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Linux and Open Source in Scientific American
Cory Williams writes " Scientific American has a nice little article about Open Source and its superiority to commercial software: "The Best Things in Cyberspace Are Free". Not like we didn't already know this. "
It's nice to see this kind of article in the press -- but did you notice that nowhere does the article actually explain what Open Source *is*.
I've noticed this in many, many mainstream press articles -- they either merrily drop phrases like "open source" without pausing to explain, or they use "free" to mean "free beer"... or worse they describe Linux/Apache/GNU/whatever as (argh) "public domain".
we should all take the last paragraph to heart.
I find it bizarre that in software, people think proprietary = secret, and non-secret = non-proprietary. I'm sure Howard Roark (the fictional architect hero in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand) would be perplexed, or appalled, if people told him that in order for him to really own a building design, he has to prevent it from ever being seen.
It would certainly be possible for software writers to include a free source code license with their proprietary programs. The Quake programs already include partial source; this is how people make mods. What if, say, Microsoft Word were distributed this way?
If the license were liberal enough -- and yet still enforceable -- proprietary programs could become as good as open source.
-- Ayn-onymous "Coward"
Pah. There are laws against slavery. Probably rather verbosely written laws.
I won't spell out the analogy -- but would you say that the freed slaves are not free, because their owners rights to do with them as they pleased were taken away?
This bothers me. Let's not forget that free (as in "speech" or "beer") software is meaningless if people can't use it.
Zontar
(somewhere in tenn.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Doesn't that figure?
"Your honor, we are required to add our browser to the operating system"
"And why is that?"
"Well, we can't find the version of the code that doesn't have it in."
Chris
So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."
Microsoft...the company itself claims to be unable to locate some of the original source code. (SciAm article)
... a little GPL maybe?
By MS' own standards, "if you can't prove it is yours (involuntarily, invasively registered; documentation overkill for every trivial u/g) you must have stole (illegally copied)it" - sounds guilty, guilty, Guilty. Real question may be who did they steal it from
Make that: not necessarily open source (not flame bait), but absolutely open file formats, communication protocols, and APIs/ABIs.
This would be a good middle-ground solution: for any format, protocol, or other sort of standard that an application uses, there should be a fully open specification, preferably including at least a bare-bones reference implementation that is under the GPL. This would not prevent the company from having a completely proprietary closed-source application, but that application would not store or transmit data in any fashion that cannot be duplicated by an open-source competitor.
Folks like Microsoft still won't like this, but I think it's perfectly reasonable -- in fact it ought to be required. The way I figure, the company would still own, and profit from, the product of all the time and energy that goes into refining the user interface, and any clever algorithms that they come up with in implementing and optimizing the data structures. However, the only possible reason for wanting to keep the formats and protocols proprietary would be to create a "lock-in" effect, making it harder for competing products to interoperate. Companies in dominant positions (cough) like lock-in effects, but this is anti-competitive. The legitimate grounds on which to compete are precisely those that would still be closed-source under my proposal: the quality of the respective implementations of the standards.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Ouch! I'm not sure I like the undertones here.
-benjy
I'll accept this as penance after SciAm's truly atrocious article on network security a couple of months back.
I wanted to discuss that article with my fellow geeks back then, but was afraid to even mention it because I didn't want the editors of my favorite rag-mag to get bombarded with flaming mail messages.
Among a number of other criticisms that might have been raised against that previous article (and a number *were* raised, judging from comments in the Letters to the Editors section of a later issue), my worst complaint about the article was that it seemed to bear a subtext conveying -
Windows NT = secure network systemware in near-universal use among professionals;
Everything Else Except "Free" Stuff = Inferior systemware in niche use by those who don't know better or haven't gotten around to upgrading yet;
"Free" Stuff = Trash that 'hackers' use because (a) it's designed for use by crackers, and/or (b) 'hackers' don't have jobs and thus cannot afford the "real" stuff.
A second (apparent) subtext was that -
The Good Guys have, or are pursuing, degrees in CS;
The Bad Guys are uneducated, or dropouts.
(I think there was a reference to a cracker who downloaded something because he was too uneducated to write the program himself!)
Despite the fact that such a scheme puts me among the Good Guys, I found it offensive due to its incredible naivety.
Glad to see their awareness of the Real World (TM) is improving.
He seems to imply that "programmers" should adjust their ideas to be more in line with those of "average consumers". Wouldn't the world be better off if the reverse happened, and the median computer literacy level permitted one to use Emacs productively?