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New ESR paper: The Magic Cauldron
Thanks to webmaven for sending us 'The Magic Cauldron', the latest piece by ESR. The paper "anaylzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon." As always, very timely and interesting reading, considering the IPO announcements and more news of investment from folks "oustide" of the Linux world.
ESR didn't say it was a widespread phenomena... you did. However, if you were to visit Freshmeat, I think you'd quickly start to get the impression that it IS! Tons of UNIX software is open source.
ESR addressed both of your counter-examples in the paper.
n /magic-cauldron-3.html
These two quotes come from the following section near the bottom: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldro
"In the short run, one can escape this trap by making bug-fix releases pose as new products with a new price attached, but consumers quickly tire of this. In the long run, therefore, the only way to escape is to have no competitors -- that is, to have an effective monopoly on one's market. In the end, there can be only one. "
"And, indeed, we have repeatedly seen this support-starvation failure mode kill off even strong second-place competitors in a market niche. (The pattern should be particularly clear to anyone who has ever surveyed the history of proprietary PC operating systems, word processors, accounting programs or business software in general.) The perverse incentives set up by the factory model fuel to a winner-take-all market dynamic in which even the winner's customers end up losing."
So according to Raymond, one can in the short run call bug fixes and patches new versions and charge for them but this leads to a condition where you tend towards a single monopoly player and customers dissatisfied with poorly supported sofware - sound familiar?
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
What's wrong with the commercial business model then?
ESR seems to be saying it's not sustainable, but the fact of the matter is, revenues are at an all time high in software. Microsoft, IBM, Sun,
Adobe, Oracle, Autodesk, Real Networks, the
list goes on.
Specifically, when you look at Microsoft, where's the slowdown? Even Microsoft keeps predicting the demise of their exponential growth, yet year after year, they continue to soar.
Microsoft doesn't make most of its money off of support either, it makes it off of Office, 98, and NT. Specifically, sales of Office and OEM sales of 98/NT.
Furthermore, while most of the software in corporations is customized in house, the PLATFORM that they are writing their customizations on is often Office and Visual Basic. There is no need to fundamentally alter the native code in Office or VB itself - that would break compatibility - rather, Office is best sold "for sale", and customizations are best done through COM and Scripting.
Same goes for Lotus Notes, or databases like Oracle, etc. They are all customization platforms undo themselves where *SOURCE* isn't needed to do the customizations.
In fact, having the source to Oracle or Office would complicate matters, because it would introduce incompatibilities which workers would have to be trained on as the products get forked.
Forking is bad because it discourages having a standard that everyone can depend on. I should only have to learn Oracle or Office once, not 15 different times because of forks.
Meanwhile, while Linux looks popular because of its growth rate, it's market share is still small. China and South America have tremendous economic growth rates compared to 1st world countries (10% growth per quarter), but their economies are still relatively small and complicated to deal with.
So don't assume the growth of Linux means the downfall of MS. That would be stupid.
>>What exactly, if not freedom, *does* he want?
>You must not have been around for too long; ESR
>has been quite vocal in his desire for "software
>that doesn't suck". This is why he supports
>open source.
I'm sorry to hear that his motivations are so
shallow. Maybe he should purchase some software
from Adobe. It doesn't suck. But it isn't open
source either. Or maybe he should rethink his
position. Or admit his true motivations.
The illustration ESR uses of a company selling fitting software for sawmills is relevant here, but I think he missed a point in that example.
There may be no advantage for the company he spoke to in opening their sources. But that company has potential customers who might have written their own software. Since many sawmills compete only within a fixed geographical area, they may feel that they have little to lose by giving that application away, and much to gain from all the usual arguments.
So where does that leave our software supplier ?
It's not sufficient to consider whether your product should be open-sourced - you also need to consider the effects on your business of someone else open-sourcing a replacement.
-adrian
Yep, forcing me to view it using a particular program on a particular platform - gotta love the OSS movement.
"We let you do whatever you want! - as long as it's Linux"
;)
ESR should write more code and less essays
> And also like the doctor who heals the patient,
> the lawyer that provides legal advice, the
> stock broker that provides financial advice,
> the psychiatrist that provides therapy.
Explain to me how any of these, except perhaps the first, is a Good Thing?
:)
Jeez, just get the SGML source and do whatever you want with it. The source is quite readable, and you can use it to generate whatever type of output you want (pretty much).
Heck, you can even use the RTF filter to make a document that is suitable for viewing in MS Word.
SGML is very cool, perhaps you should learn before flaming.
Correction: The first versions of IE were licensed extensions of Mosaic.
But the first versions of Netscape were stolen extensions of Mosaic, so what gives here?
I have a question that I hope someone out there can answer. At the end of Chaper 3 of TMC, ESR writes:
"Lowering the cost of a good tends to increase, rather than decrease,total investment in the infrastructure that sustains it. When the price of cars goes down, the demand for auto mechanics goes
up -- "
This just has me confused, and seems to be wrong. If this is basic economy theory then I'll shut up and go away.
How does this follow? In the old days, cars were cheap and there were LESS mechanics, no used car dealerships, etc. People used cars for a couple of years and disposed of them to buy new ones. You could do that - they were cheap. As cars became expensive, all that infrastructure grew up to support used cars and keep cars running longer. Am I missing something?
Look at TVs and VCRs - there used to be shops where you could get them repaired. Now there aren't - because they are CHEAP.
This should read "Lowering the cost of a good *eliminates* the infrastructure that exists to support it".
- Brannen
I think that you should organise it differently. If you program then you work. You can charge for labour. Just make a contract for it. There's nothing special about it. In construction work they do it all the time: charge hours and material. Programming takes time and requires some material (hardware, an office, etc.). That's still the most costly thing about it and that's how you can earn your money.
From this point of view, making a program for somebody is just another service. This is how you earn your money and has nothing to do with OSS or CSS. Most software companies that work on a project basis work that way: they estimate how much work it is to build the program and charge for building it.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
On the other hand, there are examples of people buying "old unsupported software" Witness some people going back to older versions of Word Perfect, or buying classic video game compilations.
Older versions of WordPerfect are still supported. You can even get things like the HP LaserJet 5si printer drivers for WordPerfect 5.1. In fact a writer friend of mine has recently contacted Corel with a question about WP5.1+, and not only got a knowlegable response (consider that Corel had no part in developing WP until version 7), but found that program development is still very much active, particularly maintaining internationalization and driver support.
As his article pointed out, video games are a special market all their own, with different rules.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Another problem is ESR's datapoint of "look at Freshmeat" If anything, Freshmeat is proof against quality code and sharing, and evidence for "fencing in" and bad code. Most of the code on Freshmeat is developed by a single coder, and most of it is very buggy and horrendous and will never gain the community effect of Apache, or the Linux kernel.
Is there really going to be a big developer following behind the latest and great CD player applet for GNOME? I think not.
You give Bill Gates too much credit. Despite the official line, MS is not a bunch of inovators under the command of the great Bill Gates. It is a company that reacts well to the moves of others. If Bill Gates was never born and Steve Jobs was never born, and Xerox execs still didn't know what they were sitting on, someone else would have come along and stolen the technology.
I don't see many of these forking problems you talk about in any of the major open source projects. The Linux kernel is not forked, Apache is not, the was a fork in gcc which was handled well and eventually rolled back in as the main version once it had proven itself. Just not that big a deal.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Well, to your company's programmers this software is open source. After all, your company can get access to the source to fix and improve things.
You don't want to release the software to the public, because it contains trade secrets. That's fine.
In actual world, many trade secrets are not worth keeping, because others have already thought and implemented similar things. In addition, there maybe parts of the internal system that could be released and be useful, without any secrets being given away.
One additional advantage for a company to release code as open source is that it can create a pool of programmers familiar with your software. This makes it easier to hire new people.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Nor is there a big developer following behind closed source CD player applets for Windows or the Mac. What you are missng is that many of those submissions on Freshmeat are small projects that require few members and in most cases add to or complement existing projects. There are hundreds of applets out there using GTK and designed for Gnome integration, the same can be said of QT/KDE or Gimp plugins or Apache modules. ESR's point was that open source development is not inherently unstable as some people claim and that the growth of open source submissions is proof of that.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
If my car is a product, why does my dealer charge me so much for a maintainence/repair contract?
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
The Golden Rule is: "Treat others as you would have them treat you". This says nothing about ignoring your own payoff. In fact, what it says is "When you want to increase your own payoff, increase the other guy's, too."
"...Raymond's Comedy of the Commons, where a cooperative few can support a large number of non-cooperators."
You should distinguish between coding non-cooperators (Microsoft, etc) and user non-cooperators (non-programming Linux users, etc). The first can be excluded by such simple means as the GPL (see www.az.com/~drysdam/GPL-as-strategy.html).
The second group is not a tragedy since there is no pool of resources being used up.
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Brooks' Law is "Adding programmers to a late software project makes it later." I strongly dispute Eric's claim that open source overcomes Brooks' Law. While open source may have advantages, super-speed in initial development is not one of them. It may be quick to *fix* vital bugs, but that's another matter. How fast is AbiWord being developed? Mozilla? (And how does the latter compare to the "Internet time" upgrades we used to have with browser versions?)
P.S. It was a pleasure working with Dr. Brooks as a grad student.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
In a negative-sum game, each move involves one player increasing his own value, by decreasing his competitors' value by a larger amount. For instance, suppose I break into your warehouse to steal your stock of Leif Garrett 45s. To cover my tracks, I burn down the warehouse, which still holds your entire supply of Farrah Fawcett-Major posters and "Keep On Truckin'" bumper stickers. Now I've increased my own value by the value of those 45s, and decreased your value by the value of not only the 45s, but also the posters and stickers.
A zero-sum game is one where the value one player obtains in each move is exactly the sum of what his competitors lose. If I steal the 45s, but don't damage your warehouse or other stock in any way, then the sum of what I've gained and what you've lost is zero.
A positive-sum game is one where one player gains in value more than he causes his competitors to lose. For instance, you concentrate on the Farrah posters you still have left. You get Farrah herself to autograph them. This doesn't change the value of what I have in stock, but it increases the value of your stock considerably.
Now, the interesting psychological importance of all this is that humans, unless they know game theory, tend to automatically assume that games are negative-sum or zero-sum -- which is often not the case. Richard Dawkins, in "The Selfish Gene," describes how in experiments, people repeatedly played as if the object were to defeat their competitor, rather than to maximize their own rewards. They failed to see the contest as all players competing against the "banker" dishing out rewards and punishments, and as a result, they wound up with payoffs substantially less than if they had cooperated.
I can't help but think of this when I see the biggest objection to ESR's paper being "It doesn't make sense (ever, is the implication) for companies to open-source; any benefits they reap from it, their competitors can reap also." This is symptomatic of the same assumption that kept the experimental subjects underperforming: assuming that defeating competitors was either necessary or sufficient for victory.
This is interesting, because it makes me think about Apple. Remember when they orphaned the IIe? What if, instead, they continued support on a pay-per model for the outdated product?
Others really earn the label.
I plan to write followups to both "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "The Magic Cauldron". I have a few ideas in mind for titles. Hopefully, these will be in the same spirit as the originals:
1. Knights of the Boardroom Table
2. Open Sorcery
3. A Code Jester in King Richard's Court
4. Slaying the Proprietary Dragon
5. Use the GPL or I'll Get Medieval on Your Arse
(All due respect to ESR, of course. I'm just having fun here.)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Ok, let's recap the points made, and the support for them:
Point: ESR is living in a fantasy world.
Support: Because I say so.
Point: Despite his pretense that he has something to say about open source, ESR's only real goal is to obtain a cult of personality for himself.
Support: Because I say so.
Point: ESR is completely, totally, utterly wrong, and will never in his whole life be right.
Support: Because I say so.
Point: I have a majority agreeing with me here on Slashdot, proving that I know more than ESR.
Support: Because I say so.
Now, exactly what was so valuable about your contribution that you think everyone needs to read it? All I read was a bunch of unsupported ad hominem attacks from someone who couldn't articulate let alone support his own views on open-source. I don't mind -- in fact, I applaud -- moderating such posts, useless to everything but the ego.
It's interesting, but it's pretty much a rehash of ideas that have been discussed almost to death everywhere over the last six months or so. I'd say ESR's basically out to round all of that discussion off and summarise the results: I think we need that, particularly from someone as respected as ESR. This is the kind of article that you'd want to point your boss at, but it doesn't really say much that's new.
That said, it is a good summary of the ideas, and though it isn't as revolutionary as CatB was in it's day, it should serve the role it was designed for.
ESR as econosocioanthropologist . . . it works for me . . .
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
This forum, like all of the ESR-oriented forums, demonstrates yet again that many are attempting, in vain as always, to validate, defend and persuade us of the superiority of open source over all other source code which isn't open source. The only proof that open source is valid, is defensible, and is in any sense better than souce which is not open source will be open source which changes the software landscape through its use. We're still waiting, ESR and devotees. Show us you can walk the talk. Anyone can talk, as many of you are proving yet again. Where's the beef?
Jeez. ESR's ASCII file is, in terms of little character games, as bad as anything ever posted by Katz. It's full of bolding commands and other foolishness. Why take ASCII *text* and fuss with it to the detriment of flat file legibility in a little editor?
>I'd like a real, not some second rate sociological
>mythmaking about tribal 'gifts' and so forth.
See this piece for once such discussion.
-matt
Do you find it hard to commit yourself to your own ideas, Eric?
{{I first tried to post this as one message, but it didn't work}}
First, what William said: "...thoughtful replies. I'll try, but it won't be easy -- you cover too many topics."
But unlike William, I'll only respond to a single theme.
>Linux can only follow Windows precedents;
Linux was network and internet aware and responsive before Windows knew it existed.
Linux multitasked from day one, Windows was retrofitted for multitasking. Linux has been multiuser friendly from day one, Windows only started down this road a year or two ago. Linux knew how to use many different hardware architectures very early in it's evolution, Windows (NT only) can now use 2.
The only (broad) area where Linux is following "Windows precedents" is in the GUI area. And lets not forget that Windows followed the Macintosh into that realm (who in turn was following Xerox PARC).
If we change that statement to:
"Linux can only follow precedents"
The argument carries a little more weight -- all of the items I mentioned above were adopted from previous/contemporary operating systems.
However it carries weight only until we look a little further and realize that nearly all software was adapted from another source. Like the world of literature and movies, there are very few -original- ideas out there.
Linux "only following precedents" is not a weakness, but a strength. Linux (like any free-open system) can, and has, adopt any good idea it sees providing there are people interested in it. Microsoft (like any closed system) can only adopt good ideas when it can make money off it (or at least not lose money).
-mat
I want to see some statistics that prove that people who agree with Stallman are only a minority of members of the open source community. Without that, this looks like just another attempt by our friend Eric to minimize the very real concerns many of us have about the real freedom of our software. Yeah, all that other stuff is nice, too, but three out of four (quality, reliability, and choice) are quite possible with proprietary software too. All you need are developers who care about the product and the customers rather than just the stock options.
>... there is no economic incentive to carry out
>the research to do something truly innovative
Most of the "innovations" currently in vogue today came from pure research labs. The mouse, hypertext, multi computer/preson collaborative document creation (workgroups), and network video conferencing all came from Doug Engelbart in 1968 (at Stanford?). A graphical user interface with icons and a pointing device came from Xerox PARC in the same era. And of course the Internet grew out of Arpanet which was developed by the Defense department and universities.
The only area I can think of (at the moment) where a commercial company being truly "innovative" is id software and Castle Wolfenstein (which reincarnated as Doom and Quake). Oh yeah, there's also the Amiga and the Video Toaster, but the innovation there is primarily in making existing technology affordable and accessible.
>(emacs still thinks there's no mouse).
I don't quite understand this statement. I've used a mouse with emacs before (admittedly, I don't normally use emacs). Besides emacs is not Linux, it's emacs.
Anyway, to at least approach the main gist of your comment - Where's the Economic Sense in Open Source?
It costs too much and develop, maintain and support a software system after it grows past a certain level of complexity or number of users. Let your users develop, maintain and support each other where they can.
Your salable value is in your expertise, experience and in-depth understanding of the system. This body of experience can be sold as publications, contract development work, and "branded" products. At home I buy white box computers and parts. At work I buy Digital, Dell, HP and IBM because we need the value and reliability they add.
-ma
The correct spelling of `definitely' is not `definately'. Why is that so hard for you?
While individuals put money in their pocket, overall every industry loses money. It's the nature of the beast, that is, CorpGov LLC standard "Private profits, Public risks". The military (funded by you and me) issued in the radio, television, internet, and every other product. So we (the peons) fund the research while those on top reap the benefits. Hell, the government was gonna give AT&T the Internet but the giant CorpGov LLC couldn't see the forest for the trees. It's all a pyramid scam with you and I on bottom. http://parsons.iww.org/~iw/oct1997/graphics/pyrami dcapiw.gif There is no profits in reality! Only those that got and those that don't. You and I are shut out of the "cash flow".
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
You've got a vlarge company with about 15 significant competitors. You have developed an in-house piece of software "Y" to run all aspects of a new (and highly competitve) line of business. The software has extreme use value, but no sale value.
What I don't see Eric's model capturing is the fact that you would want to keep "Y" closed-source to prevent competitors from gaining benefit from the technology, code fragments, business models, etc of "Y". You're not afraid of your competitor making and selling "Z" from it, but from using it to gain insight into your business or to enhance their business in a way that causes revenue loss not directly related to software.
Does this connect with anyone?
I don't think open-source is unstable, I just
question the assumption that open-source implies quality.
In my experience, most open-source stuff released on Freshmeat is very often, someone's first project or learning experience. And most of the code is very ugly.
In general, only the Cathedral style projects IMHO, have nice clean code. The GNU stuff, the BSD stuff. Linux code in comparison looks like a nightmare hacked up by amateurs.
At my previous company, code-reviews and API contracts were enforced. Everyone had to document their interfaces and use proper object-oriented design and analysis. (we used Rational Rose).
Result? Code that was nice, clean, abstracted, modularized, and documented with a high amount of use. Most people on the team were also familiar with design patterns, and everything was documented with respect to this.
In contrast, I find most of the open-source stuff to be very poorly thought out. The only projects where it isn't happen to be one where there is a superstar maintainer who doesn't allow bullshit into the tree.
The problem with the release-early release-often mentality of OSS is that people end up patching and building code on top of a design that is really just a throw away prototype.
And how much of it is total utter crap that no one users?
Visited windows95.com lately? Visited simtel archives lately? Loads of shareware, alot of it
with source.
What's your point? That somehow Freshmeat proves that open-source leads to higher quality and more cooperative?
IMHO, Freshmeat is an example of somehow hacking up something to learn how to use GTK or Linux or whatever, and then uploading it and slapping GPL on it. Big deal. I have about 20 different projects sitting on my harddrive that I haven't released to anyone because I don't think they are useful to anyone but me. I wouldn't want to foist bad unusable code on Freshmeat just to say "me too"
Freshmeat needs MODERATION.
Methinks ESR has been sippin' at ye olde Magic Cauldron too much. Why is ye floor spinning?
Too bad that you don't release them. How do you know that no one else would find them useful?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Too bad that you don't release them. How do you know that no one else would find them useful?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
---------
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
My biggest problem with the way esr writes is that he has an unfortunate tendency to joust with straw men. His deconstruction of "The Tragedy of the Commons" is a rather sophmoric set of straw men. It always surprises me to see such fuzzy thinking from people who otherwise pride themselves on rational thought.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles scream and shout.
Eric Raymond makes a very good point in noting that the value in software is more in maintenance and support than the product itself. In light of this, there is perhaps an additional business model that supports this notion without requiring source code to be freely available.
Consider a software company that leases software. Business's pay to use the software on a yearly basis (for example). This gives the software company a steady stream of revenue based upon the number of people using their software. In return, the users get support, timely maintenance releases and future features.
To make this example more concrete, consider the accounting industry. They certainly can benefit from software that deals with the everchanging tax codes. Now, most accounting firms are small and it doesn't really make sense for them to collaborate on a software project when they have no programming expertise. They're accountants, not hackers. Also, due to their size, it's not feasible for them to hire programmers for this task.
Here, a software company fills a definite need. As experts in their domain, you can expect the software company to keep abreast of the frequent regulation changes in Washingtion, DC, and update their software accordingly. Accountants need to do accounting, not hacking away at some monstrous piece of software on a regular basis.
So, the accountants, in essence, pay to use the software as service (one that's updated regularly), not as a product. Here, the software company has no reason to release their code. What might happen? A competing software company might snatch it out from under them and take their revenue away. It is after all service based, but someone had to make the initial investment to get the ball rolling. The company benefits from closed source, and at the same time has enough revenue to properly maintain and support their software.
This, I think, is a viable alternative to the business models that Eric suggests. Unfortunately, not everybody who uses software is a webmaster capable of writing his own, nor is it the agenda of most companies to delve in writing software. They'd rather being doing what they're good at, and leaving the software to experts, namely a software company who steps in to fill the need.
Note, this is not the typical consumer software market, but these applications probably account for more software and certainly more revenue (SAP?).
So, in conclusion, there's money to be made from software as a service, and let's leave the coding to people who specialize in it, rather than laymen who just want to use the software.
One of the problems with a successful game is that you wind up with a legion of followers who want minor improvements, little bugs fixed, and the like. The more of them you have, the more distracting they get - especially when you're hip-deep in The Next Great Thing.
However, you're no longer generating enough revenue from sales of the old game to justify spending your limited development time on working on it - and you NEED the Next Big Thing to start the cycle all over again. But you also don't want to abandon support for the old one and piss off your loyal fans.
Open Sourcing your game accomplishes a lot for you:
1) You relieve the pressure for bug fixes and enhancements for a non-revenue-generating product.
2) Your product gets spread to additional customers you would not have otherwise reached (Amigas...)
3) You get to look really cool and enlightened.
and in the particular case of Doom...
4) You get to teach an entire generation of programmers how cool game code is. (How often do you get to see the inner workings of a real game? Caramack single-handedly created a legion of 3D game programmers)
It seems to me they released the source to Quake as well (someone please confirm?) and I suspect that QuakeII source is forthcoming once QuakeIII is going strong.
ESR is dead on - again - although his explination could have run a little deeper here. A little more history (and maybe some JC quotes) would have helped make his point more strongly.
DG
> Not true. When I was doing consulting work, we regularly could underbid proprietary solutions by using Linux, giving us a significant competitive advantage while actually maintaining a higher margin than our competitors.
Each software has their strengths. The advantage of MS products are that they support the most common features of the business market. The advantage of Linux is its easy customisation and ability to solve once-off problems while maintaining profits to the smaller consulting companies. It all comes down to the same basic issue, if you look after the customer properly, then the profits will look after themselves.
LL
How about Turbo Power Software.
They are one the first and the best open source, third party tools software developer. They are so generous that they even give permission that their old products (BTreeFiler) to be shared on the ground that selling it would be a bad reputation.
Open Source works best to people who are the "best". So stop wondering why it does not work with you.
rockzmanila@yahoo.com
p.s. i don't want to create an account
Richard is a Saviour.
He wants to save the world from ignorance and poverty. Bill Gates got 100 billion dollars for what?
Tell me exactly which of his software is worth a billion dollar? E Bill Gates advocates are everywhere. Setting up anti software piracy laws in every country.
Soon this countries willl realize that those budget deficits could have reduced if they have not hastely embraced the technology that is dumped by the west.
Where's the Economic Sense in Open Source?
You have forgotten that today is world of global community , the Internet.
What is economic sense in giving free email boxes (Hotmail, yahoo etc.) Honestly I don't know. What I know is that Yahoo became a billion dollar company and I did not pay a single penny for their wonderful services.
The Open Source Model will surely be a big bang in the near future. Some of the groups and leading authorities in several countries started to notice it.
http://www.mb.com.ph/info/9906/11jb08a.asp
SlashDot source code is open source. So are the programming tools that it's built with. So is the operating system that it runs on. So are all the protocols that you used to write your message: PPP, IP, TCP, HTTP.
Wake up and smell the Internet. "... open source which changes the software landscape through its use", indeed.
If you would like another example, call up some of the leading embedded OS vendors such as Wind River Systems or Lynx, and ask them which C compiler they sell and support. Hint: it's gcc. Very likely, your cell phone runs software that was built with open-source tools.
chapter 6 :
"Let's say you hire someone to write to order (say) a specialized accounting package for your business. That problem won't be solved any better if the sources are closed rather than open; the only rational reason you might want them to be closed is if you want to sell the package to other people. "
Hypothetically, as a company (that doesn't sell software) I open my accounting package that I had developed in house. Assuming it was reasonably well written, it becomes popular and benifits from improvements made by the community.
Now, my competitor also starts to use it, but without the initial startup cost. Neither of us gain with respect to the other, except I had to pay for the development.
Am I reaping benifits that I don't see?
Hail to the Sun God! He is the Fun God! Ra! Ra! Ra!
>Freshmeat needs MODERATION.
Or at the very least, reviews. This is something I've been thinking about and really missed for open source stuff. Can't code but want to contribute? Think about setting up a reviews site and reviewing what does exist.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'd love someone to explain this better. How are developers supposed to make money in this brave new OS world?
The only avenue I see in ESR's document is to be picked up by some benevolent Accessorizor who thinks my efforts will help them sell more accessories - the 'Open R&D' idea.
That sucks. Let me explain my situation:
I am a partner in a small software development firm. We have 5 staff (including the partners), and write applications for a specialised sector of the market. The major application we develop is a high-ticket, low-volume product.
We may have some small competitive advantages over others in the same arena, but that's not important. Niche application software does not win on technical merits, however much I would like it to. It wins on how good a job the sales people do at convincing the customer that our product is better for their purpose than someone elses.
Right now the product is closed source. It is never likely to be something everybody has on their desktop, in fact we think the product will have a limited lifespan, say 5 years. As technology advances, the functionality that our particular software offers will not be as necessary as it is today.
I can live with that, and I think that closed source is the best way for this product to remain. It's sort of like the Doom example, before they open-sourced it. Plenty of reasons for ID to open-source Doom, AFTER they had made back the R&D cost, plus a little profit. But should they have open-sourced Doom from the beginning? Not in my opinion.
Judging by some of the comments here, a few people would disagree with that statement. I don't think that's reasonable. I'm not in this for the money (well, maybe a little). I love to program. I'd like to have the freedom to program whatever I want, help write open source software, change the world, etc. and than means I need a way to support myself financially. I'd write open-source software all day long, if someone would only pay my bills.
If we keep our product closed, I can probably make enough money from it to finance my personal programming projects. If we open the source, I don't see how I can do that. Can anyone point out what I'm missing?
I'm an Anonymous Coward because I fear the flame.
If your 15 competitors can use your code in their business, then your code does have sale value. Just not to everyone.
I agree. It seemed more an act of reciprocal generosity on Carmack's part. Basically a sort of "hey kids, thanks for helping us sell DOOM with all those pwads and stuff, here, now you can play with all of it".
I doubt releasing the DOOM source brought id much additional revenue.
BUT...
I do think id's games are a very strong example of the power of the open source development model, but not one that is relevant to commercial enterprises, since id kept a lot of "secret bits" to themselves, and mods to Quake or DOOM had to be non-commercial. But by allowing mods to be made, and releasing the code and tools to help people make them, id allowed the formation of an entire community of developers who increased the value of the game well beyond what they paid for it. Of course it also benefitted id, since it made the games much more popular.
> A key fact that the distinction between use and sale value allows us
> to notice is that only sale value is threatened by the shift from
> closed to open source; use value is not. Let's say you hire someone to
> write to order (say) a specialized accounting package for your
> business. That problem won't be solved any better if the sources are
> closed rather than open; the only rational reason you might want them
> to be closed is if you want to sell the package to other people.
This is not true. ESR misses a very important and commonly stated
reason: a company may believe that exclusive access to a piece of
proprietary software provides the company with a competitive
advantage. For example, a microprocessor-design company might embed
considerable experience and research in a computer program to improve
the quality of CPU designs. They might quite rationally believe that
if they gave that software away, their competitors would use it to
improve their own processors and take business away. H&R Block may
quite rationally believe that their tax software is enough better than
the competition that it garners them customers or increases the
efficiency of their preparers. BMW may quite rationally believe that
their engine-design software allows them to build better engines for
less money and sell more cars.
In many cases, this is delusional, but in other cases it is
undoubtedly quite justified.
It is odd that ESR missed this point, because I think it is the
fundamental reason behind the difference between the GPL and BSD-style
licenses. RMS realized that there is a large incentive for companies
to "take software proprietary", and went to great lengths to prevent
it in the GPL. If "taking software proprietary" were wholly
irrational, there would be little reason for going out of one's way to
prevent it.
ESR actually alludes to this, tangentially, later in the article:
> (One objection sometimes raised to open-sourcing hardware drivers is
> that it may reveal important things about how your hardware operates
> that competitors could copy, thus gaining an unfair competitive
> advantage. Back in the days of three- to five-year product cycles this
> was a valid argument. Today, the time your competitors' engineers
> would need to spend copying and understanding the copy is a
> substantial portion of the product cycle, time they are not spending
> innovating or differentiating their own product. Plagiarism is a trap
> you want your competitors to fall into.)
However, his rejection is rather specific to hardware drivers, and
rather flippant as well. The real reason it is rational to
open-source a hardware driver is that the expansion of the potential
market to Linux and BSD users more than makes up for the loss of
trade secrets.
What exactly, if not freedom, *does* he want?
High quality software that doesn't crash?
It seems to me that esr is interested in the results of Free Software, but doesn't much care how he gets them. (Of course, Free Software is the easiest way to get there currently.)
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
"a specialized accounting package"
As in, it is useless to others. In fact, for the specialized parts, there is no practical difference between open and closed since all the developers in the world who work on that system are already doing so.
However, just because we love to work for free, doesn't mean that we can! I have a wife and three kids to provide for! After working a job that pays the bills (writing software comercially) and spending time with the family, there's certainly not much time left over to write software for free.
--randy
Sorry, my info is not free unless I decide so.
Re, MP3s, everyone does it, just like speeding, but it is still wrong. In the case of music, the recording industry has also been screwing us over: I hate to pay for a whole album when I want only 2 songs.
who said anything against getting paid to write useful commercial software? we're talking whether or not it's free/open source, not whether someone gets paid for it.
So basically, RMS argues that because it is easy to copy software, and because it is nice to be able to modify it on occasion and fix bugs, etc., that everybody has a _moral obligation_ to produce free software.
That's what I don't buy. ESR argues that open source software is good because it enables a development model which produces high-quality, extensible, flexible software. (The business models are essentially justifications of these basic premises.)
Frankly, if Microsoft software were high-quality, if developing using VB and COM and ASP were a dream, if NT were scalable for enterprise-level tasks, I wouldn't care that it wasn't free software.
But none of these are true, and the evidence shows that open-source/free software is better. I choose the tools that will let me do what I want to do as quickly and efficiently as possible. I find the moral argument of "it's easy to do, so we should have the right to do it!" to be silly.
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
As a programmer, I rather like depositing "recognition" in my bank account. But working on something which helps people is good, too -- as long as the bills are paid. The best thing to do is both. Obviously.
An automobile can not readily be placed in my computer and copied, whereas a software program can. And I can't really buy a CD-ROM of software for $99 and own it like a car -- I can just buy a license which allows me to use it.
People please don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole. ESR is not advocating OSS for EVERYTHING. There is a time for OSS and there is a time for CSS. It is a strategic business decision that can result in some amazing synergies. If it is just you and one other competitor, you are correct, OSS'ing your software probably won't help you unless your competitor agrees to develop it further as well. A larger audience attracts more developers which attracts more innovation free of charge. The business decision in that case is to decide how much that free innovation is worth to you. Original development costs are sunk, you can't get them back. OSS will help you get some free innovation. Consider it interest on your original development money...
OSS is a major conceptual shift, one that many can't immediately grasp. Don't give up, you will benefit from understanding it.
-Chuck
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
In Bazaars whatever works well wins over whatever does not. Whatever doesn't work well but is clean outlives whatever works well one version at a time. People need clear code in order to go forward. Microsoft needs its own spin doctors in order to go forward.
Totally different ball game.
You forget that just because there's computers everywhere doesn't mean that every buyer is a veteran. More and more people will get ripped off.
Speaking of spaghetti code what are you comparing Limux to?
release early is a means of destroying the myth of get the latestr code. realease often scales extremely well with the interest of the user without making arbitrary decisions about the user's expertise. I think it's just beautiful. You don't care about new documention for foo driver which has no effect on what you do, YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOWNLOAD IT. But don't tell me to wait till BSD or MS or IBM or Apple's schedule says they'll release their security upgrade.
Finally I don't know what you're smoking almost everything that I've downloaded has run perfectly
(in alpha series).
Software is not Hardware. You can use half a program quite easily. You cannot drive half a car.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Ypu don't buy everything you see on television do you?
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Actually, Freshmeat has the capability for reviews. I've even seen a few.
Some cretin moderated this post to the flamebait level when it actually makes an unusually critical point. Shame on the cretin who did this. There is a fundamental problem with the communism at the heart of the open source fantasy, and this comment, repeated below, makes it. Here `tis again:
Yep, all you software developers are part of the service sector. You're not producing a commodity, you're providing a service. Just like the person behind the counter at Burger King, or the janitor who empties the wastebasket in your cube.
And all the good software has already been written or is in the process of being written. It's
Open Sourced(tm) so don't get any ideas about new approaches. We don't look kindly on people trying to fork the source tree. Just move up to the edge and chip away at the rock like everybody else.
And some people love to work on upgrading their car and making it a HotRod.
Your point?
Just because someone likes to do something as a hobby for free doesn't mean EVERYONE should do it, and that somehow it should be a revolution.
To me, anyways, after reading this latest piece. The notion of being reimbursed for your efforts (as Stallman and others insinuate) through software 'support' simply does not apply, especially as regards games. People bought Doom because they wanted to upgrade from the shareware 'teaser', not because they wanted software support--the people who make money in this case are those who wrote the help books; if id simply GPL'ed Doom in the first place, they'd have been out of business long ago. 12 year old kids aren't going to ask for help playing games, they will ask from their friends. The reason they released Doom was simply because it was obsolete at that point.
Raymond's argument instead infers that an evolutionary ecosystem would have built around the Doom code, a la Linux, to somehow make it better. This simply has not been the case--old code is dead code. Why in general would any gaming company want to GPL their source code?; games have a very short lifespan, and their success is based on the fact that they have something others cannot copy.
In the Linux world, you have (too) many versions of Tetris and Minesweeper, mostly as coding exercises, but nothing really unique or compelling--which I suspect is Open Source/GPL's real weakness: lack of originality. Linux can only follow Windows precedents; there is no economic incentive to carry out the research to do something truly innovative (emacs still thinks there's no mouse). The tech carrot pulling the industry these days is $$$, *not* 'making software that doesn't suck'; rather the inverse seems to be true, i.e. making sucky software guarantees $$$.
Scenario B: what if Bill Gates got hit on the head tomorrow with one of his many inhouse videocams, and decided to GPL Windows and Office? (Raymond should have brought up this at his talk); what possible advantages could there be? Netscape did it in hopes of making a new open standard and breaking the Microsoft stranglehold; as far as I can tell with Mozilla, they haven't succeeded. As for Windows, they own the standard OS as well as the desktop suite. What advantages could there possibly be for MS? So that MS can make money printing books instead? So that Corel could take and rebrand it Corel Office? So that IBM could finally have Windows back from Bill?
Someone please explain this 'logic' to me; though a lot of this appears as a troll, I am perfectly serious--I'd like a real, not some second rate sociological mythmaking about tribal 'gifts' and so forth.
Because parts and time cost money. Most mechanics do not work for free neither do most parts. Programmers however love to work for free as long as they are getting the proper recognition...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
What exactly, if not freedom, *does* he want?
You must not have been around for too long; ESR has been quite vocal in his desire for "software that doesn't suck". This is why he supports open source.
Huh? Such as? From ESR I see ideas like "In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.". This is startlingly apt- and explains otherwise inexplicable things about the Linux movement, not to mention where the profitability really is in the broader PC industry! Your counterexample is? You're not specifying. ;)
Personally, in contrast to the fellow who said 'I support RMS's ideas because I believe in utopia', I support RMS's ideas because I do _not_ believe in utopia... somebody mentioned how RMS is the way he is because he pretty well got chased out of the MIT AI lab by proprietary software. No hackers anymore to talk with- just users and competing proprietary LISP machines- now fast forward a few years- where are they now? Nowhere. This killed off a healthy software ecology and died off in meaningless conflicts leaving _nothing_ in its place, wasting a huge amount of time and effort. My personal take on that history is that it is rather disgusting. Hard to see how the people could have acted differently at the time- but still disgusting.
In theory, capitalistic jealously guarded intellectual property might result in progress. In the real world it appears to be all too susceptible to stagnation and corruption- software rot, feature creep, attempts to prolong the useful life of some code long after it is dead. In contrast to the usual use of Microsoft as a culprit, I'll say that Netscape (the traditional, not Mozilla) is a great example of closed software rot and failure to develop acceptably. By contrast, you have something like Apache- when matched in benchmarks it loses to IIS, but in actual normal use (its true purpose) it's been proven resilient, effective and in many cases (such as heavy latency or really varied load atypical to controlled intranet-like tests) it's greatly superior to IIS in practice. If it was a classic commercial product- there would be no alternative but to slant things the same way as IIS does, and get them to perform equally well on benches and equally unreliably in the real world (there are always tradeoffs). Since it is open source and maintained by those who actually run it, the likelihood is that it will continue to be optimized for real use EVEN IF that means it continues to do poorly at strange and artificial benchmarks. ESR talks almost as big as Alvin Toffler, but he happens to be trying to understand that real world which you (the above AC) do not seem to comprehend. Pragmatism rules most things. If open source leads to healthier software then it will continue to thrive, whether you can accept its politics and morals or whether you think them hopelessly naive. It's still early yet- wait and see, but don't wait too long. The open source train is at the station, and there comes a time when you have to make up your mind to get on, or you'll just have a hell of a lot of running to do to catch up later
Just like being an outcast at my school doesn't mean what I say is irrelevent.
It does mean, however, that what you say will likely be ignored by the majority of people at your school.
Since you are an outcast, if you come up with a great idea, you will have no success in trying to implement it by telling everyone about your great idea. In fact, now that your idea has become closely associated with you, few in the majority will listen to the idea even if it comes from someone else. So when someone else Believes in your idea, they will have to present it differently and distance themselves from you in order to be considered by the majority.
ESR is a severe realist and is doing all he can to get as much as possible of RMS's ideal accepted by as many people as possible. We are very close to a situation in which music is free (speech), simply because it's easy to copy. I'm not sure how the music industry will continue to make a profit in decades to come, but I know it won't be based on limiting access to the musical "binaries". In the same vein, once all software is open-sourced, we will be in much the same situation. The majority will realize that they can do anything they want with the software...and they will. We will achieve de facto freedom before we achieve de juris freedom, simply because those who make the law always have an interest in the status quo. I like the course ESR has plotted; it means we might have software freedom in my lifetime. And while I don't disagree with RMS's ideals, I do disagree with his methods. If we depended solely on him, we would NEVER see software freed.
What BS, Mr. AC! That's character assasination based on bogus issues irrelevant to ESR's argument (including "credentials"). Do you have anything of substance to say about his argument? Hmmm?
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
ESR offers a nice summary of the situation. I'll attempt to generalise it by looking a little bit more closely at the software development cycle and relating it back to some basic economic principles.
If we accept the analogy that software development (and indeed all intellectual endeavour) is based on exploring and developing the (potentially infinite) Noosphere, then we can look at the common law practices that developed and codified as a result of the gold explorations as it evolved from the goldrush days to today's highly efficient staged exploration, extraction, processing, refinement and disposal.
This can be considered the 5 stages of software development
alpha) from exploring the basic idea
beta) ramping through prototypes
gamma) sale of industrial strength product
delta) major iterations
epsilon) obsolescence and shutdown/maintenance
Now economics can be basically divided into consumption and capital goods, what ESR defines as the sale and use value in measuring software. The sale value is all important as it is the final "good" that is ultimately consumed, the end application in other words. The use goods are the intermediate software needed to produce the sale goods (compilers, drivers, OS, etc). By themselves they have high development costs but are under external cost pressure so as to minimise the final sale product. This explains the commoditisation of these products through OpenSource means as unless there is extreme specialisation (high performance compilers, embedded systems) people prefer familiar toolsets and reduced learning curve.
However, the economic justification of charging money is that the developers of these tools have to eat while spending time producing and refining the languages and techniques. No gnu compilers, minimal OpenSourced products as the entry costs for beginners is too high. This has to be balanced by the fact that for profit or personal satisfaction, the compiler writers have to eat or get reimbursed for their time. So the economic requirements at the different development stages are quite different.
alpha - exploration - grubstake, a bet on a pie in the sky that your idea might turn out to have some commercial applications
beta - extraction - seed money to dig through the possibilities and identify the gold seam
gamma - processing - development and sale of a useful entity
delta - refinement - adding increasing value and generating higher order goods like jewelery from the basic gold
epsilon - disposal - the whole enterprise has to be profitable to ensure that there is enough funds (e.g. professional indemity) to ensure that the customers are taken care of even if disaster strikes. This would be considered in the context of environmental cleanup after the seam runs out.
Now the current economic model of software patents and IPOs give rise to a rather unhealthy situation in my view. Essentially companies are rewards for the first to strike gold and gain a monopoly in a area which they can exploit to the hilt. As ESR pointed out, this leads to rather questional quality and poor customer satisfaction.
OpenSource offers a viable alternative BUT the problem is that unless it can offer a decent mechanism of supporting the intermediate tools (ie compilers, OS, 3D world construction) the only outcomes will be small toy programs which are done as academic exercises or learning experiences. This can be seen in the relatively unsophisticated capital markets of SE Asia as apart from government supported conglomerates, businesses are run by small family groups.
Thus the OpenSource movement needs to address the intellectual property rights issue to really grow from being a grassroots protest against existing proprietary software practices, to being a supported industry in its own right. Though I've got a few ideas, I'd really like people to suggest what would be a workable system given the entrenched myriad of vested interests in the current software patent approach.
This includes the usual "dirty tricks" that have plagued the development of mineral extraction. Claim jumping, absentee landlords, appraisal dilution, highway robbery, economic externalities, legal responsibility to upstream and downstream suppliers and customers, etc... Fun and games if you're young and desperate but not something that suits a family man (or woman).
Despite its appearances, the IT industry still acts like a roughshod mining town chasing a vaporush than a professional outfit!
LL
PS. Even I'm not immune from opportunistic monetary rewards as I would like to be remembered for originality in coining the phrase vaporush but unfortunately there's no way of directly capitalising on it. Such is life.
I just realised how much ESRs business models are like Patterns
All he has to do is change the format a bit and they'll fit right in at WikiWikiWeb
First, expand your thinking about politics. Communism, in practice, involves using state power to enforce utopian ideas about how people should work together for a supposed common good - ignoring actual conditions - and has been a miserable failure. OSS, on the other hand, has appeared and grown despite the common practice of the establishment and the state. This is because, as ESR points out, it is functions well in the free market - it's just that it uses a different set of business models. And there is nothing wrong with the service industry: while janitors and burger flippers are the low end, true; there is also the high end of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers. Programmers and consultants have always tended twoards the high end, and will continue to do so, IMHO. So that first quoted paragragh is just fear-mongering.
The second paragraph is even worse, containing baseless accusations about the character of the OSS community. If you have something of real value to contribute, then do so! If it requires a radical new approach, then lets see it! If you have to fork an existing code tree to accomplish your grand vision, then go for it! But it just sounds like some lamer whining to me.
As far as I am concerned, the orignal post deserved it's flamebait moderation.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
1) You are assuming that the proprietary-to-company stuff is open sourced, such as, e.g., the license key generator. This is a ridiculous assumption. Nothing requires you to distribute your software even if it is covered by the GPL. Not to mention that any competent project done in today's world is going to have a modular plug-in architecture, meaning that you don't even have to link your proprietary business practices into the code base as a whole (i.e., they don't have to be covered by the GPL just because the rest of the project is!).
2) Let's face it, most business process software has been hashed and rehashed until it's so old-hat that there's no competitive value in keeping it proprietary. How many #@%@ accounting systems are out there in the market anyhow? Why should I think that my own new accounting and inventory management software gives anybody any competitive advantage? There are industry and government standards that force any accounting or inventory software to be pretty much the same. By Open Sourcing it, I accomplish two things:
a) I allow others outside of my company to take on some of the development costs. As my boss once told me, "nobody is ever going to buy us because we have a nifty internal accounting system, they're going to buy us because we have a nifty product." This, for example, is why ISP's use Apache. The bigger ISP's have the internal talent to write an HTTP server -- heck, I have enough talent to do that, HTTP is a dirt-simple protocol (though the 1.1 spec, thanks to Microsoft's help, is considerably nastier) -- but it makes more sense for them to all use Apache and individually contribute modules and improvements that fit their own needs.
b) I get a larger debugging pool. In fact, I might release the GPL'ed version to the net first, before upgrading to it in-house, just to let others be my guinea pigs first. After all, if it turns out that my Accounts Recievable program is eating accounts, I'd rather that someone else discover it first!
One more thing: Once a project reaches a stage where any improvements will incorporate company-proprietary business methods rather than industry-standard or government-legislated business methods, there's nothing forcing you to continue distributing it. You've gotten help in building the basic framework, others can take that basic framework and do what they like with it, and you can happily use your own proprietary version in-house without ever releasing it to the general public. The GPL doesn't stop you from making your own proprietary version. It just says that IF you distribute it outside of your company, you have to make the source code available too and must allow the person who got it to distribute it too.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
For a paper that reads like a simplified version of the Other Eric's, you might want to wander by my home page to read something I did last year and sent to the Other Eric back in January for comment. (Please note that the Other Eric had parts of 'Cauldron' already up on his web site back then, so we sort of cross-pollinated, I think).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The patent system is not per-se to patent ideas, but inventions. Ideas are cheap, easy to create. Its the invention, the expenditure of time and mental effort that needs to be rewarded.
This is where I think that the patent system falls down. It rewards ideas, not inventions. Inventions are being diluted by all the trivial ideas being patented.
Scott Crosby
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Not only are quality, reliability and choice possible with proprietary software, but each of those has a "good enough" variant that is very dangerous. And, unfortunate as it may be, many in the "Open Source" community are accepting "good enough" Free Software, too.
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Considering that ESR is personally into the occult and witchcraft, it isn't surprising that his 'work' is peppered with cauldrons and magick.
However, he's generally more of a hypemeister than a scientist. There has to be more than rhetoric for it to matter. Credentials, please?
i appreciate everything that ESR has done, and I admire him for the things that he has accomplished, but I am starting to get the feeling that he likes to hear himself talk. Great ideas and all, but I don't think ESR is the do all end all, if he was gone tomorrow another person would get the lime lite and nothing would be different. I am so glad he is here to tell everyone what they must think, except for us "Vocal Minority"
First, let me congratulate esr on yet another thought-provoking essay. I'd like to bring up just one point, however, that was brushed over in this essay, specifically section 4 - "Information wants to be free".
Eric, you've setup the basic of an economic model to base open source on. This lays to rest many questions of the economics behind the free software movement. But you skipped over a central point - one that's debated and brought up daily across the geek community - the idea that information should be free.
Two cases: MP3s and "warez". Despite wide-spread media campaigning and propaganda, not many people consider this to be "wrong". The simplest arguement - is that it's free - and if it's free, why should I go elsewhere (possibly with more hassle) to have the priveledge of paying for it? Especially considering the cost-benefit of getting caught is so low.
This is an issue that desperately needs to be analyzed and thought out. Programmers modus operanti is "copy rip copy" from other programmers. It makes economic sense - why reinvent the wheel? MP3s mean (nearly) zero cost to aquire something you want (music), and this broadly applies to almost anything that can be distributed digitally. Today that means about everything.
What's stopping people from simply pushing the download button and getting something for "free"?
--
I am very much in agreement with the views
of Stallman. I find the attempts of esr to
marginalize these views to be quite
distasteful.What exactly, if not freedom,
*does* he want?
He's got pretty big shoes to fill though.. you may remember:
Understand My Job Please!
I agree that another person would take up the job, but as far as doing as good of a job as he has done? I don't know about that. I mean the guy just spoke to over 20,000(?) microsoft personell, he's got a big pair, (and I don't mean shoes here)..
how I'd rephrase ESR's subject.
cloning = everyone understands the interfaces by looking at an 'impartial' jury
ergo, no quadratic costs to keep everyone coordinated.
Can anybody kindly write up a summary of this stuff. For those who don't have the time, don't understand English too well.
And if Free Software turns it all into a commodity... well, the days of the robber barons would be over at least.
Of course. ESR is feeding off the stupidity of the anti-MS masses by claiming that his "theories" supposedly explain how Microsoft can exist.
This is ridiculous. MS doesn't make horrible software. In fact it makes a heck of a lot better quality software than most companies. (Navigator vs. IE anyone?)
There is no "software monopolies". The number of software companies is much larger now than in any time in history. The market is exploding.
Here is the reason that ESR and Stallman have started this mess:
They are the only ones that haven't got rich off the capatalistic software industry. They are jealous. Period.
This entire episode is incredibly stupid. How long do we have to put up with ESR and his legions holding up Apache and Mozilla as shining examples of how good OSS is? This is ridiculous, both products are of marginal quality.
As for OSS, ask them this simple question:
If you make your money not off the software, but off of supporting your software, doesn't it behoove you economically to produce software THAT REQUIRES LOTS OF SUPPORT???
The other side of this coin is that most vendors buying this factory model will also fail in the longer run. Funding indefinitely-continuing support expenses from a fixed price is only viable in a market that is expanding fast enough to cover the support and life-cycle costs entailed in yesterday's sales with tomorrow's revenues. Once a market matures and sales slow down, most vendors will have no choice but to cut expenses by orphaning the product.
This is the dumbest argument yet from ESR. What company provides indefinite support for a fixed price product? Answer: No company does. Companies sell service contracts that expire and can be renewed.
ESR should go back to smoking pot.
There is the real world, and then there is ESR's fantasy world. ESR can write Cathedral and Bazaar versions 1 through 666 if he wants to, and he can continue to talk about how wonderful it would be if the world would become what he imagines it should, a world where he's famous and he's widely regarded as a genius. But no matter how hard he tries, the world won't change to become what he wants it to, and the world won't, as the Slashdot readers agree, ever widely regard him as either. The world is the world, and it is not ESR's fantasy. He is irrelevant - and he is bogus.
What happens when the company is no longer in business? Where do you get an upgrade?
Companies only make large software purchases from software companies that are solid, profitable, and have a proven track record just to avoid to this very real danger.
Companies would much prefer counting on a software company that has been viable for 10+ years than on the promise of free source code. Who's going to maintain this hunk of source code if it's not the original company who developed it? Another software company? In reality, open source projects that are mainly volunteer efforts have a tendency to rot when their original contributors get tired of the project and decide to move on. This applies more to highly specialized applications than to general tools (a la GNU).
Someone has to maintain the code and for most users of software (don't think MS Office, but more specialized stuff), they don't have the time or resources to develop it or hire developers. It's just not in their agenda. In steps solid software companies, and nothing keeps these companies from giving their code to clients for a fee -- they often do. However, the companies have a vested interest in _not_ releasing this to non-paying customers.
I think that Linux and open source is needed.
After watching the Pitrates of Silicon VAlley, and also some other shows that they have had about Gates and Apple and Xerox, and the history of computing, it dawned on me. Todays Windows, (and MAC) were both spawend out of two men, who wanted to have this so they took it. Not for the benifit of computing, but rather for there own benifit. The I have to have it syndrome.
1 If xerox was not so short sited and simple minded bask then they would probably have been where Microsoft is today. Or atleast had a role in software development.
2 If Apple never took the idea, Microsoft may have, but then again we may all be using OS/2 today.
3 Our entire computing today is based on 1 mans idea (Bill Gates). Basically what he (and M$) think computing should be. They were never concerned about the end user, but in the "end" dollar, and in beating out each other. He didn't care and still doesn't that Mac's and *NIX are better than windows, he only cares that Windows has the software.
If UNIX didn't split where would it be today? We could be all running OS/2 or X.
In comes open source and GNU/Linux. WE need this. Why? Open source Linux allows developers to develop a system that is stable. If Windows went open source it may become a better system, by allowing developers to fix the bugs that they find, and improve the code. Linux seems to be uniting the various UNIXes to come to standards. Let's hope that one UNIX will emerge. Linux is also making people re-do there thinking on computing. Programs do not have to be commercial closed source to be good, they have to be writtin by people who enjoy what they are doing not people who are interested in how much money they can make from it.
Linux is a system that is more democratic, of the people, by the people, for the people. Not of a company, by a company for the world.
IMHO... my 2 cents...
Only 'flamers' flame!
You're shooting down ESR's point, yet you provide nothing you back up your claim? And how can you provide claim that the majority of the software industry produces a commodity instead of a service? ESR's hit gold with this idea, and has the points given to back him up. READ the article in its entirety. It makes a LOT of sense.
If Windows 95 is a product, why are the service fees so high?
Isn't ESR just totally off base on the whole Doom analogy?
If I remember correctly Doom source was only released after Quake was out (or at the very least after Quake was well into production). And I'm pretty sure there's very little shared code between Quake and Doom, considering the engines are drastically different, as is the networking.
ESR seems to imply that id switched to an open source model, while really, I think Carmack just decided to be cool and release Doom source because he thought it would be a nice way for people interested in 3D engines to cut their teeth. Releasing Doom source was no threat whatsoever on Quake, as it was significantly more primitive. To this day, Quake and Quake 2 (and Quake 3) are still closed source, because Carmack is still pushing the envelope and doing things better than anybody else.
id released source because they wanted to give people something to learn from, not because they wanted to increase their quality. To this day they depend on closed source software and traditional testing to make their (high quality) games.
So where does ESR get off making them an example? Didn't he do his homework, or am I just mistaken?
-Nic
AtariDatacenter asks:
You've got a vlarge company with about 15 significant competitors. You have developed an in-house piece of software "Y" to run all aspects of a new (and highly competitve) line of business. The software has extreme use value, but no sale value.
What I don't see Eric's model capturing is the fact that you would want to keep "Y" closed-source to prevent competitors from gaining benefit from the technology, code fragments, business models, etc of "Y". You're not afraid of your competitor making and selling "Z" from it, but from using it to gain insight into your business or to enhance their business in a way that causes revenue loss not directly related to software.
You seem to be talking about trade secrets, specifically, where something about the software can reveal valuable secrets about how your company operates. In at least 95% of such cases, forget about Closed vs. Open, you shouldn't be distributing your software at all. It should be in-house only, with perhaps distribution with a few trusted consultants and partners under an NDA. Don't think that the competition can't reverse engineer the trade secrets out of your closed source distribution, it would just cost a little more for them to do it.
For those few companies who have to distribute software that they want to keep the mechanics secret (eg. hardware drivers), first they should review their secrecy motives. If there is something real there, it is both inexpensive and more effective to keep the secret parts in hardware (eg. a Flash ROM chip on your card), and publish the rest.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Among other serious problems with this paper (the repeated citing of folklore and pagan-history references in what is supposedly an economic theory paper), Raymond at numerous points in the paper cites single instances of Open Source success (i.e. Mozilla, Apache) as if they are chosen from an array of possible examples he could use. This is false and dishonest. It's an attempt to amplify the few Open Source success stories into being a widespread phenomenon. Which they are not.
> Back in the days of three- to five-year product
> cycles
There are still a lot of markets where the life cycle is three to five years. In these markets, copying a competitors product is a viable option. Proprietary software is a barrier to entry that keeps the number of players in the market small.
Changes aren't permanent, but change is.
ESR seems like a swell guy n all, but it made me cringe to see Doom as a case study painted in the light he painted it. I mean, he drew some pretty wonky conclusions, like that it showed the "network is the computation" and other weirdo buzz-wordy stuff. I think the "Doom case study" belongs in his paper about "How to be a hacker," because, at least the way I remember it, it was released strictly for cool points with hackers.
Wow, I really need to pee. Bye.
=-ddt->
I couldn't help but notice that ESR managed to write a 20 page essay on the future of software without mentioning a certain company from Redmond or a certain individual worth ~$90,000,000,000.00 even once :-)
He also claimed that it was the first first person 3D-like shooter of it's type. Wolfenstein, however, came before it, and I don't think even that was the first. He also claimed that nobody knew how he had managed to generate such powerful 3D effects on such low powered machines. However, John Carmack actually discussed the algorithms at length in Dr Dobbs Journal as he developed it. Also, they only released the source to the game, not the maps, graphics, or sounds (which are no longer purchasable, so you have no choice but to use either the shareware version or pirated copies of it). Plus, as you say, Doom was already dead by the time they published it, and the only real development which has taken place on it since it's release is porting it to a few new architectures and fixing the sound problems (I think it used a proprietory sound library which they weren't allowed to release with it).
I had cc'd the question to ESR; here's his reply:
No, you're reaping benefits you *do* see. The question is whether your benefit
from spreading the maintainance load exceeds your losses due to competition
from the free rider. In evaluating this tradeoff, remember to treat the
development costs as sunk.
--
Eric S. Raymond
Hail to the Sun God! He is the Fun God! Ra! Ra! Ra!
I happen to support Stallman's ideals, not for moral or ethical reasons, but simply because I believe in a utopia.
What can I say? I am a severe optimist.
--
Companies do not fund indefinately long service/support from a fixed price.
They charge for upgrades to each new version.
ESR's analysis flies in the face of reality as Microsoft's revenues continue to outpace its costs even as it spends a longer period of time developing each new product revision.
Or consider ESR's comparison of cars to software. It's wrong.
If Toyota went out of business tommorow, far far less people would be willing to buy toyotas and the value of such cars would depreciate to zero in a few years. Why? Because finding parts, getting dealer support, etc would become harder. The only effect that would preserve value is the "collector" effect.
On the other hand, there are examples of people buying "old unsupported software" Witness some people going back to older versions of Word Perfect, or buying classic video game compilations.
In each case, there is a smaller market that values the older vendor-extinct goods, however it is nothing compared to the mainstream market.
Moral Calculations, by Laxlo Mero, is an interesting book that discusses a lot of general game theory, and in particular, a couple modes of cooperation. The classical model for thinking about cooperation (see The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod) is the prisoner's dilemma. It's a positive-sum game only if we both cooperate, but as individuals, we are always tempted to defect. A number of people have pondered what incentives could be used to encourage cooperation. Axelrod's contribution was the observation that repeating the game many times with the same opponent introduces new long-term pro-cooperation incentives.
Mero's book looked at the Golden Rule and Kant's categorical imperative. For purposes of game theory, the Golden Rule says: optimize the other guy's payoff, ignore your own. This flips the payoffs and always favors cooperation. The categorical imperative says to do whatever you would want everybody to do, if you had such legislative power. In other words, ignore the off-diagonal payoffs; again this favors cooperation.
Another mode of cooperation might be a communal rule: consider only the sums of the payoffs for each situation, never those of any individual. Adherence to this ethic is good for the community as a whole, and probably the individual practitioner in the long term. In the short term, the practitioner gets to look heroic, which involves additional payoffs.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. If the payoffs are increased by some constant, you end up with Raymond's Comedy of the Commons, where a cooperative few can support a large number of non-cooperators. Add to that Axelrod's long-term incentives due to recognition of others and reciprocal behavior, and that's more or less the OSS world.
One last book recommendation, an excellent book on economics, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, by David D. Friedman.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Interesting, this time ESR is assuming that open source is an inevitable, desirable business model from a business perspective.
...and maybe he's right.
There's nothing wrong with good, thought-provoking essays. If we had one of those for every flamer, I'm sure open source would be much more popular.
My question is, what happens when software companies build their product on open standards, and then pervert them by adding proprietary extensions on top of that? That's Microsoft's new Embrace-and-extend plot for Windows 2000. Sure, they support TCP/IP, IMAP, LDAP, and some weird new power management spec. (I wonder how much Microsoft shaped some of those later protocols...) as well as USB... I guess that's better than I2O... but on top of all that they're still supporting extensions to support their old protocols, and eventually this might go the way of Java/J++, changing an open protocol to a Windows protocol.
It seems sneaky, underhanded, and unfair. But they've got the monopoly for now...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.