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TCL Creator Writes Article on Open Source
Zagadka writes "John Ousterhout,
creator of TCL,
has written an article called
Free
Software Needs Profit for
Dr. Dobb's. It discusses
the relationship open source software and commercial
software can have with each
other.
"
Since he sees the benefits of free software, his tactics are a necessary evil at best. We need a workable business model (like work for hire) for writing free software for a living. Having to resort to selling proprietary software (and bundling enough free software to make it work) leaves us right where we started.
The article also really should have pointed out that "free software purists" use "free" as the opposite of "hoarded and proprietary," not the opposite of "costly." Assuming he even realizes that.
I think he doesn't get it.
Yes you can have a commercial product/service/business, but that doesn't mean that it has to be proprietary.
Free Software + Commercial Support == Good
Free Software + Proprietary Software == Bad
Is tcl really that hard to implement? It always looked to me like it's made up of simple string substitution and interpretation, roughly the same effort as writing the evaulator of a Bourne shell.
It'd be nice if that effort had gone into a frontend for Guile, rather than ports of yet another limited language.
Why don't people see the difference between commercial and proprietary. It is bad for the free software community when there are more proprietary products. But it is good for the community if there is more commercial support.
I'm one of those dreaded Business Programmers (hissssssssssssssssssssss)! I've got one of the texts by Harrison/McLennan and Tcl Blast.
Tcl/Tk is cool. It solves problems like address books and on the fly calendars. I enjoy doing things with it.
My only complaint is that you MUST use the mouse. I want to shut off the mouse and use CTRL combos.
"Overall, I think that Apple's action is an example of the effects of the year-old "open source" movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of society we want to live in."
" John keeps saying this, but what the hell is he talking about. Development tools are the one area where, IMO,free software has excelled. I mean, you have your choice of just about any programming language in existence, a dozen good IDEs, the best text editors, etc. "
There are many proprietary software development products that beat the pants off anything the free software community has produced.
I'm willing to shell out lots of cash for programs
that actually work, and do _everything_ I need
them to do. All the OS alternatives ive seen for
what i use just plain bite.. It's a mess of addons, patches, and updates every other week,
and always changing in opposite directions. Nothing is ever focused. For those of you who get by without having to pay anything and actually use the software, thats great, but for this user, everything from 3DSMax to PhotoShop will always be something i'll put money out for. Yeah, like I want to use Gimp or PovRay professionally, get real. Sorry to piss everyone off, but closed proprietary software will always have its place, and for me, it will always be known as the 'software that works'.
Last time I saw it used to any degree is with tkman, tkdesk, and my favorite, tkinetd.
Maybe I don't see it. (because it's getting better at hiding?)
Can anyone give me examples of where is it used in a large program?
It seems to easy to break for anything of great value.
-wilkinsm
Can you please try tcl/tk before complaining about it?
You can start creating GUIs that run in Windows, Linux and Macs in an afternoon
http://www.scriptics.com
http://www.tcltk.com
Guess why? Because no real person needs one. Anybody
who is seriously engaged in productive work
works better and more effectively with
sane, elegant tools. However, if your objective
is to impress the boss with colorful pictures,
a visual environment is perfect.
the 'new technology' aspect of "open source" is dubious...
linux can do alot but other systems are better at multiprocessing (solaris) and databasing (OS/400, oracle) and etc.
and if UI is a technology, free stuff is a bit behind.
people make fun of the paper clip in Word but that
fuckin paperclip saves MS quite a bit of $ on support calls.
it has helped me out several times as well.
im sure its easy for some guy with his own company to say that the 'free' nature of the programs arent important,
on the other hand some of us dont have $ to buy fixes. we do on the other hand have the chutzpah
to play with the kernel source when the new version wont boot/work right.
why can we do this? not because its 'great new technology', but because its free. we don't have to pay $, or worry about the copyright , for some crucial part we are missing. the crucial parts become our minds, we become our own limiting factors not how lucky we were in the game of life.
Could Microsoft embrace and extend linux? What if they ported the windows GUI to Linux with some sort of API abstraction layer that allowed win32 apps to run on their Linux distro with a simple recompile? Is that possible?
GTK is the free toolkit of the GNOME project.
www.gtk.org
This attitude is biased towards large and
existing companies. It is a huge barrier
to the founding of new software companies.
The problem with this is that small companies
don't have the resources to both provide
services *and* write the software they want
to write. The more time spent providing
services, the less time is available working
on the software you want to work on. Spend
too much time on services, and you'll never
finish the software.
Some companies want to work on software that
doesn't lend itself to related services. What
services can you sell that are game related?
What if your software project isn't geared
to a market that has lots of money for
consulting?
And finally, a lot of people aren't really
interested in spending their workdays on
other people's problems. Most programmers
have too many ideas already, and not enough
time to implement all of them.
Red Hat isn't a good example, because their
operation is funded by sales of a Linux
*distribution*.
This isn't an option for every group of
people who want to start a company to write
a particular kind of software. The market
won't support many Linux distributions, and
it would be tough for a new distribution
to compete against the established players.
Perhaps the problem is the exploitation
of students by universities? They pay
the University for the privilege of
working on projects which are often
being paid for by corporations or
the government.
When such a project splits off into
a company, at least students who
work there can get paid for their
work and time.
"make xconfig"
"Red Hat's product isn't Linux, rather it is the convience of having all the parts of Linux in one place, easy to install. It's a "value added" product. The reason people pay Red Hat is that most people would rather not download and compile hundreds of packages themselves. "
Well, I'd argue that Red Hat's product is
Linux in the same way a book publisher's
product is books. The book publisher
doesn't write the book, but they do
some editing, package it, market it,
and distribute it. And if it's popular,
they try to encourage the creator to
come up with more.
In other words, Red Hat's not a "software
company". They're a software publisher
with non-exclusive rights to the product,
and they write a little software on the
side. But their product can still be
considered to be Linux, if only as a
shorthand for their added-value additions.
"Can you please try tcl/tk before complaining about it? ... in an afternoon" doesn't in itself make Tk, Tcl, or anything else good.)
You can start creating GUIs that run in Windows, Linux and Macs in an afternoon" You don't need Tcl for Tk; there are Tk bindings/extensions for Perl, Python, Scheme, and C (and perhaps others too). In general, same ease of use, same cross-platform capability. (Though just because you can "start creating GUIs
I think Apple has come closer than RMS than grasping what a community is. The relationship RMS is looking for to describe his vision of free software is not community but rather marriage.
I guess he hasn't read the GPL... you can't just
start making a proprietary version of free
software.
On a completely different note, I'm currently
learning Tcl/Tk... so far it kicks butt.
"would probably do better if they transformed into a general purpose consulting company"
What if they don't *want to*?
The problem with this is that, generally,
at the end of the year you're left with
nothing to show for your work except money.
Your work is locked up in some department
of some company, and it will probably never
see the light of day. You've spent the
year laboring on other people's projects.
Your own ideas and dreams have been squelched,
because you haven't got time to work on
them.
Some people are just fine with that. Maybe they
have no ideas or dreams. They've no
interest in doing anything of their own.
Other people want to write something
incredible. They want to CREATE something,
and bring it to market. They want to do it
full-time. They don't WANT to waste time
on other crap. And they want to get
paid to do it.
Oh, COME ON! I have NO PROBLEMS programming with Xlib in x86, SPARC, and MIPS assembly. Of course C is more portable, but it's still plenty easy enough. Just design your stuff on paper, first.
http://comanche.com.dtu.dk/comanche
First I thought the essay was a snoozer. Nothing new there that hasm't been drummed to death here a million times over. I would expect more from him.
Second OSS doesn't need commerical concerns. If they pop up fine but I've seen too many grass roots efforts simply take off on their own and go wild. If there is desire there will be action.
Third listening to his BOF at the 98 USENIX conference was interesting. He's rather a control freak. He even admitted it. I think that is what slows down TCL development. Its his baby.
I wonder if Ousterhout ever regrets leaving the university. Sun was cool but Scriptics?
Ron
PS: I use TCL.
I assume you haven't heard of stronghold webserver. It is basically apache with SSL and easy configurability extensions (proprietry).
http://www.cpan.org/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/asherman- on-tcl.html
Please note that John Ousterhout has always thought of TCL as a scripting language designed to be used from and with C, and as such some of the comparisons herein become more favorable to TCL. However, this is not how TCL is used for the most part. Most people tend to use TCL as a stand-alone scripting language, and thus the comparisons here are aimed at such efforts.
TCL uses nul-termination for all strings. This eliminates any possible use of binary data.
TCL cannot pass arrays by value or by reference. They can only be passed by name. Perl arrays can be passed by value OR by reference. And, if you really want, they can even be passed by name.
Perl stores numbers directly as numbers, so math is much faster.
TCL stores numbers as numbers only within an "expr" statement. The return value of the expr is a string, and the parameters to it are strings, so you have to be able to do all of your math within a single expr for it to be fast.
etc. etc.
And it's free:
http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/
(Umm(guile(yeah(right(sure)))))
It seems to me like the ideal visual IDE would involve a modular approach, letting you choose the GUI toolkit and/or the scripting engine you want to use.
Of course, I'm not suggesting anyone should create an IDE that supports every Tom, Dick and Dirtbag scripting language out of the box, but ideally the design of the whole IDE would be general enough to allow other developers to develop plugins for their favorite scripting language.
Then Joe Average developer can install your IDE, download a module for a Basic scripting engine (if he wants), plug it in and start a'rockin'!
GSherman
Linux is not nor has it ever been a language.
I'd like to quit my job an concentrate on free software... but... how do I feed myself? It's fine that some people make money, but surely the creator of the project should be able to support him/herself? Until this gets solved, people will continue to make proprietary stuff.
If open source is so great, then why doesn't linux have a personal assistant like that little paperclip in MS Office? Is it so hard to code something like that? I suppose it's because all the good coders are hired by Microsoft, and all the losers work on lame operating systems like linux. straight up...
So you're calling coders at Corel, IBM, and Oracle lame coders because they're working on software for LINUX?
"Theres still nothing from the free software community competing with Delphi, Visual Age or Visual Basic with regards to GUI development."
And I hope there never is.
Some people like to read and write, and some people are only smart enough to point at the pictures.
They also add RPM (which is sooooo convenient) and provide support.
I recently saw Red Hat 5.2 on sale for $19.95. Granted, it's not exactly the latest and greatest versions of all the products on the CD, but what one product can you buy from M$ for $19.95, much less several hundred products.
It's the focus on Tcl and Tcl only that makes Scriptics's long-term survival iffy and Ousterhout's views on profit vs. open source so biased.
O'Reilly truly is a good example....O'Reilly is a leech.
f f people starving in Africa? The people in their stories should get their salary. Gosh, capitalism sucks!
The wailing that O'Reilly takes in this whole discussion convinces me how out-of-perspective this whole issue has become. Gosh, imagine, he makes a living publishing books about free software! Publishing books is so easy! He's a leech! Now that I think about it, every editor's a leech too: they're just taking the work of other people, putting it together, and putting their name on it!
And those reporters that cover free software, geez! They're just making profit off the backs of poor, unappreciated programmers! They should give their prose away for free too! And while we're at it, wht are they making a living on writing about those not-as-unfortunate-as-programmers-but-still-bad-o
As I look at the animal-adorned covers that line the shelves of my office, I wonder where free software would be without the high-quality publications of O'Reilly.
Can I take open documentation, put it into a book, and sell it at 300% the cost?
If you think that's all that's happening, and that's all there is to it, go try. Knock yourself out.
We can't fix, reuse, or learn from proprietary software. How else could software engineering be in such a pitiful state? "If I have not seen farther, it was by standing in the footprints of giants."
The answer, of course, is to buy free software. That's not a contradiction, but the suits think it is, so calling it "open source" convinces them they understand.
Actually, there's a pretty good case to be made for calling Unix an Integrated Development Environment for a language made of text variables (files) and functions (pipelines).
"Oh, COME ON! I have NO PROBLEMS programming with Xlib in x86, SPARC, and MIPS assembly. Of course C is more portable, but it's still plenty easy enough. Just design your stuff on paper, first."
You are either full of sh!t, or really, really stupid.
Well, if he'd said "we spent five to ten engineer-years extending Tk (and optimizing the hell out of Tcl, even though it's explicitly not for writing complete apps)" it would have made sense. It sounded like the time was just to get Tcl to *work*.
Freedom, my friends, is the heart of free software, not faster technology, better software, or business models. When freedom becomes second hand, or isn't even considered, they try to take it away. Companies are fine for free software, so long as they're in it with freedom as their first priority too.
Look at Apple. They got excited about OpenSource, and release Darwin, which is oookay, except that they demand the right to revoke our freedom later on. That's not acceptible by any means.
Proprietary tools or extensions are also unacceptible. What's the point of freedom, if the a functional unit isn't free? THAT truely degrades the original software, TCL included!
Reject this sort of garbage. Continue the revolution.
- chews up absurd amounts of cycles
- is universally despised as incredibly annoying
- caters to people who don't know what they're doing, whom of course hackers are none too fond of
?I have worked at the labs where AI, public key cryptography, the disk drive, GUIs, neural networks, and thousands of other technologies were invented. None of the people I met were driven by making large amounts of money. What innovators usually want is a stable work environment, independence, smart colleagues, some reasonable financial security and middle-class lifestyle, and means for getting their ideas out to the world.
Clearly, innovation has to have some payoff to justify paying for research. But the notion that more money=more innovation is wrong. To the contrary, if financial concerns become overriding, innovation is stifled. DARPA was a much better approach to financing innovation than Microsoft is, and it's probably a lot cheaper overall, too.
'..hardcore freedom dorks figure this out.... Not all software companies get by selling support'
Get a clue pal, ever hear of: systems integration, custom application development, training.... these are all legitimate ways to earn a living from free software. If you hardcore proprietary dorks would figure it out we would all be better off.
Obviously you don't want open source to go anywhere. Me I want to have sources for the OS and Language and I want to use successful OS's and languages. I thought this was a well thought out and presented point of view. Just remember the first person that attacked the food on the plate was you. If you expect the food to magically appear, why are you better than the parasites?
You have to make a distinction between businesses that add value to free software projects and businesses that polute free software projects with proprietary software. If the business mentains the free software spirit (freedom) then it isn't bad, but id it adds non-free products to an otherwise free product it is bad.
Scriptics is more like ActiveState. They keep working closely with the community improving the free version (example, the TEA summit that was held this week). These changes are given back to the community.
In addition, Scriptics sells a proprietary crossplatform debugger, that unlike Activestate one, runs on Windows and Unix/Linux (that is the beauty of tcl/tk!)
Daniel
Yeah, all this point-click - theres your dialog-box kind of software. Theres still nothing from the free software community competing with Delphi, Visual Age or Visual Basic with regards to GUI development. And I could think of other fields of development tools.
well, i like tcl/tk, i think it's a "fast glue language." it's the choice if you wanna whip up something in one night that doesn't look too bare minimum.
but i don't see how john ousterout puts it "Scriptics' long-term goal is to leverage Tcl to become the leading supplier of enterprise
integration platforms and solutions."
i mean, you got java to develop over all sorts of platforms; java is no doubt much more powerful/popular than tcl/tk. apparently no one in the community would try to develop serious programs for tcl/tk because of lack of certain power. Scriptic just gives a bad feeling that we might be held hostage again someday.
i have a feeling tht tcl/tk is losing popularity. it is installed on less and less machines. i'm sad to see this, but i have a feeling that there's some reason behind it.
Most free software, however, is produced as a side effect of government sponsored research, of commercial development where the developers want a particular piece of software used widely but don't see any money in commercializing it, or simply because people feel strongly about a particular piece of software and want it "out there".
Ousterhout's model of a small company creating and supporting a specific piece of open source software commercially and making a living at it is still unusual, and it's not clear it's going to work in the long run. It's also not clear it's going to be needed.
Ousterhout's company would probably do better if they transformed into a general purpose consulting company, with specific competency in Tcl/Tk.
Time and time again people post this rant, which as always confuses "commercial" with "proprietary".
There's nothing wrong with putting food on your table, working for money, retiring in a nice home, etc. There are wealthy people in the world who need computer software, and there's nothing intrinsically evil about providing it to them for a fee. However, the proprietary TCL extensions john creates are doomed to be one-trick ponys with no long term care taken by active volunteers, users in the field, administrators, hobbyists or professional system integrators. They will not stabilize and advance with use, they will not have code folded back in from the real world; rather they will (like all proprietary ware) have their bugs and features sorted by visibility and customer contracts, their modification schedules driven purely by the alocation of resources within Scriptics inc.
As a result they will fall behind the times and customers will either have to pay the ransom for promised (not necessarily delivered) features in the next vapour product line, or live with the broken product. A small-time customer will never have their desires addressed and will be unable to seek additional contractors to do the work. Their "hood" is welded shut and there's nothing they can do about it.
The only thing you get with proprietary ware is a big shiny box, a fancy flyer, and a lot of empty promises.
don't mind me. Just testing.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Businesses spring up around open source projects
in the same way that mold grows on my plates when
I leave food in the fridge for too long -- they
(the businesses) see a chance to make money and
jump at it.
Like my unfortunate dishes, the open source
projects can do just fine without the businesses
cropping up. Think of them more as nonlethal (we
hope) parasites.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
well, obviously RMS would.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, any real person needs one to figure out the obfuscated mess of GUI programming. Linux needs one even more, unless you like spending your life and your sanity trying to learn GUI programming with 34 different toolkits because each of the projects you're supposed to be supporting uses a different toolkit.
I'd rather use a Visual development took for the GUI layout (win32, gtk, qt, whatever), and spend my time coding the actual program.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by Tony Smolar:
hmm, a *.edu URL, how typical. When you get out of College, and have a family to feed, your perspective will change.
Posted by Tony Smolar:
I've pointed this out in the past. I was amazed at the responses. It seems that the developers don't mind having other people make money off their work, and they themselves not getting a cent.
I see a troublesome trend emerging, Company releases source code, hackers fix it, company exploits loophole in its public license, and sells proprietary code based on what it got from the hackers, in essence a free labor pool!
Posted by Tony Smolar:
Scriptics does not sell TCL, they are selling a development environment for TCL, so John is taking the hard work that John and Employees did and making money off of it. Anyway, If I recall correctly, IBM took that mystery project and added it to its proprietary "Websphere" product.
Posted by Tony Smolar:
Red Hat's product isn't Linux, rather it is the convience of having all the parts of Linux in one place, easy to install. It's a "value added" product. The reason people pay Red Hat is that most people would rather not download and compile hundreds of packages themselves. In contrast, say your company tried to sell an easy to use Word Processor under GPL. One person can buy the word processor, give it to his friends, post the source on his web site, whatever. ALL LEGALLY! Because the GPL demands that it be freely redistributable. Most people, given the choice of paying $99.95 or legally getting it for nothing will choose the latter. Some may feel guilty and buy it. As for support, if it's an easy to use product, most people won't bother paying for that, either. If support is to be the means of making money in an all Open Source world, you are going to see some reallly awful software in terms of usability. This is why I feel GPL and commercial software can't mix for most companies.
Posted by Tony Smolar:
I found that when combined with Oratcl, it makes a good CGI/Oracle glue language. Of course Perl can be used in the same way. I know that linking tcl against the proprietary Oracle libraries makes me more evil than Bill Gates, but hey, it pays the bills.
Posted by Tony Smolar:
You've confused the word "free" with the word "free" again! Money's got nothing to do with it. Most shareware comes with zero source code, so it's not free by the FSF standard. That's why they used the word "free" to make this clear.
If I hear one more person talk about "pursuing a career and having kids" I'm gonna shoot kilowatt bolts out of my arse...
Some people will NEVER want to have children/start a family, for various reasons. Don't assume that everyone is like you.
Not to detract from any of your major arguments; I'm just cranky.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
dont like TCL, but i do like tk.
yes i have written tcl code.
"a dozen good IDEs"
What, like gIDE? Version 0.1.0 just doesn't cut it.
I've developed with both command line and IDE systems. While I'll grant you the open source system has the best potential for being a great system, particularly with respect to customization -- one of these days I'll add matching parentheses syntax highlighting to gIDE -- in their current state I'll take the commercial IDEs.
Stallman used proprietary software to jumpstart GNU (no HURD back then); I see no reason the rest of us shouldn't use it if it's the best way to achieve our goals.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Of the problems you listed in your post, I believe both binary data and fast math are quite possible. Neither language is yet able to approach optimized C anyway -- why get so hung up on trying?
Those problems come out of the simplicity of Tcl. Perl is a beast in comparison. Well, Perl is a beast even in an objective way. Perl has every feature -- an attribute which isn't a feature.
I'm not Tcl-lover, but inside of its scope Tcl isn't half bad.
This "free but with proprietary pieces" strikes me as a perverted form of shareware. i.e., release the demo version as free software, but to *really* get its potential, subtract your freedom.
I think this is a bit dodgy wrt to the potential of the free parts under the "official" tree, too, because 100's of developers can easily outpace 1 or a few developers, who may not want to merge in code that improves the free version, but breaks their proprietary parts. At least forks are still permitted, but aren't necessarily the ideal situation to be in..
I don't talk funny, you leesen funny. I didn't mistake free (beer) for free (dom) .. Notice the subtle hints in my original post such as "subtract your freedom" .. and "a perverted form of shareware" Granted, shareware doesn't release source, that's why it's different. Twisted. Perverted into a new form that gives the illusion of freedom while leaving what can be advertised as "the good part" non-free.
some moderators for some reason seem to think that "conflicting with their opinions" constitutes a right to reduce a post's score.
;sigh;
-Stu
[PLUG ALERT]
How about this for a large program that uses TCL/TK? A couple million lines of code, hundreds of users world wide, and the price? Well, let's just say that people don't mind buying 500MHz-PIII's with 256MB RAM, 24" monitors, etc. 'cause it really doesn't effect the total much. :->
P.S. Please don't /. it. It's where I play quake from.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
This is incorrect. Since almost(?) the entire world has now signed the Berne Convention, you now have an implicit copyright on everything you write. You have to do something to give up this right, such as to do the work as a "work for hire", assigning it to the public domain, etc.
So, if I change two lines of code around in some file, no one else can use that patch w/o my permission. Things quickly start to get funny here. If I don't spell out what copy rights I want to reserve and what I want to give away, then it is not clear what, if any rights you have to use my work. Much of the time you can argue that the author "implicitly" gave certain rights away. Such as if I post the patch to Usenet or the Web, with a comment that says "this patch should fix the multi-user race condition, let me know if it doesn't work", then I think that most courts would conclude that I have given up much of my copy rights. Similarly, by writing this article and submitting it to /., I have given implicit permission for it to appear on /. and to be transmitted to other people. I have also implicitly said that it is OK to create "diriviative works" by quoting my article in your follow up. What isn't clear is whether I have given implicit permission for it to be copied anywhere else.
Now if my patch is applied to a GPL'ed or similar OSS license, then it can be argued, and the courts would probably agree that I implicitly licensed my patch under the same license. This means that you can't take my patch and change the license. (The BSD license, however, would allow you to take my patch and make it proprietary.)
Please note that the string "(c)" has no legal meaning. At one time, to copyright something, you have to use a c with a circle around it "©", or spell out "Copyright", but now with the Berne convention, neither of these are required. So saying "(c) Wayne Schlitt, all rights reserved" has never done anything for me.
These messy areas where you have to argue that the author gave "implicit permission" to do something causes a lot of problems in the OSS community. The Debian folks are very strict about honoring the copyrights and licenses of other people. You won't find any pirated warez on their machines. However, they frequently run into packages that have lines like this:
This causes the Debian folks to pull their hair out. If it is in the Public Domain, then that means that it isn't copyrighted at all. If you say that "all rights are reserved", then that means that you can't copy/distributed/modify it at all. This is clearly a self contradicting "license." What the courts would do with such a "license" is anyones guess. As a result, Debian won't distribute such a package without the author changing their "license."A good place to start for more information about copyrights is here and a related one one copyright myths here.
Finally, the rules for copyrights and for patents are very different. Patents prevent people from using an inventions, even if it was independantly discovered, copyrights apply only to the "expression of an idea." If you come up, independantly, with the same two line patch, then there is nothing that my copyright on my patch can do to prevent you from using yours.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
The next big jump for open source software is when coporations start developing OSS to "scratch their own itch." In the past, a lot of OSS came out of universities and goverment projects, where this kind of idea arises more naturally. In the future, I hope that lots of business look to a problem they have, see that there is some OSS that already does much of what they want to have done, and then extend it to do what they really need done. Of course, the are oblidged to release these modifications.
Once OSS reaches a "critical mass", I think that lots of businesses will be choosing this route of "extending the OSS that is out there." It has a lot of advantages over in-house development because you get a good start for free and you often get bug fixes and other enhancements from other people for free. It also has a lot of advantages over proprietary software because the business has control over their own destiny, and the cost of deploying gobs of workstations is much smaller.
Comercial software is not inherently evil.
Businesses are not inherently evil.
MicroSoft is not inherently evil. (It is irrelevant.)
The Governement is not inherently evil.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
You're confused as to how the community works.
Any individual participates in the community for two essential reasons: to get cool software and for personal reputation enhancement. While a lot of hay has been made about the second reason, the first is the crucial one.
Central to the first reason is that everyone who enhances the system "gives back" to it. Otherwise, the community members see themselves as "suckers" and the community disintegrates. As a side effect, the particular product usually loses its momentum, and the product dies. For an example, check out the story about the Mosaic browser.
(BTW, ESR acknowledges this, too. Remember the "scratch an itch" part?)
Thus the reason for my question about the superiority of the GPL. Care must be taken that companies don't "kill the goose that lays the golden egg". The GPL effectively does that.
As I see it, there are (at least) two types of open-source companies.
:-)
The first would include companies like Red Hat and LinuxCare. These are companies whose business model does not depend on proprietary software at all; their entire product is open.
The second includes companies like Scriptics and Sendmail. These companies base their business on proprietary extensions to free products - "better" versions of the free stuff.
Of course, no one can object to the first kind of company (unless you believe making money is itself evil). The second kind is a little harder to deal with, because it involves taking the hard work of the community and making money off of it without giving anything back - not in a money sense, but in the sense of giving back their improvements for the community to use.
The real gray area, in this case, involves companies like ActiveState and Cygnus. They sell proprietary software, but as separate add-ons to the free tools, not strictly as enhancements. In addition, like Red Hat, they donate much time and effort into free improvements to the free tools, keeping the proprietary parts of their effort as separate as they can.
As an example, ActiveState distributes and does lots of work on Perl for Win32, and distributes it under Perl's original licenses - free for any use, full source included. They also distribute some add-ons as "free beer" which help integrate Perl better into the Windows environment. Finally, they sell proprietary extensions to Perl: a GUI debugger for Windows and a "mod_perl"-like extension for IIS.
I think I feel better about this method of extending free software for money than the Scriptics/Sendmail way. It isn't as "exploitative"; you're really making your money off your own code, not other people's code.
Is it a coincidence that Scriptics-style companies tend to grow out of projects under a BSD/X license, while ActiveState/Cygnus companies (as well as, obviously, Red Hat-style companies) tend to grow out of GPL projects? Is this more evidence of the superiority of the GPL?
(Also: did you notice which prominent open-source project he didn't mention that doesn't have a company egging on its success? Hint: it's even more successful than all the rest, and it's the software that's feeding you these pages.
See my post below (which bears the same title) for a detailed explanation of the bare-bones argument presented here.
The debate in my mind is not whether free software benefits from commercial backing. I think everyone here agrees that commercial support for free software is an inevitable development, and that it's good when businesses write free software.
The actual point of contention is whether we need to have proprietary software companies using free software to further their business. When talking about this point, the argument that "programmers need to eat" doesn't apply: as Red Hat Software shows, a software company can feed programmers without writing any proprietary software at all. The jury is still very much out on the role of proprietary software in the free software world.
By failing to distinguish clearly between commercial and proprietary software, Ousterhout pretty much misses the boat with his article.
Yes Commercial != prorietary and therefore we can't be sure what Ousterhout really means.
I hope that Ousterhout will clarify this point.
I am willing to give Mr. O. the benefit of any doubt based on his fine technical contributions.
cheers
It also seems that you don't understand how licensing and copyright works. If I write the code I may license it however I like. In fact, I may have the same piece of code with two different licenses on it. In fact I do - I distribute my public code with the LGPL, and the stuff that the Australian Defence Forces use, have a different license on it. I own that code that I wrote and therefore may do whatever I like with it.
Ousterhout wrote the TCL code originally, so long as he sells a proprietry version of the code that does not include any improvements made by others then there is no problems legally.
Now, improvements made by others only is defined as the files where his copyright is on the top. If someone makes a (say) 2 line mod to a single file, but does not include their (c) symbol in the code as well, then they don't have a legal leg to stand on. The original (c) holder may take that code, put a different license on it and distribute it commercially/proprietry if they wish. If someone wants to enforce that you (being the original code writer) don't redistribute their changes, you need to put your little (c) mark on it as well. If you don't there's no point in crying over spilt milk.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
There is no such thing as universal wrong or universal right --- everything takes place in a context, and requires a subjective value judgement by the parties concerned to determine if it is good or bad from their point of view.
How happy are the customers of Scriptics with their commercial and proprietary extensions to Tcl, and how unhappy are they with the lack of open source for those parts of the product? If there is more happiness than unhappiness then it must be OK or at least acceptable, FOR THEM. So be it. If they felt otherwise then they would not remain customers of John's just as we do not remain customers of Microsoft.
Since in the free software community we do not use those proprietary extensions and the rest of Tcl is free software, our requirement is satisfied. Apparently, their requirements are satisfied as well, by the standards of their own community.
People who want to change the values in their own community are progressives; those who want to impose their own local values on other communities are no better than the missionaries that (believing they were in the right) coercively eradicated almost all the tribal cultures worldwide not all that many decades ago.
Personally I think that proprietary software has no future at all outside of niche markets: the charms of free software are just too seductive, and the growth pattern is irrefutable. But let the drain away from proprietariness happen at its own pace (the drain is accelerating rapidly anyway), not by labelling everyone else as bad without exception.
The case of Scriptics is particularly interesting, because John is selling to a tiny niche market such as might be left over after The Big Drain. In this way, Scriptics might represent the future of bespoke development, while the free software community might represent the future of mainstream software.
This is worth observing without bias.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your first paragraph does not carry any justification. Furthermore, judging by the current state of the free software community, it is probably entirely incorrect.
Your second paragraph is largely false because earned wealth is almost entirely drained as profit. It is very rare to find more than a small fraction being reinvested in R&D, especially in *new* products rather than new versions, and in general, new ideas tend to arise at the pre-investment stage in most cases.
Your third paragraph is almost entirely a non sequitur. There isn't any scarcity of new ideas nor products in the free software community. Try monitoring freshmeat.net for a week, *every* week. The rate of arrival of new ideas is scary.
Your fourth paragraph just relies on the premise of your previous three, so I won't bother arguing it.
Quite a few reasonable arguments have been made here on Slashdot in support of commercial for-profit development, despite the in-trend being the opposite. Your "growing up" article hasn't really helped your cause, it seems to me, not necessarily because it's wrong but because it isn't argued soundly.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
*BSD "never got very far" because of business - The Lawsuit brought by AT&T(USL) against BSDI in 1992. The Lawsuit drug on for 3 years, and eventually forced all active *BSD development to restart from a new code base. BSDI was a commercial version of BSD Networking Release-2, so it was a commercial product that caught AT&T's attention.
Meanwhile, some bright kid in Finland was developing a Unix-like OS for his own needs...
The BSD license allows developers to make their modifications private, something that should attract commercial developers. The GPL does not allow this.
I think John is on the right track. There should be no shame in making money using Open Source. As he cited, look at O'Reilly and Sendmail. For another essay along these lines, read Bob Young's contribution to "Open Sources." You know Bob's company - Red Hat. Some little startup in the Carolinas...
But, to put it simply - people have to eat. Some choose to make money their primary motivator, others choose contributing to the greater community. (And some just want to see there names in print!)
The Open Source community is big enough to include those that make money as well as those who aren't driven by profit. Let's not let this issue divide us. If by selling copies of Linux in the local book/computer stores, the more people we'll have using Linux and there's strength in numbers.
I notice you stress the GUI part. Yes, Tk is wonderful, and fortunately one can use it with other scripting languages such as perl, python, and stk. This is fortunate because many people (such as myself) became intringued with tcl/tk after seeing something like tkdesk but were immediately turned off by tcl, which makes the Bourne shell seem like a wonderful programming language.
Busineses springing from Open Source projects remind me an awful lot of businesses springing from university research projects (and of course TCL has both these origins). The founders always say that this is a positive move for the project and needed for its continued growth, etc. etc., but I sort of get the idea that the real reason is that these companies start is because the project heads want to live in a nicer house and drive a nicer car, and the way to get these things in our society is to start a business. I don't object to people like Ousterhout wanting nice things (they often deserve them), but I *do* wish these people would be more honest about their motives for going commercial.
There are people out there (who prolly read this) who feel that any and all commercial software is evil. And I do agree with one of the posts up top, it is important to draw distinctions between proprietary and commercial software.
But the essential observation here is valid: in no future I see happening any time soon do we cease all commercial activity centered around software. Yes, I believe that the essential paradigm should shift away from software as a production and manufacturing industry and more towards a service based industry. Witness the primary method by which companies such as RedHat propose to make money: SERVICES. Companies like Microsoft however, want to sell you an object, something they 'created', something you can get from nowhere else and which you may not dissect or alter in any way.
Recently, I seem to recall someone posting something about how the open sourced projects from companies should be 'spin offs' of regular commercial activity, a way to give away code without losing revenue. You aren't giving out your "product", but releasing a service to the community. I find this to be both plausable and feasable with current reality of OSS and capitalism. They can and will depend upon each other...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
I *do* wish these people would be more honest about their motives for going commercial.
Don't expect them to be honest about their desire to reap the benifits of their hard work when a considerable portion of the Free Software "community" will visciously attack them for admitting it.
I got into Linux because it was a fun hobby, and was perfectly happy to contribute in my limited way whenever I could. But now, I'm wondering how long it will be before I simply can't take the politics and the bullshit any longer and just say "to hell with it."
Dream
give me a break. There is nothing wrong with proprietary software. Why can't all you hardcore freedom dorks figure this out? Free and proprietary can and should co-exist. Not all software companies can get by selling "support"... just ask Linus...
... a scripting language.
No longer true as of tcl v8.0
same as above.
"the purely materialistic goal of faster development?" Well, while I agree that there are other goals to be considered (although not neccesarily those that RMS mentioned), I don't think that faster development should be discounted. If Linux weren't better than Windows, how many of us would use it just because it was open source?
is it a surprise that open source and commecrial ventures are compatible? since red hat, etc. it seems pretty obvious.
parallax
One area where visual programming is a big plus is designing dialog layouts for gui programs. A visual interface utilizing a toolbox of user interface components and a drawing area (like a drawing program) is great for productivity.
Writing a good dialog design program is not easy though. They should handle reading in files they write, and have proper layout support for resizeable dialogs (so you can specify whether UI components stick to a particular side or reposition themselves as the dialog is grown).
Another nice visual programming tool is a the class browser that lets you navigate your program by showing a hierarchy of class and methods.
My original introduction to an IDE was Turbo Pascal 5.5. It had the best IDE I've ever used, (interestingly it supported neither of the tools I described above). For years I though IDE meant integrated debugging environment. The support for visual debugging (setting breakpoints, stepping, watching variables) was novel and effective.
Now at my day job I use the Talking Moon visual tools (C++ and J++) and nearly all the time I simply use cout and System.out.print to debug as the visual debugger is so horribly slow (On a PII450/128MB). It's frustrating seeing technology go backwards like this.
I do not think it is open source that needs profit
as much as it is that John Ousterhout needs profit. I certainly do not begrudge him the right to earn money, but let's not confuse the relationship of who needs what.
>Obviously you don't want open source to go
>anywhere. Me I want to have sources for the OS and
>Language and I want to use successful OS's and
>languages.
Linux was a pretty darn good language long before RedHat, etc. began to commercialize it.
The whole POINT of free software is that it doesn't need any money to fuel it.
So are you saying you don't use X-Windows?
I'd say it's far easier to program GUIs in a GUI at times. I think SOME ammount visual tools are pretty darn useful when developing a large application.
I'm a diehard text-editor guy when it comes to HTML, but I can understand if some people want to use visual HTML tools. I don't say they're not "real" programmers. (In fact, I'd say some amount of automated HTML tools might be useful on a really large scale site, which I haven't done myself.)
Putting down people who use certain tools is pretty lame. Different people have different needs and wants.
I think he made a really good point- commercial companies can support and add on to an OSS project. That way it's the best of both worlds- hackers and developers can use it, and end users can enjoy the benefit of the software.
There is one problem, though: the developers of the project are not the ones who see the money. I wish more of the companies who adapt open source could pay the programmers who wrote the core.
Linux: Long live the source code.
Free Software + Proprietary Software == Bad
What exactly is intrinsically evil about proprietary software? I was under the impression that one of the tenets of _both_ communities was that people had the right to release their source or hold on to it as they wished.
I agree that in a purely proprietary world, there is a strong tendency to produce bloated, overpriced, low-quality software (coughcoughMicrosoftcough), but in a purely non-proprietary world, you would have a lot of starving programmers. Being tech support doesn't cut it. This has been brought up by many people already.
IMO, the best kind of system is pretty close to the one that we have now (or will have in a year or two), with both proprietary and non-proprietary software on the market. Open software is wonderful for keeping proprietary software vendors honest. If Windows gets sufficiently bad, then Joe Average User will be willing to go through the headaches of Linux installation just to get away from frequent blue screens. So, proprietary software vendors are forced to put in at least _some_ quality control, to the relieve of Joe Average User, and hard-core programmers and open-source advocates have their open OS and applications to play with.
But starting a Jihad against proprietary software? Come on. If it's as bad as the rabid open source advocates say that it is, it will die on its own when faced with open source competition. Step down from your pulpits and write code for once.
How many programmers?
Look at it another way to put it in perspective:
How many programmer-years went into developing Linux and everything that runs on it?
How many programmers are paid by every distributor and open-source development company?
It seems to me that there is a large discrepancy here. Some open-source coders are paid for their efforts, but most aren't. The "programmers need to eat" argument still holds. Postulate a model in which everyone who codes gets paid for their efforts at a salary consistent with that they would be earning coding on proprietary projects, and I might jump on to the "down with proprietary software" bandwagon. Until then, I fail to see why both alternatives can't exist in the world.
The point re. Open Source tending to be disorganized is IMO quite valid, and the poster was reasonably polite. Why is this post at -1?
I always find it interesting when someone bitches on the kernel list that Linus bounced their patch. Wait until people start sending bug fixes into Apple, and we'll see how big the 'community' is.
Apple's 'community' is probably intended to be much more narrow than Linux's, namely I wouldn't be suprised if Adaptec, ATI and other hardware vendors are the only members, along with a few Stanford students with friends who work in Cupertino.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Some free software purists object to the commercialization of open source software. They believe that the most important aspect of open source software is that it is free; by this standard, any association with proprietary products tarnishes the software.
Free software purists don't object to the commercialization of free software / open source software.
The most important aspect of free software is that it is free. As long as it is remains free, it can be commercial and no one has a problem with that.
Free doesn't mean $0. Free software can, of course, be commercial.
And yes, any association with proprietary products tarnishes the software.
Ousterhout should read the definition of free software as stated by the Free Software Fundation.
Forget about TCL, try Guile.
AFC
it'd be nice if that effort had gone into a frontend for Guile, rather than ports of yet another limited language.
That would have been very nice.
Forget about TCL, Guile is the answer.
AFC.
TCL is a jit byte-compiled platform-independent scripting language with a feature-set to rival even Perl.
Yeah, but the shell-interperter-ish syntax is too awful to contemplate. Regardless of its capabilities, if it's hellish to use, I want no part of it.
It also comes with TK, a platform independent widget toolkit that works seamlessly and with native look-and-feel under X, Windows, and MacOS.
There are tk bindings for a lot of languages like perl, python, etc. (In fairness, AFAIK tcl had tk first, right?) It's a strength, certainly, but since it shows up on both sides you kinda have to cancel it out IMHO.
All this comparing of languages is silly anyway; so what if I don't like tcl? If you find it useful, you find it useful, and that's that. It's hard to argue against that, because there's really no other objective measure of the worth of a language. Nobody's making me use it, so it's no skin off my ass one way or another.
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
at my day job I use the Talking Moon visual tools (C++ and J++) and nearly all the time I simply use cout and System.out.print to debug as the visual debugger is so horribly slow (On a PII450/128MB).
At work I've got a PII400 w/ 128MB RAM; I use VC and it ain't that bad. Actually I sometimes use VC at home on a 266 MHZ K6 with 32MB ram and it's not unbearable. While it's contemplating its navel, I get some time to think
What *does* piss me off is the "visual" parts of MSVC. For example the resource editor, and the dreaded "#include "afxres.h"". The lcc-win32 resource editor doesn't float my boat, but writing dialog resources in a text editor blows. So it'd be nice if I could use MSVC's resource editor without having to strain out a lot of portability-prevention crapola after every time I save the file. No such luck. Hey, fine, they can make their own products however they like -- but I'm equally free to say they suck. It's a basic problem with the competitive-market approach to software design: There's often a great competitive advantage to be gained by deliberately breaking one's own products.
I refuse to use MFC on non-work projects (it's horrible, it's dying anyway, to hell with it), but at work I have to. So I have to use the loathsome "class wizard", because there's no other practical way to do MFC event handlers (. . . that I know of, anyway; the prototypes are AFAIK undocumented). But the wizard thing is so fucking fragile, it's not funny. It's also not even remotely type-safe. You can assign a function with a totally wrong prototype and never know it. The problem is that, as far as I can see, you have to either use the stupid "visual" crap for literally everything (which is very time-consuming and annoying), or else waste years of your life becoming an MFC guru.
MFC doesn't make very many things that much easier, and it makes some things harder. The depressing thing is that there are "programmers" out there who don't know anything else. In fact, for small projects, it's easier and quicker to do it all in straight C. For large projects, you've got time to roll your own framework (typesafe, well-designed, suited to your particular program) and do it right. Ummm . . . for some 2-3 month sized projects, MFC makes sense.
Compared to a sensible, well-thought-out "RAD" tool like Delphi, MFC/MSVC doesn't look very good. Part of that is the lack of abstraction and so forth, part of it is the fragile, afterthought-ish nature of most of the "visual" things, part of it is the bizarre lack of anything like a layout manager (Delphi is very nice in that respect), and a big, big part is the fact that it's all tied to their "dominant[sic]-view architecture", which is well-suited only to a small subset of the actual programs that people actually write. It's the usual Talking Moon one-size-fits-all Procrustean Bed approach: "Sir, these sleeves are too short. Pardon me while I remove Sir's hands. Ah yes, much better."
As a text editor, MSVC is very nice
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Can you please try tcl/tk before complaining about it?
I did. IMHO tcl is an ugly and painful language to write in.
You can start creating GUIs that run in Windows, Linux and Macs in an afternoon
Hey, I did that too. It was pretty neat. tk is groovy.
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Heh. "NT: The software that works". Okay, it's a deliberate troll.
Still. Just because he's a moron doesn't justifiy zapping him. A lot of morons in favor of free software do not get zapped on Slashdot. It's unfair.
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Yes, Free Software and commercial ventures are compatible. But he is (also) talking about Free Software combined with proprietary products which aren't compatible.
I see business and OSS as a good pair. No offense, but one of the reasons that *BSD's never got very far is that they never attracted business. *BSD's have been around longer than Linux, and they are just as stable, but why have they always been religated to just being a passing hobby. The way they are licensed never attracted commercial attention, therefore they never got more than a very small foothold in the commercial sector. They remain primarily a college student's hobby.
On the other hand, the GPL was designed to explicitly give entry into the commercial sector. It allows, and even encourages commercial pursuit of the code which is licensed under it. In order to attract and keep active talent, you ultimately need to have a way to make money with the code. You can't realisticly expect programmers to continue to add to the code after college, if they can't make money. Once you start pursuing a career, and having children, your philosiphical outlook on "Free" software begins to take a second row seat to these more pressing needs. GPL'd software allows business to make money for their efforts, which means that developers get paid. Whether you like to admit it or not, $$$$ will always play a very important role in your life. No offense, but we all can't live like RMS. I don't stand to judge his choices, but I will say that I will not choose the same path as he has. Every person has the right to choose how they wish to lead their lives, and I choose to participate in the money driven ecocomy in which I find myself.
GPL, in my opinion, strikes a carefull balance between the desires of a world with "Free" software, and the needs of a money driven society. It isn't perfect, but it is the best we have for now. As such, I think that business interest in Linux is a good thing. It helps to assure that there will always be talent furthering the cause, and improving the code. It brings recognition to the software, to the cause, and ultimately to the developers that make it happen. It would be in our best interest as a community to learn to manage the problems that business brings to Open Source Software, instead of running away from business, and fragmenting as a community. Bickering and fighting won't make the issue go away, it will only weaken us.
-Master Switch out
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
Hmmm, you are right to point out that *BSD was copied quite a bit, but as a pure system in itself, it never was very successfull. Linux, on the other hand, has become quite successfull on it's own. This, I think, is more important than having everyone copy your code, but not ever pay you for it. Berkley ,I am sure, got paid. But the actuall students that helped develop it were left floating in the breeze, so to speak.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
John keeps saying this, but what the hell is he talking about. Development tools are the one area where, IMO, free software has excelled. I mean, you have your choice of just about any programming language in existence, a dozen good IDEs, the best text editors, etc.
And when it comes to any particular app, you can't have a development source much better than the source code.
Or is Ousterhout just pimping TCL again.
---
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
I read the manual. it does not seem to have any *data structure* aside from strings.
of course, that was 5 or 6 years ago and the language could've grown since then.
I'm not really interested in learning lots of little languages. would prefer to learn a few "broad-spectrum" ones.
there are so many people that want to create new programming languages, tho, that the ones that will get to see their creations widely adopted are those that are willing to distribute their code (compiler, interpreter, etc) under an open-source license. or so it seems to me.
in response to your first paragraph, ever heard of *Sun*? they used BSD as a springboard to the development of their first OS, SunOS. (later on they contracted with ATT for rights to use code from SysV.) they saved about a million dollars in OS devel costs during their startup stage by doing so. other Unix workstation vendors did the same thing. in 1993 or so, when MS needed to add a TCP/IP protocol stack to Windows, I heard from a reliable sounding source that they just copied the stack from the BSD sources, just like almost every other OS (with Linux being a notable exception) did. BSD code is used as the underlying OS for Oracle's (and some other company's) network computer. NeXTstep contains much BSD code (also code from the Mach project, which has a BSDish license.) in fact, BSD source code ended up in more proprietary OSes than any other large block of code.
your follow-up still contains false information, but I no longer feel like correcting you.
Guess why? Because no real person needs one
Well, maybe no "real" person needs one, but they sure do make your work go a hell of a lot easier. They let you ignore the tedious crap, and actually get to work on the important stuff.
For all its many flaws, the overall paradigm of VB and so on is incredibly important. It allows one to develop much, much faster than without.
An average programmer writes a program. A good programmer writes a program to write his programs for him.
Myself, I am working on writing a GUI interface-builder for Unix, similar in style to VB (except supporting C code, rather than BASIC). And you'd better believe me... just writing a rudimentary one for Gtk+ is proving to be a major hassle.
But I'm still going ahead with it, because it's a gap that needs to be filled -- there is almost nothing currently out there that will do the job.
And while I may not need such a tool, I could sure as hell use one.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Version 2.0... :-)
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Boy, you just don't know what you're talking about, do you? TCL is a jit byte-compiled platform-independent scripting language with a feature-set to rival even Perl. It also comes with TK, a platform independent widget toolkit that works seamlessly and with native look-and-feel under X, Windows, and MacOS.
What made you think you could just spout off about TCL and no one would notice?
-Sam
I think I really don't care if it is subversive at all. Most of what the software industry does it cater to the people who buy it. If all you have is free software or even a mix of the two you may just have crappy software with some underlying good stuff.
If linux were ran that way we would have something similar to NT but with a few benefits. It's people who think with the common man or even the poor man who really do justice to all of us.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
It's interesting that many see a requirement for companies operating with open source licences to 'give back' to the open source community. It is interesting in two ways..
Firstly, the open source community is seen as an entity that has given something to that company. The individual contributions of the expert programmers are not distinguished.
Secondly, it denies ESR's thesis that the reason that programmers do the work is to enhance their reputations. If work on a commercially-driven open source project enhances your reputation, then you've just gotten as much as you can expect to get.
So although the programmers have recieved something in return for their efforts, there's a perception that this is not enough, and that the community itself should benefit somehow. Why? Aren't the programmers who worked on the project happy with their lot?
Perhaps it is a case of the 'freeloaders' in the system (the non-participating programmers) seeing a possible angle to get more for themselves?
I think he is thinking more (l)'user-friendly', ala DreamWeaver for HTML, instead of Emacs.
I know what I use.....
--- Beast
An idea: if every software programmer and company gave their products away for free, the software industry would be a poor one.
If no one gave their products away for free, and software products were of value to others, software producers would earn wealth to build better products.
Anything that promotes the former idea of free products reduces the funds available for the creation of new ideas and products.
Mixing for sale and free is a concession to less innovation. People will buy things, and pay for them to be produced, if they value them. Giving them away for free is not a stimulant to innovation. If anything it promotes organizations who have another source for their revenues (the government) at the expense of autonomous individuals and companies. Making money is the best way to stimulate innovation.
I've been keeping track of the use of Tcl/Tk various projects for a number of years now, and I'm continually amazed. We have a few examples profiled at http://www.scriptics.com/scripting/success.html
These profiles are of large companies like
Motorola, Healtheon, NationsBank, and more. There are hords of smaller companies, too.
Our FTP site services 7 to 10 thousand downloads
of Tcl each week.
I'd like to respond to a few of the comments in this thread.
First, several people have suggested that companies like Scriptics are leeches that profit from open source software without giving anything back. This isn't true for Scriptics or for any of the other open source companies I know of. We are continuing to develop the open source Tcl/Tk software at Scriptics and we will continue to release it freely, as has always been the case. For example, right now our *entire* engineering staff is working on open source projects such as the 8.1 releases and the new Tcl Extension Architecture. One of our missions at Scriptics is to ensure that we advance the open source Tcl/Tk core software faster than would have happened if Scriptics didn't exist. The open source nature of Tcl/Tk forces a certain degree of honesty on us: if we don't provide great stewardship of open source Tcl/Tk, the community can always start a separate development track and take control from us.
A second comment was that I started Scriptics just to make money. Actually, my reason for starting the company is that I believe it's the best way to advance Tcl. As the company becomes more and more successful, we will have more and more resources to pour into the open source software. I really believe that a properly executed hybrid model is the best way to enhance the usage and lifetime of open source software.
A third comment is that open source software doesn't need any proprietary tools or extensions built around it: everything can
easily be done in an open source fashion. So far, history suggests that this isn't the case. Virtually every successful open source package has some commercial products build around it: if the open source packages were truly self-sufficient, there would be no need or demand for the commercial products. I'd be delighted for other people to create open source tools around Tcl, or even duplicate in open source form some of our products. We'll even feature them on our Web site! There's so much interesting stuff to do that I'm not worried that Scriptics will run out of ideas for things to sell.
The bottom line to me is that (a) the open source community is better off with Scriptics here and (b) a bunch of new commercial tools and extensions are available for those who want to pay for them. Is this really such a terrible thing?
Basically this article puts us a step closer to corporate culture eating away at the hacker culture that has brought open source to where it is.
O'Reilly truly is a good example. They do the easiest part and make the most money. Whatever open source celebrity said it -- O'Reilly is a leech. Can I take open documentation, put it into a book, and sell it at 300% the cost?
The open source developers I know make their money providing services supporting the software they develop -- i.e., someone spends their time coding free software because they make $110/hr as a contract Unix sysadmin, most of which they do remotely.
Basically, what everyone has been saying on this topic is that: "Programmers have to eat, too, after all, we live in a capitalist society where you must do something to make yourself money." Certainly free software developers are doing something productive, but that doesn't mean shit when it is time to pay the rent or go get groceries. Just like a woman who stays home to take care of her kids, she isn't really doing work because she doesn't get paid for it.
It seems like the problem, then, is capitalism -- perhaps those who prefer the "open source" label have forgotten that free software is "subversive" (ESR) -- contrary to the software industry, as well as industry as a whole, and ultimately, capitalism.
But there are too many yuppies involved for that obvious conclusion to guide any decisions of those involved in this movement.
I agree totally with this comment. I am a consultant offering my Linux expertise to anyone who will pay. In short: I make a living from Open Source.
I don't make a lot...yet....but I expect to move into Bill Gates' mansion any day now.