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Linux a "temporary phenomenon"
scenic
writes "A Washington "Think Tank" has a
report
complaining about the new "Assessing Microsoft"
conference. In particular, they have an issue with the
OSS remedy that many, including Nader and Love, have
proposed (i.e. opening up the Windows source code).
There is quite a bit of stuff concerning Linux (about a
quarter of the long article) and why OSS and Linux are
temporary phenomenons created by "media interest in
identifying a viable competitor to Microsoft." "
CRC is one of those Reagan think tanks founded to safeguard the interests of minorities (such as wealthy individuals or corporations - the poor wee things) against powerful pressure groups such as unwed mothers or disabled people.
Theie assertions are provided without any arguments based upon logic or facts. Example:
'How could anyone but a radical anarchist support a concept like "free software"? It may seem like a boon for consumers. But they should realize that a market totally free of prices is not likely to produce quality merchandise and will quickly collapse.'
Except the quality merchandise already exists and shows no signs of collapsing. So, what is the assertion based upon ? They seem to be saying
"The existence of free quality software is inconsistent with our theories --- therefore the world is obviously going to change so that the facts will become consistent with our beliefs"
A more rational group might reason as follows:
"The facts are inconsistent with our theories --- therefore there might be something wrong with our theories".
These people are TRUE BELIEVERS though, so they make assertions and back them with their beliefs
'But OSS has a fatal flaw: it is based on a false theory of production.'
What does this mean ? OSS will not work, and here's why - it won't work because it is based on a "false theory", and how do we know this theory is false - easy, it's different to our theories so it must be false.
These guy's should have worked for the Spanish inquisition. They've got the techniques down pat.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
1) We'd all be using X all the time because it's kind of hard to show a parade of advertising pics at the bottom of the console.
2) Instead of a penguin, we'd have that dog from the Taco Bell commercials for a mascot
3) Tonight on Springer: vi/Emacs mixed marriages; can they survive? And a special segment: how to pronounce "Linux."
4) "We're sorry, this program is blacked out in your area" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.
5) Al Gore would try to take credit over the Net for creating the media.
...anyone got any others? This one just begs for jokes to be made. Honestly, how clueless can this writer be?
How could anyone but a radical anarchist support a concept like "free legal arguments"? It may seem like a boon for consumers. But they should realize that a market totally free of prices is not likely to produce quality legal arguments and will quickly collapse.
Actually, the "free legal arguments" movement is not opposed in theory to sale of legal services.... The word "free" refers not to price, but to the removal of restrictions on repeating, delivering, improving, and redelivering legal arguments once they are presented in court or otherwise obtained.
But OLA (Open Legal Arguments) has a fatal flaw: it is based on a false theory of production. For the sake of an imagined voluntary cooperative, OLA rejects free market competition and loses the market's distinct advantages to meet consumer needs with quality legal arguments and targeted marketing. By contrast, in a free market, identifiable lawyers own the arguments. They are responsible for their performance, and they can be held liable for inexcusable flaws.
OLA shows that Nader and his allies' "self-proclaimed consumer advocates" do not have in mind the best interests of consumers. His support for legal anarchism would deprive lawyers of their property rights and deprive consumers of standard, quality legal representation.
They just keep missing the point.
Free Software is NOT about "Ralph Nader's Agenda" (whatever that may be.) Nor is it about "Competing with Microsoft."
Free Software is about software - and in a broader sense technology - returning back to the public grounds. Technology should not remain locked up in the safehouses of the few who have (money- or knowledgewise), but instead should flourish in the common culture.
Openness of the Stuff that programs (or technology in general) are made of is a prerequisite and the best guarantee for a continued interaction between development and use of programs (technology) in our human culture.
Locking up knowledge is a dead end for humanity.
The Gartners, Brownses and the rest of the FUD slinging professional truth-mongers just don't see this. Maybe they don't like to, clinging as they do to their business of selling you the truth, in a handsome report.
But lets focus on the contents of this "Trend Analysis"
Once again, a "report" appears to be humming the well-known FUD theme "who are you going to sue?"
I'd like to see these "consultants" for once to come up with some detailed cases of customers sueing software vendors for buggy software. In any case, I've never heard of any substantial case.
For example, did anyone ever successfully sue Microsoft for the bugs in their software?
These incredible dimwitted reports are really starting to annoy me, because they are so flagrantly untrue and disrespective of the plain facts of reality.
With Free Software, the question is not "who are you going to call if things break", the question is "who are you NOT going to call if things break."
With Free Software, you can call virtually any skilled software engineer to fix your programs, because the code is available.
This might even be far cheaper than stumbling in the dark to pinpoint the cause of problems, losing time and money on the phone with your vendor's (clueless) "tech"-support drones, losing even more time argueing with the vendor about who's to blame and finally paying premium for a "custom" solution from your vendor, costing a multiple of the original (buggy) software.
I have to take issue with the "temporary phenomenon" quip. It seems to me that Linux has been around 6 years, UNIX has been around for decades, and Kernigan (inventor of C) released an entire language under "open source". Open source supports much of the vast infrastructure of the internet - sendmail & apache, bind, for example.
To say that it is only temporary is to show a complete disregard for the history of the internet, nay, computers at large.
--
All of this pseudo-analysis is worthless. The market will sort out the validity of open-source. This of course, will take time.
One distinction that should be made I think is that demand for linux is not fueled by its open-source nature. Demand is fueled by the fact that it is a very inexpensive way to get a solid unix-like OS on to commodity hardware. Most users couldn't even tell you what path the source code is in.
- Only the desire to maximize profits drives people; since Linux doesn't make any profits, it must be shoddy.
- Windows is popular and exists in a free market, therefore it must represent consumer preferences accurately.
- The value of a product is measured by how much people are paying for it; because Linux is free, it doesn't have any economic value.
- Any information, creative or incidental, automatically represents a property right, so requiring companies to disclose their APIs amounts to "deprivation of property rights".
There is more, but that let that suffice. (I'm reminded of Dilbert's comment that he likes circular reasoning because it leaves no loose ends.)A careful economic analysis of these issues needs to take into account, among many others, notions of public goods, cooperation, non-monetary economic goods, opportunity costs, and multi-attribute utility.
One of the most blatant problems with Reilly's ideas (and it is representative of a particular political agenda, not sound economics) is that it incorrectly describes human behavior in a quite fundamental way. It should be obvious to most people who have spent any amount of time at top research and development labs that it isn't profit that drives top quality researchers and developers (but, I suppose given that Reilly works at a conservative Washington think tank, that lack of experience is understandable).
In fact, one of the reasons for the low quality of Microsoft products is that their development seems primarily driven by short term profit considerations rather than an interest in quality. This actually seems quite reminiscent of the US auto industry, which produced large, inefficient cars and ran into serious problems when nimble, small, cheap Japanese and European cars became available. The analogy to Microsoft and OSS should be fairly obvious.
Reilly's piece is full of misrepresentations and factual mistakes. It's not worth expending time on analyzing them all, becaue the most fundamental blunder he makes is that he thinks that OSS is an alternative to the free market.
Far from it: OSS succeeds because of the free market. That has nothing to do with a short-term desire of harming Microsoft (a kind of "software dumping"?), but because it makes long term sense for individuals and companies to cooperate on operating system development. It's free market economics at its best.
People like Reilly like to assume the mantle of "free market economics" and "conservatism", but they really just represent economic interests that want to avoid free market competition as much as possible. Ensuring a functioning free market requires that the market is governed by orderly rules and regulations; otherwise, we would have social Darwinism and anarchy. Given the economics of software development, I'm sure an orderly free market is all OSS requires for its long-term success; at least OSS is up for the challenge.
And for consumers who actually like Microsoft software, I don't think he has to be concerned: OSS and Microsoft will live side-by-side, hopefully with dozens of other choices, as is proper and desirable in a free market.
I got the impression from reading the histories of UNIX that AT&T, at least at first, was fairly good natured about licensing it's UNIX & C code to whoever wanted it. I got the impression that the licenses weren't cheap, but they weren't expensive either, and AT&T wasn't very discriminatory about who they licensed the code to. So they weren't open, but they were at least fairly good natured about this. Is that true or just a mis-impression?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I think we can all agree that this essay is a load of crap...but I think that we need to be carefull of having a knee-jerk response when stuff like this comes out. Whenever something criticising linux/*bsd FSF or whatever comes out, people jump all over it. As a community, it would be better to sit back, analyze what other have to say, and attempt to address potential weeknesses. Even essays such as this can have one or two things worthy of consideration, if only to determine what type of logic underlies the criticism. I thought that these people brough up two points vaguely worth of consideration.
A. Long term viability. Lets face it, the current boom is a fad masking over a long-lasting tradition. But this fad is bringing in valuable support. In the public eye, Linux will fail if it falls back to being a geek toy, sure, it can continue on indefinetly in that manner, but the public doesn't care about that. They only care if it affects them. Maintaining a broader user base, and Linux is heading for now, is important for Linux to become something other than a server OS (I think the classic FSF model works fine for server), but the variety of software needed for desktop software by nature demands wider support, and this support comes from users. Assuming one wants Linux to become a desktop platform in addition to a server platform, maintanence of this broaduer user and vendor base is necessary,and at this point, as this support depends largely on hype, a long-term solution is needed. (note: contrary to many, hype isn't all bad, I think it helps reach a large amount of geek-inclined, tinkers or idealists who other wise would never of heard of this. Their not the tradational linux users, but hey, the more the merrier.
B. There is a slight contridiction in stateing that software should be free, than stating that it is ok to make money through support, education and the like. When one thinks about this, it means that software is only free to those who don't need support, IE geeks (most of the time). There is a dicotomy that needs to be resolved between "free" code and the ability to make money...the current model just doesn't hack it, the free except for other things...either its free or it isn't. I personally would like to see a case where all vital tools are available oss, ie, OS, server tools, office suite, web browser, and the like, whereas more eclectic things may remain proprietory, such as games, weird niche apps, whatever. Propriatory software does have a place, we just need to remove the issue of its closedness from being a barrier to new entries who may not be able to afford the cost of propriatory software, such as kids, new companies and organizations, people in underdeveloped areas and the like. This would level the playing field, but still allow for commercial activity.
On a completely random note, I think that contrary to these people, OSS is a perfect example of a free market. The notion of a free market implies that there are many providers and customers are free to give their support (i.e. usually money) to the one that they feel is best. Theoretically, this leads to the best product winning, which we all know is not true. We do not and have not for some time lived in a free market economy, we live in a oligopoly, where a few large providers are able to control the market. This is not free market, the average consumer is not forced to decide between competing products, and the best product does not always, or even ever, win. OSS brings this back, replacing the resource exchange of money with the exhance of ideas, support and the like. Yeah, its messy, thats the way the free market was intended to be. Current defenders of the free-market are defending something that, on a large scale, died long ago and are acting as intellectual pimps for companies.
whew.....getting off of soapbox now.
Brian
BTW: I know of analytical firms/thinktanks that take oss very seriously, its just the better ones don't make alot of hype or follow hype. Their view of OSS's future seems to be positive, though not leading to world domination.