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Open Source In the Datacenter: It Was Never About Innovation

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-was-all-about-the-benjamins dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The secret to open source innovation, and the reason for its triumphal success, has nothing to do with the desire to innovate. It's because of the four freedoms and the level playing field (and agility) that was the end result. It's like Douglas Adams' definition of flying: you don't try to fly, you throw yourself at the ground and miss. This article explains why it was never about innovation — it was always about freedom. Quoting: 'When the forces of economics put constant downward price pressure on software, developers look for other ways to derive income. Given the choice between simply submitting to economic forces and releasing no-cost software in proprietary form, developers found open source models to be a much better deal. Some of us didn't necessarily like the mechanics of those models, which included dual licensing and using copyleft as a means of collecting ransom, but it was a model in which developers could thrive.'"

1 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Gnu.org = biased view by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Seems like a lot of open source stories lately are coming from highly questionable, if not zealot types of sources.

    Let's cover two points before ya'll mark this as troll or flamebait.

    GNU is the lesser evil:
    A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

    The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
    The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
    The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
    The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

    There's no "closed source is evil, propietary software is designed by money grubbing capitalists, all software wants to be pirated" point of view.

    Richard Stallman himself however does have an "evil" agenda if you will. (from wikipedia)
    Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.

    The GPL violates all four points in that:
    1. The GPL prohibits commercial use or sale of software without releasing the source code "somewhere else for free so I never have to buy it"
    2. The GPL has viral components to it that, even if you make changes to it, someone who wants to benefit from that change must accept the GPL or not use the change, even if they are simply studying the code. So this means that if you want to develop something that works like or with the the GPL software, you can never study the GPL software without making your software GPL too.
    3. The GPL makes it impossible to charge money for any part of software, be it source code, art assets, music, sound, or video. Every part of a "GPL" program must be redistributed without fee, so even someone who mis-appropriates something from the public domain can "GPL it" and and render the PD invalid.
    4. Nobody benefits from software that they have a license-gun to their head.

    Nobody should be using any GPL software, less what you make become GPL too. If you're fine with that, then maybe the GPL is for you, but for the vast majority of people who just do not want to deal with political footballs, the GPL is quite evil. People who wish to make games in particular and not have their game pirated, ransacked by chinese gold botters, and utterly destroyed two days out of beta can not use any GPL software whatsoever, because access to the source code means someone just adds a "letmecheat=1" to the source code and your game is ruined.

    There are some really good reasons to have things like GPL operating systems,GPL compilers and GPL drivers, because these are the parts that make a computer something more than a blackbox. Past that point, mandating that everything compiled with GPL compilers that runs on the GPL OS must be GPL licensed and free is folly.

    Copyleft ransom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system )

    Is the act of giving copyrighted works away for free, but not producing it in the first place unless a set threshold of money is given. Basically what everyone is doing with Kickstarters today.

    There is nothing wrong with this.