Slashdot Mirror
ESR On O'Reilly Summit
The Open Source Summit report from the anonymous poster using the tag line "You can't handle the truth" got a crucial fact wrong -- and that fact is symbolic of a larger problem with the essay.
It was not, in fact, a guy from HP who flung at me "You've never run a business". It was one of our own; Larry McVoy, a hacker who is a sort of anti-Stallman -- he believes that unless the open-source community accepts direct-revenue-capture licenses we will all come to a horrible end.
The author seems to have filtered his view of the summit through a simplifying myth that regards hackers and businesspeople as poles apart, with all hackers on the "free software" side of the fence and all businessmen either opposed to open source or puzzled by it or out to exploit it in some sinister way.
That simplifying myth has no room in it for Larry McVoy. Nor for the half-dozen or so businesspeople in the room who really seemed to get it. The truth is, I didn't see "hackers vs. suits" at the Summit -- just a whole bunch of people trying in various ways to get a handle on a very powerful and complex phenomenon.
And you know what? Licenses, everybody's favorite subject for doctrinal warfare, *were never even discussed*. They just weren't a big issue. My sense was that everybody there understood the basic hacker-community social contract that the OSD expresses and accepted it -- *even the suits*. All the hot questions were posed at a higher level; so we've got this social contract, we know why it clobbers the hell out of closed-source methods, now what do we do with it?
Mr. "You can't handle the truth" apparently had some trouble assimilating it himself. I saw no evidence that anyone there was incapable of "getting it", and I saw no justification for alarmist fox-in-the-henhouse metaphors.
Some plain truth: businesspeople can't "crush" us because, fundamentally, they can't do *anything* to us except throw money or refrain from throwing money. They can't erase all our source archives. They can't stop tens of thousands of people from writing code every day for reasons that are outside the ken of material-scarcity economics. They can't prevent the open-source community from evolving in any cultural direction it damn well pleases. As well try to cut water with a sword...
The only way I can account for the tone of Mr. YCHTH's essay (or the less sophisticated rantings of J. Random Slashdotter) is by supposing that a lot of hackers have a sort of need to feel persecuted, a need to cast themselves as the little guy in a David vs. Goliath drama with eschatological stakes.
Reality is much more complicated than that. This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works. And it's safe to tell him, too, because big guys are relatively lousy with slings and we'll always be better than he is at it.
We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us.
...who are we supposed to fight? Our egos need to feel like we are tearing at society's fabric...
What is it that make people opine on everything under
the sun? And why does every one think he and he alone is
right? Go figure! I'm a GNU/Linux newbie and was pleasantly surprised by the stability
of the system and also the fun factor in installing/configuring. Then I started
looking into the philosophies behind GNU..
Nevertheless, for some time now, people here seem to be more
interested in "naming" things (GNU/OSI..) rather than making things.
Lesson I learned? Use and enjoy free software, run fast and far from its
politics. Heh, give me a podium and I too can murder people
with opinion! (No, I will not listen to myself either!)
"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" The unspoken message to the New World Order that Eric Raymond has created for us. By replacing personal wealth with personal ego we can be sure that we will eliminate any chance of being corrupted by wealth. Yeah, that does leave the problem of Ego and Personalities but then with fair, open minded leaders like ESR, we can rest safe at night.
He even totes guns to protect us!
Scarey prospect, isnt it......
Eric must be about the only developer they dont own. Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, so Eric's not a developer. But he gets good press. Even if hes about as photogenic as old road kill.
I don't know about David vs. Goliath.. I always code for fun :)
Seriously, if I wanted to go and make money programming it would be extremely hard now that I have found out about all thats going on. Before (in Windows world) I was ready to hop on the shareware wagon (or work for a closed-source producing company). Now I barely have the urge to program for a living (damn.. there go college plans). I think we need more places like Red Hat that hire open-source developers. That way when you make a program it will always remain your's (and millions of other people's) instead of behind companies' walls.
Just think if open-source was big in DOS world. Imagine all of the things we would still have floating about the internet and not on 360k disks that are gone bad.
I enjoy reading much of Eric's writing -- but I think he really missed it on his analysis of "You can't handle the truth". And his comment that we are more likely to 'corrupt' business than it us, is way off the mark -- unless he has redefined 'corrupt' to mean improve in a social context.
I guess I sit in the middle between Eric R. and RMS -- I see a great need to reform business from a social standpoint. Open Source has the potential to do this, and I think Eric R. would do good to step away from the financial side of it occasionally, and see the real power Open Source has to change peoples lives in fundamental ways.
For software patents, you don't want to prevent proprietary works, you want to prevent other software patents. An "Open Patent" license should be free to anyone who releases *all* their software patents under an "Open Patent" license, and expensive or prohibited to those who don't.
In other words, it still needs to be viral, but in a different way from the GPL.
Just because the suits like them why does it mean that the hacker community must then hate them. I use Redhat (and the superset distro Mandrake). I think they've done a good thing with RPM's. It doesn't matter that they are the best or not. It just matters that what they've done works the best for me (I've tried Debian and Slackware too).
Business can strike into the heart of Free Software anyday. How are you using the influence you gained on our behalf to deal with this threat?
You wanna use a copy of my code? Right, I need to give you some of my copyright rights, under my terms, or you're breaking the law. I grant you the right to copy my code if and only if you forever waive any software patent right you may have.
One system smashes the other. Cute.
Eric has asserted that the "suits" can not hurt Open Source. Maybe not, but the following scenerio is certainly possible.
Intel is ticked becasue Linus has once again told them to take a hike with there Open Driver Interface. What does Intel do. They fork the linux kernel and add the desired Open Driver Interface themselves. These changes are then re-released under the GPL. This is perfectly legal, the GPL allowes for such a code fork. There is nothing Linus can do to stop them!
Intel is a stock holder in RedHat. Intel comes to Mr. Young and insists that RedHat uses there version of the Linux kernel. If RedHat dosen't, Intel threatens to pull there money.
This may or may not be a concern for RedHat. It depends on how much money Intel has invested and can RedHat live without it.
If it is considerable and RedHat can not live without it, then there just might be an incompatiable version of Linux on the market.
Mr Young really has no choice. He likes his paycheck as much as everyone else and he needs to protect his investors interests. If he doesn't protect there interests, then law suits can be quite nasty and long drawn.
Does this hurt Open Source. No, not really, everything was done nice and legal. Everything is GPL'd and followes the Open Source guidelines.
But it certainly hurts Linux. There are now two versions, each somewhat compatiable.
Can we say Unix wars... Again...
This is how the "suits" can hurt Open Source.
In fact, I was more concerned with ESR's comments. If there is nothing that the suits can do, why stoop to this level?
I think merely a quiet "resistance is futile" would suffice.
the binary only drivers would suck and people would reject them anyway, just like I reject AFS, OSS, 3DFx, and everything Windows...
I too quite enjoyed the article last night, and I
see little reason for ESR's sarcasm above.
And at the same time, I find that ESR's comments also have certain merits (minus the sarcasm).
This is only a problem if there are a few dominant distributions. If there are many, then there's less leverage possible.
TTVeih
ESR's comment about the mindset of those steeped in "material scarcity economics" triggered one of those Eureka! neuron connection events.
Paul Pilzer, an economist turned entrepreneur and author (and very successful at it) published a few years back a book (Unlimited Wealth) on his theory of "economic alchemy" - turning the old economics of scarcity on its head. He's also done some tapes and videos .
One of the key points he makes is that in today's economy, the cost of *production* is increasingly a negligible part of the end cost of a product. (Example - a decade or so a go 85% of the cost of say a TV would be materials and manufacturing, and 15% distribution costs. Today it's the other way around.) And he predicts that the old manufacturing industrial empires will/are fading as distribution empires (eg Walmart, Amway) rise.
The parallels with the rise of Linux are obvious - the money is being made on distribution (and after sales services, etc.)
The standing army of programmers that Microsoft needs to maintain the expected level of galloping featurism in their increasingly bloated products is a huge albatross around their neck in this regard, because their development costs are increasing - which means raising prices if they want to keep the same percentage profits - at a time where competing companies' development costs are near zero.
The direction of the open source movement seems to parallel the direction that many material goods industries have gone: inexpensive, commoditized products where the money on the manufacturing side is negligible, with the profits made on the customer services side - distribution, convenience, after market add ons (eg who makes money on VCR sales - the hardware manufacture or the movie/video rental businesses?)
- AJWM (whose password is around here someplace..)
There *is* only *one* dominant Linux. Red Hat Linux. Its like saying "Tampax"; everyone knows what it is and what its used for.
How can you patent something that is already implemented in an Open Source Software project? What do you mean that they can stop us with patents? Do you mean that they can patent ideas and prevent someone from writing software that uses that idea? What do you mean?
Yeah, osi.org definately makes open source look like swine.
Yes yes!!! Flare your ignorance!!!
I'm a programmer, and I want to earn LOTS of money programming. If I do well, I might end up in a 'suit'.
I also think open source & GPL & Linux are great, and I want to write open source.
And I think a Redmond-based desktop monopoly is a lesser evil than Stallman's utopia.
There is no paradox here - OK?
eric sits here and spouts out philosophical bs all the while calling himself a "hacker".
eric is no hacker, not in either sense of the word.
while larry mcvoy is contributing to linux on the linux-kernel mailing list, eric sits there on his butt waxing philosophically and kissing face with the corporate world.
come to grips with who you really are eric - you never have, never will be part of the hacker community.
Those people that are "naming" things as you say are not the ones that are creating the movement. Open (free--whatever) software is not dependant on these people at all. Those that actually write code are the ones creating the movement...everyone else is just blowing hot air, trying to figure out what is going on.
It all comes down to writing code for users. If you aren't writing or using the code, you aren't contributing to it.
I keep seeing this name around. Anybody have any pointers on who he is?
http://www.bitmover.com/
Worked at Sun, SGI, etc.
He actually writes code and knows his head from his ***, unlike the vast majority slashdot kidies.
The I2O spec is availble to basically anyone for no cost from the I2O SIG, and has been for quite a while.
Well said, I agree. Real programmers are artists.
programming someting you do becos you love it, not becos it pays your bills. Thats someting the suits have problems to understand, why people work hard on things for free and just for fun.
oh, wait.. you forgot to properly spell it:
"Open Source (tm)".
and fetchmail? just another collection of other people's work.
heck, i dont even know anyone who uses fetchmail.
"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" The unspoken message to the New World Order that Eric Raymond has created for us.
:) I'm certain that you meant your statement to be bitter sarcasm, but it's actually quite literal truth.
Eh, not quite. Each gives according to how much they WANT to give, limited only by their technical expertise and the limitations of computer science. Each takes according to how much everyone else has given. The more people give, the more everyone is able to take.
Or, put much more succinctly, "Share and Enjoy". I think that should be the official unofficial motto of the FSF and OSI; not only is it a Douglas Adamsism, it perfectly captures the underlying egalitarianism of open-source/free software.
By replacing personal wealth with personal ego we can be sure that we will eliminate any chance of being corrupted by wealth. Yeah, that does leave the problem of Ego and Personalities but then with fair, open minded leaders like ESR, we can rest safe at night.
Yep. Hey, it's worked well so far.
Fact: as a whole, the free software/open-source movement has the largest amount of mindshare, likely by an order of magnitude or more. This incredible intellectual base is nothing without leadership, though, preferably leaders with differing styles and opinions so as to make the overall experience all the richer and more dynamic. RMS, Linus, ESR, Alan Cox, Daryll Strauss, etc. -- they all are important figures in our movement.
None of them would categorize themselves as leaders, by the way. RMS is not a leader, he's a visionary. Linus is not a leader, he's a master hacker. ESR is not a leader, he's an evangelist. Alan isn't a leader, he's a programmer. Daryll isn't a leader, he's just a 3Dfx guru and generally Cool Guy(tm).
He even totes guns to protect us!
I strongly suspect that he doesn't particularly care if you're 'protected' or not. He owns firearms to defend himself and his family with, as well as for sporting purposes.
I'm sure that you're a big boy and can take care of yourself. I wouldn't dream of trying to protect someone against their wishes, and I can't conceive of ESR being any denser than I am in this regard.
If you cannot make your point on technical merits without having to resort to the bugaboo of the Second Amendment, which is in absolutely no way related to the topic at hand, then your point fails, prima facie.
See an exposition of this idea at the League for Programming Freedom web site.
It is unlikely that Redhat would do such a thing, no matter how much money Intel threatened to pull.
:). Has the fork of egcs severely hurt gcc? Not in my opinion. These things happen. Usually for sound technical reasons and because not all things are reconcilable under one umbrella. Sometimes one version will go away, sometimes the fork is permanent, and sometimes they will merge again. Neither case is necessarily that bad. The only bad thing is the increased work to maintain compatibility and crossport, but that is work done because two groups feel there is no other way, and only time will tell if one or both were right.
Ultimately, Redhat's buisness case is dependent on maximizing Linux marketshare, and maintaining a strong position and postitive brand recognition within the Linux market. If they started making, under the pressure of Intel or other companies, a technically unsound forked version that would hurt both severely. They would rapidly be failing in protecting their stockholders interests.
But either way, do you really think such a fork would permanently harm Linux? Has the existence of XEmacs severely harmed Emacs as a whole? In my opinion I just got two choices instead, and I prefer the forked version
No, it isnt unix wars again. Cross-fork compatibility on a GPL product will remain much higher than between multiple proprietary forks of a source. In the GPL fork, both have every advantage of keeping compatibility and they have access to the sources to do it. In the proprietary fork they will wrangle to establish a market lead and widen the fork to diffrentiate.
The bounty is not a race to the first implementation. Hackers bid on the contract to create an open source implementation.
Some people will complain about anything!
But Squeeze Truck, do you realize why RMS has not been contributing as much as he has in the past?
Because of the very long hours he put in coding GNU cc, Emacs, etc. he suffered major nerve damage to his wrists and arms. That's why he only posts things occasionally to the mailing lists, rarely codes....
Stallman will stay off my list of heros-turned-lusers out of this incredible respect I have for the man. He is one of the few who made a tangible sacrifice to see free software to where it is today.
Oh, that's a bunch of crap. I haven't written any kernel modules lately, but I and others do alot. I troll the news groups and help out newbies. I can't count the number of people I've helped install whatever dist. of Linux. I'm involved in the local LUG, I help others with the maintenance of their system. I give freely to others of my knowledge and time. I test code. I help write documentation. I'm also a scientist, and give away my code for doing my research for anyone who wants it. Just because it isn't GPL'ed and part of the OS doesn't mean anything. If I get free time, maybe I'll contribute to something I use alot, like octave etc. But even if I didn't, I and literally millions of others make a huge difference in how and what Linux is. Without all of our positive effort and attitude, Linux wouldn't be anywhere like where it is today. Quit being such an elitist snob. I'm damn tired of the "if you aren't a hacker you don't contribute". Wake the hell up, or shut the hell up. One or the other.
-Jason Crosswhite
jason@newberry.uoregon.edu
Yeh... This paying developers to write free software must STOP NOW!!! Stop RedHat paying Alan Cox!!!! Stop them!!!! Quick. Alan shouldn't have any money! Or he should be getting paid by some other company to do something other than Linux!!!
You are a loser. This debate is well and truly dead. Wake up. Complain when RH actually do something bad, will ya? (Oh yeh, writing a dist. that you consider "crappy" doesn't count... use another dist if ya want.)
AndyM
Larry, that wasn't the point of the first person's comment. Eric is trying his best to "make" himself part of the hacker community. Yeah, he threw together a mail retrieval program. But he also does not /currently/ participate in the hacker community. He's one of the corporate suits trying to look like a hacker. That's where the problem is - not that he is not doing a good job at what he does (catering to the suits).
I could not do a better job at "Open Source(tm)" politics because I find that whole organization unethical.
I don't myself feel that would be an entirely fair judgement on ESR or the Jargon File, but I think it's plausible enough to deserve a reply. Would Mr. Raymond himself like to take this opportunity to answer this criticism?
I'm here to write. Write code that is. I don't know about you but what I like about programming is the challenge of the code it self and seeing my little creation come to life. And the satisfaction of it being used by others. I have no need to fight.
Snoop
Here is Eric S. Raymond himself, v6.1, 13 August 1998:
"Prices for CD-ROM distributions of Intel Linuxes start at $20 and top out at a whole $50 (and the extra few dollars can buy real value). Many vendors sell subscription deals that will lower your cost-per-CD for regular updates over the subscription period.
Price correlates with features and quality pretty well (as one would expect in a very competitive market). Your editor recommends paying the few extra dollars for a top-drawer original CD-ROM distribution; this will pay off in fewer installation and administration hassles down the road."
Many of you present here today are witnesses that such advice benefits Red Hat, and no other.
"Do you mean that they can patent ideas and prevent someone from writing software that
uses that idea?"
That's exactly what is going on lately.
Ideas are beeng patented and many of them
are just obvious.
What do you mean ? Didn't you know it?
sheesh!
Err how does this benefit RedHat? It's pretty much the truth of the matter. A Linux cdrom/book package no matter what the dist is on contained on the cdrom generally runs around $20-$50, and has been so for the past couple of years.
Larry,
Can you please publish your
business model?
I both agree and disagree. On one hand, I think the problems mentioned are valid. Bounties on code would sicken our community.
On the other hand, I think that if someone was working on a program for a bounty and I thought it was a really nifty program that really should be written, I'd offer them my help for free. What really matters is that the code gets written and given to the public.
How does this benefit Red Hat? Well, it is the only major company I know who price their distribution at $50. The author strongly recommends to spend the extra dollars; in other words, to buy Red Hat. In addition, there is no mention
of cheapbytes.com who sell the same Red Hat distribution for $2, exactly what Red Hat does not want the newbie to know. These prices include the price of any manuals, not book. Book are first mentioned much later at the section about OpenLinux Linux. Since the author recommends the $50 cd-rom, I logically conclude that the author recommends Red Hat.
Hahahahahhhhahahahhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ahahahahhahahahaha
sorry, but i dont have time to educate cluebies who think they own the world with their lame leenax kernel.
get a life. use freebsd and youre almost there.
Real Men use BSD(tm).
To use an unrelated Point B in order to "reinforce" a Point A is jejeune and sophomoric. Really, I knew better than to argue that way when I was six. Attempting to taint someone's ideas by bringing up an unrelated subject which some may find distasteful is a sure way of announcing that you cannot win the debate on the facts of the matter.
Your citations regarding firearms are fairly commonplace. I won't even attempt to refute them, because I don't find it to be particularly relevant to the issue at hand -- which is whether or not ESR has a point in his essay. All I will say on the matter is that if you believe statistics compiled by political agencies -- any political agency, whether the FBI, NRA, HCI, what-have-you -- then you're going to get exactly what you deserve.
The bit about mindshare is reasonably accurate, I feel. Look at the amount of mindshare that Sun has, the amount that MS has, that HP and Apple and everyone else has. How much of this goes to redundancy, to reinventing the wheel? How much of it is lost to corporate left-hand right-hand? The open-source/free software movement manages to avoid most of those problems (through some arcane means which I don't think anyone fully understands).
Maybe "most mindshare" was inaccurate, but "most usable mindshare" probably isn't.
Define "currently": fetchmail was last updated 20th Dec/9th March (release/devel). rpmwatcher was updated in December. Not current enough for you? They also serve who only maintain, you know. In fact, the job of maintainer is vital to the whole future of free software. Too many hackers are fly-by-nights who have brilliant ideas but aren't prepared to stick with them.
I have a hard time understanding what is unethical about Open Source (as it currently stands). The plain fact is, RMS protestations to the contrary, free software is usually the parasite, not the other way around. The community can usually only produce free software because they have day jobs. Some, like Eric and RMS are lucky enough to be paid to hack on free software, and that model actually works. But who's going to pay for the software to be written in the first place? Can you really see a company who only makes a specific class of program paying staff to write that program, which they're going to give away when it's ready? No, because their business (and survival) depends on selling that program. Yes, you can make money selling support and services, but unless you're talking enterprise-class software, the margins on that are small. Companies are generally run not by hackers but by businessmen, who are not reknowned for their love of small margins. So, the survival of free software is often dependent on good-will and hand-outs, which makes it a parasite in my book. Mind you, it's a remora I quite enjoy carrying around 8-).
The problem is that we live in a society where money is an issue, and for the free software movement to mature, it needs to come to terms with that. There are many inventive ways we can arrange the funding of many classes of programs, but most of them, sooner or later, involve talking to the suits and convincing them that their money will be a worthwhile investment. Eric has done a good thing, IMO, in opening a dialogue. As long as he doesn't climb into their pockets and try to sell us down the river (which wouldn't work, and besides which I doubt he's that kind of guy), we'll be fine.
(Incidentally, as my contribution to funding ideas, do Intel fund GCC? If not, why not?)
Are you a programmer. If nothing else, so we
know how much faith to put on your attitude of respecting.
Again, the issue is not Eric's programming, its
Eric's programming of us. Open Source should be
called a sell-out by those who have even the
smallest respect to the ideas of RMS.
Open Source & Tim O'Reilly means is a selling-out!
Hey, I never denied that [the original poster's Point B was idiotic]. You're absolutely right. But if the point is unrelated, either ignore it or address it separately. The fact that Poster A above used an unrelated Point B has no effect on the validity of his Point A.
:)
True, it doesn't. However, the fact that he brought up Point B in the first place certainly affects his credibility -- anyone who will gleefully be so idiotic is not someone whose opinions I'll waste much time with.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, but I still throw it in the garbage.
Ummm, yeah. To a large extent that's true, though there are exceptions like the ongoing KDE/GNOME gotterdammerung. On the other hand, free software has unique problems of its own. I worry a lot about the notion that free software tends more towards reimplementation than breaking new ground. Of course, nobody at MS or ZDNet who mutters about that stuff ever seems to notice that ~99% of proprietary software is just pointless wheel-reinvention, too.
There's very little real innovation in the IT field, really. New innovations take decades, quite literally, to come to fruition. The modern computer interface -- the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pull-down-menus) -- was developed back at Xerox PARC waybackwhen, for instance, but we've had to hear Mr. Bill telling us for years that the Windows interface is "innovative".
The real innovations are typically the Genius From Mars technique, and sometimes it takes a long time for the guy to arrive from the Red Planet.
Open-source/free software does wonderful things and has a couple of Geniuses From Mars, but by and large the movement isn't concerned with innovation so much as developing and perfecting past innovations. Nothing wrong with that, either... after all, don't most of us wish that Microsoft and Apple were half as vigilant in developing and perfecting their OSes as we are with our free Unices (Linux, the BSDs, etc)?
KDE is, IMO, much more solid than Gnome - used the panel or Gmc lately? (And why can't Gnome programmers seem to display the current line number in their text apps?)
On the other hand KDE is, well, boring. It has the plain-jane functional efficiency of a German factory.
KGnome or GKDE anyone?
"This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works."
This is dumb and obviously untrue. It's like saying, "My parents don't want to ground me; they just want to figure out how my clever shenanigans work."
Along with arrogance and flout, the author uses needless words and poor grammar. I can't believe people praise this sort of scornful slop.
No, you said professional courtesy :-) It just sounds a little less convincing than "out of respect".
I assumed you were not aware of why RMS is not as active as he'd like to be anymore.
Ah well.
Most businesses that pay to have code written do so to use it themselves, not to sell it. They may have a reflexive reluctance to let outsiders improve it, even though they'd be better off- unless the strategic advantages of having the only copy of that code outweigh the expense of doing all the maintenance.
People that sell software have the most to lose from open source, but they're the exception.
If business takes issue with open sourcesoftware, it will, most likely, not be with products such as Sendmail, BIND, and Apache that allow business to benefit from the effort. It will, rather, be with the GPL -- whose purpose is explicitly anti-business.
Eric Raymond has learned that he can sell open source to business when he downplays or intentionally fails to mention the intent of, and the philosophy behind, the GPL. There is a lesson in this: an antibusiness agenda, or one that seeks to entrap businesses and then cry "Gotcha!" (which is what Stallman avocates), won't work.
However, if ESR promotes GPLed software while withholding information about the mechanism and intent of the GPL, he is being disingenuous and deceptive. If he wants to be honest and promote the adoption of open source software by business, he must advocate the use of licenses that do not prevent businesses from reusing the code in their own products. As mentioned in the article at the top of this thread, the businesses are not "taking" the code by doing this; after all, they can't nuke the source archives! What they can do is improve upon it and make money from their work, which is a very legitimate thing to do. This is the incentive that will spur the adoption of open source. Instead of regarding business as the "enemy" -- as Richard Stallman does -- open source advocates must make it an ally by giving freely. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!
--Brett Glass
http://www.brettglass.com/mailbrett.html
The GPL isn't a person, so it doesn't make sense to say that it "regards" business as anything at all! However, the GPL is designed to undermine and sabotage business. Read the GNU Manifesto for more on this. It clearly talks about eliminating competition -- in other words, destroying markets and the businesses that sell products into them.
Intellectual property is the enemy, and unfortunately the business world is built on the premise of IP.
It's not just the business world; in the Information Age, it'll be pretty much the whole world. Individuals as much as large businesses will suffer if they cannot hold intellectual property -- the "coin of the realm." Programmers will suffer because they will have nothing to sell in order to make a living. And we'll all suffer because incentives for innovation will vanish.
We're already seeing it happen. Be, Inc. was worried about Microsoft, but it's ultimately Linux that stands to kill their (exceptionally good) product. VCs are turning down business proposals for product categories which GPLed software has invaded.
Open source has a chance to change the business structure, not merely be coopted by it.
Unfortunately, there is no other basis for business structures except for possession of physical objects and infrastructure. Which means that the large corporations which own that infrastructure will have an inexorable grip on all of us. This is not a step forward; it's actually a step backward to the days of landlords and feudalism. To destroy intellectual property is to destroy value and freedom.
What the GPL ensures is that a business using free software is contributing back to the community.
Let's look at that statement carefully for a minute. First, what's going on here is not exactly a "contribution." The GPL's goal is to compel businesses to give up their intellectual property rights, not to contribute willingly. By depriving businesses of the right to use the code as they will -- for any purpose -- the GPL makes the software un-free to them. It thus discriminates unfairly against them by destroying their markets and at the same time preventing them from benefiting from the code. This isn't creating community; it's gathering a group for the purpose of attacking another. Richard Stallman wrote the GPL out of animus for for-profit businesses in the hope of creating this division. True community means sharing without worrying about "free riders." There will always be some, and it's not a big deal.
Other licenses turn the communal capital of open source into financial capital without taking any care to benefit the community.
The above is only true if you take a very narrow view of what's beneficial. I'm glad to patronize software companies that charge for their products; the relationship is mutually beneficial. The availability of good, innovative products helps us all.
David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World" explains this process of turning social economies into corporate ones, and the effect this has on the deterioration of the social structure and environment. Free software is merely an application of this principle, albeit one that is very close to my heart.
You seem to have a particular concern about corporations here. However, not all software is published by faceless corporations. I publish software myself, and would quickly be run out of business if the GPL invaded the markets in which I sold my work. This would happen even if my product was superior to the GPLed product, so long as the GPLed product was even marginally adequate. Is it socially beneficial to deprive me of my livelihood and willing buyers of the chance to benefit from work?
Brett, I agree with your assessment, but I think it's worth trying to persuade corporations that the GPL presents a viable economic model. We seem too stuck in the trap of thinking that selling a software product is the only way to make money.
None of the other ways adequately reward the skilled programmer. Sure, you could become a disk foundry, like Red Hat, but then you're not making money by creating software; you're making money by selling plastic. You could become a consultant, but then you're on an endless treadmill -- and, again, there's no incentive to create something of lasting value.
It's like saying, "Sorry, but you can't create a better car; the only option that's open to you is to be an auto mechanic."
--Brett Glass
This is, perhaps, the most self-contradictory aspect of the GPL. While it claims to guarantee freedom, this is merely an empty slogan. The GPL in fact restricts the use of code more than many other licenses, including the Cygnus eCOS license, the MIT X license, and the BSD license.
Inasmuch as business practices are at odds with freedom (in the Information Age, more and more), yes, the GPL is in opposition to that.
This is an unfounded generalization. In fact, the ability to conduct business is a key part of freedom. Only when business practices are predatory and anti-competitive should they be restricted. The GPL implements an anti-competitive scheme in which individuals as well as corporations are hurt by predatory practices, and thus should itself be curtailed.
As an individual, my choices are limited to creating my own business (expensive, difficult, but possible) or giving up my intellectual property to my employer.
There is nothing wrong with either of these approaches. Yes, if you're an employee, the default is to relinquish your right to work you do for hire. If you did not do that, the employer could not resell your work and hence could not benefit from employing you. Hence, he would not be able to pay you.
The GPL gives me a viable tool to protect my intellectual property so that I personally, and other developers, can benefit from it.
The GPL does not protect your intellectual property. In fact, it prevents you from profiting from it. Once you've published your code under the GPL, no one will pay for a comparable product, since an equivalent is available for free. What's more, since you do not own the improvements made to the code by others, it is impractical for you to license it for money later. By using the GPL, you have sabotaged yourself.
Again, you're too caught up in the notion that you must be able to sell a software product. Why not charge the same fee for installing your product, providing support, selling nicely-bound manuals?
Because all of these tasks are peripheral to the valuable skill and vocation of creating software. I'm not a manual printer, a technician, or a tech support person; I'm a programmer!
What's more, others can perform the same services for your software and in fact undercut you, putting you out of business. You have no protection against this.
You seem to scoff at these notions, or the disk foundry concept, but I hear the same sort of knee-jerk reaction all the time with people who are used to the process of selling software licenses.
This is not a "knee-jerk" reaction; it is simply true and obvious.
I consider myself a decent programmer, and thus my services are in high demand. I'm not going to starve on the street. If I can provide services to someone and retain the rights to the software I produce, everyone wins. The GPL gives me a tool to do so.
No, it does not. When you publish under the GPL, you have relinquished your opportunity to profit from licensing your software.
When the value proposition of the economic structure does not benefit the society that relies on it, it needs to be destroyed.
The concept of intellectual property does indeed benefit society, in that it rewards creation and innovation. To destroy it is to hurt society.
There are other forms of value, however, and other forms of freedom. I am, in point of fact, very much a proponent of the free market and of capitalism. But the world economic system is not a free market of the kind envisioned by Adam Smith, idealized by Ayn Rand, and paid lip service to by our intellectuals and economists. If I tend to say "corporation" every other sentence, it's because those embodiments (latin root) are the golems of modern-day society, creations of an unjust socio-economic system.
A corporation is merely a way of structuring a business, nothing more. If I choose to incorporate my business (which is now a sole proprietorship), little will change -- primarily, I'll gain some small measure of protection against certain kinds of lawsuits and will have to do different paperwork when I do my taxes. But otherwise, nothing will be different. You are making a "straw man" argument here.
In any event, the GPL is even more harmful to the small developer than to a large corporation. Large companies have the resources to re-engineer things which are GPLed; the little guy does not.
Lots of open source projects have built better cars and the individuals involved profited from their work.
The individuals involved rarely profit at all. (Red Hat makes far more off of Linux than Linus.) If an author has profited, it has only been in ways peripheral and incidental to the creative effort.
The key is realizing that the mainstream business model is incompatible. O'Reilly makes a ton of money from Perl...
And had nothing to do with creating it. The author has not profited. This is an intended consequence of the GPL: authors, because they do not retain control of their intellectual property, are not rewarded.
--Brett Glass
It seems that, at least temporarily, the day of the tame hacker producing little applications for their company are gone, not least because the ever-increasing complexity of computer systems requires standard, not custom programs. I personally believe that, if the free software movement directs its efforts to trying to change this, it'll be wasting it's time, and could even threaten its own survival. Like any successful parasite, its g
Like any successful parasite, it's got to learn to exploit the habits of its host. Hopefully, one day, it'll graduate to true symbiosis 8-)
Read carefully. YCHTT stands for "You Can't Handle The Truth," which is what the anonymous poster used as a sig or tagline or something. YCHTT was being used as a way to refer to him, not as sarcastic nastiness.
He also once wrote a horrendous little childish play on the Halloween thing, with him as a character, also put up on the OSI site.
Apparently public pressure has made him delete both of these. The only controversial thing left for people to see is only his Gun nut page.
Hehehe. I guess this will start Yet Another Gun Control Flamewar.
---
ESR is quite the mature fellow.
two things:
1) I currently have no desire to mix my hacking with any business.
2) If I did, I'd think twice about connecting my software with Open Source(tm). Why? ESR. He hasn't done anything amazingly embarrasing, but the Obi-wan thing, and more importantly the immature snippets from the AOL letter... maybe if this was hacker2hacker, but not hacker2businessman. I'm suprised Mr. "suit" Case didn't respond with "HAHA."
I'd much rather be connected with the FSF/Free software movement. Plain and simple freedom.
Posted by Pepi:
Larry did OS work for SUN (performance analysis
mostly) among other things. He is also developing a versioning system that we're probably going to use for 2.3 (but who knows) - bitkeeper. At www.bitkeeper.com you can read more about the product and Larry.
Posted by Pepi:
Larry did OS work for SUN (performance analysis mostly) among other things. He is also developing a versioning system that we're probably going to use for 2.3 (but who knows) - bitkeeper. At www.bitkeeper.com you can read more about the product and Larry.
Posted by Pepi:
Eric is doing a lot of pivotal work, mostly in advocating opensource. This is just as important. On the side he also made fetchmail.
Posted by penguin in a tie:
Is this Linus' post? I think this is Linus.
Posted by Pepi:
I use fetchmail and so does lots of people, who have gotten past Netscape and other great readers (tm).
Since I obviously wasn't at the `summit' (why does that word seem so like one that only a suit would use?) it gets difficult to see what actually transpired. However, I'm not going to toss out what Scoville had to say just because ESR says that he's wrong. I have a hard time thinking that a man who wrote something like Elements of Style: Unix as Literature as being almost completely unable to comprehend what went on at that meeting. It would make more sense to think, all this being the third-hand information that it is and perceptions being what they are, that the truth of what went on is somewhere in between what Scoville and ESR say.
Off topic (somewhat):
ESR is the guy whose web pages originally told me about this world of hackers and Unix and free software and all that -- without which I would still be wallowing in the pits of MS hell -- but lately I've been losing some degree of respect for the guy.
Calling Scoville ``Mr. `You can't handle the truth''' strikes me as both incredibly silly and strangely immature. I'm not sure where in Scoville's assessment of the `summit' that he might have even thrown a bit of mud ESR's way that would incite ESR to toss some back. You would think that someone who wants to be taken seriously for what he's trying to do would act just a tad bit more responsibly, wouldn't you?
Futhermore, his dressing up as Obi-Wan Kenobi (or, perhaps more appropriately, PDP-1) at the Microsoft-Refund event was just as immature. Sure, it may have been a joke, but as a parallelism, ``how do you stop a rhino from charging--take away his credit card'' ceases to be as funny as it used to be at some point on most peoples' lives and just marks you as a schmuck if you tell it.
I won't even start on the Perens-OSI cat fight since, for me, the jury's still out on that one...
ESR has some pretty big balls (metaphorically speaking) to do what he's trying to do with free software. Straddling the fence between hackers (who tend to dislike most suits--with exceptions) and suits (who don't usually care about much more than the profit margins--with exceptions) is a very difficult task and he deserves credit for that. But if he keeps up with this immaturity trip, he might lose the support of at least one of the ``sides'' that he's trying to bring together.
Sorry if I'm out of line with this; just a newbie's thoughts.
--
Jeramey Crawford
I can see your point and agree as well. It's really too bad that such a high price is placed on information.
About the Obi-Wan thing, I actually thought that was a little humorous (despite being rediculous), but I'm trying to get Linux in use at the workplace and I really don't want to show the boss something like that. Bad image == no Linux at work. The more interesting my job can be, and the less I have to deal with expensive NT, the better.
Yes, I am definitely new. Although I heard about Linux a few years ago, I haven't had the chance to actually use it and learn it (and find that I really, really like it!) until the last 6 months to a year or so.
I had heard about the Hitler-Gates picture but have never seen it. Um, what? I fail to see the connection between Adolph and Bill. No contest. One is worse than the other and I'm sure you know which one!
I've also read the Halloween stuff, too. Not funny.
I won't discuss guns if you won't.
Hmmm. The near-ubiquity of transistor radios in the Third World, the green revolution that showed up all the Malthusian doomsday scenarios of the '70s for the nonsense they were, the Ford Model T that set in motion the incredible mobility of the rural population, the ability of a quarter of a billion people or so all over the planet to communicate with each other instantaneously via the Internet, the revolution in "freedom of the press" brought on by the Web -- but these dreams are "seldom fulfilled." OK, sure.
If you're saying "Nothing is a panacea", that's true but trivially obvious. If you're saying any more than that, you're obviously quite wrong. Technological development in the last 150 years has vastly increased the empowerment of individuals.
Craig
-- as thousands of the talented do every year when they graduate and get a [gasp!] job!
> 2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits
-- that is, actually paying money to some hackers for working on Linux! Eeeek!
> 3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.
-- that is, enlarging the community (Horrors!) by including people whose definition of "freedom" may not be exactly the same as RMS'. Aaagh!
Craig
I don't know anyone whose vision of life consists exclusively of anything. Do you?
Likewise I know very few people whose vision of life does not include food and shelter, though in some cases (notably RMS') in a rather minimalistic form.
> You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why?
Gee, I dunno. I just looked around and noticed that a hell of a lot more great software with source was available now than it was when I first started using it nearly ten years ago. Silly me, I thought it might be because more people were writing the stuff....
> You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why?
I assume it's all right for the same reason I assume gravity is all right; it's inescapable. "A group" is not a thing, it's a word for a number of people who choose to cooperate with each other in some area of endeavor. Show me somewhere a group all of whose members are there with the same motivations, values, and goals and I'll show you a group that is at the very least unlikely to be individualistic enough to do any really superb hacking....
> Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL?
The last time I looked, Linux depended for its GUI, for example, on X. Is that "more" free, "less" free, or "as" free as if X(Free!) were under the GPL?
Note that the definition of "free" promulgated by the GPL is oddly one-sided; many of us object to the habitual use of "free software" as a synonym for "GPLed software", just as we'd object to restricting the phrase "Let's do lunch" (now trademarked by Frito-Lay) to proposal of occasions when we planned on consuming potato chips.
Craig
Well, it clearly didn't do it very thoroughly.... In fact, what it [business] did was break up the AI Lab at MIT in the midst of the "artificial intelligence" marketing craze of that era, the sole long-term effect of which was to offend RMS' communal sensibilities (understandably enough) and inspire him to dedicate his considerable hacking talents to e.g. gcc and other utilities central to OSS. Prolog and its friends are at best confined to a tiny niche; OSS is in the process of squashing NT, Microsoft's Prime Weapon for dominating enterprise computing. Some "crush."
But in spite of RMS' offended spirit, open software continued to be available from numerous other sources, both in academia (think about BSD and its associated stuff) and elsewhere. The "growth of the internet" by any reasonable metric started around 1983; basic free stuff -- like sendmail, vi, and so on -- were circulating from the very beginning. In 1991, when Linus first put up version 0.00whatever, the internet was a tiny fraction of its current size -- but it was big enough....
RMS himself, by the way, points out that nearly two-thirds of a standard Linux distribution consists of non-GPLed software, so apparently the FSF, for all its valuable contribution to OSS, is still in the minority when it comes to defining the term "free software."
Craig
> The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business.
I would say -- and this is ESR's whole point -- that your analysis is getting it exactly backwards. "The strongest evolutionary pressure" at this point is against the institution of proprietary software, and in particular against Microsoft's dominance of that institution. Linus (and RedHat) didn't go hat in hand to Intel, IBM, Netscape, and the rest begging to be saved and legitimized by commercial investment; they came to us. They want something from us, and as in any free-market transaction, they're trying to figure out (a) exactly what it is they want, and (b) what they can give us for it (whatever it is) in trade.
Free software advocates (and I'm one of them) tend to grossly underestimate the power of their own movement, however disorganized and anarchic it may be (that's something else the suits don't understand, although their institution, the free market, is at least as disorganized and anarchic as ours, and resists all government efforts to "solve" that "problem". What, by the way, makes you think they're any more "coherent" than we are?) -- and to grossly overestimate the power of finance in this movement. We'll be OK no matter what the suits try to do.
As to motivations, RMS is one of the very few the examples I know of who decided to write free software just so it would be FREE. (LessTif is probably another such case.) Much more typical is Spencer Kimball, who started to write The Gimp as an intellectual exercise. He was using Motif, discovered that it sucked eggs big time, and the result was GTK+. Likewise with WindowMaker, Blackbox, Lyx, and probably most of the kernel. Software freedom, for the most part, is a by-product rather than a goal -- note that Netscape freed their source not because of altruism but to hold on to market share.
> ...a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. ... new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
OK, let me get this straight: somebody writes a fantastic new application for Linux that's just wonderful and superior. It's proprietary and costs money. You have a Linux system. You run free software. Somehow this guy selling his wonderful app has ... curtailed your freedom?
How? Will your Linux suddenly do less than it could before? Will tar and emacs immediately stop working? Or will you simply have more options than before for using your machine (this particular option not being of interest to you because of your a) poverty, b) dedication to RMSFreedom, c) all of the above)?
And what kind of freedom do you value when you would prefer to suppress this proprietary software, when other people may want it, be willing to pay for it, and not give a damn whether they even get the source, much less whether they can hack it however they like? Doesn't their freedom of choice matter?
RMS' views on software freedom are purely religious -- i.e. you need to either accept on faith his moral system, in which case the GPL follows, or not accept it, in which case there is no rational way to defend it.
The "pragmatist" school points out the engineering value of the open-source development process, which is discussible in empirical and rational terms. Guess which approach to open software advocacy is likely to pick up more adherents.
For years now us Linux advocates have been petitioning major software companies to port their apps -- office suites, games, CAD, whatnot -- to Linux. Now they're poised to do so, and the response of the more insecure and easily frightened in our community is "EEk! Not commercialism! No, no, anything but that!"
In the immortal words of Nero Wolfe, pfui.
Craig
Craig
>Of course business can't "crush" OSS in any real sense, short of social domination.
RMS can tell you it already has done so, back in the late 70's/early 80's. Not by force, but by hiring away the best and brightest.
I think it's really the growth of the internet and the advancement in the capabilities of computers that has made OSS more viable this time around. Fast downloads, a "supercomputer" on everyone's desk, and numerous free development tools means that the barriers to creation and distribution of open source are much lower than they were. Also, going proprietary has gotten tougher, as the sophistication of applications has gotten higher, not to mention Microsoft's competition-crushing nature.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I've been thinking about that myself. Get the patent, and publish a license granting an unlimited license to use the patent in GPL code only. At the discression of the patent holder, proprietary software must either pay for a license, or cannot get a license.
Actually, you couldn't be more wrong. Mr. Young would say back to Intel, "we can't do that, we'd lose market share." Most of RedHat's investors would be similarly displeased, and Intel wouldn't have a choice. Selling their stock won't reduce the money in RedHat either.
Even if everyone rallies around Intel's move, the Linux community won't be too thrilled about a kernel fork which does them no good. Very shortly you'll find people using other distros. More than likely Mandrake or a similar distribution will offer "RedHat but with an unforked kernel", and RedHat will be dead.
sigs are a waste of space
The most important thing ESR said above was that the suits can't stop us. Just keep coding and keep doing what we've always done. They can't keep the community from going in whatever direction it wants to. Regardless of what happens to Linux commercially, it won't change how I treat it and how I use it. And everything I ever write will be some form of GPL, LGPL, or something similar.
:-)
I don't care about world domination, I just want an OS that I enjoy using and that works well for me. World domination would be just icing on the cake.
I think you confuse "lacking a sense of humor" with "being mature". In other words: You are thinking like a suit, not like a hacker.
And he is still doing more work than most, as Emacs maintainer. He also prefers dealing directly with other developers, rather than participating in public flame wars.
;-)
(Initiating public flame wars is another matter
The practical effect if Red Hat (or some single other distribution) becomes dominant can be one of two:
1) Red Hat does a great job. They stay dominant. Users and developers win.
2) Red Hat does a poor job. Someone else takes their GPL'ed code, and does a better job. Users and developers win.
So, what's to be afraid of?
The fact that ESR didn't look a little harder at the URL and work out that Thomas Scoville wrote the article suggests his response was written quickly in a less understanding mood than he might otherwise be in. (Yes, Scoville should have included an attribution on the original page, but I guess this was an oversight.)
Of course business can't "crush" OSS in any real sense, short of social domination. It may be able to marginalise it, but so long as we can download the software we want from the net, I doubt that will have much impact either. But it's still fair to say that business doesn't "get" OSS. Offering bounties and investing in the companies perceived to be the leading players are illustrations of business "joining" the OSS movement the only way it knows how: by spending money for something tangible.
Paying a programmer to write software only the business wants and then releasing the source will not realise the true benefits of OSS. Those occur when the programmer writes software he or she wants. (Pop quiz: name one leading female OSS programmer or explain why you can't. Worrying?) Where business can help is in paying those programmers so they don't otherwise lose time earning a living by undertaking unrelated activities. Unfortunately, that's only likely to happen where the programmer coincidentally happens to be creating something that the business wants. Red Hat *needs* a good desktop; it so happens that this is sexy stuff to many coders anyway, and they found people already working on a suitable package. IBM may have to look harder to find the folks coding enterprise features, but I'm sure they exist. The danger is that those projects succeed at the expense of related projects following other designs; this introduces imbalances into OSS output and potentially leads to software monopolies, although probably of better software than that provided by the proprietory world (eg. GNOME becoming the best-supported desktop).
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
I don't think you can sit between ESR and RMS. RMS defined free software and provide the GNU license to make it work. ESR is just sugarcoating it to make it palatable to business. I doubt RMS cares whether business uses it or not.
This is exactly right. No one is going to go through all of the trouble (and expense) to patent something just so they can give it away.
:).
The best defense, at this point, is to simply write a lot of software so that other people can't claim copyrights due to your already existing "prior art."
Or better yet, we can simply crush commercial software beneath our heels so that all software is free
This would certainly hurt RedHat, but there is nothing that says that RedHat is Linux. Not only that, but the two competing ideas might actually help Linux overall. After all, it would all be open source, and all of us would be free to choose which version of Linux we ran. So we would get more source, and more freedom into the community.
The reason that Intel is pushing ODI is they think that they can get the Open Source community to write drivers for all of the *nixes (both open and closed). If ODI is really cool, it could happen. If it sucks, it won't.
The majority of people who are killed by handguns are criminals. Not all, but a majority.
-russ
Eric, thank you for reminding all of us that social and political reality is seldom simple. That said, let me point out that while OSS can't be crushed, it could be marginalized. You may be sure that MS is already working on it.
Every new technology is marked by dreams of freedom. Seldom are these dreams fulfilled. If the hope of OSS is to be fulfilled, we need more political subtlety than so far I see manifest. We can start by bringing some ideas back from the various doghouses to which they have been sent: ideas like organization, cooperation, and competition. If a healthy balance among them can be found, then OSS can come into the mainstream and stay.
Yesterday's "fox in the henhouse" essay, combined with the "bounty" article (Sun and Adobe offering money for open-source implementations of their pet concepts) made clear to me just how little many suits understand Open Source. See, true suits (not hackers in management positions) have a very difficult time understanding a gift culture. To them, things are measured in dollars. How often have suits and journalists (who don't get it either) said that they can't imagine good programmers giving away their work for free? My own take is this... *mediocre* programmers may only work for money. But the *good* programmers *must* hack, even for free, just as a good painter has to paint, even if she never makes a dime off it.
Back to the bounty... by offering a bounty for implementation, they unwittingly undermine the very things that make Open Source work. The bounty encourages code hoarding (so no one else can use your work), and rush work (finish before the deadline). These are the very things that undermine the quality of commercial code. Open Source is a *quality* win because of constant review, and the lack of time pressures. Get all the help you can, and release when it's really finished.
I think a lot of suits see Open Source as a free labor pool. Hence the bounties... paying a prize for an implementation is cheaper than hiring a couple of programmers to implement it in-house. And of course, no classic suits want to pay for the coders to write open source that their competitors can use. Adobe in particular looks bad here... by paying a bounty for tools for their highly proprietary PDF format, they look like they're bottom-feeding for cheap labor. If Adobe wants Open Source work around PDF, they can release a damn RFC documenting the format!
But i must say, it is promising that they're at least realizing the value of Open Source implementations of standards like XSL, and are willing to put up some money to encourage it. Now, we just need them to spend their money effectively. I'd suggest that they follow Red Hat's fine example - pay for a core development team that releases open, early, and often. This has worked *extremely* well for GNOME and Enlightenment - by paying for full-time developers who release GPL, Red Hat has vastly accelerated the already swift Open Source development process, without sacrificing the peer review that makes Open Source so effective. The resulting high-quality software could well lead to GNOME and Enlightenment becoming interface standards for Linux (and Unix in general - in the current climate, commercial vendors may well pick it up), providing the tools for the user-friendly desktop journalists keep telling us we need to compete.
This same logic applies to tools like XSL... Sun would benefit if XSL became an industry standard, especially if built around a standardized Open Source implementation that discourages proprietary extensions and platform-dependent bugs. It would be worth Sun's while, i think, to fund Open Source development of implementations for standards like XSL. Hell, i can see an industry Open Source consortium, with business funding full-time Open Source development for standardized tools which benefit the whole industry. This could be what the quote Open unquote Software Foundation (OSF) dreamed of being...
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Red$at? A killer communist sattelite?
I don't get it. RedHat thrives at the whim and pleasure of its users. I can concieve of no threat from them.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing gnome/E in a distro. (and maybe my theme too? (please please please...)
Leeb nowe. Lat helpee us nub.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Me too. Eric's essays (especially Homesteading the Noosphere) make me make the same eureka neuron connection[*].
In a world of supposed plenty, there is no reason why a kalahari-style gift economy could not take root. All this advertising-to-create-demand-that-doesn't-exist is really backward. In fact, chapters 3-5 of Capital seem more relevant today than in 1840 when it was written.
Boy that's off-topic.
[*] if ESR is reading, i think this should be inducted into the Jargon File.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Remember the issue of Forbes with flowerchild Linus on the cover? It had a keen and very clueful story about IBM's negotiations with the Apache group; and how it was not money, but IBM's offer of privilaged access to the Win32 API that closed the "deal".
This indicates to me that IBM really does seem to "get it". I couldn't venture to explain why. Maybe they still have some 60's-era hackers on staff waxing nostalgic.
I'm kind of looking forward to the IBM distro, too. I hope they contribute, and not just assemble.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Celebrity certainly is fleeting. Ironically, this ESR "backlash" seems to be exactly what ESR himself predicts in his essays.
:-)
Several months ago, ESR was cranking aout the essays. They were and are outstanding essays, and what I would call a "good gift", and we all revered him for it. Then ESR annotated and released the Halloween Documents. Also good gifts.
Today however, Linus continues to give gifts, De Icaza gives gifts, Malda gives gifts, and Rasterman gives gifts. They are still in high esteem.
ESR seems to have stopped giving good gifts and started just saying stuff, and some people have started to get upset.
I would say the same of RMS, but IMO RMS has given the ultimate gift. Granddaddy RMS will stay off my list as a professional courtesy.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Stallman will stay off my list of heros-turned-lusers out of this incredible respect I have for the man.
:-P
Didn't I just say that?
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Hey, the phrase "glass cathedral" is an excellently turned phrase.
Have to remember it for future use...
ESR concluded with the statement,
" We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us. "
I belive that ESR is correct.
In the long run, the freedom that the GNU GPL gives to the software development, is likely to spread to other industries.
Peace, love, software and physical life support!
When it comes to lack of freedom you can count on Bill Gates and the People's Republic of China to deliver. See the story at: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?9 90310.ecgateschina.htm
I needed closure on this important issue.
Thanks for setting the record straight.
Keep up the good work.
cheers,
smithdog
I agree. Aren't you glad that our self-appointed leaders aren't above petty flame wars?
Very well said indeed. I read that essay last night, and was a bit disturbed by it's tone and content. Nice to get a different view of this Forum from someone else who was there. That someone else being Mr. Raymond doesn't hurt, either. ;)
Intel is ticked becasue Linus has once again told them to take a hike with there Open Driver
Interface. What does Intel do. They fork the linux kernel and add the desired Open Driver
Interface themselves. These changes are then re-released under the GPL. This is perfectly legal,
the GPL allowes for such a code fork. There is nothing Linus can do to stop them!
Hmm... and what would Intel gain by doing this?
...richie
...richie - It is a good day to code.
You're confusing Patent Law with Copyright Law and they are two separate (though somewhat related) issues. To create a PGPL would not Patent anything. To put the PGPL tag on anything wouldn't stop anyone from patenting your idea and suing you for not paying them royalties. To fix the problem with current patent law requires political action and educating politicians what is wrong with current U.S. (or your favorite country) Patent law. The problem is that current patent law was designed to protect inventors during the Industrial Revolution and hasn't been updated to protect the inventor in the Information Revolution.
As for crushing commercial software... How do you propose for me to pay my rent? I'm a professional programmer, paid by one of those "EVIL" commercial software companies. I agree that Open Source Software is a good thing, but if you use it to make my means of supporting myself non-existant, I'll fight OSS tooth and nail. And don't tell me that I can sell documentation or support. I'm not a technical writer and don't want to deal with clueless people full time. There are those who enjoy writing and helping users, but I prefer designing and coding code.
I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants. That the suits can't do what the hackers can do (avoiding the issue of the validity of the terms) isn't relevant. If more & more hackers start to be motivated by suitly concerns, they've corrupted us.
Not to say that trying to get OSS accepted by suits is a bad thing, I don't think it is. But its certainly a gamble on our part. We can't say how this will turn out.
That's why we need the Doomsday device.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Actually, I'd say that it is totalitarianism that was always the problem more than Communism and Socialism. Which is to say that the ruling party never gave up their power to the proletariat like they were supposed to in true Marxism.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Excellent point on the bounties. I knew that there was something wrong with the bounty idea when I first read it, but I couldn't quite figure out what. You've captured it beautifully -- it really isn't open source when everyone is competing to win the money. Open source is all about cooperation. I think that many "suits" are seeing things in terms of free labor, and this pretty much proves it.
Maybe they should select somebody in their company to be a project maintainer and pay developers a bounty by-the-line for code that gets accepted. Basically divide the $20,000 or whatever by lines of code submitted.
I'd also like more companies to follow the Red Hat model by hiring free software programmers and basically funding them to continue to write free software. I don't like it that only one company is really doing that so far -- it gives them a little too much influence. But this influence could easily be mitigated if another company started doing the same thing. Problems could turn up when 2 companies want to influence the same project, but I think that they could both hire programmers, and the 2 teams would have to cooperate in order to prevent a code fork.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Your point is quite good but your example isn't phrased in programming terms. It might be better if you gave the example of the classic C phrase
*dest++ = *src++;
which is the most easily comprehended form for C-literate people, being turned into
do
{
ch = *src;
src++;
*dest = ch;
dest++;
}
while (ch != '\0');
just to pad out the program statistics, but unfortunately also making it less maintainable and often slower.
I hope it never comes to that.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Oops, I seem to have missed out the while() around the "classic C phrase". It should of course have been
:-)
while (*dest++ = *src++);
Maybe it's so classic that I've forgotten it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
ME TOO
Very well done, and true, I might add. I have experienced the persecution complex first-hand (I am an ex-Amiga hacker) and it takes a bit to get over it.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I use mostly RH because it has a good balance between "ease of configuration" and "simplicity of configuration". But I very seldom use RH kernel. The first thing I do on every box I install is to take clean 2.0.36, add Alan's pre-patches, then secure-linux patch by Solar and often some others.
Kernel is one of the most interchangable components in Linux distribution.
I enjoyed the article last night, and I like the one today. There is no need to say that one hated the article from last night to like the one written above. I agree with the author, that business will do little to harm open source since they are incapable of doing so.
But there's no need for name calling or sarcastic nastiness ("YCHTT" or whatever it was) just because someone has a different take on the proceedings.
I'm glad the conference went reasonably well. Anyone have pictures?
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
Good essay!
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
It seems that Redhat's only real competition is Caldera...and Microsoft. If Caldera followed Redhat's lead, then the only ones dealing with a forked kernel are Debian, slackware and all the little guys that nobody is paying attention to.
---
Don't forget that the kde group hates gnome just as vigorously. I think it's because they feel kde is solid and easy to use and failing to adopt kde means that linux will have a bad reputation as being hard to use. IMHO, windows and icons won't make easy to use unless fundamental changes are made.
See:
http://members.xoom.com/kurtkilg/linux
---
Eric is doing his best. It is a hard job, one which most of us would be unwilling to take on,
so tr and cut him some slack.
I don't mean this as a blanket endorsement of his
actions - there are things he does which make me
quite unhappy. But he is trying to do the right
thing.
If you are unhappy with what Eric does, you should
propose a better plan. Take the time and write it
up and send it to the OSI. Maybe you'll be their
next prez.
That would be me. I used to be a kernel hack at
Sun and SGI (and before that at ETA which means you are really old if you remember them).
I don't do anywhere near as much kernel hacking as
I would like to do anymore. I'm working on the
source management system which will be (I hope) used for the 2.3 Linux development effort. You
can get an overview at http://bitmover.com/talks/linuxworld/index.html
I'm also someone who argues with Eric a lot about business models. I've invested around $300K of my own money in working on BitKeeper and I need to
make a return on my investment. But I'm also trying very hard to be a good guy in the open source world, so I'm creating a business model which works both for money and for free use of the product. I am very proud of the business model I've come up with, it is quite clever and it actually meets the current open source definition and still generates revenue.
I'm the guy who "flung" this at Eric. I meant no ill will by it and the writer who suggested that Open Source Summit turned "nasty" clearly didn't understand. Eric and I may disagree on some things, but in general, we agree on far, far, far more than we disagree on.
My point to Eric was in response to one of his statements that I found problematic. He doesn't run a business and so he isn't in tune with some of the business issues. This is an area of open discussion between myself, the OSI board, and other business people. We're making progress.
Eric did point out in his summary that I and the suits in the room were all trying to feel our way through this stuff and that the general sentiment was very positive and cooperative. I concur. It was a positve meeting, I'm glad I was there and I was honored to be included.
So?
Communisim isn't all that bad (same for socialism). I think that many of the communist governments have failed because they (communism and socialism) are ideals. Ideals are hard to achieve in the "real" world.
Fortunately, our community doesn't exist in the real world.
And we should always be striving towards the ideal.
-Alan
I don't think ESR misses the non-financial aspects
of open source -- I believe he focuses upon the financial aspects because OS advocates have shied away from them historically, and because of his generally libertarian politics (appealing to the
self-interest of others is usually easier than to their love for their fellows, and it's certainly easier to explain to the average person).
Despite what some say, ESR is definitely a very spiritual person -- atheistic Discordian, but still spiritual. And he definitely is not blind to the non-financial aspects of OS, or of life in general, if his writings are any indication.
And I'm sure he meant corrupt in the sense that "traditional business values" (profit over all else) will be "corrupted" by the superior virtues of the OS community -- honesty, integrity, etc.
-damaged justice
looking lame with a cut off sig and not bothering to fix it yet
Fuck Slashdot
That's an interesting idea.
The problem that we've had with patents so far is that they're exclusive. The open source community designs things and doesn't patent them because it wants to share them openly. So the first proprietary interest that comes along can in theory grab up the patent rights and lock us out of things that we invented.
RMS designed the GPL to 'hoard' software just like any other software license would, but the GPL requires that it be 'hoarded' by the General Public instead of by one powerful corporation. He took copyright laws that are intended to protect proprietary interests and used them to protect the public interest.
We could do something similar with patents: promote a 'Patent General Public License' that would be written into patents (or simply applied by the patent holder) and would mark the invention as owned by the inventor (as all patents do) but available for use, modification, and redistribution by the general public, as the GPL does. In fact, the PGPL could require (in the case of software patents) that all implementations of the patented technology be released under the GPL.
Armed with something like that, open-source developers could grab up the patent rights to hundreds of technologies, PGPL them, and then enforce the patents to keep them from being used in proprietary products.
The great thing about this is that a patent protects a *technology*, not an implementation. So if the proprietary developers want to use our technologies, they can't make the end product proprietary. They have three options:
1. Start developing free products. That's what we want, of course.
2. Put the patented part of the product in a separate 'module', which they would have to distribute on a free (i.e. GPL) basis. The rest of the product could remain proprietary. This is almost as good as (1).
3. Use a different technology. This is a patent, not a copyright, so they can't just reimplement our stuff. They have to find a totally different way to do what they're trying to do, or leave it out entirely. The idea of cutting out functionality should be scary enough that most companies will choose (1) or (2) and write lots of free software to make their own products work.
The consensus of the literature in criminology is that guns in private hands save lives and prevent crimes.
The CDC-funded studies by Dr. Arthur Kellerman that claim to show otherwise have been pretty well discredited; you can find some relevant discussion in this Reason article. Kellerman's main sin seems to be selective use of data; he chooses to study a population that he thinks will support his thesis and finds excuses to throw out contrary examples until the data fits the thesis.
The Lott/Mustard study used the entire United States rather than a single city or county, and found a significant deterrence effect.
Folks interested in either side of the issue should consider reading these two books:
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott
Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America by Gary Kleck.
I play Nerd-Folk!
ESR is indeed a developer: he is the maintainer of fetchmail.
I don't think most Linux users would reject something just because it's binary only. Since Red Hat is the distro of the newbie, I could see the scenario above taking place.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
This war has died since Troll Tech created an Open-source license for QT. I still sense that there is alot of animosity and distrust in the GNOME camp though.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Thanks. You've just given me the motivation to set my threshold to 1. I don't need to read half-arsed comments from unproductive cowards with definition problems.
--
I'm not so terribly worried about the suits. Remember that what they are getting out of us, they get from having an open source / free software community that works. So they're offering bounties? I don't see this as encouraging software hoarding, not when the *bounties are for open source*.
Licenses are a problem. We're getting new ones every day, and people need to understand the implications of their licenses, and why they might or might not work. An example is the license IBM provided for postfix (or SecureMailer, or whatever the name of the month for that program is). The license provides that if someone *threatens* to sue IBM over an intellectual property dispute with the program, IBM can drop postfix and make you stop using it too. Small wonder the community is not falling over itself to get involved with postfix.
Other problems I've noticed with postfix are instructive. Last I heard, it still did not scale well---large numbers of undelivered emails, as can happen when your net connection becomes spotty, clogged it up horribly. And when I was using it, I noticed that every few emails, it would refuse to deliver one. These problems can be solved, indeed, they may already be solved, but I see them as inevitable in an open source package whose one-year-long alpha test was closed. No bazaar there, and certainly Wietse Venema, one of the authors of SATAN, should have known better.
The message in all this? If you want to participate in open source, research the matter a bit. Learn how people participate in the community. If you must write your own license, make sure it really works as an open source license. And use an open testing regime, if you really want to get people's attention. Even if you don't think your program is anywhere near ready for the world, use the glass cathedral (anonymous CVS and an open license from the start) to get people's attention and interest. Don't be embarrassed at the quality of your code; when it is ready for public consumption, the public will know. And they'll be glad you let them look over your shoulder.
Open source is not created in a vacuum. You know it, I know it, and the suits will figure it out.
He was out shooting with all of us on Geeks and Guns night (last Thursday right after the Expo closed), that's where he was.
_Deirdre
Why do you reject AFS? If you don't like that Transarc's version isn't free, why don't you get a free AFS?
Maybe they should select somebody in their company to be a project maintainer and pay developers a bounty by-the-line for code that gets accepted. Basically divide the $20,000 or whatever by lines of code submitted.
Ouch. This sounds very Dibertian, as it will lead to
code
that
looks
like
this
from developers, and
codethatlookslikethis
from the maintainer after integration.
I heartily agree with the principle, but so far I know of no mechanistic way of figuring out how "productive" a given programmer is by automatically examining their code. Current industry makes an approximation by paying programmers for their time at a rate dependent on what their boss feels reflects the quality of their work, but this doesn't work very well for paying contributors to Open Source projects, who aren't a part of the company and so can't be timed or evaluated as easily.
Not that the conventional system is perfect, of course.
But this influence could easily be mitigated if another company started doing the same thing. Problems could turn up when 2 companies want to influence the same project, but I think that they could both hire programmers, and the 2 teams would have to cooperate in order to prevent a code fork.
That only holds true if the companies are altruistic enough to hold the quality of their software over the revenue and/or ego boost gained by having the project follow their own model. Realistically, if a serious dispute came up, I think that each company would fork the code and hope for the best. Remember, business by and large isn't altruistic. There are isolated exceptions, but IMO these will remain exceptions rather than the rule.
I don't know if you're a shill for CheapBytes.Com or not, but you did a heck of a job!
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
The reason you so rarely see this done is that it costs thousands of dollars to get a patent, and people who bother to spend that money are usually viewing it as an investment on which they hope to get a return. But if you consider that your time as a skilled programmer is worth thousands of dollars anyway, and you'd otherwise spend it on writing more open-source code, you might want to try this. It would be an interesting experiment in yet another OSS paradigm.
Then again, copyright is a lot cheaper, and more suitable to things that are likely to be done on a hobbyist basis. If patent protection for OSS becomes useful, maybe there could be some scheme to pool funds among many future users to cover the costs of the patent process.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Computerworld says "Many Linux developers would consider it a show of faith if Intel were to release the I2O specification. But what most people don't realize is that Intel doesn't actually have the right to unilaterally release the I20 spec. It's owned and managed by a consortium of companies under the I2O Special Interest Group (I20 SIG)."
So number one, its not just up to Intel whether I2O works with Linux.
Number two, I2O is being challenged [PC Week] by another industry consortium with an incompatible spec.
Fragmenting the speedy IO market would be irrational, it would work against Intel's market share in the high end server/workstation market. Why would Intel strong arm Red Hat (taking for granted that they could, since you believe in evil corporate greed) to fork Linux into a smaller market? If anything, Intel probably would have a goal to EXPAND the market for workstation class machines using Intel hardware.
Just look at how people run to SciTech Display Doctor (for example) as soon as it supports linux. 100% commercial. People care more if their latest video card works than about some abstract philosophy.
If you cannot make your point on technical merits without having to resort to the bugaboo of the Second Amendment, which is in absolutely no way related to the topic at hand, then your point fails, prima facie.
It seems to me that the merits of his other arguments are closely tied to their own merits, which is to say, the merits that they have. In other words, the merits of A are generally the merits of A, and relate in a purely arbitrary way to the merits of C, W, theta, and thorn. To ascribe the merits (or lack of merits, in this case) of A to B you need a better excuse than mere proximity. Take for example the following two statements:
A. Ronald Wilson Reagan was the President of the United States;
B. That guy in Louisiana who just murdered several people in a church is a shining example of why we need more handguns in private hands, because if he'd been better armed he could have finished them all off and made a better news story.
Well, gee. As for Reagan, a lot of people who lived through that depressing time can vouch for that, but, oh, boy -- B is a crock of shit! By your logic, if B is false, then A must also be false. Is that reasonable? The two are -- as you say of your own example -- completely unrelated.
What if the statement about the second amendment had appeared in an adjacent post? Imagine for a moment if Rob Malda, in a fit of post-Linux World despondency, had added that line to the post without the author's knowledge or consent? YES I KNOW Rob wouldn't do that; the point is that you're attacking your perception of the poster's thought processes rather than the arguments in post itself. It's ad-hominem, and it's crap.
He owns firearms to defend himself and his family with,
Against what? His own insecurities? People who own guns are far more likely to be shot than people who don't. The majority of people in the U.S. who are killed with handguns are killed by family or by close friends -- by people they trust. The above-mentioned incident in Louisiana does not support this claim because one incident is not statistically significant; it's anecdotal and good for sound bites, but it tells us nothing about trends. Still, these things are very well documented, so unless you're going to go right off the deep end and claim that Kofi Annan has ordered the U.S. government to skew the statistics as part of a New World Order plan, you'll have to come to terms with the fact that the Constitution is one thing, and practical reality is another thing entirely. It may very well be that all the killings are worth it; it may very well be that the principle of the second amendment is valuable enough to be worth some hassles. But don't give me any of those tired old lies about self-defense. If the Second Amendment is worth keeping, it's worth keeping at the cost of the safety of our homes, not in defense of it.
as a whole, the free software/open-source movement has the largest amount of mindshare, likely by an order of magnitude or more.
Largest among whom, and compared to what? In my apartment, it's got a good solid 100% (not counting my cats
This incredible intellectual base is nothing without leadership, though, preferably leaders with differing styles and opinions so as to make the overall experience all the richer and more dynamic. RMS, Linus, ESR, Alan Cox, Daryll Strauss, etc. -- they all are important figures in our movement.
I dig it, baby. Sing it loud!
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
:)
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
To use an unrelated Point B in order to "reinforce" a Point A is jejeune and sophomoric.
:)
Hey, I never denied that. You're absolutely right. But if the point is unrelated, either ignore it or address it separately. The fact that Poster A above used an unrelated Point B has no effect on the validity of his Point A. Point A may very well be moronic and indefensible, but by addressing an entirely unrelated issue you've done nothing to demonstrate that.
Attempting to taint someone's ideas by bringing up an unrelated subject which some may find distasteful is a sure way of announcing that you cannot win the debate on the facts of the matter.
But, in a sense, isn't that what you're doing? You're "refuting" A by addressing B, just as the original poster "proved" A by addressing B -- but B just ain't relevant either way.
Your citations regarding firearms are fairly commonplace. I won't even attempt to refute them, because I don't find it to be particularly relevant to the issue at hand -- which is whether or not ESR has a point in his essay.
So I drifted off topic . . .
Look at the amount of mindshare that Sun has, the amount that MS has, that HP and Apple and everyone else has. How much of this goes to redundancy, to reinventing the wheel? How much of it is lost to corporate left-hand right-hand? The open-source/free software movement manages to avoid most of those problems (through some arcane means which I don't think anyone fully understands).
Ummm, yeah. To a large extent that's true, though there are exceptions like the ongoing KDE/GNOME gotterdammerung. On the other hand, free software has unique problems of its own. I worry a lot about the notion that free software tends more towards reimplementation than breaking new ground. Of course, nobody at MS or ZDNet who mutters about that stuff ever seems to notice that ~99% of proprietary software is just pointless wheel-reinvention, too. There's also the fact that by distributing the source, the reimplementers are adding a hell of a lot of value right there, even if they introduce no new features at all. It may be wheel-reinvention, but it's not pointless. On the whole, I'm optimistic, but not blissful.
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
You could fairly argue that Microsoft thrives at the whim and pleasure of its users, too. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping the approximately 250 million users of MS products from installing Linux and running Applix or Star, and demanding en masse that all their other application vendors port to Linux.
Believe me, every MS product I use except one (Windows 95) I use by choice because it is truly better than the alternatives I have tried in some way. This same principle is why many people choose RedHat.
The rest just go with brand name recognition and don't even consider the other choices. For a great many Linux users: Wipe that smug grin off your face - you're guilty, too!
I would like to point out that RedHat is not the only company sponsoring programmers to develop open source software:
I'm sure there are many I didn't mention; I just wanted to mention a few other companies that are paying people to work on open source projects.
Eric has been part of the hacker community for a long time, he was part of it before Linux even existed. I think the reason so many people resent him now is that he's trying to act as the salesman/marketeer of the hacker culture, and most hackers instinctively hate salesmen and marketing.
I've been suspicious of the idea myself, but I think it's naiive to believe that free software can take over the world just by being better, without any sales or marketing. Look at how many inferior products have come to dominate their industry segments (x86 architecture, PC system architecture, Microsoft anything) by force of superior marketing. And if we're going to have marketing than it should be led by one of our own.
In fact, perhaps it's best that the marketing be done by someone who's known more for his analysis of the community on a social level than for hacking code.
Calling Eric a suit is just too out there to even think about.
This seems a little abstract to me? Where are the indications that the 'suits' get it?
"This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works."
I don't think we should kid ourselves for a minute - if big business could coopt the process and extract money (directly or indirectly) they would. Witness large corps releasing non-free products for Linux and grabbing huge publicity bonanza's. I haven't seen Abisource or Debian mentioned too often on news.com. If big business truly recognized the 'social contract' and accepted it, why would they still be doing this?
The problem with MS is that it unethically
crushes the competition. It is a monopoly.
RedHat could NEVER be the same, since it
distributes something that can be modified
and distributed for free. They don't CONTROL
anything.
Once you've written a program, the only expense in giving the code away is "opportunity cost". That is, you own the code's copyright without having to pay anyone anything (at least, in the USA and other Berne Convention countries), and by giving it away you're giving up the opportunity to make money off that copyright.
On the other hand, to get a patent, you have to pay a specialist mucho $$$ up front to write a proper application.
If I had a patentable software idea, I'd rather just publish the idea, thereby preventing any later inventor from patenting it, and give the cash to some worthy charity.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Well, since licenses weren't discussed, let's discuss.
I had this idea recently that I've been pondering about patents. I know they're generally evil and wreak havoc all over creation, but what if there was an "open patent" license, sort of a PGPL that prevented the patent's use in _proprietary_ works. I'm not proposing such a license, I just want to know what other people think of the idea.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Compete amongst ourselves. KDE vs. Gnome for instance. Notice all the animosity one camp has for the other. OSI vs. FSF, the same. There is no need for a Goliath. David can fight David.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
And you've missed my point. PGPL would be a patent license. i.e. J. Random Hacker applies for and obtains patent #55555555555555, then licenses _the_patent_itself_ under PGPL. As opposed to GPL and LGPL which are software licenses (and yes, I agree, (L)GPL'd _can_ infringe patents, just not PGPL'd patents ;-) ).
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I agree that patents are far more expensive than copyrights, but then again giving away code is more expensive than selling it, too.
I understand that a patent holder can license the patent any way he/she/it chooses... The problem is that for those of us who might like to license a patent with the freedoms as GPL'd software, no such readily available license exists. Not only that, but the existence of such a license might prompt organizations like Red Hat, LinuxCare, and well, maybe even the FSF to patent stuff and release the patents under a freedom-added license.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Precisely, but not necessarily only in GPL'd works. BSD and other licenses are free, but not GPL. By giving PGPL the same viral characteristics as GPL, well, I'll use an example.
foo is a program written by some guy, licensed with a BSD style license. foo doesn't use any patented stuff in it, doesn't infringe anything at all. Some other guy decides to use the code in a proprietary thingie, and does because he can (it's a BSD license, after all).
bar is a program that does the same thing as foo and is also BSD licensed. But since bar uses a better algorithm covered by PGPL'd patent #xxxx, bar does what foo does, only better. Some other guy wants to use code from bar in a proprietary work, and can (because it's a BSD license), but must use a different algorithm because the patented/PGPL'd algorithm cannot go into a proprietary work.
See the difference?
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Not actually. The Qt license started the war, but now that the two GUIs exist and have established evangellical followings, it doesn't matter that Qt is free. People will still argue simply because there are competing platforms.
And besides, it's still a good example to use for illustrative purposes.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
They're on the same railroad, but not the same track. The GPL turns copyright law on its head by protecting code from proprietary use, whereas copyright law was actually designed to protect proprietary intrests. A PGPL should do the same for patents. It should turn patent law on its head by protecting ideas from proprietary use. The key benefit for the free software community is that rather than protecting just a specific implementation, it would be able to protect the technology as well, forcing proprietary developers not only to reimplement, but also redesign.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Open source is a very new thing in the business world. I suspect that over the next few years, we'll all be able to get paying jobs writing open source. I'm not a businessman, so don't ask me semantic questions about it, but look at Red Hat as an example. You won't have to deal with clueless people (well, no more than you do now) or write documentation (no more than you do now), but your organization probably will.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Thats why we need the bomb!
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
The book Open Sources talks about bilogical research going from academia to big business. When 75% of the researchers are working for pharmaceutical companies, there is more research on drug treatments than therapy treatments. SO all business has to do to corrupt the movement is throw bodies at writing OSS.
What would happen if Microsoft went completely open source? I think we would see the group heading towards them just because of mass. J-- anyone?
I heard that ESR sneaks around at night dumping fluoride in out water supply too!
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Hey, d00d--
If you get tired of smoking that stuff yourself and want to sell it for a profit, you should probably avoid the L.A. ghettoes -- the CIA might get annoyed at you for cutting in on their turf.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
You're obviously not from Germany. Over there, and in much of Europe, SuSE is very dominant.
There may "*BE*" only Red Hat wherever you are, but the rest of the world has choices, and there are whole countries where they aren't choosing Red Hat. Try to look beyond the US.
And everyone I know understands just plain "Slackware" or "Debian" just as easily as "Tampax" or "Red Hat".
And the silly comparison to Microsoft, complete with dollar $ign, may be cute, but it doesn't really hold much water. I personally don't hate MS because they're the market standard; I hate them because they're arrogant, domineering bastards who produce shitty products and abuse monopoly power to get them accepted. Why hate them becuase of their market share and Bill's wealth (which looks an awful lot like sour grapes and envy) when there are so many good reasons to hate them?
By comparison, Red Hat doesn't have monopoly power (and so doesn't abuse it), produces decent if not good quality products, and funds programmers to write open-source software that the entire community can then benefit from. (RPM is a great example.)
So why the "Red $oft" moniker?
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
I think it's naive to assume that nothing can ... ) are investing in it.
corrupt us and that that is the only problem.
Take the case of the current flurry of investments in RedHat. What if (let's asssume for a minute) RedHat becomes the only distribution of note out there - just because all the business people use it because all the business poeple they trust ( IBM, Compaq, Netscape,
If RedHat becomes the single dominant distribution, the practical (not philosophical) effects of that on Open Source are likely to be significant -
* no (or small non-zero) competition hence less
motivation to improve
* the ability of a single commercial entity to
decide what software goes
on the RedHat CD - ie scarcity of distribution.
Yes you can put it on an FTP site but that's not the same to the buyer of the RedHat CD or the
guy who buys it pre-installed on a DELL machine.
... and it's cascading ripple-effects
In my opinion the OSD movement is declaring
victory when the real battles have not even
started.
Instead of discussing what is really OSD and what is not we might want to discuss how to create a
sustainable financial foundation for our ideals
so that it does not end up splitting us apart.
It is naive to think all we need to do is "stay the course". Remember the last time we heard that phrase ?
Nitin
======================
The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
I don't know a damn thing about Eric, but
I do know when someone has egg on his face...
Claiming "you just don't get it" without trying
to explain what it is we're supposed to "get" is
pathetic. Worse still, you then insult the person
that just shoved some REAL FACTS into your face.
Why not try to prove that Eric isn't a "hacker"...
perhaps dispute some of those claims on the resume,
or however you think you can dispute this.
P.S. This is a stupid thread as it is, but you
did start it...
There's always Micr$oft. For now, anyway.
---
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
This seems far more realistic view than the
one that was painted for us last night. I'm
glad someone stepped in (even better that it
was ESR himself) and straightened it out.
Perhaps ESR has a coded message in this report. He gives us "Some plain truth" and then goes on to tell us that reality is complicated. This might lead a cynic to speculate that his plain truth is too simple. Following further down this path, an examination of the idea that all that business can do is "throw money or refrain from throwing money" could lead to unsettling predictions at variance with his own bland assurances.
So, how could this innocuous tossing about of money affect us? Well, it could:
1. cause the talented to work on projects that were of interest to the suits
2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits
3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.
The last is perhaps the more fundamental. Licences such as the GPL are not a magic panacea that will protect Free Software forever and ever throughout the ages. They only have force in law as long as there are a sufficient number of people who have resources to conduct possibly lengthy and expensive legal battles. It requires that those people be motivated, organized and clear in their minds as to what is worth defending.
Time to stop my "less sophisticated rantings".
Crush.
Obviously, you disagree with both RMS and ESR. I include the latter here as he claims that hackers are motivated primarily by egoboo, not by money. Linux and the tools surrounding it are good because they are written by people who do it mostly for the pure love of producing something excellent. They are not drones whose vision of life exclusively consists of "graduate and get a [gasp!] job!". As to getting paid for working on Linux, that's cool, as the RedHat setup suggests, as long as the relationship is of a company supporting a hacker that controls the project they work on. That way the commercial pressure to produce the latest and greatest does not take pride of place. ;)
Your last point is probably the least worth responding to, however:
You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why? You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why? You can surely (if you sit down for a few minutes in a quiet spot and hurt your head with some thinking) observe that groups with a coherent purpose usually manage to work better. You allude to a definition of freedom not exactly the same as RMS' (with a humorous Aaaagh! at the end of it - ha ha! What a clever substitute for an argument!) and fail to explain exactly what that definition is. Is it in fact non-freedom? Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL? Anyway, I'd better get back to my job now
"Show me somewhere a group all of whose members
are there with the same motivations, values, and
goals and I'll show you a group that is at the
very least unlikely to be individualistic enough
to do any really superb hacking...."
Well, perhaps I have been careless in the use of the word "motivations" as you are obviously casting it to mean "motivations, values and goals" with the obvious intent of extending it to mean similar in all respects and I don't think that suits my argument. I mean that for a network/association/community to be functional there has to be some sort of shared objective - a non-violable principle. To be sure there will be differences in how this can be attained or furthered, but at least it should be agreed as the reason for common association.
Until recently I would have shown you the Linux community. Note that these motivations do not have to be IDENTICAL merely non-contradictory. That is what I would guess is the minimal state for a working community. If however such a group exists and attracts new members who are interested in being in the group for the benefits that it confers it does not necessarily follow that it will survive. It is an evolutionary process. The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business. No, they don't fit your restrictive definition either. They are not identical. However they do have a shared common goal. The obtaining of profit. This is not the goal that I would argue has motivated the development of Linux and the GNU utilities. They are in many ways inimical. Your point about the other types of licenses is partially true. There are other ways of effecting a statement of freedom. However, unless they semantically reduce to the essential aspects of the GPL then the stage is set for a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. I hope that I am wrong, but I predict that there will be an expolsion of development on top of Linux, an acquisition of new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
Another way of looking at the problem is that you get paid as recompense for time taken away from doing 'fun' stuff.
.... Though OpenSource can be a very effective creative force, somehow it must coexist within a very consumer-oriented society where most people do not earn >$100K programming salaries. 'Suits' are then charged with the responsibility of trying to squeeze more efficiency and defined outputs from the system. If OpenSource represents 'free energy' then it will be 'exploited' by those in a position to do so.
Let's face it, most work can be placed in the tedious but needs to be done category. User support, maintainence, integration, documentation, etc
The interesting factor is what conditions external groups place on the 'gift culture' in an attempt to control conditions for their own benefit. For example, there is a certain amount of 'reciprocracy' in the system where it is expected that on receiving a gift, there will be a balanced contribution by the receivee in the future. In a system where there are different values (suits vs hackers), asymetric expectations can cause tension.
Designing a Formula 1 car is fun and sexy, but someone has to do boring tractors otherwise nobody eats. Given that the biggest bottleneck at the moment is lack of trained people, OpenSource makes sense in optimising the spread of knowledge. On the other hand, if everyone can program, I would suspect a proprietary system will be 'superior' as it retains a 'competitive edge' for a select group. What works in reality can be quite complex and it's probably best to be flexible and choose whatever system best suits the circumstances.
LL
Eric, it was an anonymous coward who sent in the link, not who wrote the article. Thomas Scoville is no Mr. YCHTH, and his reportage is consistently far more articulate, well composed, and balanced then your own.
Speaking for my own read of yesterday's essay, the thesis I got was not that business simply doesn't get open source -- in fact they are starting to, thanks in part to your organization's aggressive marketing. Scoville seemed more focused on the point that the suits are approaching Open Source/Free Software as something of an alien force, or even a potential panacaea, without a clear idea of how to fit it into their particular worldview.
I find your callous disregard for one of your own uncalled for, and your further insult to the community here as a group of inarticulate J. Random Slashdotters particularly telltale. By distancing yourself from those of us who truly support the advancement of free software, you are doing the community a grave disservice.
Yours,
Wes
QWxsIHlvdXIgQmFzZTY0IGFyZSBiZWxvbmcgdG8gdXMh
Open source has a chance to change the business structure, not merely be coopted by it. This is the point on which ESR and RMS are 180 degrees apart.
What the GPL ensures is that a business using free software is contributing back to the community. Other licenses turn the communal capital of open source into financial capital without taking any care to benefit the community. David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World" explains this process of turning social economies into corporate ones, and the effect this has on the deterioration of the social structure and environment. Free software is merely an application of this principle, albeit one that is very close to my heart.
Brett, I agree with your assessment, but I think it's worth trying to persuade corporations that the GPL presents a viable economic model. We seem too stuck in the trap of thinking that selling a software product is the only way to make money.
Wes
Quote from Rutherford B. Hayes --
QWxsIHlvdXIgQmFzZTY0IGFyZSBiZWxvbmcgdG8gdXMh
Be, Inc. was worried about Microsoft...
Okay, let's move on to the real issues...
The GNU GPL is designed to guarantee freedom. Read your local COPYING-2.0 file for more on this. Inasmuch as business practices are at odds with freedom (in the Information Age, more and more), yes, the GPL is in opposition to that.
Individuals as much as large businesses will suffer if they cannot hold intellectual property.
This is certainly true under the dominant paradigm. Is this the way you want the world to work?
I don't. As an individual, my choices are limited to creating my own business (expensive, difficult, but possible) or giving up my intellectual property to my employer. The GPL gives me a viable tool to protect my intellectual property so that I personally, and other developers, can benefit from it.
Programmers will suffer because they will have nothing to sell in order to make a living.
Again, you're too caught up in the notion that you must be able to sell a software product. Why not charge the same fee for installing your product, providing support, selling nicely-bound manuals? You seem to scoff at these notions, or the disk foundry concept, but I hear the same sort of knee-jerk reaction all the time with people who are used to the process of selling software licenses. I consider myself a decent programmer, and thus my services are in high demand. I'm not going to starve on the street. If I can provide services to someone and retain the rights to the software I produce, everyone wins. The GPL gives me a tool to do so.
To destroy intellectual property is to destroy value and freedom.
When the value proposition of the economic structure does not benefit the society that relies on it, it needs to be destroyed. There are other forms of value, however, and other forms of freedom. I am, in point of fact, very much a proponent of the free market and of capitalism. But the world economic system is not a free market of the kind envisioned by Adam Smith, idealized by Ayn Rand, and paid lip service to by our intellectuals and economists. If I tend to say "corporation" every other sentence, it's because those embodiments (latin root) are the golems of modern-day society, creations of an unjust socio-economic system. This is getting far afield from software engineering, but the intellectual property ideas are the same.
It's like saying, "Sorry, but you can't create a better car; the only option that's open to you is to be an auto mechanic."
Lots of open source projects have built better cars and the individuals involved profited from their work. The key is realizing that the mainstream business model is incompatible. O'Reilly makes a ton of money from Perl, and has Larry Wall on staff. Larry could just as easily have started his own Perl company, without making Perl closed-source. That many open source developers, Linus included, are happy to work for free is of little interest to me. That's their choice, but it should not be held as the sine qua non of open source development.
Wes
QWxsIHlvdXIgQmFzZTY0IGFyZSBiZWxvbmcgdG8gdXMh
There's more to it than just writing or using the code. I think raising public awareness can and should also be viewed as contributing to the movement. (I'm saying this mainly because I'm a lousy programmer, but I'm trying to improve. :-) )
-- Shawn K. Quinn
While I'm not going to defend every single thing that ESR does, I think labelling him or implying he is a communist is quite out of line. As a long time fetchmail user, he will have my respect for his programming ability if nothing else.
-- Shawn K. Quinn
Yes, I have programmed before, but mostly small bash scripts for my own use, though I do dabble in C from time to time (my current project is figuring out X Window System programming).
I may soon publish (if the original author doesn't fold in my patches) at least my modifications to html-helper-mode for Emacs to more or less bring it up to date with the W3C's HTML 4.0 standard plus add a few things I found convenient. I consider this quite an accomplishment as I only learned what I know of Emacs LISP by example (i.e., only by looking at existing code, without a textbook or formal training).
-- Shawn K. Quinn
http://partners.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelati ons/nonmember/acrosdk/docs.html
Pointy-clicky on the words "Portable Document Format Reference Manual Version 1.2".
The rest of your post is well thought out- misleading statements only detract from your point.
We don't need to fight business _people_, we need to fight the inertia present in business _organizations_. Plenty of people want to do their jobs well and solve customer's problems and so forth, but are hobbled by crappy tools. Application programers such as myself would be much happier if there was wider acceptance of open-source type tools. Maybe changing old methodologies in a constructive way isn't as glamorous as fighting the "bad man", but it needs to be done.
This is a damn good article, and I think the point is clear. :-)
We want to write programs, they want to make money.
They can't stop us, and if they want to make money, they'll find a way. Maybe not in this business, but hey, if they switch from CocaCola to
Apple, they can also switch to Durex or something
Well I think the idea ROCKS!! I know a researcher who does all his research and has no patents. He just does stuff and then shows people how to do it themselves. It is almost a "open sourced" science. If he could get "open patents" that would rock. If your interested check out. www.eagle-research.com
I was there as well and it was exactly the positive meeting that you describe. I'm glad I was lucky enough to be invited.
The war is not over. These are problems with KDE that are not had with gnome: :)
* Clean object model added as an afterthought
* KDE uses not just C++, but Qt's stupid little preprocessor
* Qt is actually an inferior widgetset since it needed not only C++ but EVEN MORE in order to implement useful functionality
* and because I needed to post something stupid to test a cookie feature.
From the accounts of this summit, it seems like business is doing its usual of trying to get money from wherever it can - no problem. The little that seems to have come out of it surprises me, though. There seem to be at least a few cases where there is a solid DMZ forming between the two camps. Linuxcare and RedHat (and others, probably), in the light I'm shining on them at least, are in the unique position of providing corporate support for OSS products. This is not the only service I think business would like to extract from us, but it does provide them with a buffer. Business wants a knowledgeable resource pool that it can access immediately for product support and bug fixes,
while still being able to get the powerful, yet unpredictable support from the open community. It also allows the companies to stay anonymous when asking for help with OSS, that is, if they go through a commercial OSS support vendor. Business wants stability and assurance, right? It looks like that may be taken care of.
What else do they want? Any particular project they'd like to see started could possibly go through the various OSS funds (admittedly not ideal), the bidding trend (not perfect either), or perhaps they could be a little creative and develop a more interesting plan that envelops divers functionality and appeals to many, while still solving their problem. They could trade some of that corporate leverage upon other companies (to open their hardware specs, whatever) in exchange for developing new features.
As long as the hype doesn't get into people's heads, it ought to be pretty cool.
d
...