it are trying to make money on it, why on earth wouldn't they make the improvements you want, since you're offering to pay them for it? The only reason they wouldn't is because you're low-balling them, and if you're that cheap, you're not going to get anyone else to make those changes that cheaply either, for the reason I mentioned above. (It's even worse if the code is open-source but poorly or not documented/commented; I tried making some changes to Magento once for a hobby project and gave up for this reason: the code was completely inscrutable.)

Basically, your statement here is a red herring. You don't need "control" of your source code. You have control of your own development tree, and if someone wants custom changes, it's generally cheaper and easier for them to just pay you for them than to find someone else or do it themselves. If they do do it themselves, they probably have no money to pay you (e.g., they're an individual with lots of time and no funds for a hobby project).

Re:In other news..

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm not sure you really understand what kinds of problems Java is actually good at solving.

(Which aren't necessarily the problems it was originally hyped as solving.)

Re:In other news..

[metrix007]

American. Not USian, American. Retard

I say this as a non-american.

Re:In other news..

[ivucica]

While developing the software, developers at least consumed food. Hence they needed to ensure funding for the food. Despite that I have, in effect, implied organization as necessary, I intended to say that nothing is unpaid for.

I release stuff as free software. I label it as such (not as open source). At the same time, I don't expect to make a living off of that software.

I don't have software-unrelated skills. I don't want to do unskilled labor. What can I do? I can write software for living.

I want to make people happy. What kind of software I can write? End-user software. How do I make money off of that? By selling it. How do I tell people that I'd appreciate their money? Well, by asking for it. How does libre software fit into all this? It doesn't really -- it's a hobby of mine.

People working on Unix were employed at Bell Labs. Which turned it into a big commercial thing. Linus Torvalds was a student when he began writing the kernel. Linux and GNU contributors were primarily hobbyists with obviously other source of income, paying for development instead of users. Alternatively, they were employees of enthusiastic companies (or those that needed to satisfy a market) and *gasp* they were making money off of it! Apache started off as a fork of NCSA httpd, did it not?

Do you think Linux would kick off if it weren't zero-cost to redistribute, aside from being libre? Do you think Apache would, when NCSA's httpd was zero-cost?

Re:In other news..

[davek]

This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.

Incorrect.

Think about it: there are more people on earth today than there were yesterday. Therefore, in order for a company to retain their current market share, they must constantly grow their customer base. Simply said, from a business standpoint, if you're not growing, you're dying.

It's not cutthroat capitalism, it's just a basic fact that will remain true as long as the world population continues to grow.

Re:In other news..

[Dhalka226]

You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it.

Or you make yourself look pompous by the suggestion that more than just a handful of companies have ever put together viable business models based on open source. Or suggest that some sort of large-scale switch wouldn't absolutely devastate most software businesses out there even if they were fully prepared and ready for the change by assuming the OP's comments don't actually know the definition and all you have to do is come along, inform him in the most haughty way you can think of and depart, problem solved.

Not every company can make it by support or donations, and once the code is out there "you have to pay me" becomes a race to the bottom, at best. For every Red Hat out there, there are dozens of companies who never made it with this model and a handful more companies like Mozilla, propped up largely by other generous for-profit companies like Google.

Nothing the OP said was wrong. If companies don't feel they can make money on something, they're not going to invest in it. The fact that you assume that re-spouting the same "free as in freedom not free of cost!" drivel we've heard ten thousand times before magically solves all of these major quandaries about potentially moving to open source doesn't make it so. And making snide remarks about the profession of somebody who works in an industry propping up so much open source is more despicable than the general level of despicable it takes to try insulting somebody for their profession.

Re:In other news..

[calzones]

growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.

We're getting off topic, but I want to engage this point anyway.

First, I'm 100% in agreement with you.

However, I see this as something of a cancerous relationship. On average, shareholders don't care an iota about what value or detriment the company brings to society, or whether the value or detriment comes now or in the future, or whether the value or detriment comes at the expense or benefit of a limited set of certain members of society. Shareholders only want to put their money in a company and get a fast return so they can dump it before it starts to flatten out or decline, as they move on to the next company. CEOs are beholden to shareholders and not their company's employees or customers. Decisions are made to maximize shareholder returns, not to maximize value. Or worse, decisions are made to avoid punishment from shareholders, not to sustain a healthy company. The modern practice of day trading has made this all even worse.

I'm not saying making boatloads of money or giving your shareholders massive returns year after year is bad. I'm just saying that being fixated on this being the Raison d'être for most (non small business) companies in the US is ultimately detrimental to our society, our economy, and the very capitalists and entrepreneurs who play the game.

The edict that a corporation's only purpose is to increase shareholder value is the problem.

But entrepreneurs and inventors often have a different purpose. They aim to solve a problem or make life better for others and get compensated commensurately for doing so. The fact that public investment helps fuel innovation and this kind of positive growth is certainly a good thing. But the fact that it almost always ends up getting corrupted into behemoth conglomerates seeking to make a fast buck for their shareholders and vastly overpaid CEO sock puppets while the original mission and vision of the founders atrophies and dies shows that our method has a dark side that seems completely unavoidable unless we can find a way to change the method in some fundamental way.

Growth for the sake of growth is a problem.

Re:In other news..

[Jorl17]

It's not about money! A logical diagram will also show that, while Free Software is bound to affect profit, it does not imply that a company earn no profit. That's just the old thinking of people who don't think logically. "Oh look at me, I have an example, but I don't produce deductive arguments or possible counter-counter-arguments, I am so good!".

BS.

Re:In other news..

[Lehk228]

stock value is what stockholders want to see, typically the way to increase stock value is to grow, or to attract attention in other ways.


the problem is that stock value is typically determined not by the current and expected future dividends and expected stability of the company, but rather pricing is based on expectation of future pricing.

that is to say, stock value is dependant on itself, nothing more than a chaotic feedback loop most of the time.

given this nature, it's odd that insider trading is illegal, since people trading on insider info are the only traders who aren't out of their fucking mind to put their money into such a system.

Re:In other news..

[gnarfel]

In medicine, we call growth for the sake of growth 'cancer.'

Re:In other news..

[pclminion]

If something with a finite useful lifespan is a failure, then you're a failure. Gotta die someday, right?

Re:In other news..

[calzones]

For the most part, marketshare is only a meaningful metric to shareholders and a competitive mindset.

If your employees are well paid and the company is alive and well, it doesn't matter if you're first or last in market share. If your product is crap and you lose marketshare and go out of business, well the problem was the product, not the marketshare; perilously declining marketshare was only a symptom of a problem. But declining marketshare itself, like due to population growth or sprouting competition amidst the growth of an emerging market does not mean your business is dying. You could be doing better year over year and still lose marketshare.

The mentality that "if you're not growing you're dying" is nothing more than simplistic and short-sighted sloganeering.

For what it's worth, even if it were true, dying is not necessarily a bad thing if the alternative is unbridled growth for the sole benefit of shareholders and diminishing returns (or loss) to society.

Re:In other news..

[Mongoose Disciple]

This seems to be working just fine for Red Hat and others

Out of curiousity, who would the non-trivial others be?

I agree that Red Hat's business model seems to be working well for them, but I've never seen a convincing argument that most software companies (due to various differents in product, market conditions, etc.) wouldn't bankrupt quickly trying to do the same thing.

Re:In other news..

[Sam Douglas]

Look at the difference between Ubuntu and RedHat and you can see that ever since they took on their idiot former COO, Ubuntu have been losing credibility. His hire was probably more a symptom than a cause, but you could see immediately that he started blogging for open-core Ubuntu started to lose devotees.

As a former Ubuntu 'devotee' I switched to Debian to escape from Ubuntu's retarded technical decisions.

Re:In other news..

[mrchaotica]

Shareholders only want to put their money in a company and get a fast return so they can dump it before it starts to flatten out or decline, as they move on to the next company.

This is the problem that dividends are supposed to solve: instead of relying on increasing share price for their returns, shareholders collect dividends periodically. If the company is stable (i.e., neither growing nor declining), then the dividends and share price should remain stable too.

(Does Red Hat give dividends? I don't know.)

Re:In other news..

[metrix007]

USian does not exist, and is not a fucking term.

It doesn't even solve any problems, is inferior to the standard convention, so why use it?

The US is the only country in North America with the word America in it's name. Thus, it becomes clear as to which people 'Americans' refers.

Mexico is the United States of Mexico. Does USian refer to people from Mexico, or the USA?

The only argument for USian is that using American would cause confusion if talking about people from the continent. Luckily, aside from this little thing called context, we also have the clear and easy to understand terms 'North American' and 'People from the Americas'.

USian does not solve anything and creates additional problems. It's an idiotic term used by idiots. Give up, and be at peace with being an American (as stated on your passport).

Good boy.

Re:In other news..

[NotSanguine]

I see this all the time on Slashdot but I don't see why it's a bizarre idea that companies want to grow. Many companies want to grow because it makes them more efficient

[snip]

So in (oversimplified) summation - growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.

You are 100% correct Schnell. However, that doesn't mean that the results are a net benefit to society.
The ever-present push for growth drives down wages, drives up inflation and, in general, makes things more difficult for the vast majority who get their income from wages and not investments.

Those who would disagree and say things like "A rising tide raises all boats." or "We all benefit when the richest get richer." seem to have very short memories. Ronald Reagan called it "Trickle-Down Economics." Those of us who experienced it first hand called it "Pissing on the poor."

Don't get me wrong. Our capitalist system can (and has) work(ed). It has raised millions out of crushing poverty and improved the lives of even the worst off among us. But when almost 15% WSJ, USDA of the US population requires government assistance (food stamps) to get enough to eat while the richest 3% control more and more of our capital and resources, something is wrong and we need to fix it.

IMHO, creating incentives for corporations to think, at a minimum, in the medium (2-5 years) term rather than focus exclusively on quarterly gains, should be part of such a fix.

Re:In other news..

[tsm_sf]

It's a lot easier, faster, and probably cheaper to just hire the people who wrote it to make changes you want. If the people behind it are trying to make money on it, why on earth wouldn't they make the improvements you want, since you're offering to pay them for it?

I'd like to mention that the option you bring up here is woefully overlooked in its various forms. I've had clients bemoan the fact that they can't use an otherwise perfect piece of software in their project because the license is too restrictive.

The simple solution is to get ahold of the author and ask them to sell you a license that will work with what you are trying to do! They can do this! It's theirs to license!

Re:In other news..

[Sam Douglas]

I love car analogies and free software as much as the next Slashdot poster, but I don't think I could make a living as someone who copies a car, turns it into a hotrod and sells to someone, who can then freely make and distribute copies of the hotrod.

Re:In other news..

[Coeurderoy]

You point out exactly what is wrong with current views of what a company should be...

You say that companies who pay dividends are "not good", and that the growth of the share price is the only thing that shareholders are/should be concerned with.

But the law of diminishing returns make it that at some point the growth will hit a limit, so basically any "pure share" play is a ponzi scheme, at some point the people who should pay your "margin" on the share you own stop being interested.. not because the company is not good anymore but because it does not get "better" fast enough.

Seen from another point of view, if you buy something "good" you should want to keep it, so why are you buying shares with the intent to sell them...
Do you plan to buy other shares ? or need to eat ?...

So we all live in a global "con game" that only works because in the past 50 years global growth has outpaced the "potlash" effect...
As we fill up the earth, and as we try to stop innovation growth will stall, and then suddently the system will implode, and people who have invested in companies doing something usefull and stable and paying divident will be very happy they didn't try to put their eggs in "growth values"...

Re:In other news..

[tepples]

Notice the phrase "to redistribute copies" - that's "free as in beer".

And that doesn't also mean corporation can sell it.

Corporations can't distribute copies of a work for a hefty fee if someone else is driving the supply curve to the right by distributing copies of the same work for a nominal fee (e.g. CheapBytes) or no fee (e.g. Download.com). And no, selling support isn't always the answer. Not all kinds of programs need paid support; the canonical example is single-player or LAN-multiplayer video games.

Re:In other news..

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

That's ONE.

Bottom line is it's hard to make a lot of money in open source. Great for consumers, bad for investors.

Re:In other news..

[saider]

Car analogy. Great.

Perhaps a more specific question is in order.

Consider if you had a company that made a piece of code.You need to pay the developers to continue to work on that code. The code is licensed under the GPL, because it is free and the sources are posted on your website.

How do you convince people to give you money to pay your developers when they can download and compile it off of your website?

Re:In other news..

[Lawrence_Bird]

Clearly you have no financial background. What is stable? Stable revenues? If so then you better be increasingly more productive to offset the effects of inflation on your gross margins. If not, your bottom line will dwindle as will your ability to pay a dividend. If you are claiming a stable net income (and therefor increasing revenues) and a stable dividend payment, then the value of the company is subject to changes in the discount rate which is used to determine the present value of all those future cash payments. Your seemingly stable company could quickly find itself worth half what it once was. Further, your "neither growing nor declining" could imply a stable market share in some industry. If so, that has no clear bearing at all on profitability or value of the company to the market (ie shareholders).

Finally - a company which only pays a dividend is in essence a bond. The big question though is, will there be a return of capital at maturity? Or will the company survive long enough to be considered a perpetuity and thus the 'principal' can be ignored? As many investors know, owning a bond is almost always less risky than owning the underlying equity in a company. Further, an investor can simply purchase a "risk free" bond such as a 10 or 30 year US treasury [ok, perhaps not as risk free today than in decades past]. Which would you own? A US bond that pays 4% or stock in a company which pays a 4% dividend with no prospect of an increased payout or an increase in the share price?

Re:In other news..

[dch24]

IBM, for one.

Re:In other news..

[internettoughguy]

It's easy to pretend "libre" isn't followed by "unpaid". It's also easy to see that it's just a pretense.

It's also easy to pretend that all client software isn't already "free as in beer", whether you give away the source with your software is irrelevant. Lets cut out the act, for the time being, that we can have such a thing as a "trusted client", without specialised hardware anyway. Business software licencing is easier, because of audits, but in the business world, support contracts are king, whether you're Red Hat or Microsoft.

Re:In other news..

[snero3]

If you think the only reason sun went under was because it was starting to embrace FOSS, then you are horribly miss informed.

Re:In other news..

[Lawrence_Bird]

No, he still hasn't learned it. "free" as in socialist/communist is more like it. The collective shall develop the software and it shall be available to all comrade! I'm all for charity. If you want to write a program and make it OSS, or spend time working on something that already is, power to you! But don't try to commit me to doing the same thing.

Re:In other news..

[janwedekind]

I couldn't have said it better. I think Redhat is way more efficient than Microsoft or Apple. They deliver more value for a fraction of the cost. They are also less noise because they don't waste so much money on advertising and retail.

Re:In other news..

[dgatwood]

Why waste time with individual consumers who are fickle, stupid, and above all, cheap, and are going to copy everything on BitTorrent anyway?

Because if you depend on corporate use to sustain your business, you're going to be very disappointed unless your product is in the IT space or is something very generic like a word processor. For other products, you can't make enough money that way to cover your costs.

Diving into someone else's codebase and trying to get a handle on it and start making nontrivial improvements on it is pretty hard, and time-consuming. It's a lot easier, faster, and probably cheaper to just hire the people who wrote it to make changes you want.

And that's great for the employees of the open source software company. Not so great for the company itself.

What you're also failing to understand is that many of those folks who want extra features are likely to want more than you as the original author can provide in the time allotted. Thus, they're going to end up bringing in people to do some of the work anyway. Once they cross that threshold, the incremental cost for them to do all of the work they need is noise.

Finally, many of the companies who want new features would want exclusivity for those features, or would want specific tie-ins to their own internal systems, which is work that isn't inherently useful to the community as a whole. And that work is almost never easier to contract out than to do in-house. It's often not even feasible to do without being on-site. Over time, this results in hordes of in-house staff at dozens of companies who all understand your code base and can add other features as needed, making your support contract unnecessary overhead for those companies.

Eventually, this leads to those employees realizing that they can make more money as consultants, and now you have hordes of consultants out there making money off your code instead of the original programmer.

Re:In other news..

[hey!]

Java is slow? Compared to what? For what kind of task? Even in the pre JIT compilation days, I thought Java wasn't so bad given what it is.

The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it. Anybody can write a slow program if they make it complicated enough. The incredibly rich software ecosystem of Java makes it incredibly easy to over-engineer an application by glomming together huge chunks of pre-built functionality. That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.

The legitimate speed complaints about Java as a platform (as opposed to over-engineered apps) were largely addressed by JIT compilation, although there are some problem domains where there is never enough speed. What has bedeviled the Java world since is complexity. It didn't help that that shiny container managed persistence hammer in the J2EE toolbox was hopelessly borked. Sun also badly mismanaged J2ME, trying to make it a success by working with third party implementers, who in turn were offering J2ME to handset manufacturers, who in turn were beholden to mobile carriers, who had all kinds of perverse incentives. This could be seen as another reflection of the cultural acceptance of excessive complexity. It's hard to imagine how J2ME could thrive in such an environment, but apparently Sun thought it could make it work. It took Apple to break the carriers' death grip on mobile technology. Google, riding on Apple's coattails, wisely chose to give Sun's moribund, least-common-denominator J2ME initiative. If they hadn't, they'd never have been able to achieve rough parity with Apple's iOS.

Android is a bright spot in the Java world, but not the only one. A consensus seems to be emerging on how to develop web apps and services in a simpler, less tedious way, without sacrificing some of the things that formerly drove complexity up (e.g. distributed transactions). The timing of Oracle's acquisition of Java is fortuitous (for Oracle), because a lot of good things are happening in the Java world ... except perhaps for Oracle's acquisition of Sun's Java IP.

Re:In other news..

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget the Windows 7 Sins which you have just GOT to love! If this isn't proof that RMS and pals sees F/OSS not as simply an alternative software model but a religion I don't know what does.

While personally I respected the reasons why RMS did what he did, such as writing the GPL because he couldn't modify a printer driver and believed that users should have a "fitness of purpose" right where if the software didn't do what was needed the user could modify or pay someone to modify said software until it was fit for purpose, I think he is starting to reach the PETA "Sea Kittens" phase of overboard crazy.

I mean what happened to the freedom to choose which license you wanted, and the users freedom to choose whether to accept it or not? it isn't like anyone is forcing those millions upon millions of users to use Google services. Lately it seems that "Its a Trap!" should be the catch phrase for RMS as he sees EVERYTHING that isn't 100% F/OSS as a trap.

I mean for the love of Pete the man uses some rare POS Loongson netbook because the fricking OLPC wasn't "free" enough for him because it had firmware in the wireless! There is such a thing as going overboard and hurting the cause, and I think RMS screaming "Trap!" to everything that doesn't follow his line is hurting more than it is helping the F/OSS movement by making it look like a bunch of extremists.

Re:In other news..

[hairyfeet]

I'd actually argue that RH is a hell of a lot worse off than they should be, thanks to the "free as in beer!" brigade actively fucking them over. I mean here is a company that puts its money where its mouth is and donates more code than most other companies combined yet thanks to the "Free beer!" brigade nearly 30% of the web servers are running not RH but CentOS, which was originally created by a hardware company that wanted to use RH's tools but were too greedy to give RH a dime.

So I'd argue that RH and the rest of the F/OSS companies will never be more than a blip on the radar because GPL lets the "free beer!" brigade screw over any company that dares go GPL. Look at how many GPL companies have died or gone on life support simply because the "free beer!" brigade can't stand the thought of paying a cent even if it ultimately hurts them and the community by leaving less vendors, developers, QA, etc.

I'd say F/OSS is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem, and while a few companies like RH managing to survive thanks to PHBs that don't like having ANY software without a license doesn't negate the fact that the reason F/OSS has less resources for...well pretty much everything, is because there are so many free riders compared to paying customers. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT or Apple makes more in a month than RH does in a two year period, there are simply too many leeching and not enough paying.

Re:In other news..

[abulafia]

You simply don't know what you're talking about, on any of those topics, except for your opinion on why they failed (which, as an opinion, just is).

Re:In other news..

[WeatherGod]

I'll give you another: Enthought. They drive the development community around NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. They do sell packaged versions (EPD), but primarily derive their revenue from selling targeted software development services to companies. Admittedly, it is a BSD style license, not GPL, but those companies were free to develop their software using the same tools themselves. Enthought makes money because they have the mineshaft and the experience to best utilize those packages. The business models surrounding free software are different from traditional business models. This does not make them any less valid, only different.

Re:In other news..

[WeatherGod]

s/mineshaft/mindshare/

Re:In other news..

[hduff]

Maybe you could not, but a number of people do. It's a niche market and they pose no threat to major cars manufacturers.

Here's a copy of car you can buy.
http://www.streetrodderweb.com/tech/0801sr_signature_series_1932_ford_highboy_roadster/index.html
http://www.classicautomotiverestoration.com/turn_key_camaro.html

Re:In other news..

[Sam Douglas]

I went to the links you provided, but I couldn't find a download link

Re:In other news..

[Sam Douglas]

I should have been more careful with wording:
"and sells to someone who can then _effortlessly_ and freely make and distribute copies of the hotrod"

Digital information duplicates readily. If I want one of those hotrods, I need to supply the material and labour or pay someone to do it for me.

Re:In other news..

[hduff]

There are degrees of freedom. The FSF takes an extreme position to make a point.

I don't think you have to give away the source code and there needs to be a profit incentive for some development, but what about horribly restrictive licenses?
If I paid for the software, why can't I re-sell it? Or give it away?

Or data formats that ensure vendor lock-in? The software developer does not own my data and should have no right to tell me how I may re-use or share it.

Or what about perverting standards? If software is sold as standards-compliant, shouldn't it work with other software that supports the same standards? And if it won't, shouldn't I be told that up front?

Re:In other news..

[calzones]

That was the point of my comment.

There are a ton of small businesses and independent contractors making a living off of OSS. OSS has created an ecosystem for them to thrive, as well being a critical component of bigger for-profit companies (look at Apple and even Google for example).

The accusation that OSS makes people no money and is therefore not worth investing in is patently false. It has proven a huge boon to our modern economy. As a web developer, my livelihood would be severely crippled if all I could rely on were Microsoft or Adobe technologies.

Red Hat is but one example of someone who had a brilliant means of parlaying an OSS living into a significantly large enterprise. There are other examples out there that have sprouted decent sized corporate entities but having had varying success, such as JBOSS (ironically now part of RH), MySQL, Ruby on Rails...

That there is no collection of mega-corporations with the exact same business model as Red Hat doesn't invalidate the business model. It certainly doesn't make the OP's case that everyone part of the for-profit OSS industry is going out of business.

Re:In other news..

[Yunzil]

Why waste time with individual consumers who are fickle, stupid, and above all, cheap, and are going to copy everything on BitTorrent anyway?

Because those are all consumers.

Re:In other news..

[clang_jangle]

You sure do make a lot of incorrect assumptions, troll.

Re:In other news..

[WorBlux]

each of those three pull in 10-20 times more profit per employee.

Source? And it may speak poorly of FOSS to you, but even if this were true, all it would scream to me is "MONOPOLY RENTS".

Re:In other news..

[WorBlux]

I see this all the time on Slashdot but I don't see why it's a bizarre idea that companies want to grow. Many companies want to grow because it makes them more efficient - better economies of scale, better leverage with their suppliers, etc.

But remember that there are also diseconomies of bureaucracy, which is ultimately the only way to allocate resource within a firm.There is no way to establish a real internal price system. Smaller companies get more immediate feedback from customer choice of their actions and allocation of resources.

Re:In other news..

[jmac_the_man]

The US is the only country in North America with the word America in it's name. Thus, it becomes clear as to which people 'Americans' refers.

You really just aren't all that bright, are you?

What other countries in North or South America have the word "America" in their name? (As noted elsewhere in the topic, the United States of America and the United Mexican States are both groups of "United States" in North America.)

Re:In other news..

[painandgreed]

The US is the only country in North America with the word America in it's name. Thus, it becomes clear as to which people 'Americans' refers.

You say this but I have been corrected several times that everybody that lives on this half of the Earth are all Americans. Sometimes I've even caught myself referring to myself as an American when speaking to people of this hemisphere who are not citizens of the USA and can see them all break out into smiles as I clarify my statement. Funny enough, it mostly seems to be Columbians that this happens with, perhaps it is a local usage for them also, but I have had to deal with that speaking to Mexicans before. So it does happen that some other term is useful when trying to be polite to some people you might want to talk to. As you are neither an "American" nor polite, it's not really an issue for you.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ignoring the fact that Red Hat and other GPL companies are just as much users of the free beer brigade as they are contributors. In fact, I remember when Red Hat was nothing more than pre packaged versions of other peoples code that they (got for free) and didn't contribute hardly anything at all back to the community other than making Linux a little bit easier to install.

While you consider that having to re-share your modifications and contributions to code that you got for free in the first place as a tragedy, the truth is companies like Red Hat would not have existed in the first place if it wasn't for that horrible pool of software that can be taken from and used freely as long as you then share your modifications back to that pool.

You can't really complain about others standing on the backs of companies like Red Hat as they build themselves up, when Red Hat and others originally built themselves up in the exact same way. I'd say that's the beauty of the GPL and the free beer brigade.

Re:In other news..

[WorBlux]

Red-hat is a support and solutions company, that just happens to have it's own OS to offer as a platform in it's support and solutions.(It isn't a platform company) Those on CentOS either aren't at a level where they don't need support or at a level where they can self-support. Either way they weren't potential customers of Rh's in the first place. And in fact because the CentOS community didn't have an intimate hand developing the platform, they are at a disadvantage if they tried to compete with RH's support and solutions.

Re:In other news..

[eric_herm]

On the other hand, enough people complain that some company are selling Firefox or Openoffice on their website or on Ebay, so this work :)

Re:In other news..

[alexborges]

"RH is a hell of a lot worse off than they should be..."

What an interesting choice of words. Had you said "not as rich as it could", your argument might have been welcome, but then again that would show a bit of flawed logic: Red Hat would not exist at all if it wasnt a free software company. It is what it is, not what you wish it was.

Now its a billion dollar company with a huge income growth year to year albeit its coming from a small number. Revise your logic sir: you are advocating that people steal what others gave for free under the conditions of the GPL.

Re:In other news..

[cavreader]

Money is usually required on your journey to your goal. Money is not the end it is often just the means. How much money you need depends on what your goal is.

Re:In other news..

[Mazzie]

Distribution is only part of it. The freedom to modify software that you rely on to perform your task better is what is at stake. Just like you have the freedom to modify your car to perform better.

Re:In other news..

[Mazzie]

You asked a marketing question that I don't really know how to answer. I make a full time living as a contractor developing and maintaining free open source software. All of my revenue comes from companies who find my code useful and are willing to pay for access to my talent to add features, fix bugs, give support, etc. I am not listed in the phone book, I don't pay for any advertising, etc. Free stuff gets around quickly and people seek me out.

Re:In other news..

[Kalriath]

Where the bloody hell can I find this free beer? All the places around here charge $6 a pint!

Re:In other news..

[cavreader]

And who defines what is enough? When a company first goes into business the successful ones usually try to create products or services that are better than their competitors offerings. The principals use a combination of hard work, good ideas, long hours, and out right aggression to make the company successful and beat your competitors. If the company starts to succeed in gaining market share and growing their revenue stream it is hard to just stop and proclaim well were good enough now so we can just start to relax and try to maintain the status quo. Striving for mediocrity is usually not the way to run a buisness.

Re:In other news..

[MBC1977]

No, it is not a marketing question, it is a business strategy question (yes, there is a difference).

Writing software for the sake of writing software, without consideration of the investment the developer has to make (food, shelter, education, time, testing, etc.); is in fact an exercise to lose one's shirt. Granted, like you so said money can be made though F/OSS, but one has to take into account that your gambling that someone will need support and will pay you for that support. By charging for software and not releasing the crown jewels, you are positive you will get paid for your hard work. By giving the source code away, someone else can just setup shop and offer support - a lower price - than you and reduce your revenue.

There are more issues, but that's just one that sticks out most in my mind at the moment.

Re:In other news..

[dogsbreath]

FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.

Sun was never a big FOSS-friendly company. They picked and chose certain things to put into the open source domain but for the most part, they didn't "get it". Look at all the fits and starts with Solaris on the x86. Besides, they were a hardware/os company and not a software vendor at the core. They went down not because of their support for FOSS but because of their poor performance with one of their two business pillars: servers and CPUs. OpenOffice was a distraction to them.

Their foray into FOSS was born more of desperation than as a value of their business model.

It remains to be seen what Larry can do with Solaris and the Sun h/w products. They have lost a huge amount of business to IBM.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

Because if you depend on corporate use to sustain your business, you're going to be very disappointed unless your product is in the IT space or is something very generic like a word processor. For other products, you can't make enough money that way to cover your costs.

Huh? Seems to be working fine for Red Hat and Novell, who likely make zero money from individuals/non-corporations. Tons of businesses survive solely in the B2B space, both ones selling software, and ones selling other goods and services. IBM's a huge company still, and I don't think there's anything they sell to consumers any more (not many consumers buying mainframes or enterprise software services).

And that's great for the employees of the open source software company. Not so great for the company itself.

How so? The company makes money, and the employees get paid. What's the problem? Maybe they're not able to keep increasing their stock price indefinitely (at least until the next bubble pops), but unending growth is simply unsustainable anyway, despite what a bunch of stupid Americans might think.

What you're also failing to understand is that many of those folks who want extra features are likely to want more than you as the original author can provide in the time allotted.

How so? We're talking about modifications here, not a whole new application program. I think this is a red herring.

Finally, many of the companies who want new features would want exclusivity for those features, or would want specific tie-ins to their own internal systems, which is work that isn't inherently useful to the community as a whole.

So what? If it brings in money for the company, what's the problem? No one said that everything open-source companies do has to be beneficial to the community as a whole, or their entire userbase. If Company X wants to buy certain features that are only useful to it, in order to integrate the program into their processes, then great; that makes money for the OSS company that wrote the program.

And that work is almost never easier to contract out than to do in-house.

Lots of companies don't have the resources to do extra development work in-house, so they have to hire consultants to do it all for them. Basically, with OSS software, you have much of the program already finished, and you just hire the original developers to do the small part you still need for your custom application. That's a lot cheaper than hiring a consultant or a whole development team to do it from the ground up.

At my last job, the company was working on a line of new embedded devices, which was to replace its current line of devices. They only had a handful of developers, so they contracted out most of the project to other companies to do the development for them. This is pretty typical these days, as many medium-size and smaller companies don't want to pay to keep experienced developers on staff all year long, so they just hire other companies to do their development for them when they decide to do new projects.

Over time, this results in hordes of in-house staff at dozens of companies who all understand your code base and can add other features as needed, making your support contract unnecessary overhead for those companies.

Again, not true. Smaller companies don't have "hordes" of in-house staff. They usually have barely enough staff just to do maintenance on the product lines they do have. We're not talking about 300,000 employee companies like IBM, we're talking about companies with 2,000, 1,000, 500, or even 200 employees. My previous company had 1800 employees worldwide, but they didn't have enough staff in-house to develop their own next-generation product, only to maintain their current products and fix bugs. Smaller companies have even less resources. They don't have people sitting around who can spend a few months making a custom version of an OSS product.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

You think this isn't representative of consumers in general? Go talk to someone who works in retail and see if they don't agree with me. Or talk to someone in the record industry.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. If the license doesn't agree with your use, you can easily pay the copyright holder $$$ to give you a special license that does agree with your use. For the right amount, they'd be happy to grant you a special license to do whatever you want.

Re:In other news..

[NSCoder]

That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under

Apple. Mac OS X and iOS are both built on open source projects, the former on over 300 of them. They contribute significant resources to projects like LLVM and WebKit. They're not going under anytime soon.

Re:In other news..

[SecurityGuy]

Yeah, and the earth is more than 6000 years old. You know it and I know it, but the average USian considers that knowledge to be heresy.

As a USian (oh, what the hell, i don't care which term you use), that's nonsense. Most of us are religious, but most of us are not stupidly so.

Re:In other news..

[WidgetGuy]

<OFFTOPIC> Thank you for Stylish! Made my day (week, month, year...). My vision is trashed thanks to over 30 years of staring at computer screens twelve hours a day. I can now read slashdot comfortably without horizontal scrolling! Took about two minutes to download and install the Firefox add-on and even less time to download and apply the style. Hats off. Great job!<OFFTOPIC>

See? Sometimes it pays to read sigs.

Re:In other news..

[Mongoose Disciple]

I can't seriously count IBM when so much of their revenue comes from proprietary software and hardware, directly or indirectly. Mainframe contracts, Lotus, etc.

That's like counting me as a vegetarian because I had a salad for lunch, even though I ate a bunch of other meat today. Including some on the salad.

Re:In other news..

[mrchaotica]

Clearly you have no financial background. [Lots of reasons why you're wrong.]

Wow, no kidding! Never mind...

Re:In other news..

[clang_jangle]

Glad you like it. Feel free to let the devs know (I'm not one of them, just a satisfied user).

Re:In other news..

[mrchaotica]

In general, though, once you give up the source code, you've lost control. From that point on, if you don't make the improvements that the customers want, they can go to someone for improvements, and you no longer have a revenue stream from upgrades.

Ok, and how many times has that happened?

Actually, forking a project because the people in charge aren't managing it right is pretty common. For example:

• GCC->egcs (which then got re-taken over by GNU and renamed GCC again)
• Xfree86->X.org
• OpenOffice->LibreOffice

Re:In other news..

[shutdown -p now]

I believe GP refers to that yearly Gallup poll where they get a figure of about 40% (highest ever was 47% in 1999) of Americans asserting that Young Earth Creationism is true. So, while he is trolling, he's not that far from truth on that particular point.

Re:In other news..

[darkpixel2k]

You are a self-hating fuck. If the U.S. sucks so much, why don't you leave and hate on it from somewhere else?

Sorry, the EU is already at their quota of US-haters. He has to stay here for the time being.

Re:In other news..

[darkpixel2k]

This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable.

I think you're missing an important part of capitalism. Companies that are unsustainable (think General Motors) are supposed to (if the Government doesn't meddle) go bankrupt and have their assets purchased for pennies on the dollar by companies that may have a better idea about building a product or creating a service but don't have the capital that the 'big boys' have.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

Three projects in all of OSS is not "common". In fact, these are pretty exceptional cases, although they do show another of the strengths of OSS: when the original authors (or current maintainers) are completely mismanaging the project, the open-source nature makes it possible to fork the code and create a new project that picks up where the old one left off, instead of having to start from scratch. This doesn't mean that such mismanagement is common, however, just that there's a mechanism for dealing with it when it does happen.

Forking a project, while trivial in the technical sense, is a pretty major undertaking in reality when you look at the human side. Any Joe Blow can make a copy of X.org and start a new fork, but with a large project like that, he's not going to get very far by himself, and will need more developers to join his team, and also enough users who are willing to jump ship, for his work to be relevant and useful. IIRC, Keith Packard of X.org tried for a very long time to work with the XFree86 community and management, before he and his cohorts got completely fed up and finally decided to fork it. It wasn't something they did on a whim.

So, again in answer to the OP's statement about "losing control" and not making the improvements the customers want, if your OSS company (not just a non-profit project like GNU or X.org) is managed decently, this should never be a problem. If someone is offering you good money to make changes, and you refuse to make them, then you deserve to go out of business! Unless you're already booked up (in which case money shouldn't be a problem for you and you should be making money hand over fist), why wouldn't you take on a paying customer?

Also remember, GCC and XFree86, to my knowledge, were/are completely non-profit projects, not products made by a for-profit company (unlike StarOffice/OpenOffice). So those examples aren't even applicable here; those projects weren't even for-profit businesses, and weren't in the business of trying to get companies to pay them for custom versions, and basically any changes they made they made for reasons not having to do with making money. OpenOffice is a different case. From the "community" POV, the incident shows that OSS is better, since a group of interested developers can fork a large, important project and add changes they deem important, despite what the megacorporation now owning it thinks. But it's hard to see things from Oracle's POV since we're not buds with Ellison and co., so for all we know, they could care less about LibreOffice (since individual LO/OO office users generally don't pay a dime for it, and just download it for free), and are quite happy with their corporate customers. I do know that H&R Block uses OO on their tax advisors' systems, not MS Office; that's one huge customer right there. As long as (now) Oracle's customers are happy with Oracle's support and prices, and Oracle's making money in it, they're probably not too worried about LO. Besides, there's nothing preventing them from copying LO's improvements and merging them at their convenience. Finally, unless I'm missing something, LO is not competing with OO, not for money. Sure, a bunch of Linux distros have switched over, but they never paid for OO anyway. LO is a non-profit, so if you're a company wanting an office suite that uses ODF files that doesn't cost as much as MSO, and you want to pay for support, AFAIK there's only one serious choice, and that's Oracle.

So, in a nutshell, there's zero instances I know of of a for-profit OSS project being forked by another for-profit company, and that company attempting to steal away all the original company's customers.

Re:In other news..

[roman_mir]

This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.

- you are barking up the wrong tree then.

Say that to your government, the Fed, who are PRINTING federal reserve notes. What do you think that means?

In 2003 1 pound of cotton was 50USD and gold was 350USD/ounce.

For 1 ounce of gold, you could get 7 pounds of cotton.

In 2011 1 pound of cotton is over 200USD and gold is over 1400USD/ounce.

For 1 ounce of gold you are still getting 7 pounds of cotton.

However notice that in USD the cotton went up 4 times and gold went up 4 times.

This has nothing to do with production of gold or cotton, this has to do with printing of money. Companies do not print money though, they use federal reserve notes - legal tender.

IF, IF there was no 'legal tender' notion on those worthless crappy pieces of greenish paperish substance, the more enlightened of us are rolling to snort cocaine with, then the merchants would not be accepting those dollars.

They would be requiring REAL money, and since real money cannot be printed, the PRICES of things would go down, just like they did throughout the 19 century USA, when dollar (gold equivalent), rose in value by a factor of 2.

In 20th century dollar lost value by a factor of near 20 now.

--

Now, of-course to stay ahead of REAL inflation (which is NOT what hedonistic CPI adjustments give you, which is reverse engineered never to show real inflation), companies have to grow their earning substantially year to year, because THERE IS such thing as cost of opportunity.

Why should anybody sink a bunch of money into one enterprise that doesn't even stay ahead of true inflation + earns some interest (at least as much interest as any other business)? There is no reason for money to be there if the thing doesn't stay ahead of inflation + doesn't gives something back on top of that.

You think this is bad for society? Get back onto the gold standard and prohibit the gov't explicitly from ever printing 'legal tender' again.

Re:In other news..

[hairyfeet]

Afraid to actually back up your words with a UID? I'd say look in the mirror to see a troll, or more likely a "FOSSie" which like a Moonie stubbornly goes "LA LA LA" if anyone points out a flaw in their religion, but I'll try to use small words, kay?

It is actually quite simple AC, do try to keep up: You have two competitors, lets call them A and M. Now A&M have X+Y to spend thanks to sales, which gives them MORE developers, MORE R&D, MORE QA, MORE...notice a pattern here?

You see it is actually quite simple and why I would argue RH is a classic example of the free rider problem. Too keep up with MSFT and Apple they need to spend X+Y, but because such a huge number are riding free on CentOS they simply can't afford to put out the same level of money for R&D and developers. Since RH gives a good chunk of their output straight back into the community in the form of code the freeloaders hurt everyone else by costing code and QA that would have otherwise been spent to simply not exist.

Is that REALLY that hard to understand, or does your religion keep you from being able to understand math and basic economics 101? Despite the total bullshit the FOSSies like to spew bug fixes and QA by and large DO NOT come from some guy in his basement scratching an itch, which is why I would argue the desktop is so far behind the competition. Without a big company focusing serious resources bugs simply don't get fixed, as someone coding for free would rather work on new code than sit in front of mountains of old sifting for bugs, because it is boring and tedious. Both Apple and MSFT have the resources to PAY to have this done, RH simply doesn't have that luxury.

Is that REALLY so hard to grasp, or has your love of the idea of communism (which lost BTW) simply kept you from understanding the most basic of economic principles?

Re:In other news..

[Score Whore]

You said "makes" not "has cash flow." Lay of the smarm when you know you're completely and totally wrong, you just come across as a doofus.

Re:In other news..

[Score Whore]

Correct, those numbers are Redhat's profits, i.e. their earnings. Revenue is around $900 million.

Regardless the phrase "makes" in the English language means profits, not cash flow. If someone buys a house for $300,000 and they later sell it for $250,000, no one would say they made $250,000. Well, maybe mendacious knuckleheads, but not someone conversing in good faith. In one of Sun's last quarters they had $2.6 billion in revenue. They didn't make $2.6 billion, rather they lost $200 million.

The post I was responding too showed either complete financial illiteracy, dishonesty, or general disregard for facts. In any of those cases it calls into question the quality and value of the poster's comments.

Re:In other news..

[martyros]

...yet thanks to the "Free beer!" brigade nearly 30% of the web servers are running not RH but CentOS...

RH doesn't mind CentOS -- the people who run CentOS and stay there generally wouldn't have been paying for RH anyway; and it's an opportunity to start free, realize you actually need support (or that support is cheaper than hiring an army of IT people capable of doing it themselves), and upgrade to RedHat.

Re:In other news..

[ianare]

In regards to video games, you can make the engine open source but use a regular copyright license for the artwork, levels, characters, etc. This is what ID Software does, after they don't license the engine any longer.

Re:In other news..

[mcvos]

That's ONE.

There are others. A previous employer of mine (Hippo) is doing very well giving their CMS away for free. My current employer isn't that into open source, and while a lot larger, is actually less profitable (though there are many other reasons for that).

Re:In other news..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable.

One less traditional economist I know likes to sum it up with this quote (not his), "Humans don't understand exponential curves".

Re:In other news..

[Mazzie]

Whatever kind of question it is does not change the risk involved in trying to profit from software, or any product for that matter. I would argue that the time invested to write the software is the same for either case. You are also gambling that someone will want to pay for your closed source software.

Re:In other news..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

People from other parts of the two american continents that are not part of the United States of America find people that are from the United States of America insistence that they are just "Americans" rather dumb.

Re:In other news..

[mcvos]

Java is just so damn slow. Otherwise it's no better or worse than the languages it sought to replace.

I suspect neither of us knows what you are talking about. Java is faster than most modern languages. Java as a language is a lot better put together than C++, which is the language it sought to replace. The JVM is a very good platform, offering a lot of security, stability, threading, performance, checking, garbage collection, etc no matter what OS you run it on.

The two big problems of Java (the language) are these:
1: It inherits too many bad ideas of C and C++, making it too verbose and tedious to program in,
2: A culture of over-engineering grew up around it. Every problem gets drowned in an overdose of architecture.

JVM as a platform is one of the greatest gifts to server programming ever. The problems with the language and its architectural overkill is the reason why new JVM languages like Groovy, JRuby, Scala and Clojure are so popular nowadays.

Re:In other news..

[mcvos]

COBOL is a lot of things that aren't appropriate for a family-friendly forum, but it's not in any way a failure. If it had been a failure, nobody would hate it so much.

Java is the new COBOL in more ways than one.

Re:In other news..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

If find it amusing that you call medium term 2-5 years. I would call medium term till i am about 50 (20 years) and long term when i retire, so about 40 years. Yet if i am talking about things like energy security, long term is 100+ years.

One of the reasons i like the Long Now foundation.

Re:In other news..

[myforwik]

Yeah and there nothing stopping me bottling air or sea water and selling it, except that because its has no scarcity it has no value! Free "as in freedom" goes hand in hand with free "as in beer" for any peice of intellectual property. Please name one major software company that relies on donationware that also operates under the GPL?

Re:In other news..

[JAlexoi]

Yeah... They are doing just fine luring companies with open source no vendor lock in crap and then lock in to their crappy software written by monkey coders in Bangalore.

Re:In other news..

[JAlexoi]

No. Sun monetising Java was a failure, other's have done it very well... Look at IBM, most of their software is Java these days. Look at Oracle. Look even at SAP.

Re:In other news..

[JAlexoi]

Watson says that Java and slow are not related in any way.
In addition, just so damn slow is basically why infrastructure of SalesForce, Amazon and a lot of Google's services run on Java... Yeah... Slow.
Microsoft has an issue with NIH and "Thou shalt no stray from the Microsoft way" attitudes.

Re:In other news..

[JAlexoi]

Obsolete != Failure. In fact COBOL is a massive success. If Java programs end up in service for 50 years, I would be very happy. Even C programs cant boast that...

Re:In other news..

[LordStormes]

Sure, but they must realize that's a fallacy - if MS gives out the code to Windows for no money, what's to stop me from compiling it and using it instead of paying for it?

Re:In other news..

[LordStormes]

But then nobody buys the new Adobe CS-93 with 5 features added. They just add them themselves, and Adobe goes out of business. It sucks, but companies need to make money to survive.

Re:In other news..

[sco08y]

CentOS what??? CentOS was created by an individual who's organization (a library IIRC) couldn't afford RHEL. Take off the tinfoil hat, step outside, and take a nice deep breath. Not every company can afford $799 per server per year. That's the minimum you can purchase and still get actual help.

Bullshit. $800 a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the salaries of the users + the salary of the IT support.

And everyone assumes non-profits are doing everything for the good of humanity, newsflash for you naive idiots: they're run by assholes who want to cut corners and enrich themselves just like everything else. The library that "couldn't afford" to spend $800 just shuffled it into a greedy manager's pay.

Re:In other news..

[sco08y]

RH have annual revenue of just under $1 billion. That's enough for any company.

What a stupid, fatuous remark.

So, when you're trying to retire, how is your 401K going to make any money if half the companies in it just decide, "yeah, we've made enough, we're just going to hold what we've got?"

Or, if you were a customer, how would you feel if they said, "nope, we've got enough business, sorry."

Or, if you were looking for a job and they tell you, "nope, no positions available, we're not expanding any more."

Oh, right, you'd be balling your eyes out at the unfairness of it all.

Re:In other news..

[tehcyder]

That is profit, try looking into revenue.

Comments like that really call into question whether anyone should ever believe anything you post, since you probably already knew that.

You fail, original poster is quite right that saying a company "makes" a billion dollars would mean to a normal person that it had profits of a billion dollars. It's easy to increase sales if you don't care about increasing profits.

Re:In other news..

[Tim C]

Yes, exactly - once they've stopped charging for the engine they release it for free.

They make damn sure they make their money first.

Re:In other news..

[tehcyder]

In regards to video games, you can make the engine open source but use a regular copyright license for the artwork, levels, characters, etc. This is what ID Software does, after they don't license the engine any longer.

But what is the philosophical justification for this? If software should be free because it can be copied for no cost, why shouldn't the same apply to artwork, design and so on?

Just as there was time and skill involved in creating the artwork etc so there was for the software.

Re:In other news..

[gottabeme]

The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it. ... That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.

...?

Re:In other news..

[MysteriousPreacher]

CEOs are beholden to shareholders and not their company's employees or customers.

I only have a problem with that in cases where a company has a de facto monopoly. This would be very likely in privatised public transport and utilities companies. In those cases the companies, if privatised, should be done so with a very clear contract and regulation to prevent them from milking their customers. In many of those cases though, where it's kind of impossible to have true competition, I think that privatisation is more about short-term fund raising and providing a nice windfall for friends of the party.

I've no problem with Joe Blow Sandwich Company replacing meat in their sandwiches with stuff that's legally meat but pretty crap. The market decides on the level of quality it wants - with regulation ensuring that basic safety and ethical minimum standards are met. Joe Blow is prevented by law from staffing its sandwich mills with children. Again though that's where the public has to decide what it wants? Are we happy to buy stuff from a company that treats its employees like shit, and sends all of its workforce overseas, simply because the products are nice or cheap?

If the CEO is responsible primarily to shareholders, it doesn't mean that Joe can make his shareholders oodles of money by replacing ham with "I can't believe it's not ham". I agree though that a move to short-termism is bad, in both economics and politics.

Re:In other news..

[rgbscan]

Not being used for anything new? All the big banks use it for their back ends. I work in a shop that continually develops new functionality using COBOL based code. All those whizbang features like mobile banking and making deposits by taking a picture with your phone are driven off a cobol based backend.

Re:In other news..

[Random BedHead Ed]

So what? Really... so what? Red Hat is stable and exists as it does perfectly fine. This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable.

Maybe this is true in the long run, but it is the way corporations function. Corporations are designed to generate increased value for their investors, and are required to do so. It's not so much a rampant ideology as it is a deliberate design of the legal system surrounding limited liability companies.

Re:In other news..

[hey!]

Well, that's the point, isn't it? You don't have to build an application with so many bells and whistles, but if you *do*, then OSGI is a pretty neat solution to managing them. If you're going to need something like plug-ins, then OSGI is an alternative to rolling your own, but it comes at a cost of having to learn to think in OSGI. It's conceptually heavyweight, but not necessarily more so than whatever you manage to come up with.

Whether that's over-engineering depends on the problem. OSGI is a big win in an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans, or an application server like Glassfish or JBoss.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking hell. This passes for insightful on slashdot these days?

Red Hat don't make their money from software sales, they make money from support contracts. You don't buy Red Hat because you're a PHB who loves licences, you buy Red Hat because if it breaks they'll fix it for you... Which means so long as they provide this service they've got folks paying $1k per server every year, instead of $400 when ever your users want to update their OS (like Apple or Microsoft).

Re:In other news..

[NotSanguine]

If find it amusing that you call medium term 2-5 years. I would call medium term till i am about 50 (20 years) and long term when i retire, so about 40 years. Yet if i am talking about things like energy security, long term is 100+ years. One of the reasons i like the Long Now foundation.

I agree with you. Planning for the future should be considered done in terms of decades and generations.

However, there's something called "context." Since you apparently haven't heard of such a thing, I'll elucidate using the current topic of discussion:

As was mentioned several times, public corporations think in terms of quarterly profits and quarter over quarter growth. Just to make sure "quarter" isn't another one of those concepts you don't know about, a quarter is three months.
Given that these corporations think in three month time frames, in the "context" of this discussion three months, IMHO, can be considered the "short term." As such, it's not such a great leap to call 2-5 years the medium term. Get it now?

Re:In other news..

[alexo]

People from other parts of the two american continents that are not part of the United States of America find people that are from the United States of America insistence that they are just "Americans" rather dumb.

I am a Canadian, "from other parts of the two american continents that are not part of the United States of America" by your definition, and have yet to meet a person that shares your sentiment.

One of the reasons that "Americans" is the accepted term to refer to people from the US is that we already have "North Americans", "South Americans" "Central Americans", "Latin Americans", etc. to refer to various subgroups of people from the American continent.

If you think about it, the people from "the two american continents" have almost nothing in common as a group -- culturally, linguistically, historically, ethnically or racially -- apart from residing on the same geographical continent (in contrast to, say "Africans", "Europeans", etc.).

What reason can there be for anybody to define themselves as "Americans" in the sense of "people from the American continent"? The population is too diverse for the term to have any reasonable meaning (except in the geographical sense but then it is too broad, like "Eurasian" or "Western-hemisperer" -- it just isn't used broadly enough to merit a specific term).

On the other hand, if you're being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic, I will preemptively concede the argument and move on to more interesting discussions.

Re:In other news..

[dgatwood]

How so? The company makes money, and the employees get paid.

Not after the company who needs the work done realizes that it's cheaper to hire those programmers directly than to pay the middleman.

What you're also failing to understand is that many of those folks who want extra features are likely to want more than you as the original author can provide in the time allotted.

How so? We're talking about modifications here, not a whole new application program. I think this is a red herring.

Not bug fixes. Features. It's not at all uncommon for a feature request to require significant redesign. If that feature isn't broadly beneficial, the project team is going to roll its eyes.

And even when it is broadly beneficial, in many cases you get situations where... say 10% of your users want something to be done one way and the other 90% want something done the other way. It may or may not be easy to support both. This happens quite often.

Finally, many of the companies who want new features would want exclusivity for those features, or would want specific tie-ins to their own internal systems, which is work that isn't inherently useful to the community as a whole.

So what? If it brings in money for the company, what's the problem? No one said that everything open-source companies do has to be beneficial to the community as a whole, or their entire userbase. If Company X wants to buy certain features that are only useful to it, in order to integrate the program into their processes, then great; that makes money for the OSS company that wrote the program.

That's only true if that OSS company has an engineer that they are willing and able to part with full-time for weeks or months at the customer site to get the job done. That's not always possible, and that was my point. Otherwise, the company that needs the work finds an independent contractor, and learning the software enough to get the work done is the contractor's problem.

Again, not true. Smaller companies don't have "hordes" of in-house staff.

Again, you missed the point. Every company doesn't have to have that. It just takes a handful. A couple of companies need the work done and the Free software support company can't provide it right then due to limited resources, so those companies hire people on a contractual basis. When that company no longer needs those people, they're now freelancers who know the technology.

After just a handful of companies do this, the demand for the Free software support company's services dries up because there is now a glut of freelancers out in the field who need work and will undercut them. The company adds an unnecessary layer of bloat that costs money to operate, which means that hiring freelancers will always be cheaper unless there simply aren't enough freelancers who are willing/able to do the job.

Now I'm not saying that this always occurs—there are cases where it won't (embedded Linux development is a good example because pretty much 100% of the clients need custom bring-up, which is an area of skill that's well beyond what the average software engineer understands how to do), but again, those are the exceptions that prove the rule, not the rule itself. It is highly unlikely for any of those exceptions to apply to a team of programmers working on a typical end user application (unless it is huge like OpenOffice, and to some extent, not even then).

And even the market for Linux bringup could dry up if universities started pumping out people with actual operating systems programming backgrounds instead of Java/C#/Python programmers. Fortunately for those of us who either work in or have worked in that field (*raises hand*), it has a limited job market, which means that most people aren't willing to spend the effort to learn it.

Re:In other news..

[Grishnakh]

Do you have any experience in business at all, or do you live in your mom's basement?

Not after the company who needs the work done realizes that it's cheaper to hire those programmers directly than to pay the middleman.

Where the hell did you get that idea? Do you have any concept of how much it costs to hire employees? And that's only if you're able to. If the company is located someplace where there aren't any qualified programmers (like Fargo or Indianapolis), it may not be able to entice them to move there. Hiring qualified people also takes a lot of time, which is bad if you need something done quickly. Finally, what do you do when you don't need them any more?

It's much cheaper to just contract the work out to another company, if you don't intend on going into that company's business permanently.

After just a handful of companies do this, the demand for the Free software support company's services dries up because there is now a glut of freelancers out in the field who need work and will undercut them. The company adds an unnecessary layer of bloat that costs money to operate, which means that hiring freelancers will always be cheaper unless there simply aren't enough freelancers who are willing/able to do the job.

Why would a bunch of engineers up and quit their stable, salaried jobs to be freelancers? That's why they join companies like this in the first place: it doesn't pay quite as well, but they get a regular paycheck and are available whenever the company finds them a client to work for. Why do you think there's so many temp/staffing agencies, and they're so successful, even though they're just a middleman?

Obviously, you have zero experience in business.

Re:In other news..

[dgatwood]

Where the hell did you get that idea? Do you have any concept of how much it costs to hire employees?

I guess it depends on whether any large companies care about the product.

Finally, what do you do when you don't need them any more?

Have them work on something else? It's not like programmers only know how to work on one piece of software....

Why would a bunch of engineers up and quit their stable, salaried jobs to be freelancers?

Because working for a startup is anything but stable. Been there, done that. When it comes to companies that provide support for OSS, the vast majority are startup-sized companies. Becoming a contractor certainly isn't for everybody, but I do know a lot of people who have made that call over the years. It's not nearly as rare as you think. And it is even more common when you're talking about people working at a startup who know that a single bad quarter could mean that they're looking for work anyway.

Obviously, you have zero experience in business.

I've been working in the software business for over a decade. I've watched companies that I've worked for hire the lead coders for open source projects because it's easier and cheaper than trying to work with the companies that support those projects. What I'm describing does happen, and it happens often.

Re:In other news..

[dannys42]

I agree part of the problem is cultural... it can be summed up in this nice little quip:

"When Java is your hammer, every problem looks like a thumb."

Java makes it really easy to use things like XML... But the language does also make it really difficult to do things at a binary level. This inherently makes all the Java people make everything use XML when it doesn't need it... And that's what gets you started down the slipper slope of layers and layers of additional complexity.

Yes, I'm perhaps overgeneralizing. But that's my 10,000 ft view.

Re:In other news..

[dannys42]

The combination of JITs and faster hardware has mitigated the performance issues of Java. But I do know that to this day, I *still* dread when I hit upon a website that causes my JVM to load. My Mac (and I believe Windows?) deals with this problem by pre-loading the JVM on startup.. And I believe the JVM is something like 500-700 MBs of memory.

If you run a Java app on a smaller embedded system (think i386-i586 class), you'll definitely notice the difference.

However, I'll grant that in many cases you may not care about that difference.

It's really sad, though, because Inferno was out and usable even back in 1995, and really did offer a small footprint (smaller than flash: http://slashdot.org/story/00/12/15/0428227/Inferno-Plugin-for-IE---An-OS-In-Your-Browser), run-anywhere JIT, etc. etc... it delivered on every one of Sun's promises for Java (which other than platform-independence, I don't think Java has yet delivered quite as nicely)... it just couldn't beat Sun's hype machine.

Re:In other news..

[rubycodez]

As systems programmer have been using NFS since version 2 (lockless and udp only, by the way). Of course I know what I'm talking about, I'm older than Unix. Your writing as if you only know Sun's history for the last 15 years or so.

Re:In other news..

[mrchaotica]

Three projects in all of OSS is not "common".

Those were merely well-known examples, not an exhaustive list. There are many, many others.

Also remember, GCC and XFree86, to my knowledge, were/are completely non-profit projects, not products made by a for-profit company (unlike StarOffice/OpenOffice). So those examples aren't even applicable here; those projects weren't even for-profit businesses, and weren't in the business of trying to get companies to pay them for custom versions, and basically any changes they made they made for reasons not having to do with making money.

I don't think that difference matters.

As long as (now) Oracle's customers are happy with Oracle's support and prices, and Oracle's making money in it, they're probably not too worried about LO. Besides, there's nothing preventing them from copying LO's improvements and merging them at their convenience.

That depends on how many of the developers were Sun employees, and how many jumped ship when Sun became Oracle. If most of the development effort is outside Oracle now (and I have no idea whether or not it is), then Oracle could indeed have trouble keeping up with the changes

Re:In other news..

[dch24]

Look at the revenue and growth charts. IBM is an open source company, with a lot of old baggage still hanging around.

i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[digitalsushi]

I was going to be all snarky about some blog post probably not being the voice of FSF, but then, http://www.gnu.org/people/speakers.html and he's on there.

So I guess I disagree with the FSF, and not just him!

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[byolinux]

Out of interest, what do you disagree with?

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[PRMan]

If they care so much, why don't they raise money and build their own free FSFMail? They can make it as free as they want.

What's that? They can't afford to? So, basically it makes it look like FSF stands for FreeLOADER Software Foundation.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[digitalsushi]

I feel like it's asking too much. The concern is, "hey gmail maybe your code triggers some js machine bugs, and we dont trust it." That's valid. But asking them to open source it for inspection, well that lets other folks pick the pieces up and start hawking their own version. Isn't there a middle ground [to ask for, and be denied]? I've just become jaded enough to start agreeing with that crappy business model "let the 10% that complain cancel their service". So long ago that seemed like a joke answer a fake company would use, but now we see it all the time. And I agree with it, alas. If you dont trust gmail, dont use it. Dont ask for their trade secrets either under the veil of security auditing and the intended benefit of legally copying it, or legitimately security auditing it and haphazardly allowing competing services to glean legal copies. Ask for some NDA access to have yourself or someone you trust inspect it. Just because something can be open sourced, doesn't mean it needs to be.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[byolinux]

The code is already in your browser and you can already look at it. That's not the issue.

The issue is that without the essential freedoms to study, modify and distribute copies of the software, users are at a disadvantage to the developer and that's unjust.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[byolinux]

You know that Free Software is about freedom and not price, right?

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[AdmiralXyz]

The issue is that without the essential freedoms to study, modify and distribute copies of the software, users are at a disadvantage to the developer and that's unjust.

Before parroting boilerplate lines, could you please make an effort to understand the context of what people are talking about? Your quote is great for talking about Matlab or something; here, it makes no sense.

You can already "study" Google's Javascript code: like you said, you can look at it. You can already "modify" Google's Javascript code, just like you can modify any other Javascript code. Try it sometime: type "javascript:foo();" into your browser and watch the magic happen. Nothing is stopping you from disabling Google's Javascript altogether and setting your own scripts to run every time you open mail.google.com. You could even share your custom Javascript with other people if they want to use it: behold, you're distributing copies. What rights, exactly, are you arguing for? And what are you talking about, "disadvantage to the developer"? You can see exactly what the Javascript does, and you can disable or modify some or all of it at your whim.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[geekoid]

"But asking them to open source it for inspection, well that lets other folks pick the pieces up and start hawking their own version."
So? what, people are going to move away from Google to joeblows mail service? The value on gmail and Google is not just the email.

email is to integrated into society and to critical for daily use that people should be able to know what's going on.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[CSMatt]

If you dont trust gmail, dont use it.

That was easy enough back in say 2004 or so, but in today's world not having a GMail address doesn't mean you are "safe" from GMail. Nothing stops other people from e-mailing you from their GMail addresses, so having any conversations with them is going to result on your mail being stored on Google's servers, most likely forever, regardless of whether you like Google or not.

This leads to "Well, just flat out refuse to reply to GMail addresses." Except that GMail allows both e-mail forwarding and forging the From headers of another address, so you could be talking to a GMail user and not even know it.

Re:i guess that was a sanctioned comment

[trickyD1ck]

It's a scary world you live in. Here's a solution: don't use email.

Re:Yeah right

[H0p313ss]

You do realize that you can already debug it and step through because it's client side?

Just like all other software

[MobyDisk]

The FSF wants all software released under a free software license. So it really isn't news that they want Javascript software released under a free software license.

Re:The Code is the Design

[moberry]

The way they obfuscate and "minify" it, it might as well be in binary.

Re:Yeah right

[h4rr4r]

Good job having no idea what you are talking about there. Javascript runs on the browser, you get a copy every-time you visit google.

On top of which if you have source, you don't need to reverse engineer anything. Plus hiding access to source is not security, just obscurity.

Over all your entire comment was pretty much totally pointless and uninformed.

over the top

[applematt84]

i'm all for the FSF, but in my opinion, this is a little over the top. this kind of complaint from the FSF just borders on whining.

Re:over the top

[betterunixthanunix]

What exactly makes the complaint over the top? The purpose of the free software foundation is to promote free software. A web app is software, and the AGPL has not exactly caught on yet. It seems entirely reasonable and in line with their goals for the FSF to push for Gmail to become free software.

We cannot go around talking about how modern and awesome web apps are, then turn around and claim that the FSF has no business discussing the implications of web apps on software freedom.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

it's over the top because (as i understand it) they are complaining because the code is compressed and as a result of compression, the code is obfuscated.

Re:over the top

[gstoddart]

What exactly makes the complaint over the top? The purpose of the free software foundation is to promote free software.

I agree that the FSF is doing exactly what they've always said they'd do, and for those stated reasons.

It's just that sometimes the FSF come across as being zealots. They're like old communists and the like talking about the ideological purity of software. The rest of us are just trying not to make contact with the crazy person.

Commercial entities aren't generally interested in the notion that all software should be libre.

It's like hippies (or whomever) advocating we should stop all modern technology, and start living in a peaceful, agrarian society and sing songs around the campfire ... everybody but them is sorta like "sure sport, you go right ahead, we'll meet you there".

Re:over the top

[h4rr4r]

You missed the biggest part of their complaint. They want you to have the right to modify that code and have the rest of the four freedoms. They want this code under a free software license, as they want for all code.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

that doesn't make sense; the javascript comes from the hosting web server. how do they expect Google (and other providers) to allow one to change the code? that's like expecting a 4.0 GPA from a struggling C-average student.

Re:over the top

[byolinux]

They just have to provide the code under a free license. Running the code is another problem entirely.

Re:over the top

[h4rr4r]

That is not their problem, but grease-monkey already lets you do this.

This is just done in the users browser.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

i don't know ... i feel a web application is something completely different than, say, a software package you can download and install on your computer. to me, if i were Google, i'd feel like the FSF is trying to strong-arm me into revealing the bread-and-butter of my product. it's like showing your cards during a poker game.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

agreed. i use grease-monkey and i think that's enough.

Re:over the top

[byolinux]

But this is Google's code that its running on MY computer. I should be able to control it.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

i think then, you should take up the argument with the browser, not Google. use something like grease-monkey or a plugin like CustomizeGoogle. that's like saying you want Shell, BP, (et. al. gas vendors) to provide the equipment to convert your car's fuel system from gasoline to hydrogen-based when you should actually be seeking support from your car's manufacturer. however, nonetheless, we can agree to disagree.

Re:over the top

[trickyD1ck]

Do you think that engineers and managers at Google are idiots? If releasing the code under an open-source license were such a good idea, they would already be doing it, without your pushing and bullying.

Re:over the top

[applematt84]

not to mention Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.

Re:Yeah right

[doishmere]

Well, the source is already technically available, since they ship you non-compiled javascript code. FSF's has several problems with this. 1) Gmail has not granted the user the right to modify the Javascript code. 2) Even if (1) is conceded, the FSF is arguing that the obfuscated code transmitted to the client browser does not truly constitute source code. They would like a link to be placed in a comment in the obfuscated code to the original, un-obfuscated code. There is a broader problem, however; even if a website transmits GPL'd code in the clear, the user does not have any easy way to replace the transmitted code with their modified code. They would like browsers to support hot-swapping websites' scripts with modified copies.

Re:Yeah right

[adamchou]

Considering that Javascript runs on the client side, I don't see how someone couldn't already do that. On top of that, if someone can hack the server side by exploiting a flaw found in client side code, then that is EXACTLY the reason why the unobfuscated source code should be released. Server side could should not be susceptible to an exploit a client can induce by manipulating code or data packets.

What I don't understand is what the hell the FSF is asking for. JavaScript runs on the client side and the source code is already available.

JavaScript is client-side

[Ironchew]

Releasing the client-side code isn't a big deal (it's right there in the page source!) I'd be more interested in the server-side code.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[h4rr4r]

It is a huge deal. It is right there in the page source, and you do not have the right to do a thing with it according to the current license on that code. Giving you the four freedoms on software you are running is a huge deal and the goal of the FSF.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[Terwin]

With the stated reason of: "so that users can trust their service", the important part is being able to examine the source-code.
Admittedly the GWT generated JavaScript is not very reader-friendly, but it is all there for you to look at if you should choose.
 

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[h4rr4r]

But you currently do not have the right to do that. The license google uses forbids this, I am pretty sure.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[hansamurai]

You can do at least one thing with any code you have in front of your eyes, including client side javascript, and that is examine it to see if you can "trust" it. No, you may not have the right to do anything you want with it, but that's within their rights to license the code however they wish. If you don't like how they license their code, don't use their service, find one that meets the four freedoms and live happily.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[twebb72]

I would agree that client side code is (relatively) accessible via the programmer (even if it is compressed); however trusting their server side execution of those includes is really where the trust factor comes into play. Most browsers will lock down cross domain requests. The real power is controlling what the server serves to the users that use that include.

For example, www.xyz.com decides to include a couple lines libraries from google.com, say, jquery, and analytics. By virtue of making the include, that third party site has the ability of pass messages back and forth via code generation (to bypass the cross domain issues) and manipulate the DOM of www.xyz.com in however it sees fit. Now, a security minded person wouldn't include a resource that's off-site, for this very reason. Good examples of this are bank sites like usaa.com. No where on that site will you see a third party domain resource, once you've signed to your account. Putting the resource files on www.xyz.com makes a lot of sense for versioning, but also securing the site from potential hacks of the third party (hacking that google's analytics includes or akamai servers is a juicy opportunity, but only if you could execute code server side).

When it comes to javascript, the best way to secure your site is to host your own resources, and DON'T use off site includes that are from untrusted sources. Even if the source is trusted, it doesn't mean your in the clear. Your best bet, is to always host your own site resources.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[TheSpoom]

Oh, please. I'm pretty sure a judge would side with me if Google complained that I right-clicked the page and viewed source.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[CannonballHead]

Google licensing prevents you from reading plain text?

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[Anonymous Coward]

Google licensing prevents you from reading plain text?

Yes! It also makes you sterile.

Torches on the right, pitchforks on the left in that bin there. Don't bunch up, it's a long road to the castle.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[Anubis IV]

You're pretty sure? You have got to be kidding, right? You think that Google can forbid me from clicking "View Source" in my browser after they sent me the information in plain text? That's like suggesting that they could forbid me from reading a publicly accessible page that they linked me to. It's nonsense.

If trust of the JS is all that needs to be established here, the source code is all you need, and we have it for all of those sites mentioned in the summary, so the FSF (at least according to the summary, since I haven't read the article) is making a moot point. Honestly, I'm less worried about the source of client-side code and more worried about the database and enforcement of their own policies internally, neither of which will be helped even if Twigoobook did set up some repository for the JS of their services while licensing it with terms that would make the FSF swoon for them.

Re:JavaScript is client-side

[agrif]

Although it's not nearly as hard to read, saying GWT-generated JS is enough to examine source for trust is like saying binaries are enough to examine for trust. You can go through a binary and figure out what a certain program will do (after all, computers do this every time they run a program), but it's much more difficult.

Re:Yeah right

[h4rr4r]

They want the user to have the four freedoms over this code. They also want an unobfuscated copy. Right now you sure could copy the JS and modify it yourself, but you would be in violation of the license google has placed on it.

What about WebKit?

[Tr3vin]

Nobody complained when WebKit, an open source product, had a vulnerability in it that allowed for remote code execution. Sure, it was eventually found, but having it open source didn't make it instantly safe. I don't see why we should force companies to publish all of their javascript. It is plenty open as plain text, no need for a free license. Open sourcing the code would encourage modification, which could easily lead to the attacks that we are all afraid of.

Re:What about WebKit?

[byolinux]

We're not talking about forcing anyone to do anything -- but JavaScript is programming code too.

The FSF's goal is for all the software a user runs on their computer to be free software -- without a license, the software would be full copyright and not in a fit state for modification. This is completely within the goals of the FSF.

Re:What about WebKit?

[gandhi_2]

the js client can't do anything the API doesn't already provide access to. you can modify it all you want, the server doesn't trust the client any more than the user privileges allow.

Re:What about WebKit?

[geekoid]

"...but having it open source didn't make it instantly safe"
No one said it does. It does however make it far more likely to get fixed when it is found, and more likely to be found.

I also could fix it for myself while waiting for an official patch.

"Open sourcing the code would encourage modification, which could easily lead to the attacks that we are all afraid of."
nonsense.

The fact that someone would post that ancient canard means their are fewer and fewer software engineers reading slashdot these days.

Re:Yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

They would like browsers to support hot-swapping websites' scripts with modified copies.

Am I the only one that sees this as an enormous security vulnerability waiting to happen? We've already got flash ads and dodgy popunders trying to execute malicious scripts as it is... why give them yet another attack vector?

Re:Would not help so much

[doishmere]

The FSF also calls for browsers to support loading modified (or saved) Javascript instead of what is given to you by the server. So, in your example, you would just make sure that your browser loads your copy of their 'clean' source code, rather than something they've patched and re-served.

Re:If the rest of the world worked like the intern

[h4rr4r]

You should be able too. You can always replace the code on your devices to be sure.

Most people might not care, but that does not mean anything. Most of those people would be ok without freedom of speech or freedom of thought either.

Re:Yeah right

[h4rr4r]

You are the only one, because you have no idea what you are talking about.

The FSF would like to see you be able to substitute sites scripts with your own modified copies only on your own browser. Oh no, you could run exploit code on yourself.

How about you register an account and come back in a few years when you have learned something.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[byolinux]

Most Facebook users use a browser written in C++ -- they don't know that either, yet free software browsers and rendering engines remain in common usage.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[h4rr4r]

Meaning they could actually get a second opinion. Seems like that would be great. I am no doctor, but I get access to the records so I can show them to another doctor. Getting a second opinion is a valuable thing.

Ask for the server code, damnit

[Massacrifice]

Sorry, but this it stupid. The real brains that we'd need to trust is in the SERVER code. And all of Google's procedures. Knowing what the client is up might make some feel good, but this all very centralized.

Re:Crap Idea

[h4rr4r]

Wow, that is one really good troll.

They already give you a copy of this code numbnuts, the FSF just wants them to change the license on it. Confiscation is done against your will. the FSF does not have the force of law they just are asking.

The FSF is never demeaned when they try to have software come under a free software license, that is their goal at all times.

Greasemonkey

[Nushio]

The popular Greasemonkey Firefox extension (Which I believe is built-in on Google Chrome) lets the end user modify the javascript/css running on the site to the user's desires. There's a huge database on UserScripts.org that lets you browse site-specific mods to Twitter, Facebook and yes, Gmail.

Another very popular extension is "Better GMail 2", which basically packages some greasemonkey scripts into a single extension.

Re:Greasemonkey

[trollertron3000]

You seem to have the same answer that others here do but it's a bit off. Anyone can already get the source code and use it. But it's the license that is the issue here. No one can legally place it on their site and write their own version AFAIK.

Re:Yeah right

[drb226]

...enormous security vulnerability...

For whom? Who would be responsible for that vulnerability? Browsers? Web site designers? Users?

Certainly the browser should make it as easy as possible for users to execute (or prevent execution of) any arbitrary javascript. Anyone with Chrome or Firefox can already do this with relative ease. I don't think it would be very hard for browsers to provide this ability exclusively to users, though the Vista effect ("are you *sure* you want to...?") could be an unfortunate side-effect.

Fair enough. I want a pony!

[calmofthestorm]

And a space unicorn! And free candy!

Javascript is evil! Use GnuWebScript!

[mveloso]

You may not know it, but the website you're reading RIGHT NOW is a festering hotbed of evil. EVIL. Evil code that will steal your information, kill your wife and children, and damage the transmission on your car.

The ONLY way around that is to use our new FSF GnuWebScript, which is Totally Open and Free. Not only is it a Force for Good, it whitens your teeth and makes your toes smell nicer. It will never do those evil and nasty things that the Javascript does, because it's not Javascript - it's GnuWebScript!

GnuWebScript is a free side-set* of ECMAscript, a tragically unfree industry standard. GnuWebScript implements everything in ECMAscript slightly differently using free, non-proprietary language extensions.

GnuWebScript - to be free you must chain yourself to it!

* side set is not a superset or a subset - it's a sideset.

Re:Javascript is evil! Use GnuWebScript!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad slashcode is FOSS...

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[EmagGeek]

That doesn't mean that the justification for releasing code under an open license is to "let users trust the service."

Releasing Facebook's code will not "let users trust the service" because most users, and I imagine the overwhelming majority of them, wouldn't know what they were looking at. It would not enable them to trust the service any more or less than before.

It would enable a few users, let's call them group G, to trust the service. The remainder of users, call them group L, would then have to trust Group G. This has the same trust problem as trusting Facebook in the first place, so nothing is accomplished.

Facebook's code is their property, and they have every right to keep it secret. If you do not trust Facebook, don't use it.

Could it be...

[slapout]

That someone at the FSF has been using Gmail and started feeling guilty about using "non-free" software and instead of switching to something else is trying to get Google to change?

Re:Could it be...

[Phoe6]

I bet that was the case.

Why?

[PetiePooo]

From TFA (emphasis mine):

JavaScript code is no different to languages like Python, C++ or Ruby — applications written in those languages running on our computers should be free software, so we can run, modify and share them if we wish.

Should? Why?

I understand it's RMS's and FSF's belief, but why must it be everyone's? What's clearly missing is the qualifier, "We believe that ..." or "It is the FSF's position that ..."

FWIW, that's a rhetorical question. I know why he believes what he does. I also know that his is an extreme position that not many people share. That he wants some corporation to open up their code for others to use/share/modify is Not News ®. <yawn>

Re:Why?

[byolinux]

You think the FSF should prefix all of its opinions on its own website?

Re:Yeah right

[somersault]

They would like browsers to support hot-swapping websites' scripts with modified copies.

Can't you do that with Greasemonkey? I wouldn't know as I've never tried it, but it's the sort of thing I'd expect you to be able to do with it from how people talk of it.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[EmagGeek]

Why do you trust the second doctor any more than the first? Your trust problem is not solved at all in this analogy.

Re:Yeah right

[Ruke]

The problem with this logic is that cross-site-scripting, flash, hell, even your garden-variety "computer virus" all require you to run software "only on your own computer." Any hot-swapping technology has to be implemented with extreme care, and even then, you're still opening up a new attack vector. I seem to recall Greasemonkey, an open-source Firefox addon which allowed users to run external scripts within their browsers, having a history of vulnerabilities to this type of attack.

Re:Yeah right

[Kamots]

Opera does this. I've made use of it in the past to fix buggy javascript on a site.

I'd suspect Firefox does something similar.

Re:If the rest of the world worked like the intern

[Pentium100]

I at least want the circuit diagrams and all images of the (E)EPROMs so I can fix the device when it breaks. It was like this in the past (circuit diagrams were in the manuals or in some magazines, at least in the USSR). I can find service manuals for some devices, but I want them included with the device and also have images of the chips that need to be programmed before they can be used.

red herrings

[cthlptlk]

Speaking of obfuscation, the article by the FSF drags Node.js and V8 into the discussion, even though they have nothing at all to do with the client-side javascript that the ostensible topic of the article.

Also, as the author mentions, it is possible via greasemonkey to do essentially what is wanted--modify the client-side javascript--so it seems like an ideological point rather than a practical one. The "obfuscation" of the javascript source is as much about reducing the bandwidth consumed by javascript as is it about hiding the source code from the People's Republic of GMail Users, so it would be silly to transmit the original source.

Of course, linking to the original source would help people write better GreaseMonkey scripts. Since I live in Michigan, which is being turned into a banana republic by its governor, you will pardon me if I throw up a little when you conflate freedom and convenience.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[byolinux]

Psst, here's a copy of Facebook's secret code -- http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yp/r/Ub2OCc5xWCb.js

Re:Yeah right

[tukang]

Yeah but the javascript you get is compressed with all white space taken out and variables are renamed to be as short as possible, which makes it next to impossible to debug.

Re:Yeah right

[just_another_sean]

With the Firebug plug-in you can change the JS (and HTML and CSS too for that matter) in the debugger and see instant results. But I don't know if it allows you to swap a complete script. I guess you accomplish that by changing a link to a script in an HTML file to point to your own. I've only ever used it to debug my own scripts or someone's I had to take ownership of.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[h4rr4r]

Because the odds that all doctors are evil is lower than the odds that one doctor is evil. Trust is not an all or nothing thing.

Re:Yeah right

[GameboyRMH]

Nothing a glorified find-and-replace can't help with. This'll help you get started:

http://unwrongest.com/how-to-decompress-javascript/

Re:If the rest of the world worked like the intern

[drb226]

Greetings from 2163! Patents were sooo last century...can't imagine how you got any collaboration done with that crappy system. Patent law encouraging innovation...hah! (spoilers) World War IV pretty much put an end to that silly "intellectual property" idea. But for you "free software" geeks, I suggest you go into hiding before the Sharer's Inquisition a few years after WW III.

Re:Yeah right

[MozeeToby]

Wouldn't FSF's effort be better placed making a tool that intelligently adds whitespace and allows the user to quickly and easily change variable and function names? It would still be above the typical user's level but all it would take is one white hatter de-obfuscate the code and post it somewhere. Seriously, gmail's java script isn't that big, you could probably do it with notepad and find-replace by hand in a couple hours.

Re:Yeah right

[MozeeToby]

Can't you do this with greasemonkey (and presumably other tools) already?

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[digitalsushi]

Exactly, we have the code. Why does it need to be open sourced?

Their reason is also bullshit

[Sycraft-fu]

The thing is, JavaScript is inherently source visible. Since it is a script, and it runs on the client system, you can always see the source. For trusting an app, you don't need the source to be open, as in free to redistribute. You just need it available. The US Government trusts MS software because they have the source (many people have the source to Windows, governments, universities, etc). You can audit it, compile it yourself (or interpret it yourself which is automatic in JS) and so on.

Thus there is no trust reason AT ALL for Google to open source their stuff. You can argue other reasons, but not trust. That the FSF is using that means they are just building a straw man, perhaps because they don't feel a real argument would stand up.

Re:Their reason is also bullshit

[Jorl17]

Hahahah! People trusting Microsoft! Boy have things gone crazy!

Re:Their reason is also bullshit

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

"The thing is, JavaScript is inherently source visible."

Ever try to comprehend highly minified JavaScript? It's difficult at best. Keep in mind it's not just white space and comments, it's also things like symbols getting renamed to very short (not meaningful) names. Is it possible to figure out? Yes. Is it easier. Not at all.

Re:Their reason is also bullshit

[Duradin]

So if someone writes a piece of GPL software like it was minified would it be violating the GPL? Is it their responsibility to make sure you can understand it?

Re:Their reason is also bullshit

[Xacid]

Well here's just one example from a quick search:

"Microsoft is expanding a program to give government organizations access to some of its tightly guarded software blueprints amid growing competition from rivals who make such source code freely available.
Beginning Monday, Microsoft will offer more than 60 governments and international organizations the option of viewing the proprietary source code for the latest version of its ubiquitous Office software, including the Outlook e-mail program, Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheet application."

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/09/65018

Re:Their reason is also bullshit

[jfengel]

That's actually a good question. It sounds to me like such a thing would not be "libre" in the same sense that binary compiled code isn't. Arguably, minified code isn't really the "source", since that's not what you wrote.

That doesn't reflect one way or the other on this case, but it's an interesting point.

Re:Yeah right

[dgatwood]

They want the user to have the four freedoms over this code. They also want an unobfuscated copy. Right now you sure could copy the JS and modify it yourself, but you would be in violation of the license google has placed on it.

Isn't that somewhat moot? Unless they have restored offline support in the last few weeks, Google could take away the service at any time just by shutting down their servers, and it wouldn't matter at all if you had the client-side code cached locally because it won't function without the server.

Further, the code changes frequently. This would make it pretty fragile for even sophisticated users to maintain a patched version of code for sites like Gmail.

Who do they think they are going to help with this, and under what conditions would their request help? Because it seems like a stretch to me.

who cares

[nblender]

Does anyone listen to what this Botanophobe says anymore? Seriously?

Re:who cares

[geekoid]

He's afraid of plants?

Re:who cares

[nblender]

Yes. I think that's fairly well known isn't it?

Re:Yeah right

[trollertron3000]

The source is obfuscated and also compressed.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[just_another_sean]

Yeah well at some point you ask a third and then a fourth and before you know it you have an overwhelming majority of experts agreeing on something. That makes you feel a whole lot better then just hearing it from one. And, you know, people might trust a doctor who also happens to be a family member or close friend more then a hospitable.

OK, enough beating on this analogy. The point is that even if I don't have the knowledge to examine the code and deem it safe I'll feel a lot better if my friend who works for NASA and my 15 year old nephew who never ran into a computer problem of mine he couldn't solve told me FB's code is safe as opposed to me hearing it from FB. Yes I have to trust my friend and nephew but, for me, the user anyway, that trust is easier to give to them then to a for profit entity who has more interest in keeping me as a customer over keeping me safe on the web.

Re:Yeah right

[CastrTroy]

Swapping their script for your own version would be a nightmare. What happens when Google updates the official script, or a related one, and your script no longer functions because of incompatible code. What happens when even simple HTML is changed, causing your script to stop working. It would be equivalent to getting data off a website via screen-scraping. Every time the site changed some minor thing, your scripts would become useless.

Re:Crap Idea

[trollertron3000]

Well I see your point but I disagree. It's not confiscation because Google would still own the copyright and this would be their choice to open source it.

I think the FSF approach is this - imagine a world where instead of hiding information and ideas, which is what source code is, we share those ideas and move forward so much faster. It's not in the name of security you see, it's in the name of freedom and moving humanity forward that much faster. You don't have to agree with it. It's idealistic, but some of us are.

Re:Idea assumes everyone knows Java

[byolinux]

Because users aren't able to legally modify, study and distribute it? Plus, it's not in a suitable form for modification.

Re:found one

[ivucica]

I apologize for not making a distinction between self-hosted web-based blogging service and a blogging tool for interaction with remote services, but with integration of the local desktop environment.

Sorry, doesn't work that way

[Sycraft-fu]

If I release software and I say "You can do whatever you want with this software. You can modify it and redistribute it as you wish. It costs $50 per copy." Well all that has to happen in one person buys one copy and then redistributes it for free. That is allowed, I said they could redistribute it. People won't pay for my copy, since they can get the same thing for free legally.

That is why you find that when companies make money using free software, it is a service model or the like. You can't just charge for the software because people can just redistribute it legally. Fine, some things work in a service model, but not everything.

Gmail Javascript is GWT/Java

[alannon]

I think the real issue with the Javascript being 'opaque' on GMail and other Google sites is that the javascript is not the original code the software is written in. The original code is written in Java and 'compiled' into Javascript with GWT. In order to be truly useful and readable, Google would need to release the Java source code. The javascript that is delivered to your browser will even differ depending on what browser you're using.

Re:Gmail Javascript is GWT/Java

[jambox]

Congratulations, you are the first to make the most salient point out of about 200 posters. Although, some of it I think is JS which is loaded into a script tag from the server, so that would be a different case since not converted from Java.

Re:Gmail Javascript is GWT/Java

[alannon]

I'm not really surprised it's not been mentioned since GWT is not a technology that most people realize exists or is in use. Personally, I absolutely hate writing and debugging Javascript so I will usually jump at an opportunity to use GWT if I'm otherwise writing a non-trivial amount of browser-side code. Since I write server code mostly in Java, I think this approach makes a lot of sense.

Re:Gmail Javascript is GWT/Java

[jambox]

It certainly does make things a little bit more bearable with larger projects. I work with pyjamas which is a python port (also trimmed down a little) of GWT and it really is an exceptionally powerful toolkit.

Re:Yeah right

[geekoid]

Open software does nothing to increase or decrease ones ability to hacks. Only software design determines that.

Re:Yeah right

[joeslugg]

They also want an unobfuscated copy.

If obfuscation is forbidden by the GPL, there's about a gabillion Perl scripts out in the wild that are in violation.

/rimshot

Re:Yeah right

[tukang]

The link you posted to states that it only does indentations and does not (obviously) replace the shortened variable names with anything meaningful. Again, reading code with meaningless function, class, and variable names is next to impossible even with proper formatting.

FSF is done

[cstec]

Can we finally just admit that the FSF is irrelevant and move forward?

FSF -- Free as in Not

Re:Yeah right

[Kamots]

With Opera I can right-click on a page say "edit site preferences" go to the scripting tab, and set a javascript folder. It will then load the javascript in that folder followed by the scripting on the page. However, in the javascript in the specified folder that you load, you can use opera-specific extensions to modify/overwrite the subsequently loaded javascript from the site. I'm probably doing a horrible job of explaining as I don't really do web-development stuff. So...

http://www.opera.com/docs/userjs/

I don't see the point

[grumbel]

I don't quite see the point. Sure it would be nice to have the Javascript under a Free Software license, but that would be very far down my list of priorities, as with Javascript and the Web in general there is one very fundamental difference to regular software: You neither own that stuff nor control it, they do and that is the problem that needs attacking. It doesn't make a difference if they stick a GPL header on top of their code or not, I as I would still be forced to use whatever version they ship me, keeping around an older copy with features they might have changed/removed/whatever doesn't help me when the API to their servers has changes, that old GPL copy might either break or become unusable. The real solution would be to provide standard data driven APIs for webservices, so that I wouldn't depend on their Javascript and HTML code, but could roll my own.

The whole problem with the Web today is that I don't have direct access to my data, but instead can only access it via a whole swoop of HTML and Javascript stuff, that makes it frequently hard or even impossible to actually do certain operation. A very basic example would be backup. Yeah, I can download mail from GMail via POP or IMAP and that will give me some of my mails, but what about chat logs, mail I send, tags, contacts, etc. and a bunch of other meta data that isn't just the mail? Can I backup all that? And even more importantly: Can I actually restore it? If GMail decides to delete my account tomorrow, can I open a new one and restore my backup into the new account? Can I do that when I change mail providers? Will meta data survive the transfer? That is the problem that needs fixing, as almost all webpages suffer from it, even the glorious 100% Free Software ones generally don't give you full import and export capabilities of your data and even when they do the interfaces are often limited and cumbersome.

Re:I don't see the point

[john.wingfield]

... but what about chat logs, mail I send, tags, contacts, etc. and a bunch of other meta data that isn't just the mail? Can I backup all that? And even more importantly: Can I actually restore it? If GMail decides to delete my account tomorrow, can I open a new one and restore my backup into the new account?

Yes, except the tags. Very easily.

Re:Yeah right

[pegr]

Yeah, try parsing the Javascript Google shoves down, then reconsider the issue. While I'm sure one could de-obfuscate it, that they obfuscate it to begin with is a problem. "Do No Evil" my ass. Secrets imply deception.

Re:Crap Idea

[h4rr4r]

No one is taking about using force and you know it. Everyone has the right to use their free speech to try convince people to do what they want.

Re:Yeah right

[Duradin]

How dare they try to reduce the size of the pages the serve!

I wonder if GPLv4 will have clauses stating which indentation style is allowable.

Re:Crap Idea

[geekoid]

-1 troll.

or

-5 too fucking stupid.

WRONG

[jopaki]

give me a fleepin' break

Re:Would not help so much

[Grishnakh]

Google could release a clean javascript source and add a nasty patch to their server.

It should be trivial to take your clean javascript source, minify it, and compare that to the minified JS they're serving you to verify they're the same, and alert you if they're not. However, being a web service, you have to understand that the served JS is going to change from time to time as they fix bugs and make upgrades, so when you're alerted that they're not the same, it should be easy to see if a new clean source was released, explaining the discrepancy.

Re:Would not help so much

[Nerull]

And the number of users who will bother with that can be counted on one hand.

Open JavaScript?

[Bucky24]

Ok I haven't read through all the comments here so someone may have already said this.

JavaScript is client-side. That means it has to be downloaded by your browser, so the code has to be world-readable. It's not very difficult to just go download a copy of the JS code yourself. And some browsers (chrome native and firefox via firebug) allow you to view the javascript on any page without even having to separately download it yourself. This is basically like saying "we want all your HTML code to be available for anyone to see!"

It already is "open source", you just have to look for it a bit.

Just a couple cents worth of nothing

[Jekler]

I know the FSF's mission is an ideal or a puritanical vision, but there are real important and pragmatic issues they address. I really have to agree with this idea of a "Javascript Trap". We've gotten very comfortable with free and open web services that it's easy to forget, the code that handles your sensitive data isn't open to review.

It's simple really, in the spirit of free and open software, code hiding in any form should ALWAYS be a red flag. There just shouldn't be a point where people say "...and, for the rest of the application, trust us, it just works somehow."

Re:Ok. Ridiculous

[517714]

If Google wished to do something untrustworthy with Gmail, Java is the least of your worries.

Freedom is great isn't it

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Freedom is great isn't it, people are free to write code then choose what they do with it and how it is licensed.

Seriously, if you don't like not being able to see, audit, or use Facebook's code, don't use Facebook.

And while your at it, stop loaning RMS your phones! If he doesn't want to pay the money, or own a device with unacceptable software on it, let him do without.

And people who don't wish to agree with a license are also free to do without.

And all the other

[DrYak]

That's ONE.

Yup. And you could also add, IBM, HP and countless of others smaller companies.
FL/OSS *is* economically viable.

Bottom line is it's hard to make a lot of money in open source. Great for consumers, bad for investors.

Given the data, it's not impossible to make money in opensource.
It's bad for rent-seeking companies, it's good for everyone else.

Re:And all the other

[Kalriath]

IBM? I wasn't aware a consultant was an open source program, or a Netfinity 5000 server. HP? I'm pretty sure a DL385 G7 is not an open source program. HP/UX isn't either.

It's all well and good to say it's economically viable (it is - if done right. Redhat is done right, Canonical is done very wrong), but neither IBM nor HP are examples of this.

Re:And all the other

[Keen Anthony]

Neither IBM nor HP are remotely comparable to Red Hat or other companies that focus on FOSS. HP and IBM develop complete software systems that include hardware they design. IBM has chip development. HP has imaging, printers, etc..

Re:Yeah right

[Bamfarooni]

What, you don't write all your code that way?

Re:Yeah right

[Golddess]

And if the code was released under a different license, suddenly it wouldn't be like that?

It's already distributed

[DrYak]

The issue is that without the essential freedoms to study

study is already possible. the javascript code is already in your browser.
So even if it's not Free/Libre, GMail is already gratis and open, at-least.

The only limitation would be obfuscation and luckily GMail isn't doing that.

modify

As the source code is available, you're free to modify it.
In fact there are already lots of possiblity to do this.
User scripting extensions, for example, like GreaseMonkey and UserScripts let you improve websites.
In fact, I use a couple of such to "patch" some functionnality of Facebook in FireFox.
Lots of other possibility exists to modify functionnality at the client level.

And there are countless of precedent, mainly in the realm of video games and game-genie cheating device, which confirms that this is not creating an unlicensed deivated work, it's just the consumer doing whatever he wants with code which was legally distributed to him/her.

distribute

although the original GMail code isn't GPLed and thus user can't distribute patched copies, the patches *themselves* can be distributed under whatever license the patch author choose.
several software project have started that way (Apache has started as a serie of patch of httpd, LAME as a serie of patch to the MP3 reference code, OpenDivX/Xvid as a sries of patch to the MPEG 4 reference code, etc...) and became autonomous FL/OSS only once so much was patched that nothing is left from the non-free/libre software.

It would have been problematic if users didn't get access to the code (like the server side of the code).
But with the current solution, users can get the benefit of open source, and even with faster distribution. (Currently once a nice patch is created, it can be uploaded to some user scripting site or whatever - it doesn't need to go through the whole Google validation procedure and wait until Google decides to incorporate it into its next version).

Now the FSF is perhaps seeking to create a precedent whith which they could pressure other to follow the freedom trend, including website for which this isn't possible due to javascript obfuscation.

Re:Crap Idea

[tater86]

Except that, based on the pro-FSF posts in this story, they want google to give up a significant portion of their copyright so that others can modify and distribute it. In exchange, they will give google nothing. They are trying to pressure google to give up their freedom to release the software they wrote in the way they choose.

RedHat is US Government subsidized

[gatkinso]

Well not directly, but the only NAIP approved Linux distro is.... RedHat, the exception is OpenSUSE.

So... if you want to run Linux on a classified system... Redhat is basically it.

Similar to the virtual monopoly Sun used to enjoy wrt to US government computing.

Wrong !

[DrYak]

It is a huge deal. It is right there in the page source, and you do not have the right to do a thing with it according to the current license on that code.

And that part of the license isn't enforceable.
There are precedents from the realm of video games & cheating software and devices, confirming that an end user *can* modify a copy of software which was legally distributed to him/her.
Copyright law only kicks in when distribution is taking place (when buying software in a shop, or downloading the software from the net).
Not when using said software.

What wouldn't be possible is to modify a non copy-lefted javascript, and publish the modified version on your website. (Because that would be distributing, and according to copyright law, would require you to have a license to do it).

On the other hand you can make a patch out of your modifications, put *the patch itself* under GPL, and distribute that one freely on the web (say, as an user script). Other user could use the patch to gain the same functionnality or fix the same bugs.

Patches

[DrYak]

No one can legally place it on their site and write their own version AFAIK.

So you won't be able to re-use the code *BUT* you can patch it and release the *patches themselves* under LGPL if you want and publish them.
So no way to reuse Gmail on your site, but plenty of opportunity to add features or fix bugs.

There are lots of software which started their life as such patch sets.
Apache started as patches against httpd, LAME and OpenDivX/Xvid started against MP3 and MPEG-4 reference code, etc.

Re:Patches

[williamfrench4]

It's not practical to distribute patches against compiled code; whenever Google makes even a small change in the source (which is in Java), the minified Javascript is likely to change so much that the patch becomes unusable.

So many comments, so little RTFA...

[ElusiveJoe]

Really, fucking read it already. And stop posting nonsense like "but javascript is already opensource" and "FSF are lunatics".

Yes, your browser does download JS. And yes, you can view it. But you cannot legitimately re-use it. What FSF suggests is that some major web sites would release their JS code under free license, thus allowing code modifications and re-usage. What worries them is that a lot of Greasemonkey scripts for gmail are published under free licenses, but the original javascript remains copyrighted.

Re:So many comments, so little RTFA...

[shutdown -p now]

I very much doubt that Google is not aware of the existence of GPL. If they chose not to place GMail JS source code under it, then that's their choice to respect. What makes it different from any other proprietary software out there?

Re:So many comments, so little RTFA...

[trickyD1ck]

You see, the FSF knows better. It can judge what strategy is best for a company in the blink of an eye. This is evident by the tremendous success it has been over the years: billions in revenue, multiple spin-offs, their funding for startups, the fact that GNU/Hurd made Windows obsolete in 1995, that Microsoft and Apple are bankrupt and their former employees now work at the FSF. Why won't you trust these guys?

Re:Would not help so much

[Grishnakh]

I imagine all the FSF people would do it; they'd probably write up a Firefox extension for it even, to make it fully automatic.

Besides, if all your principles are based on popularity, then you must be a rather sad and spineless person.

Value added distribution of free software

[tepples]

I don't see what's wrong with distributing a copy of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice binary+source for a fee. One way to add value and make it worth the $50+shipping is to include non-free clip art. (The data that a GPL program uses doesn't become GPL.)

Trap?

[sdiz]

What trap? Like you can't check email with noscript?

Re:Yeah right

[Rakishi]

Useless if you're lucky, what if your version of the script now wipes out all your data because it interacts badly with the new apis put in place?

How about urchin

[tokul]

If you care about privacy, force them to disclose urchin javascript and server side code.

A brief summary of TFA:

[shutdown -p now]

"OMG! My FREE browser can abuse me by quietly running NON-FREE PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE without telling me! It's a TRAP! I need everyone who writes JavaScript to tell me in no uncertain terms whether they are FREE and kosher for me to use, or PROPRIETARY and should be blocked by my FREE browser so that no taint of proprietary evilness defiles me!"

Re:Yeah right

[adamchou]

It is hardly about secrets or trying to hide stuff. Its more so that google and other sites are using a parser that removes spaces and shortens the lengths of all the variables so that there are less characters to send across the network. When you're handling billions of page views a day, those characters definitely add up. So rethink your position on that. They aren't trying to hide stuff. Thats just a side effect of them trying to reduce their bandwidth costs.

But I can already read the javascript source code

[AC-x]

By its very nature all javascript source code is visible. It's probably been minified but you can still trace through and see exactly what it's doing.

Note the assumption about power boundaries

[jonaskoelker]

Most browsers will lock down cross domain requests.

The assumption in this philosophy is that all the URLs below a particular domain are all owned by the same party.

If geocities.com/~userfoo/*html sources geocities.com/~userbar/*js, should the js files be trusted?

The other side of the assumption, that each party is limited to one domain, causes inefficiency: if I own foo.com and bar.com and I want foo.com/baz.html to source qux.js, I can't have that be bar.com/qux.js --- it must be foo.com/**/qux.js. But if bar.com/*html wants qux.js, I must put qux.js on bar.com also. (I guess virtual hosting and sym/hardlinking comes to the rescue here, and I can stop whining about my tiny, tiny js files being stored twice OH TEH NOESES...)

Re:Note the assumption about power boundaries

[twebb72]

I would simply put both on a static content server, that shares both subdomain names, static.foo.com and static.bar.com. The locking of cross domain requests only happens for ajax calls to a root domain that's different from the originating request's root domain. So ajax calls between ajax.foo.com from www.foo.com/, should work (I think). They share the same root domain (foo.com). +1 for the geocities use case! Winning!

And yet...

[LostMyBeaver]

there are more than a few people that manage to crack applications or even reverse engineer video encryption algorithms or DRM algorithms by stepping through much worse code either through a simple debugger or a possibly more advanced debugger such as IDA Pro which makes C style snippets.

Fact is, it's not about the code being written IN javascript. It's about the code being written in Java and then compiled to javascript. The compressed javascript in question is not typically even javascript to begin with and nor is it compressed, but instead is simply the result of compiling java to javascript.

How about the real pros who can take a microscope photograph of a microchip and reverse engineer the the resulting 3d image of lines and boxes into an encryption algorithm?

You're making the comment "is next to impossible even with" applies to you and many others, but there are those among us who can approach the problem differently. For example, instead of starting from the beginning and tracing forward, start with a point of context. I'll speculate at this point having never really cared about gmail other than reading my mail, but I'd imagine there's some algorithm in use which provides the gmail servers with a query for messages. These queries are more than likely meaningful. So, if you're looking up your friend Jim Bob, locate where the post to the server happens and find the reference to Jim Bob. It probably has the field name for which it applies connected to it such as "SearchText='Jim Bob'". At this point, you can be pretty sure the function which transmited that is a transmission function. It should be possible to decipher variable names in that function and work backward from there.

Reverse engineering is typically starting with what you know and working backward, annotating as you go along. Use a damn good editor with a "change symbol name" feature and each time you identify a new symbol change it.

The code in question probably has an extremely high level of complexity as I'm quite sure it's machine generated from another language. If it's hand coded and compressed, it might be equally bad.

But Impossible, certainly not by any means. Just time consuming.

Re:And yet...

[w_dragon]

It's not even that bad. You can indent it automatically, as mentioned above, then step through it with a debugger. It doesn't take that long to start to get the feel for what's going on.