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Survey On the Future of Open Source, and Lessons From the Past
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Oram reports on the quality, security, and community driving open source adoption. 'All too often, the main force uniting competitors is the fear of another vendor and the realization that they can never beat a dominant vendor on its own turf. Open source becomes a way of changing the rules out from under the dominant player. OpenStack, for instance, took on VMware in the virtualization space and Amazon.com in the IaaS space. Android attracted phone manufacturers and telephone companies as a reaction to the iPhone.'"
The facts don't support your claim.
Traditionally, it's been common to view price as a motivating factor, since open source software is often free. Last year, freedom from vendor lock-in was cited as the the primary goal.
This year, however, freedom from lock-in dropped to No. 2, while quality, which was in third place last year, was named the most important factor behind open source adoption. The availability of vendor support, meanwhile, is now a point of much less concern than it used to be.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Android gives users more control over their hardware and their user experience. It also presents a more diverse and meaningful set of choices.
A lot of people like to whine about Android fragmentation and then ignore how badly forced OS upgrades can run on an iPhone.
Even without Google trying to emulate Apple. Android provides a useful and distinct alternative.
There is nothing about Google engaging in Apple style megalomania that will improve my user experience as an Android user. Those perpetuating the usual FUD in this area never highly any actual real consequence of this so-called tragic fragmentation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
People willing to spend $2000 or $600 on a bit of software are very resistant to change. It doesn't matter what license the alternative uses.
The problem isn't the "quality" of Free Software alternatives but the fact that NO alternative of any sort will be considered acceptable because software consumers tend to have a mentality fixated on single brands even when the data formats involved don't have any inherent lock-in.
Shills with no money but lots of free time to post on web forums help contribute to the sense of "single brand ineveitablity".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
All that proves is that Free Software is more transparent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'll disagree, there is no equivalent or better alternative in the open source world to the proprietary products I mentioned, the job simply cannot be done in the open source world. But for other softwares, say an operating system or a browser or general purpose scripting language, the open source is superior.
yea, but there's just as much crap closed source products as well. The only difference is you can see the garbage in an open source product. My employer has gone from being very annoyed with having to deal with open source licenses and trying to get the whole idea of "it's free, we can't negotiate the license, there's no support contract" though their approvals process... to now just having a check box for which GPL version it is and an automatic approval process. It's great now. Granted we're limited in the scope of what we build with a GPL product. If we're building something that hundreds of people will eventually depend on and we have no way to back out... then that project is going to get a lot of scrutiny. The one good thing about closed source vendors is you can sue them if shit hits the fan.
You entirely missed the crux of the summary. Each company knew they could not, individually, supersede the established competitive advantage of the most successful player in their industry. However, bandied together in cooperation, they COULD forge a competitive advantage and undermine the player's supremacy. Better to collaborate on an alternative than concede and pay out millions to the player.
It's like Zulu uniting tribes against The British Empire. Or Attila the Hun uniting tribes against Rome. Or Genghis Khan against China.
If your business model needs you to the be the sole owner of a competitive advantage, and you are never able to achieve that advantage alone, then you have no business model.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
You bring up two points that are worth addressing. There's some truth to both, and there's good news on both - they are solved by using open source in a way that makes sense, not thinking it's exactly the same as proprietary software, except you get the source code. It's kind of like saying that dogs are better than cats because your cat won't play fetch. True, cat's don't play fetch, instead they play with laser pointers.
You're right, you can find lots of beta level OSS. Both free and proprietary software have betas. With proprietary software, you're not allowed to see the betas (unless it's Microsoft, in which case your new computer comes preinstalled with Windows 8 alpha.) With free software, you can choose the beta version of a mature project (Fedora), the stable version of a mature project (Red Hat), or the beta version of a new project (FuSe). They are all available. That means you'll want to look at the status of that version before making a major commitment to it. Don't install FuSe if you want a mature system, install Red Hat. It's actually cool that you CAN choose FuSe, or a development kernel, if you want some new feature that's in development and not yet rock solid stable. You do want to check though, and that's why Sourceforge shows you right up front how much activity the project has, the version numbers, user ratings, etc., so you can choose maturity vs. bleeding edge, etc.
You also mentioned documentation, which is sometimes important, and is actually entirely separate from the quality of the software. True, the programmers of OSS have less incentive to author well organized, newbie friendly documentation in the style you're accustomed to, unless you use a certain trick. There's actually MORE in-depth documentation for OSS. Every change to the software and the design decisions are normally documented three times: on the -dev mailing list, in git/svn, and in bugzilla or similar. If you have a question, you can email the list and the authors of the software will answer you, assuming you ask a Good Question (see ESR). So if you want to really understand how something ticks, you can find lot more information about how Apache works than how IIS WORKS, for example. That's not too newbie friendly, though. For comprehensive, newbie friendly guides, you need one of two magic words.
HOWTO is the first magic word. Google _____ ______ HOWTO for any OSS topic and you'll probably find the documentation you're looking for. If not, the second magic word is "book". I work on a OSS project you've probably never heard of, Moodle. Moodle isn't a high profile project, yet Barnes & Noble has EIGHTY listings of Moodle books. That's EIGHTY versions of the comprehensive documentation you're looking for. (Could be 40 different books, B&N may have duplicates listed.) I know, you're shocked. I just suggested BUYING something related to open source software. I know it may seem strange, but compare $500 for a Microsoft solution versus $22 for the book to go with the free software option. I'll take $22 over $500 all day long if I really need 150 pages of illustrated documentation.
So you're right, OSS projects don't prevent you from downloading beta quality code. And dogs don't catch mice. Consider this post as "Intro to Cats, a Guide for Dog Lovers".
The GPL is hard to understand, because it is quite long. This is because it is written to have legal meaning. It's the legal system(s) that is at fault here, I think.