Slashdot Mirror
Open Source In the Datacenter: It Was Never About Innovation
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.'"
90% of everything is crap, but at least with open source you can find out why instead of waiting for the developers who can't reproduce your problem.
When people say Innovative, we think of something that when we see it, we go Wow this is so cool I would never think of of that myself, and usually throws the rest of the industry in catch up mode.
Now the iPhone (not the iPad) was an innovative idea. Phones before the iPhone had external keyboards, at the expense of of screen size, or thickness. The idea of very few real buttons at the time was very foreign to us. And using gestures seemed almost impossible, as many early gesture systems had a lot of complicated gestures to get tasks done.
The iPhone wasn't innovative based on its features, there were other companies that had phones with more features or better hardware. But the innovation was able to successfully make a phone, that the advance feature were accessible and to the end users. The idea of say browsing the web on your phone, or have it as your main method to check for email seemed silly before, today it is quite common.
What happened after the iPhone kicked off, it threw the Industry in catch up mode. It took years for good Android phones to get into the market to start competing, and these new phones all are based on the iPhone.
Now the iPad isn't that innovative, it was easy to realize you take your iPhone and just give it a bigger screen, and fit better processing.
Other innovative products.
ID software 3D shooter. Wolfinstine 3d and Doom. They had some wire-frame attempts, and a few polygon based games. But games before that for the most part where 2d sprite based (Side Platform like Mario, or top down like Zelda), specificity for fast paced action games.
Nintendo Entertainment System. Unlike the Atari and other predecessors it didn't give any allusion that it was a person computer, just a straight game console. Priced more affordable than the others, and focusing on games.
Innovation is very rare. Most of the time it is copying someone else idea and tweaking it so there are different set of trade offs. Now their tweaks may change the market, but not as much as a innovative product.
How you choose to license your product, isn't really that big of a deal. Open Source, sure people can tinker with it coming with some new ideas. Commercial Software will have paid employees trying to come up with something new.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When I write code for personal reasons, I always release it under the Affero GPL v3+.
It saves me the time and effort of attempting to monetize or control every little snippet of code that I write just for fun or just to learn something.
It also ensures that nobody can commercially exploit the code without A) paying me for a non-GPL license, or B) contributing back to the community.
As a side effect, it makes a great way to show off my coding skills to potential employers.
They can look me up on GitHub and evaluate my code and skills, but they still have to pay to play.
I'm not a libre software zealot. I don't believe that everyone is under a moral obligation to release their source code.
However, I do find the Affero GPL effective at protecting my non-commercial interests and providing an assist on my commercial interests.
That is why I use the license, and encourage other software developers to do the same.
This is just an opinion piece, not even remotely news.
And is it "stuff that matters"? Not to me it isn't.
You fellers (or whatever) are stuck in the past. The closest thing to a motto on the front page now is at the bottom, and it says Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One thing I don't get - if there is a downward pressure on prices on developers, how does adapting an Open Source model help them? It's not like they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code.
Also, the 'four freedoms' have never been about making better software, as RMS never tires of pointing out (and it shows). They've been an end in itself. If you write a software - no matter how bad, but simply put it under a A/L/GPL license, RMS would be pleased. Your software respects the 'freedom' of your neighbors, who you must help, as per Freedom 2.
But I doubt that the desire to put Open Source in the datacenter had anything to do with any 'freedom'. It was about putting better software out there. Since the existing datacenter hardware was tied to the support contracts that a Microsoft or Sun/Oracle or HP would provide, moving to FOSS meant that any datacenter that adapted it would determine its own support timelines, since the open source meant that they could hire their own developers to maintain it beyond upstream support, and also, the upstream projects had no strong reason to EOL a version, unlike commercial entities.
The innovation part - this part is not completely true about FOSS, since there ain't millions of programmers interested in the project, and so the software usually doesn't get examined except by its developers, and maybe some very interested customers. Where FOSS helps is that if a customer has esoteric hardware, the software can usually be ported to it to exact the maximum life out of the system, as well as provide a uniform software platform for heterogenous computing environments.
Close. In my case, as head of technology and development at a small outfit then using SCO Unix, it was a combination of factors. First, and most important, was gaining some level of control of the underlying software stack. A couple of examples: We installed the SMP package on a customer's system. Random crashes and panics became too common. We replaced the server - no joy. Having a support agreement with SCO ($$$), we called them for assistance and their response was "re-install the SMP package". When I explained that we'd already done that, they said "well, do it again". Another time, we needed their DDE-RPC package to run some CSTA software. When I tried to buy a copy, they said "nope, we discontinued that package". I offered several options: we'll pay for it, but not ask them for support, etc. No, no and no. It was about this time one of my techs who'd been singing the Linux song finally handed me the pack of Yggdrasil floppies and once I finally got it loaded and started looking at the source code for *everything*: kernel, compiler, utilities, etc. my jaw hit the floor and I knew that the world had shifted forever. We started then on a migration project - which took a couple of years - and we've never looked back. Worth every penny that we didn't pay to SCO, but did pay to our engineers.
You are absolutely wrong about point 2. A GPL licensed library does not give you the freedom to license your code "however you like." The LGPL does that. Don't confuse the two.
If you use a GPL library, you're required to use the GPL license for your code as well. This is not an accident or a "mistaken interpretation" of the license. It's clearly stated and has been known since the first version of the GPL license was released.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.