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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 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 :-)
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"
;)
> 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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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
ASCII output from nroff looks much the same; maybe that's how the flat ASCII was produced. Just view it using 'more' or 'less', which turn A^H_B^H_ into 'AB' and underlines it.
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.
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.
> 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
If you really want pure ASCII,
do this on vi.
:1,$s/\^H.//g
-Siva
If you really want pure ASCII,
do this on vi.
:1,$s/\^H./g
-Siva
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!
He says:
All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for
id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it
actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997.
id never changed their strategy as to how to make money, they kept making close sourced games that had better (proprietary) engines than anybody else at the time.
Your point, which I agree with, is that eventually, it became more of a headache for id to keep supporting Doom than it was worth, especially since they were actively working on something new.
This is a very different thing than embracing open source, or using open source as your model. Instead it's basically giving something away which is no longer cutting edge and isn't bringing in much revenue anymore (with the advent of other games like Duke Nuken etc..) and is in fact more of a headache than it's worth due to people wanting ports and support issues.
I agree Carmack is the man for having released the source and educating tons of people out there on writing high quality portable games, but using id as an example of a company which shifted it's model to an open source one is completely off base. If anything, id proves the point that if you're doing something that's really cutting edge, it pays to keep it closed source and make a mint off of it, at least if you're good enough to do it with high quality. (granted very very few are as good as JC)
Anyways, I still think ESR is way off base on the whole thing and is confusing the matter more than anything.
-Nic
>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.
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
This begs the question as to whether or not there should be any such thing as "your info". It's not obvious that information should be owned since it behaves differently than other, physical things which we can own. Specifically, when I get some information from you, you don't lose it.
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)
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
ESR wasn't saying that id had turned into an open source company, he was saying that Doom, the product itself, had changed from being something that was better as closed source to something that would be better off as open source. He wasn't saying anything about id, just about the game.
His argument was that software goes through a sort of life-cycle, shifting over time from new and unique and very profitable to old hat, and with just about no money value. He was saying that it's perfectly sensible to make the thing closed source while it's new, because that's the best way to milk it for money, but after it gets to be old hat it's far easier to turn it into open source. Doom was merely an example of that kind of software.
"All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997."
This quote is perhaps a little bit confusing, but it's still talking about Doom, rather than id as a whole. id switched from making money from Doom by selling it to making money from Doom by selling other stuff related to Doom, and then they gave up on it altogether and switched over to Quake . . .
He's talking about strategies for each bit of software, rather than for the company as a whole.
. . . just the ramblings of a tired and confused mind . . .
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
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.
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.
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Put Hemos through English 101!
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"?
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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)..
And if Free Software turns it all into a commodity... well, the days of the robber barons would be over at least.
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!
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.
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Open mind, insert foot.
> 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 :-)
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.
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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.