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20 Years Later, Has Open Source Changed the World? (infoworld.com)
"Most code remains closed and proprietary, even though open source now dominates enterprise platforms," notes Matt Asay, former COO at Canonical (and an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative). "How can that be?" he asks, in an essay noting it's been almost 20 years since the launch of the Open Source Initiative, arguing that so far open source "hasn't changed the world as promised."
[T]he reason most software remains locked up within the four walls of enterprise firewalls is that it's too costly with too small of an ROI to justify open-sourcing it. At least, that's the perception. Such a perception is impossible to break without walking the open source path, which companies are unwilling to walk without upfront proof. See the problem? This chicken-and-egg conundrum is starting to resolve itself, thanks to the forward-looking efforts of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other web giants that are demonstrating the value of open-sourcing code.
Although it's unlikely that a State Farm or Chevron will ever participate in the same way as a Microsoft, we are starting to see companies like Bloomberg and Capital One get involved in open source in ways they never would have considered back when the term "open source" was coined in 1997, much less in 2007. It's a start. Let's also not forget that although we have seen companies use more open source code over the past 20 years, the biggest win for open source since its inception is how it has changed the narrative of how innovation happens in software. We're starting to believe, and for good reason, that the best, most innovative software is open source.
The article strikes a hopeful note. "We're now comfortable with the idea that software can, and maybe should, be open source without the world ending. The actual opening of that source, however, is something to tackle in the next 20 years.
Although it's unlikely that a State Farm or Chevron will ever participate in the same way as a Microsoft, we are starting to see companies like Bloomberg and Capital One get involved in open source in ways they never would have considered back when the term "open source" was coined in 1997, much less in 2007. It's a start. Let's also not forget that although we have seen companies use more open source code over the past 20 years, the biggest win for open source since its inception is how it has changed the narrative of how innovation happens in software. We're starting to believe, and for good reason, that the best, most innovative software is open source.
The article strikes a hopeful note. "We're now comfortable with the idea that software can, and maybe should, be open source without the world ending. The actual opening of that source, however, is something to tackle in the next 20 years.
public domain.
It's changed my life. does that count?
Yes
I'm pretty sure I was hearing the term in the late 1980's, especially in regards to unix software, and almost certainly by the time I first heard of Linux in '92.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Next.
The internet was built on open source. In 1997 it was more curiosity or nerdy thing. By 2017 the internet is generating untold sums of money and is utterly essential to the economy. I wish I felt the same excitement for this technology as I did back in 1997.
The article strikes a hopeful note. "We're now comfortable with the idea that software can, and maybe should, be open source without the world ending. The actual opening of that source, however, is something to tackle in the next 20 years.
Open Source till hasn't adequately solved the "how to make money" aspect 20 years later. Not to mention the dearth of people with the needed domain knowledge to keeping the OSS train going.
Look at several domains of computers: free software makes up the vast majority of operating systems for servers, mainframes, and smartphones. Users are interacting with these constantly without even knowing if they are using free software and in that sense, it is so meaningful due to how ubiquitous it is. I think the primary *failure* here is in the moral and legal dimension where users don't necessarily prioritize their rights. I would sincerely hope that users will prioritize free software because it is the right thing to do, in addition to being more secure or cheaper.
Bruce Perens! esr! Come quickly! Set this fellow straight!
Open source is now synonymous with "software that respects the end user."
The more you curse the GPL, the further we stray from this goal.
Well, it certainly has changed mine. Cheers!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And not only for the ready-to-use software you can download. You can now come up with any idea and have immediate access to amazing tools and scaffolding to build with in order to realize it.
free software makes up the vast majority of operating systems for servers, mainframes, and smartphones
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by "the vast majority of operating systems for [...] smartphones" I assume you're referring to devices that run Android. In that case, what's larger on an Android system image: AOSP (Linux and free components of Android userland) or GMS (Google Play Store/Services and other bundled Gapps)?
I think the primary *failure* here is in the moral and legal dimension where users don't necessarily prioritize their rights.
And the unfortunate result of this is that economies of scale associated with support make laptops made for Windows* cheaper than laptops made for GNU/Linux.
* A device is "made for" an operating system if its manufacturer claims that reasonably complete drivers exist to make the device work with that OS.
Seeing as how the most widely used mobile platform is built on Open Source and has had a major affect on the way the world communicates, I'd have to say yes, Open Source has dramatically changed the world even though it's an underlying aspect and most people don't even realise it.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
"thanks to the forward-looking efforts of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other web giants that are demonstrating the value of open-sourcing code. "
Yea, try seeing the source code for the things these companies make money from, you are more likely to see Trump Tax returns.
The open source stuff is there to drive more people to its closed source money making activities, nothing more. Google pays Apple billions to keep it as the default search engine, why, because they make all that money plus profit back.
I had a LOT of open source software on my CPM machines back in the late 70's early 80's, open source has possibly been around longer than closed source. Certainly lots of code has always been shared among universities way back in mainframe and punchcard days.
Open source has a effect, but mostly because of companies like Google who build on it. How much of Google influence can you accept and still call it open sourced?
As a certifiable Old Fart(TM), I remember all too well the bizarre days of the UNIX wars. AIX had a great admin tool called SMIT; SCO had a great channel for feeding the SMBs that developed the cool applications to other SMBs; Solaris ruled telecom and other HA realms; etc. There was NO "UNIX API" as MS had, hence their subsequent success. And no one shared a god-damned thing. Device drivers, admin tools - you name it. Each KNEW that their way would bring consolidation, failing to recognize the fundamental flaw built-in to that thought. Enter GNU/Linux. Yes, I put them together for a reason - neither could exist without the other. I made this point to the first Intel Linux Conference at the mothership and glad to see the prophecy fulfilled. The world is a much, much better place because of GNU/Linux!
Boost, openSSL, GDAL, POCO, the list goes on
tools of the trade
know them, use them, or your carrier is toast.
I've been programming professionally now for over three decades...
A while ago, if you were working on projects, and you wanted to do something complex - you were buying an external library to make that happen. UI forms, even data storage collections!
Nowadays even if you are working on a closed system, you are using a LOT of open parts and libraries to help make things happen. Most people are using Apache instead of proprietary web servers. Most people are using a multitude of open source libraries that means when you switch jobs your expertise is no longer fully invalidated, because you can use some of the same libraries as you move around. Many people are browsing using WebKit, way more than IE...
Sure there are a lot of closed systems around still but they operate in a world that is dominated now by more open protocols, open source tools, and libraries and so on. No longer is it considered risky to go with open source when LAMP now is considered the conservative choice.
Even though software development is still a pain for all sorts of reasons, it's still never been better and easier than it is now and you can build things today that just were not possible to pull off 20 years ago. Open source will continue to advance as the idea has proven to be gene4rally solid and reliable, and will only continue to spread further... eventually we may reach a plateau beyond which the remaining software will generally be closed for a variety of reasons, but I don't think we are there yet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are Android eco systems without all that Google spyware crap on them. Sadly sometimes it the Amazon spyware bundle or the Microsoft spyware bundle, but others do exist.
IMHO, Android is more bound to Samsung than it is to Google. Think of DEX, the Android windowing system, think of the stylus set, the multi-window features.... all of these were driven by Samsung not Google.
There's also Google's attack on Android that's leaves it vulnerable to a fork by more professional bodies. That fork would lose the Google crap in the process leaving a cleaner, more professional Android without Google's fuckwit limits in it.
e.g. the awful garbage handler that will forcibly-crash an app if it uses more than 51200 blocks that are weak referenced. The garbage handler isn't sure if these are leaks or blocks in use, so it kills the app as punishment for using so many global references... freeing up perhaps 5Mb. The app has no real problem, the hardware has no real problem running the app, it's the garbage collector that decides to make something it doesn't like into a critical failure.
The app is killed, any files being written are left corrupted, it doesn't even raise a runtime error and call the uncaught exception handler so the app can exit gracefully, it just force kills it.
OK, so you're trying to use Android to control a factory cooling system, and it does this and the factory explodes.
Or your app is busy writing that major order from the customer who is on a just-in-time system, the garbage collector kills it, and the order isn't fulfilled and the customer's factory grinds to a halt.
Or you're trying to use Android for an XRay machine control system, the garbage collector throws its fit, and a person gets zapped with a lethal dose of Xrays.
Or you're making a self driving car running on Android, garbage collector does its incompetent fuckwittery, the car crashes into a group of nearby children.
You can see how choices like this force Android to be used only for little mini-apps, which is why it never succeeded for corporate bespoke apps.
You see this kind of attitude all through Google's code. I blame Pichai, I think he's crippling Android at the high end to make space for his Chrome/Android mashup, and in the process, it means that the high end of Android is really led by Samsung and others, and they would be better off without Google and it's idiot choices.
Back to topic, so that means that part of Android that would survive a split from Google is the open source part, and the part that would not survive a split from Google, is the gps sniffing, wifi sniffing, spyware, ad-serving part. That closed source part that Google 'sells'. Which is the part you also don't want in corporate environments anyway.
Open source has unquestionably changed the world. It is silly to even pretend otherwise. Open source software has been fundamental to many tectonic shifts in our world, and to a myriad of countless lesser improvements.
But did it fulfill it's promise, I suppose is the real question being asked. If you are a doctrinaire Stallman accolyte, you probably are tragically disappointed that all information isn't free, and that any closed source code exists anywhere. You probably view the existence of cell phones with a mixture of open and closed source software as an abomination. But beyond the die-hard GLPv3 adherents, opensource is everywhere and is doing everything. It has been the most successful development in the history of computing.
The negative aspect of open source being accepted in business is that it makes slave labor more acceptable as a business practice. Most open source development goes unpaid. While this development achieves better systems, do the businesses really deserve the systems their incompetence is unable to achieve? Slave labor continues to exist for phones, clothes, and other goods, so it may be a natural existence for software, which lacks protection as intellectual property when compared to hardware.
Before quick, always-on Internet connections were available most software had to live locally, so even though it was closed source you had the entire blob. Today, more and more of the client functionality is going open source - but the essential bits have all gone online as web applications, SaaS, multiplayer/matchmaking services and so on. Google is giving away Android and Chromium (with proprietary codecs = Chrome) so you'll use Google's services. Microsoft is open sourcing things so you'll use Azure. Amazon is open sourcing things so you'll use AWS and so on. Companies that were just giving it away without some sort of plan to monetize it like Sun went under.
And in this competition with "free" services, open source is struggling in many areas. Like for example LibreOffice vs Google Docs, Google got like 3 million paying G Suite businesses, 70 million educational users and lord knows how many others, I couldn't find a statistic. They're taking on the battle of Office/Exchange open source has worked on for decades and not really gotten anywhere. Services like Alexa and Siri you couldn't really do as a local application anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the Microsoft market falls and the desktop goes "open source" like Android. But it's not really like how RMS envisioned it...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think that Eric S Raymond deserves most of the credit for open source software being what it is today. While people like rms and Linux and Steve Klabnik and Miguel and Bruce Perens and Lennart made important technical contributions, it's Eric who has been the glue that binds the open source community together and give it strength. We can ignore individual open source projects and the open source community still stands strong and proud. But if we take away the sturdy communal foundation that Eric provides, then the entire movement would disintegrate. Open source software really is only possible because of how Eric brings together creators, users and advocacy. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Eric is the most important member of the open source elite. [And before anyone makes a false accusation about me being Eric, I'm sad to admit that I am not him. I do often wish I was somebody as important and influential as he is, though!]
Premise invalid: "a Microsoft". HAH.
No. Microsoft Windows being the classic example.
That and enterprise likes to keep things closed because it likes to believe that they are each special and no one but themselves should see or can understand their business practice/rules.
Itâ(TM)s also true that the population of developers with interest and aptitude in a given piece of software will shrink the higher up the stack you go.
Really? More people have aptitude for writing bare-metal firmware than some cloud application? I doubt it, not so much due to "difficulty", but due to the fact that there are far more jobs at lofty levels of abstraction where you can do useful work than there are down in the kernel/metal.
Public domain was better because you didn't need to be an armchair lawyer to understand the license you were using.
I have published software under the GPL in the past, but these days, I don't even bother with licenses anymore. I just give away the source code and anyone can do whatever they want with it.
There are too many open source licenses to choose from, and it causes license fatigue. I lost the ability to care about open source long ago.
So software changed the world yay! But AI is just getting started. I am already alarmed, not of a potential "singularity", but by the effects of AI gone wrong. I'm not even talking SkyNet or even self-driving cars gone awry. I'm talking about the very silent bias (no pun intended) from these AI systems - of which there is no legal or professional quality standard. Companies deploying bad models that shape our future, either because they are used in government and carry the force of law, or they are used by companies to decide things for us and limit our future because we, for whatever reason are an under-fit outlier.
In other AI news, the AI revolution continues into the arts, here, AI is creating [passible] music, images, scripts, etc. While there are a growing list of impressive feats, it concerns me that it will replace the human element of art with a very artificial one.
I am calling for legislation for any AI that is consumer facing to me labeled as a product of AI, and that customers who are subject to the output of the AI to be able to inspect the input vector which represents them, and the output of the AI on that input vector. We cannot have black-box AI systems rule our lives. We need our input vector to ensure the data doing in is correct, and we need the output to ensure we were not subject to bad data practices like under-fitting, over-fitting, mini-batch normalization. It is implied that there is a way to correct errors as well.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It's changed the way applications are written. It has put pressure on companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google to provide development tools and libraries free of charge.
But thinking Open Source Software will/would/has changed the world?
I don't think that's reasonable.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The real barrier has been ignorance on the part of the intellectually lazy who still don't get the difference between open source and the poorly written "freeware" of the 90's. That, and the avarice of those who do know the difference but who believe that they can only hold onto market share by keeping as much software and hardware as proprietary and closed as possible. While a lot of people, including the leaders of many tech firms, see free software as unleashing creators to create and users to use their products, there are whole industries whose supply chains stubbornly resist any opening of their ecosystems (like the mobile hardware market that has consistently rejected efforts to deploy open source operating systems like Ubuntu or FirefoxOS). That's shortsighted, but it wouldn't be the first time the world suffered technological stagnation due to the selfishness of dominant players.
"Open Source" failed "Free Software" succeeded.
The FSF has been around since 1984 and has been widely more successful.
Today, 99 out of the top 100 websites run GNU/linux, the exception being one FreeBSD shop.
Today, most cell phones run either Linux, with Android, which at its core is Free software, or iOS, which at its core is darwin, more free software. Without FreeBSD to make darwin, or a powerful linux kernel, neither of these would exist. And no, kernels that powerful could have not been developed commericially on time, on a budget.
Free software fueled the dotcom boom allowing small companies and even not for profits access to server hosting resources on cheaper x86 platforms.
"Open Source" was coined by Eric Raymond to troll Free software and ruin it. By 1997, Apache, MySQL, GNU, Linux, PHP, etc.. and other commonly used software already existed and was deployed. He's convinced few people or companies to contribute. The ones that do, its clearly the power and circumstances of successful powerful software like GNU, Linux, Apache, nginx, et al and their ability to perform is more a factor that ESR's inane ramblings
Speaking of "Open Source". Its time we stop repeating what this terrible concern troll, likely sociopath Eric Raymond has to say. He hasn't really contributed anything except trying to discredit actual content producers. His anti social antics are the stuff which makes nerds look bad.
http://www.azquotes.com/quote/...
Does any person or company want to be associated with that? The OSI is merely a publicity org, and their founder is public relations poison.
The only "success" Open Source and the OSI has had is convincing people to use the term "Open Source" instead of Free Software. Other than that they've been a dismal failure while Richard Stallman, the FSF and the Free Software moving have been a blinding success.
Speaking of RMS. Despite all the nasty things people say about Stallman, he's got a phenomenal personal brand, die hard followers and people trust hiim. If you plan on releasing your source code to the public, he has far more credibility than a forgotten anti-social liability like ESR.
Anyone who says OSS hasn't changed the world doesn't know what the world was like before OSS. Before OSS you had to pay for every little library or thing you wanted to do. You had to pay for the OS, the DB, the compiler, everything.
That obviously makes this FAR cheaper, and far easier to use. We'd almost certainly not have 90% of what exists today without OSS.
Of what functional relevance is a 20 year anniversary celebration of a piece of marketing nomenclature? If you want an excuse to have a cocktail party to celebrate a two-word branding phrase that is lamented as failing to meet someone's ambition, go ahead.
My realm is embedded systems: high reliability systems with 10-20 year designed service life, using a variety of CPU architectures, and evolving into very high complexity System On Chip designs. These systems would not be feasible across this timescale without a stabilized and evolving GPL'd tools base: gcc, binutils, and glibc, and Linux as a long-lived build platform.
20 years might be accurate for "open source" as nomenclature. It is not accurate for the underlying phenomena. My choice of monument is a GNU Emacs 16.56 source tape dated 1985, at the point where RMS had replaced the disputed display code from Gosling Emacs.
By around 1992, gcc had evolved to be usable (with a lot of configuration work for gcc and the runtime library) as a cross compiler. At the time I was working on a 68000 based embedded system, using a commercial cross compiler. The commercial product was expensive, slow, had some arcane proprietary extensions, and was abandoned by its supplier (their principal business was defense contracting) from further development, and even if I recall correctly, re-hosting beyond Sun 3.
Gcc became the clear choice to carry the project forward. I put it into place, and it supported the product for the remaining 12 years or so of active development (some new capabilities, mostly keeping up with replacements for obsolete components).
For the past 9 years much of my work has been centered around a body of proprietary software that supports certain high function System On Chip products from a vendor. This software has a history of at least 10 years, three major chip family architectures, and several steps of evolution within each architecture. It has grown to around 30M lines of C code. This is not bloatware with elaborate frameworks and libraries: these devices are sufficiently complex to require that much software to even construct a usable API (around 2800 pages for a sketchy API document, 5800 pages for a very incomplete chip hardware reference).
None of this would be feasible without a long term stable cross-compiler (gcc) and a place to run it (Linux) on large bodies of code.
Meanwhile in the un-free software world, a defense contractor friend pointed me to a recent U.S. Navy RFP for translation or other porting technology, seeking to make 1970s software written in a proprietary 1969 language (CMS-2), runnable on ordinary modern commercial machines. Today it runs on fossilized power-hungry refrigerator-sized Univac AN/UYK-somethings, built from components that went out of production years ago. Yes, our national defense depends upon stuff like this that has outlived essentially all of the original authors. The situation is similar for other long life cycle embedded products, in realms apart from weaponry.
Note that IBM mainframe OS and compiler software were freely available until the early 1970s, when compilers and some other larger products went from a $25 tape copy charge for source, to expensive licenses and restricted source code access. Some of us learned quite a lot by reading e.g. the $25 Fortran H compiler source code.
The history from my perspective, looks more like open (1970), closed (1972), opening back up (1985), usably open (1992), then "open source" as nomenclature (1997), then whatever you want to call today's maelstrom of bloated frameworks. GPL's origin in MIT / Symbolics / LMI controversies is a crucial component of the 1972-1985 evolution; that story must be mentioned, and is told elsewhere from disparate perspectives.
Communist open sores is by niggers and faggots, for niggers and faggots, which is why it will always suck when compared to real software.
that has taken over the world.
Under this new business model, penny-pinching CEOs have cheap lazy bad programmers put together the embedded software for their new consumer gadgets in the worst way possible. These bad coders grab a bunch of open source code from the web and stick it together with chewing gum and bailing wire and then stuff it into products which then hook to the internet and become security hazards. They cannot maintain or fix 'their" code because they did not write most of it and have no clue about how it works and the limitations of, and potential bad interactions between, the various code blobs they used.
The bigger downside is that most users can never update the firmware as open source ASSUMES users will be able to, so all those gadgets become instantly hackable as soon as an exploitable bug is discovered in any of the code modules included in these products.
Before the open source revolution, any of us who embedded code into products had to write ALL of it and understand ALL of it, including any network protocol stacks. We had to make stuff pretty rugged and test a lot because we presumed there would never be any updates. Managers hated all the testing and coding time because they did not see tangible results, particularly because the end-user problems that did not happen did not get their attention.
... global warming, so "yes."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There's never been anything about open source that suggests that developers should listen to the end users..
And there's the foundation for every OSS GUI fight, from KDE vs Gome, to Blender and GIMP. That's why there's a perpetual [year of] Linux desktop.
Has open source changed the world?
Only a little, and it's because OSS has weak economic models.
Idealism is good, but it needs support, including financial support. I basically feel like defying you to name any OSS economic model that has successfully competed against the greedy bastards. I don't have time now, or I'd start listing the failures.
What I do have time to say is that I think OSS programmers should be paid fairly, and the money should be there BEFORE they start working on the project. I also think the projects should be linked to users who are willing to PAY for the work, even if each potential user is only chipping in ten bucks or so. A software service driven by OSS that incurs ongoing costs should be funded on a similar basis, with the beneficiaries of the software helping to cover those ongoing costs. None of this needs to be driven by massive greed for YUGE profits, but just by the goal of recovering the costs and paying people fairly for their time and work.
I already noted that my time is intruding, so I can't repeat the whole description of how this could be done. Or maybe you have a better idea of how to achieve these goals? You can find LOTS of details in my old comments on Slashdot, or ask nicely and I might have time to rehash it before the story dies and falls off the front page.
Gotta bike. Bye for now.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
While the vast majority of software in use today is proprietary, and much of it hidden behind servers that process the day-to-day business of many companies, much of it is built out of open source parts with open source tools. So in many ways, it's similar to what the idea of interchangeable parts did for manufacturing. Not only does it make it easier to build software today, it's actually feasible to do some maintenance and modification of software, even proprietary software, when it's based on these open source basic parts. For example the entire MacOS operating system is, as a whole, a proprietary system, but there're a lot of parts that can be tweaked, replaced, or modified all thanks to a variety of open source projects that have become the standards. Beats the heck out of the old proprietary idea of standards.
So in this sense, open source software, and also free software, has won wildly and completely displaced the older styles of development where compilers and IDEs were expensive, and incredibly proprietary and not cross platform.
It's never been easier or cheaper or more accessible to develop software and build systems with sophisticated tools thanks to the effects and affects of open source in general. Even Visual Studio supports using free software tools for targeting a variety of platforms including Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and Linux in general.
So there is yet much reason to be excited about the future of open source, Linux, hardware, and many other things coming.
There's this little thing known as genome assembly and protein structure prediction. I'd like to suggest that this has changed the world. And how did it happen? federations of people sharing their software improvements openly.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Open Source is changing the wold.
A cloud without linux, docker, Java, and all those Apache projects is nearly unthinkable.
However why would a bank or a travel agency or an airline open source their custom made software?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Do you have any proof of that connection?
My experience is rather that Open Source contributions are done voluntarily and not by force.
And a lot of Open Source out there is more or less working as the glue that ties things together. Without it we would have been stuck in a world filled with proprietary solutions that were unable to communicate with each other without having gateway nodes or even carried on physical media. In some places the tax authorities required that if you were to file taxes electronically the taxes were filed on some obscure IBM format on 8" floppies.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Just one aspect, often ignored by management-types... The cost of buying software is often the small bit. The real money is spent on staff to use it.
The decision is dictated by economics. Depends entirely on the software's purpose. Is it infrastructure or is it a source of competitive advantage?
Common infrastructure code begs to be open source. Having 20 subtly incompatible flavors of Unix does the world no good - hence linux and bsd's success. Likewise Android gives all mobile phones a common base, taking away the burden of 20 vendors each creating a mobile OS poorly. Same thing with web browsers, few benefit anymore from making a closed proprietary platform. Better to share the burden.
Software that gives companies a competitive advantage is completely different. Open sourcing that would be killing the golden goose. Yes companies can build their business model around services and support instead of proprietary code - but that decision is made very early on and hard to reverse later.
You don't see Microsoft open sourcing the windows kernel and API, or Apple open sourcing their GUI libraries, or Google releasing their web search or data center code, or Amazon open sourcing their cloud server platform (it's built on open source but the custom parts stay proprietary). These things will stay closed because that's how these companies make money. Putting this code in competitor's hands makes no sense.
As long as these companies derive competitive advantage from a piece of software, they'd be foolish to open source it. In other areas where the software is just a cost to the company, it makes sense to open source and share the burden.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
The answer is clearly proto-chicken...
Yes, Open Source has changed the world. And I'm going to argue that the most important thing that ever came out of the Open Source community was not Linux, nor GNU (the whole of it), but specifically GCC.
GCC is what enables you to sit down and write software without having to pay a massive sum to a compiler vendor. GCC is what lets young people interested in programming experiment, learn, and ultimately become professionals. GCC is why we have the rest of GNU and the Linux kernel. GCC is the reason we have free versions of Visual Studio. And GCC is the reason C++ is the most important programming language today. In many ways, GCC changed the direction the software world has taken, allowing software to be written that would otherwise never have existed, and planting the seeds of the value of Open Source software in people's minds.
I'd even dispute the assertion that most open source development goes unpaid. It might be true if you look at total lines of code written, but I'd be very surprised if it's true if you weight it towards the projects that people actually use. Most companies get very nervous depending on volunteers for anything business critical and would much rather have someone paid to be responsible for it. I contribute to several open source projects (and I'm paid for quite a lot of that) and the most successful ones all have most code written by paid individuals. A lot of the unpaid work is effectively advertising for the developers in question: 'hey, you need an expert in this? I wrote a load of it, you should hire me!'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, OSS has changed many a thing, but, no, it hasn't changed the world much. The world is still based on profit as the single exclusive control quantity for things being done, which stays the primary reason why the world is in its dire and further deteriorating state. And of course OSS is only able to flourish where it doesn't harm profit, and that's not going to change within an economic operating system that would break (and lose its capability to feed people, as limited as that capability ever was) without the continued maximization of profit.
Working for a very large financial company, the main reason they don't use more open source is the lack of a single point of support. When there is an issue, they don't want to have to scour through web posts looking for a cure. They want to be able to pick up a phone, dial one number, open a ticket, and get the issue resolved asap. They do have a large RedHat presence, but that is about it for Open Source.
It was established ass a "viral license."
What happens when on-tech managers (and corporate counsels) hear "viral"?
Guess.
I think the advent of more permissive licenses, like MIT have made a huge difference. I participate in CocoaPods, which expressly forbids GPL.
Anyone that's ever called a BBS knows that SHAREWARE was the real start.
You could get almost any utility/app/game and if you liked it, you MAILED the author a small amount of money.
That was the first step towards open software. FREEWARE was also a thing. All OSS did was add some legal stuff to solidify the agreement between you and the software's author.
"[T]he reason most software remains locked up within the four walls of enterprise firewalls is that it's too costly with too small of an ROI to justify open-sourcing it."
Talk about damning with faint praise. A novel interpretation and the first I've ever heard of this analysis. The worlds top supercomputers all run on a variant of Linux and the makers still manage to make a profit. If I was paranoid I would suspect Matt Asay was put up to join the Open Source Initiative and subvert it from the inside.
Linux totally dominates supercomputers
Red Hat on the NYSE
78 percent of companies run open-source software
@GerryGilmore: 'There was NO "UNIX API" as MS had, hence their subsequent success' .. That and sabotaging Windows to not run other peoples software and keeping the API calls undocumented.
Microsoft's Allegedly Undocumented APIs - Comes v. Microsoft
'The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect'
"We're starting to believe, and for good reason, that the best, most innovative software is open source."
There's not an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange that comes anywhere near close to being the "best" or "most innovative"
Anyone who believes there is is mental.
No doubt that GCC changed the programming world by making reliable compilers exist.
The compiler market was pretty lame by today's standards.
Linux has made a few inroads into the general public, but it mostly affects the tech community.
Munich comes to mind as the biggest general experiment.
Using Ubuntu to make a low budget computer might be a another area.
Web browsers are probably the biggest direct impact for the general public.
The biggest world wide affect may be the general raising of the bar for software products.
I really liked the way Notch did it. He made an API and released that for everyone to use, then it was just understood that anything you wrote yourself, you were on your own supporting it.
Some companies will just take whatever code they find, use it without attribution and F.U. Admittedly, most of those companies aren't particularly successful, but it happens a lot, because it's easy. Those bad actors can just do it without worry, and that's pretty cheap.
Unfortunately, many companies refuse to use open source AT ALL, because they believe it is infectious to ownership of their IP. Whether that is true or not of a particular license, there is a notable subset of the open source world who thinks infection is a feature which should be encouraged, so it can be hard to get legal departments past that hurdle.
When I was working at Google, they had a department tasked with reviewing things and deciding on which were usable. It was actually pretty nice, because at Google's scale, they could have experienced people who could make decisions with confidence rather than fear. But even there, there were licenses which were "Don't even install these packages on your system".
I get GNU's position on this, I just think it's a dumb position which ignores reality. Sure, it _would_ be nice if all software was checked into github for free sharing by everyone. But that's just not how people work, sometimes you need to put in time getting them used to the idea of sharing before they get to a point where they can successfully share the stuff they're writing.
No
No, the vast majority of software is proprietary. Proprietary software isn't going anywhere soon, so are copyrights and software patents. Developing a good product isn't cheap or fun and if there is no way to monetize it, then sorry, it's a suicide. One of the best examples of such failures is desktop Linux. Open source software has always existed even before any Richard Stallmans and nothing has radically changed.
1) Most proprietary apps are line of business apps that wouldn't work outside the company. Who wants the access database app code a local insurance company uses?
2) Most proprietary crap quality and companies don't want it out there because it's embarrassing.
3) Software as a service/cloud hosting is an end run around the GPL since the software is never distributed to users.
I see a fair number of academic and government codes now appearing in github. That puts them under source control and make files. Sometimes bug management and documentation. These are all items mandatory in the software industry and used to sparse in crappy student code. It can also be good publicity for code authors in future job hunts.
that only 5 people can understand it is usually being done at a University because it's usually so far from being turned into a product that nobody'll fund it for cash. The exception is High Frequency Trading and military applications (think missile guidance systems); both of which rely on secrecy (and in HFT's case a good 'ole boys network).
Where closed source rules is in boredom. It's hard to get folks to write office software because it's not a very interesting problem to a software dev and unlike the GNU tool chain it's not something the devs need for themselves.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Forced spying and user-hostile privacy policies make open-source a good choice. Now if only Samsung TVs could be flashed w/an open source firmware (Samsung Privacy policy is highly disturbing).
One example, with added chuntzpah:
Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD. - one of the world's largest makers of DVR/NVR/Camer software is shipping Linux distros on HiSilicon (Huawei) SoC hardware, adding proprietary software (which is riddled with GPL symbols) totally stonewalling all attempts to obtain source code and then complaining loudly that other people are stealing its software.
Yes, the same Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD whose DVR software was the host for Mirai and friends - and whose "fixes" for this can be circumvented in less than a minute (they disabled telnetd, it can be reenabled via the web interface and the traversal attack is still there)
Because POSIX changed everything. So did the Standard Unix Specification.
Oh wait, no they didn't.
It hasn't changed the world because the world hasn't changed. "I like my xxx software because it does what I like and I'm perfectly alright with paying for it." Good for you, Joe. Have you tried changing? "No, it doesn't do it for me." So that's what you have, Joe. Keep churnin'.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti