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Academic Criticism of ESR's The Cathedral & The Bazaar
Gorgonzola sent us the linkage to First Monday's critique of [ESR]'s The Cathedral and The Bazaar. C&B is criticized academically, cited as being an oversimplified view of OSS, as well as a distortion of reality. Well-written critique, and one that should provoke discussion.
All I seem to get from this article is a long-winded diatrabe trying to say that ESR is a commie-pinko bastard.
This article is more of a rant than any kind of constructive criticism.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
I often think that the Cathedral and the Bizarre was not particularly well thought out. There's a few main reasons that I say that the main one being the fact that there almost always needs to be some 'cathedral' like organisation for open source projects to work, all the successfull projects (e.g. Linux) have a hierarchical approach with Linus as the leader then people under him (e.g. Alan Cox) then people submit patches to them. This is not strictly Cathedral and nowhere near bazarre. It is however more cathedral then bazarre as there is a high element of organisation towards the top of the tree.
Open source projects that don't go by this approach and go on the 'everyone is equal' bazaare approach often means the project gets absolutely nowhere and instead consists of endless discussions and absolutely no coding.
Some of ESR's early advocacy made Netscape believe that open source would be the panacea which would solve all their problems, if they were told to think about it before releasing a product we may have been much further along in their progress.
However Mozilla is now on track despite the early setbacks and their mistakes will hopefully guide other companies along the open source route. I'd like someone at Mozilla (or the departed JWZ) to write in depth paper about the mistakes made by Mozilla and how they're finally getting on track and set to release a decent product.
If you don't believe me download a few nightly builds (read the release notes before complaining as they're still pre-alpha).
I thought Bezroukov's article was fairly well written... and was probably mostly *correct* at that. But the one thing that rather bugged me was the number of times that he attempted to diminish Raymond's arguments by casting the aspersion that they were Marxist (and therefore wrong).
This is bothersome on many levels. For one, I am a real Marxist academic. Real Marxists are not the straw puppets warned about at the Heritage Institute or the _Skeptical Inquirer_. We are not touchy-feely-and-yet-totalitarian as the outline seems to run in Bezroukov's mind. So obviously I don't care fore 'Marxist' used as an aspersion (especially without understanding what it means).
On the other hand, Raymond's writing just aren't Marxist in tone or content. I suppose that, yes, they are a little left-wing in bent. And they do have a couple themes that are also talked about by Marxists (in different ways). But overall, it just ain't Marxism. That doesn't in itself make it either more or less interesting... but one should read them as what they are. I have no idea how Raymond thinks of himself politically or intellectually, but I *do* know what his writings say.
After you put aside the common red-scare cannard of Bezroukov, the bits about understanding a rather longstanding scientific cooperative process are well taken... and definitely help to round out some of the simplification in Raymond.
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Microsoft talked tough to competitors, but generally backed down when their bluff was called. That, folks, is what is known as ordinary business practices.
That is called bully tactics at best, and if its ordinary business, then business should be ashamed of itself. And even if it is common, it doesn't mean that the industry shouldn't fight against unethical and/or illegal practices when they happen.
For example, Microsoft threatened to withold Windows 95 from IBM. IBM didn't budge from their position. Microsoft backed down.
IBM is one of the few companies that is big enough and powerful enough that they can play hardball with Microsoft. IBM also has a track record of playing dirty (although they seem to have significantly cleaned up their act in the past few years), which they also have spent significant time in court with the government over.
In any case, Microsoft may have eventually backed down, but they did manage to stick IBM with more expensive licensing than some of the other competitors were paying, and they also delayed giving IBM access to Windows 95 long enough that it was a competitive disadvantage for IBM.
"Plays well to the choir" can be translated as meaning: "Sounds good to the already convinced."
Stuffed shirt theoreticians who get off on sounding all mighty and powerful when giving speeches to their followers have existed for centuries.
It doesn't mean a damn thing on Main Street.
RMS is for Free Software defined by the GPL.
He (and many others) should get credit for all the GNU utilities that come with a Linux distribution.
RMS view of OS is not the same as ESR view. I don't see RMS as trying to take credit for Open Source, but he wants people to acknowledge the GNU utilities that are out there.
Just try to use Linux w/o GNU.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
That's a defeatist attitude. If your going to try to create a product like a browser or a word processor, an individual doesn't have a chance in hell of getting rich. I think the internet IPOs and people becoming instant billionaires has warped people's thinking on this. You do not have to get rick overnight and you don't need any backing to do ok.
On the internet you can look like a big company even if your just one guy. If you have a good idea and implement it well, you can do well enough to quit your day job. It's much easier to think that it just not possible and go to work each day. I know that. It wasn't until my department was down-sized (to zero), that I decided I wanted to be in control of my own destiny.
I think Microsoft has done it's job when it has killed the imaginations of a generation of programmers. When I see the IBM commercial where the kids say, "when I grow up..." I think these are funny, but apparently it has become too true.
Linux can unshackle you. Who gives a damn what the community thinks of closed source software. If you have a dream for a piece of software and you want to try to get rich, go for it. If you go home today, forget about it, and are back in your cube Monday morning without an idea or two about getting out you've lost all rights to criticize Microsoft for its lack of innovation.
The fact that your comment has been moderated up to a 3 or 4 speak volumes about the readers here. Microsoft has nothing to fear.
I would classify this as a PR release meant for journalists. It has tons of material which could be rephrased to fit whatever agenda the journalist has in mind. Ideal material for a journalist who gets a second paycheck from MS. No MS sources, just a "scientific" criticism of open source.
Is it a coincidence that this was timed to coincide with Microsoft's attack at Linux on their website? The timing should push a review of this piece into the same article which will cover Microsoft's attack at Linux in tomorrow's newspapers.
If I was planning MS's propaganda campaign against Open Source, free software, and Linux, I would distribute a piece just like this for the consumption of the public and journalists.
Seems like a classic piece, directly from a spook lab.
I'm not talking internet companies. I'm talking software packages. "e-Bay" does not sell their software.
If you have a dream for a piece of software and you want to try to get rich, go for it.
I do, actually. I just don't think that selling it is the way to get rich
Can you name anyone who has gotten rich selling software in the last ten years? (If you say "Andresson", I'll have to point out that Netscape gave away their browser pretty much for free, even in the beginning.)
The cake is a pie
Well, that happens in closed source too. I know because I'm the idiot who usually ends up fixi-- hey, wait a minute. Nasty AC, you tricked me. Anyway, I know because I'm the guy who usually ends up fixing it.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
E.g. ("It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas.")."
Anyone who has followed the development of Linux knows that one of the greatest talents of Linus Torvalds has been his ability to accept his own mistakes. He has been known to scrap his own code in favor of better code by others on several occasions. He is the leader of the movement precisely because he doesn't allow his ego to control decisions on Linux.
These types of unqualified comments are a tool used by authors of propaganda. It is not tolerated by scientists, who are very adamant about sticking to facts.
Whether you are a scientist or a lawyer, you know that third party quotes are a very bad way to prove your point.
However, every writer of propaganda knows that journalists don't have the time to check all their facts because of pressing deadlines. So these types of lies easily creap into published articles. This is true especially in the case of daily newspapers. And these are the primary source of information, or intelligence some like to say, for the voting, stock buying, software buying masses.
A company has monopoly power in a market if it is able to sell goods at more than the marginal cost of production. Microsoft in recent quarters has achieved about 50% profit margin. They take in 1.5 dollars of revenue for every dollar of expenses. This margin is way above what any company in the software market or any other market can make. Therefore, according to the economists' definition, Microsoft has monopoly power in the OS market.
There is a theorem in microeconomics that states that in a competitive market, long term economic profit is zero. Note that economic profit is different from the accounting profit that companies put on their quarterly reports. I am not saying that in a competitive market companies have no profits! Economic profit is defined as accounting profit minus opportunity cost (the cost you incur by not using your resources to exploit other opportunities). The theorem simply says that, in the long term, competitive companies do not make any additional profit above and beyond what they could make doing anything else.
It seems obvious to me that a company like MS, expecting 50% profit margins for as many years ahead as the eye can see, is making serious economic profit, that is above and beyond what they could make in any other line of work. MS's enormous long term economic profit indicates that their market cannot be competitive.
Monopolies are not outlawed in the US just because they're immoral. A major motivation for the Sherman act was that monopoly power can seriously drain the nation of beneficial, and vital, economic activity. Whenever you have a company like MS with monopoly power, you have deadweight loss--the company's product (e.g. a copy of Windows) costs far less to produce than it is priced, so consequently a lot of people who would pay more than cost of production for a copy of Windows are unable to get one. This loss of mutually beneficial trade hurts both the consumer (who would rather have his Windows) and MS (who would gladly sell something for more than cost of production, if only it didn't have to lower prices to everyone else!). In extreme cases (e.g. the industrial trusts of the late 1800s), the deadweight loss from monopoly power can drain away a significant chunk of the national economy. Restoring a competitive market can add a whole lot of beneficial trades that bolster the national economy, as well as the aggregate well-being of both the consumers and the producers who participate in said trades.
So that, my friends, is the academic economist's perspective. Make of it what you will.
There are plenty of ways to criticize CatB, you can go point by point and find things that need better clarification or things that aren't entirely accurate. CatB is kind of a light-weight work and it covers a wide range of topics (why free software? all the way to how to run a good project to community and cultural issues to design and code level discussion.) and it never goes in to really great depth on any particular topic. It's an introduction to a thesis. (not that I don't like it, I've read it a few times and I look back at it periodically, it's a nice article)
I only skimmed this article but it seems like it really glosses over some of the fundamental weaknesses of CatB. CatB is a tough work to flatly criticize because 1) it's a remarkably enjoyable read, regardless of what you think of the content, it's geek literature 2) it is littered with lot's of bits and pieces of information that can only be described as "truth" and 3) it covers a number of topics, some of which are completely subjective in nature. And somehow, CatB manages to avoid some of the issues Stallman is so quick to raise, I don't know that it mentions anything about "sharing with your friends" or "because it's the right thing to do."
I read this new article and I feel that it is partially a critique of ESR, which is probably deserved (I hope ESR is cool about all of this, it would be great to have a good intelligent dialog on this stuff without it getting personal, the fact that a dialog could even occur is another testament to the strength of the phenomena he and this other guy are trying to study) and then a very glossy high level critique of the model ESR describes, but CatB is so vague is some respects that this critique doesn't seem warranted.
To really "disprove" (whatever that means) the free/open software model you would need to establish that it is really and truely different from other models, which I'm not completely convinced of, it really just removes the financial aspect of them. Then you'd need to show that other models work and the the free/open model has a failure space that is interesting.
It's kind of funny, I've been contemplating producing my own paper on how CatB needs to be revised or extended or how it is wrong. I go through CatB point by point and the more I look at what it says and the more I look at free software the more I think issues of freedom need to be addressed and that is the fundamental weakness of CatB. (well that and the fact that it is written from a voice "outside the community," it sounds kind of pretend in ways and maybe that's where some of the friction between ESR and the community lies) Good software is getting produced in the open, it can work. Picking up CatB and following the "rules" isn't a sure fire plan to make it happen but..
The author slags Linus for being a dictator, and claims Linux is not demorcratic. But the author also slags OSSs need for strong leadership.
Personally I think giving the masses a vote on whether driver X implements feature Y in a sensible way is just plain stupid - Democracy does not work everywhere.
More useful would be solutions to the problems which most /.ers know about.
Don't get me wrong I don't think OSS is a silver bullet either, but we need to be a little more constructive in our criticism of it.
<joke> I think we need ESR to vigourously defend himself, and maybe some choice words from Bruce wouldn't go amiss too ... </joke>
DWR is Ajax for Java
Again, being a practicing Druid, and Celtic Reconstructionist, I see the OSS movement in terms of what I know, just like Bezroukov does. Doesn't make either of us, or ESR wrong, just different.
ttyl
Farrell
Druid,
Silver Fox Grove, ADF
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
...is that a lot of people assume that the Cathedral model of development is essentially the same as that of the commercial world, and the Bazaar is that of free software. They forget, or don't notice, that the essay's primary example of Cathedral development is the Emacs core, which is most definitely an example of free software!
It seems that this 'academic' critique makes the same oversight, which makes me a bit less willing to accept its arguments.
He refers to the fact that it's the biggest growing.
You should mention that he has also stated that the quality of Linux is poor. (Because it is true.)
Anyway, the difference other than hype and quality is zero, Linux just copies ideas from other unices.
This is not a troll, Linux fills it's fuction but people should wake up, it's not the end of other OS's, nor is it the best.
The Internet is a new media. It would be worth studying the emergence of other media types - radio, newspapers, even speech in general - and their characteristics. This I think would give a better picture, and provide a better foundation for an analysis. The author has the right idea, comparing to what used to be the academic scientific community (although I fear Capitalism, Panacaea For Making Something Good, has almost completely ruined the "hot" areas in the same way Linux advocates see Microsoft ruining software).
For instance, even though I'm not a social scientist, several things leap out at this higher abstraction level, from human-nature oriented things - what was the big deal with cable? Movies? No, be honest, it was really soft porn - such as sex and advertising being the first big two utilizers of a new medium; to what I see as the major cause of OSS - the new medium needs stuff done. There's a vacuum, and the medium itself allows anyone to fill it, so they do.
This strikes me as a temporary situation though, at least partially; what happens when, five or ten years from now, you can no longer just tweak and "make" your kernel? Or the gnome/kde infrastructure is so big that newbies cannot just jump on and start coding? (In that last case, you'll start seeing more informal similarities with the academic scientific model). Will OSS really matter that much anymore?
Here's a more interesting angle into that question: what happens when computers become "invisible"? Electricity and telephones are already invisible - they're so ubiquitous that you don't notice them. Computers will be a utility and a many-to-many medium. Hm, on second thought, maybe this is just assuming the general purpose PC will go away ....
Those are just possibilities though. What do you think?
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
This guy really seems to make a lot of erroneous assumptions about the Open Source community. I only read C&B once but I don't remember ESR saying that OSS projects are magically easy. I don't remember him saying that OSS projects never fail.
Did he say the Microsoft needs to be destroyed? It seems to me that most OSS people agree that Microsoft's software and business practices suck, but care little about M$ beyond that. Yeah they'd love to see Gates get a good spanking, but I certainly don't think they really care what happens to M$. These may be my erroneous assumptions, but one thing I'm sure of is that this guy is overestimating the relevance of Microsoft in the past, present, and future of OSS. It's a common goal, not a common enemy that drives this community.
Almost every paragraph that I read seemed to be off key with my view of OSS and the community surrounding it. Or maybe it's just my view that's skewed...
numb
I think the point should be made that coexistance between Open and Closed is perfectly possible. In fact, it gives some rather interesting pricing information. If 2 compilers are priced at $5K each, then it might be harder to distinguish the features as compared to a free one where you know that if you wait some time N, features might become available. It then acts as a natural queuing system, separating people according to their time perference. It also has the benefit of being a quality bar in that any commercial product must be at the minimum be better than the "free" and thus force the company to keep on their toes and pour some of those profits back into development (ie discourage rent-seeking behaviour).
The point about Microsoft is rather interesting. If its role is to "act" as a convenient target due to its "innovative" business practices, if MS wasn't around would OpenSource be more conflict-driven and less cohesive or even not feasible? Much like the Blitz in WW2, if everyone is suffering in equal misery, then there are less complaints about ownership/sharing of kudos as the focus is on the external "threat". I would see this as a future problem as more projects become commercialised and money becomes a influencing factor rather than idealism or passion.
The only area which might be a little lacking is the comment about technical support. If ESR's Magic Cauldron thesis is correct in that maintenance becomes the primary cost function in software as a service rather than manufactured good, then it makes sense to pay for the value of support/hand-holding (or risk reduction) and OpenSource then becomes the advertising sheet (if 50% of peers use it then it must be worthwhile). In any complex problem especially software systems, if you don't understand it, you can't support it and any competitor would have a significant time penalty. I think some studies on the true cost of IT would be rather illuminating.
The other point about scientists having capped financial rewards (ie low salary compared with equivalent industry experience) is that it is a trade-off between what you enjoy (research). It seems to me that you get paid for doing things you don't like and pay out (or salary sacrifice) for fun things. Would it be fair to say that OpenSource is to some people a hobby for relaxation? If so, then it is understandable why people prefer the GPL as it is probably offensive to see others benefit disproporationately from an act of generosity.
So in a world of Open/Closed, it opens up a whole new set of rules that should be interesting to watch. Personally I see it like a snowstorm, you require the chaotic elements to initially form (small = more likely to be creative), but then you need the balanced framework to grow (formal documentation, etc). Together, they make rich and varied beautiful structures.
LL
It's funny... when I first read ESR's essays on open source, I was immediately and viscerally won over by what I then perceived as the inherent rightness of his descriptions of open source development. This is how it things should be.
However, reading Bezroukov's article, I'm struck just as strongly -- that this is how things really are. I don't mean that I necessarily believe that open source is doomed to "fail", (whatever failure means) but until and unless we recognize the limitations of a development model -- or a governmental model or anything else for that matter -- we will not be able to make good choices for ourselves or for our industry. What's the old saw "those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it?" By declaring that open source is NEW NEW NEW we try to take it out of context and fail to make use of our opportunities to learn how to strengthen it.
Scrappy
The example I read said something about a bad famine causing a population to not grow as tall during that generation - but that subsequent generations also didn't get as tall as before the famine, but were heading that way.
Could it also be that regular old natural selection is at work here? People who "wasted" scarce resources growing "needlessly" tall died out, while those who had a predisposition to shortness survived.
Cook the gene pool under said conditions and cool. The population is now shorter, obstensibly due to malnutrition.
But wait a bit longer, and see that new generations are getting taller now that the selective pressure is removed.
Phenomena explained, using only standard evolutionary/genetic theory, and by Occam's Razor is a better explaination.
Now I am not saying that this methylation thingy is wrong. But it is not necessary to explain the phenomena you cited.
BTW, I am not a biologist, by I am a chemist, and I have done a little work studying methylation of DNA, specifically as a way to treat cancer.
First, off I really enjoyed this article and I think that he makes some really good points about problems in Free/Open Source Software. In particular, I think that he has some good points about the problems projects have as they grow. I have seen a lot of symptoms he mentions in the growing pains that Debian has been going through.
I think, though, that he has picked the wrong target for this article. He makes a lot of good points, but I don't really think that he is refuting ESR in most of them.
I think that his "Catherdral and Bazaar Postulates" are exaggerated. I did not get the impression that ESR believes in these postulates, either from CATB or his later writings. There are probably some people who would agree with these postulates, but I get the impression that ESR is more pragmatic.
He says:
I don't think that ESR thinks the Bazaar is for everything and every project, and I don't think that it is implied in CATB. There are plenty of Free Software projects that are closer to the Cathedral than the Bazaar, and there is nothing wrong with that. Each project should use whatever form works for its participants and best meets the goals of the project. The point of CATB is that you should examine your development model and see if opening it up might help the project.
More like software needs to not suck. We need more competition in software so that the software gets better, and Open Source Software is one way to help get it. Microsoft isn't going to disappear, but maybe they'll be forced to make more reliable products.
I don't think ESR is that idealistic, or that Open source Software depends on that kind of idealism. Flame wars happen. Big deal. Sometimes they may distract people from getting real work done, but often the real flamers are just wannabes, so their lost time does not really slow progress. Conflicts are fine, and the right kind of conflicts help make the software better.
Anyway, it was a good article, but I don't think that it was really refuting CATB.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Thankfully I am among the stupid and uninitiated who have used thier Microsoft product CD's for frizbee's. My Linux box hasn't crashed yet and that is more than I can say about Windows based computer I've owned. Talk all the trash you want, experience tells a different story.
It depends what you consider rich. If you mean call BillG up and go to lunch rich I'd say no. I would never say Andressen, since I think Netscape is the biggest failure of the 90's even though they were purchased for an ungodly sum.
Look at some of the smaller software companies on the Wintel side of things. JASC who makes Paint Shop Pro started as a single guy, as did Niko Mak Computing, which created WinZip. ID software started as 3 or 4 guys. They are all doing OK.
I'm all for people making their own destiny: open source or closed, it doesn't matter. If your software will make my life easier or is just plain cool, I do not mind having to pay for it.
I also feel that almost no innovation is going on in the desktop application arena. Too many want to just make a quick buck on the internet and get out. I do not consider internet sites to be software development. I am enamoured with desktop apps and spend most of my time writing them.
Not where I'm a developer, mainly because everyone here are specialist and can't understand a thing that "the other bloke" wrote =)
This is as it should be for work dealing with Open Source. Put it out, get feedback, fix it, repeat.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Some minor discrepancy which catched my eye. The author first states that
(A) Authoritarian methods will kill any given open source project more effectively than anything else.
and later (B)
Open source may sound democratic, but it isn't. Leaders of the best known open source development efforts often explicitely stated that they function as dictators
It seems impossible that booth of these statements are true. Did the author miss something here?
These statements back each other up. The first one says that dictatorships will kill an OS project, the second one says that the best known OS projects have dictators, ergo, OS will fail (not my personally opinion, but that of the original author). There is no contradiction in either of these statements.
- Damnit, I'm dead Jim
"linux was created to fill a genuine need for the home user desiring free, specifically-typed software" NO!
Linux was created because Linus mainly wanted to learn how the i386 worked.
He also wanted a UNIX, but Minix wasn't as good as the UNIX he had in school.
Linus is not a great programmer or a messiah,
just an ordinary bloke that got a lot of help to do what he wanted.
"What I find is an excellent example of why academia, and academic criticism, has so little respect outside its own little pond."
Without entirely repeating myself from an earlier thread, or seeming to defend academia, I feel compelled to point out that this isn't a paper in the academic tradition.
=> Doesn't ground itself in an existing body of theory.
=> Doesn't refer to other, refereed academic or scientific works.
=> Doesn't attempt to support, refute, or extend an existing body of theory through additional evidence and logical argument.
=> Doesn't attempt to create a new body of theory from first principles and support it with experimental evidence.
=> No footnotes, citations, or other references.
=> No layout of arguments or evidence from cited references.
So - an interesting polemic, yes. An academic work, no.
sPh
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Given this, one should consider the phrase "vulgar Raymondism", which implies a similar corruption of ESR-style OSS.
Or, in other words, the author seems to be saying that OSS in practice is different from what ESR describes. The author then goes on to explain what he thinks the differences are.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
ESR has often complained about being flamed rather than being given constructive criticism (e.g., the Bruce Perens/ESR dispute), so I simply have to wonder.. Exactly how will he react to criticism like this, which is much more academic in nature?
Of course, the reason why this comes to mind is because of a post in a previous discussion (I believe regarding ESR's answers to the questions posed by Slashdot) that suggested that flaming ESR was pointless because it would engender an attitude in him along the lines of "no, you don't understand. I'm right, you're wrong, so get out of my way".
~ Kish
ESR has posted his responce to Nikolai Bezroukov's criticism. ESR states that he "welcomes such criticism" but that Nikolai "adds almost nothing useful to the debate."
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
I think that the author made a very good point about Microsoft. While I don't know how much ESR really called for the "destruction" of Microsoft (was he referring to total destruction, or "IBM" destruction-- lose a *lot* of market share to the better alternatives, but still keep a profitable business?).
The thing is, I see the Linux community calling constantly for the downfall of Microsoft. I hear them rallying behind the DoJ, claiming that we need to destroy the Microsoft monopoly. Yet, if the number of people on Slashdot is any indication, there are enough people using Linux, *BSD, and other operating systems to show that Microsoft *can't* have a monopoly. It's self-contradictory.
That doesn't mean I like Microsoft. I think the products are shoddy and the FUD is distasteful.
But I guess Microsoft is a sort of unifying force to a lot of people. Ironic, then, that the very people that Microsoft unites are attempting to destroy it.
Give MS time. It will eventually hang itself, and fade into the background. It will become a geek-accepted company ("They don't make the best products, but *at least* they don't have a monopoly, like [insert new evil empire here]"). It will be a good place to invest money. It will do some interesting research, come up with some interesting stuff from time to time, but really just be another software company-- kinda like IBM is with hardware now.
It's continually facinating to me that so many stories and interpretations come from a single set of words. Where you seem to have read:
my understanding of the same article was markedly different:
Ahhh. Slashdot. Where you can read 10,000 unique news stories every day.
Well here's my take after reading the whole thing...
:)
.sig)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
This doesn't seem to be a critique of CatB at all - more squarely aimed at the open source concept in general.
However... It's just a nice collection of articles, writings and statements we've seen and argued about before. I've seen nothing new here. What I do see is a lot of stuff from a few individuals who've had a bad experience with OSS - or even who've pointed out weaknesses in the model (and yet often pointed out solutions - a fact this article doesn't cover). We've all seen the writings of Ritchie and Zawinski on this subject - often well thought out, sometimes flawed.
There's a bit in there about development models - how patches to Linux get rejected and waste developer time causing bad feeling. But someone should go and read Linus' statements on the ISDN stuff from the kernel dev list - they are very clear as to why sometimes good patches get rejected. That's just the nature of the beast. However it doesn't amount to wasted time. Those patches don't vanish in a poof of smoke - they could be integrated better (or written better - whatever is applicable) later. Even on commercial projects you don't always get your code included just because you spent a 3 months writing it (voice of experience here...).
Yes, it's a good article covering a lot of pitfalls of open source development. Yes, it's a horribly flawed article. No, open source isn't a panacea - that doesn't exist (unless you're in s/w marketing).
Move along - nothing to see here.
(really need to change this
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Well written (except for a missing close bold tag anyway *g*) and fairly good at summarizing the various criticisms of open source. Unfortunately I don't see too much new thought, just an organization of some good points that have been made before.
I also don't agree with a lot of these points. For example, he makes a point of the dictatorial nature of many a group's management. There is a bit of a difference between authoritarian management and the normal usage of the word "dictatorship", in that this is dictatorship by consent. Leaders are delegated dictatorial powers by their group in the interests of efficiency. No guns are being pointed at developers heads. Dissenters can always fork their own version of the software should the power be actually abused. The dictators aren't rewarded disproportionately and often work a lot harder than most contributors.
He repeatedly refers to ESR's papers as "marxist." While they may be biased, it would be rather surprising to find marxist bias in the writings of an avowed libertarian-capitalist. I think this is clear evidence he wasn't able to completely parse what ESR was really saying. Or maybe ESR is a closet communist after all?
I think he's also a bit overly concerned with distro fragmentation. It *does* lead to irritating problems, but nearly always problems with solutions, and usually fairly simple ones. There is no doubt it can be done better, and I expect Linux will evolve to do so if the problems created become serious enough. The real concern here is that the response will likely be for the market leader to become the de facto standard. It might be better if the most functional and efficient distro layout triumphed. But, good enough often wins over better, and open source is not a solution to *that* problem.
As to open source not being a magic bullet, I think nearly everyone agrees, it's almost a straw man. Worth pointing it out one more time since some don't get it, but not exactly surprising.
The academic parallel is a worthwhile subject of study. Stephen Adler's Open-Source/Open-Science conference recently is clearly an indication that others have also noticed the similarity. But don't be too quick to conclude which side will learn more from the other. It's likely both can benefit.
I do not think the article dismisses CatB as socialistic rhetoric. The main point I got out of it was that CatB describes Open Source as a new phenomenon, whereas it really is another form of scientific community.
I thought the article was well-written and accurate. One especially valid point is that the failures of open source do not get any attention. For every Apache there are probably dozens of aborted projects that never worked out. This is not necessarily a problem, because the people that worked on the failures learned something and had fun coding. But it does give us a skewed view of how effective the open source methodology is (because the successes are far more visible than the failures). In the commercial world, the "failures" usually end up being released at some point, so we see the whole gamut of results. -YoJ
The fundamental problem with the whole "Open Source is communism" argument is this.
If you create a widget and give it away, you lose the widget.
If you create a program and give it away, you don't lose the software.
This is difference fundamentally effects the economics of software.
Now people like to talk about "lost sales" as a sort of loss similar to giving away a physical object, but in reality this is rarely the case. If you look at the success of "Linux" vs. the success of "Minix", it is pretty clear that the "lost sales" experienced by Linus in giving away his product for free were minimal. Had he attempted to sell it, it would have failed. Given the noteriety he has gained, I do not doubt that from a purely self-interested standpoint, he was better off in the long run giving it away. I suspect this is true for a lot of Open Source authors.
The cake is a pie
This is an interesting polemic, well-written and thought provoking for the OS community. However, I would have to respectfully disagree with the statement that it is an "academic" (that is, of or from the academy) criticism.
;-).
Reason: no footnoted arguments from, or references to, any academic literature from the last 200 years or so in the areas of economics, political economy, business (evil MBA stuff), or software engineering. No reference (that is, detailed references with footnotes) to current or past theory in these areas. No cited quotations from academic journals. And finally, no obtuse, buzzword-driven jargon
Now, opinions may differ on the value of academic research and publishing, particularly in areas such as economics and business. However, there is a fairly well-established framework for presenting an idea to one's peers for scrutiny in an academic sense, and this essay doesn't follow that framework.
Personally, I think it would be helpful if both ESR's CatB argument and some counter-arguments _were_ written up in this format and hashed out in , say, the Journal of Political Economy. YMMV may vary on that thought, of course. But this essay isn't that.
sPh
This paper is FUD at its worst. Bezroukov first numbs the reader with several statements that rely on links for support rather than explaining the points made in those links: e.g. "(see Jamie Zawinski's letter)"
... "its [sic] a moving target that never really gets out of beta."
;-)
Bezroukov's point is often unclear, which may be why he just throws in quotes from others. He even contradicts himself about the payback for OSS developers:
"Who will be rewarded financially for the enormous open source effort? Burnout of OSS leaders like Linus Torvalds is all too common to ignore."
followed later by:
"In both science and programming,those involved aren't in it for the money. Most of the OSS developers are doing it to chase a dream, not to build up their bank balances."
More pap:
"A casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense."
Welcome to the world of free speech - this is why we have moderators.
"Linux isn't secure and it isn't stable," my informant writes,
WHAT???? Linux is much more like a constantly improving work toward the goals recognized by the majority of its developers. No, wait - it's
exaclty like that.
"Although people are physically separated, they all are working toward a common and important goal. That fuels the Linux movement."
Yes, it does. If Bezroukov understands this, why spend so much time crying about the "problems" of the open source movement? Why try to shoot down Linus with the anticipation of burnout or authoritarian rule? Oh, yeah - it's FUD.
Open source is a completely new progressive phenomenon (bright future of mankind) with no analogs in history.
I find nothing within CatB that suggests this. As a matter of fact, I found the following which would seem to refute it:
Strike oneAll open source projects are the same and employ the so-called "bazaar model"
CatB definitely does not say this. Here's a quote:
That is, no open-source project ever starts out being developed in bazaar style. In fact, just about every project starts out as the work of a single individual. Eric recognized this, but this Nikolai person somehow misinterpreted the paper.Strike two
Microsoft needs to be destroyed.
I searched CatB for the term Microsoft. Not once is it mentioned that Microsoft needs to be destroyed.
Strike three
I couldn't read any further. If his entire paper is based on the fact that he somehow attributes these "postulates" to Eric's paper, then his entire paper is based on flawed assumptions.
Either this character really dislikes ESR (why did he say Eric had a "vulgar Marxist" interpretation of the phenomenon?), or he's simply attacking a famous person to whip up some publicity of his own (very likely).
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The GNU project has always been part of RMS's campaign against proprietary software in general, not against any particular software vendor.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Although nominally a critique of CatB, the author quickly strays into much speculative and anecdotal critisism of Open Source itself, with Linux as a favorite subject. Strange that the article managed to quote just about everybody but Joe down at the pub, while not quoting CatB at all.
"Um, someone I know who wants to remain anonymous says Linux is insecure and unstable." Excuse me, but what are Jesse Berst's and Fred Moody's qualifications to address software development models and economics?
I had heard that First Monday's articles were 'peer reviewed'. In its published state, this would not have survived any peer review I'm familiar with.
---------------------
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
OpenBSD is indeed based on NetBSD and not FreeBSD.
Regarding the word "split" - it is a bit more dramatic than it is. Yes, there are different people at the helm and there is a different source tree, but there is still exchange of ideas and fixes.
IMHO OpenBSD is a fairly typical result of a natural evolution process. OpenBSD gives priority to security, NetBSD wants to be very portable and FreeBSD has tried to make best use of the x86 platform. Specialization leads to new species.
However all three (like those birds from Galapagos) are able to exchange genes .. er patches.
And ESR a "vulgar Marxist?"
The new article is right that ESR's essay had a few shortcomings, one of them the downplay of the FSF. On the other hand, like you mention, its sloppiness with facts (if the BSD stuff is that messed, how messed are the Linux facts?) is a bit annoying. I hope the author reviews it.
Out of all the blowhards on /., you probably bore me the most.
Have fun refuting that. Excuse me while I got sit in a corner.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
mr, sushi likes to play Devil's Advocate, usually when there isn't any room for contentious argument. He probably got to a regional final on the debating team and thinks it is his duty to argue for no apparent reason. That's ok, though. There will be people to smack him down when needed.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
While a lot of people at Slashdot do use non-MS OS the legal definition of a Monopoly is that a company controls 30% of their market.
As for IBM, they create alo of great stuff. They really changed a lot about themselves, not everything just a lot.
haha, agreed :)
The article looks like it wants to associate opensource development with communism.
:) )
let's assume for a while this is true. in such case, "normal" commercial development would be tyranny. consider this example:
(Programmer) Listen... i'm tired of working on product X. it no longer interests me like it did before. is there anything you can do?
(Boss) well, there's a vacancy at Y. other than that, nothing.
(Programmer) but i don't want to do Y! Z is what i'm really enthusiastic about...
(Boss) sorry. we just don't do Z.
do you think the programmer would be happier? more enthusastic to contribute?
these are definately prime factors in productivity, as any good manager knows. now, let's examine the "communist" example:
(Programmer) X technology doesn't interest me anymore. i think i have contributed quite a lot, and i should move on now. hey, Z sounds like a great thing! i'd love to do Z... i have this neat idea for a Z-Widget which turns doorknobs...
(Programmer dreaming up ideas for the next 2 hours
well, you get the point. coding is quite a bit of an artwork. did you ever see a company forcing an artist to draw picture-this/picture-that?
i think sushi-san needs to step back from the computer and realize the world isn't 1's and 0's. perhaps after a brief perusal of real.life(8), he'll realize that us humans(5) can actually support a plethora of varying definitions of "derivative".
The folks at Marimba have done pretty well.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
Read the document carefully. It actually points out that comparisons of OSS to Communism are flawed. I don't think the article was needlessly negative. I think it was needfully negative to balance a lot of hype out there. Then people can make up their own minds, unlike in communism.
Cheers, Justin.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
From Kitsune Sushi:
"It seems odd that he would refer to GNU/Linux as a derivative of Unix"
There are lots of different ways to be derivative,
only some of them involving a common codebase.
IMNSHO, any system that reimpliments the same
(user and programming) interfaces counts
as derivative.
So, maybe not if we are talking to lawyers,
but I think the rest of us can be more honest.
The introduction of this critique opens with:
"[Open Source] programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
M. Sinz, CBM Inc.
Huh? I don't have time to read long winded articles on issues that I personally feel are already decisive, and this opening quote put me off reading further immediately. If you are programming Open Source software, chances are you're programming under GPL or perhaps BSD licenses, which specifically state no warranty. Maybe I should have read further to properly understand why this quote was valid and important enough to open a critique with, but frankly it didn't give me much faith in what might follow. Call me lazy, but I just feel no need to hear critique on something I feel is already a proven hard fact.
el bobo
It's a shame that this piece has to have the flaws it does: namely some rather bizarre appeals to authority (Jesse Berst) and red-baiting.
The reason it's a shame is this:
I got really sick of the bumper crop of "papers" that sprang up in the wake of CatB, all written by people long on verbiage and enthusiasm, but short on falsifiable premises. All of them were passively accepted as "good" on these pages and duly posted, making me long for a checkbox in the preferences to disable display of "enthusiastic but amateur pseudoscholars" items.
I waver from week to week on how I feel about ESR's body of work. I'm happy that CatB inspired the Netscape folk to give Mozilla a shot. I'm pleased that someone is trying to describe the open source development model sytematically. On the other hand, there's a certain middle-American craving for respectability that comes out in the style and execution.
That aside, the author of this piece seems, by the time he reaches his conclusion, to have read ESR the wrong way. Where CatB and friends tend to cleave to descriptives (with ESR's HOWTO on the subject of project management offering the prescriptives), this author seems to take the whole thing as a manual that needs to be confronted because it has suspicious ideological flavor.
His conclusion, in part, reads:
However, little seems to have been learned from the overall history of programming and software development. Ignoring the lessons of history may make open source an interesting footnote in the overall history of computing a century from now.
That's an interesting idea, I suppose, except that "open source" development existed prior to ESR calling it such. The development model springs from the personalities of the community that practices it. Steven Levy's Hackers provides a nice psychological history of just where this comes from. It is not something anyone dreamed up to storm the gates of Microsoft, because it predates Microsoft. Reading Hackers, once more, Bill Gates inspired the ire of early home computer hobbyists precisely because of his resistance to sharing the source to his BASIC. In some ways, Gates and company are the radical new development model on the scene if we want to talk history.
Following from that, once you strip open source development of some "meaning" outside "the way enthusiasts have been behaving toward the software they write for the last thirty years", it's hard to argue that it can "fail" and become a footnote to anything because it's not a directed ideological or theoretical movement, except in the heads of some of its advocates. The burden of proof lies on the newcomers: people who would proprietize the process. Open source programming developed "naturally," before Richard Stallman (who has applied a certain ideological bent to the process, and who doesn't show up in Levy's book until the very last chapter.) It certainly developed before ESR decided to identify it on his own terms, label it, and make it more palatable to business. It didn't develop as a reaction to big business, but was already in place culturally when big business came to computing. It developed, in some ways, before there was anything we would recognize as "computing."
Linux has already "succeeded", and it succeeded the moment Linus felt happy that he had some sort of working Unix on his home machine. It succeeded wildly when the rest of us agreed that it was indeed a reasonably working Unix and that we'd like it on our computers, too.
"Open source" on the whole has already succeeded, too. The author may wish it away because it makes him see commies under the bed, but it's a model that existed prior to attempts to prove or disprove it in papers. It's an expression of a community's personality and can fail about as much as any element of a popular culture can. Which is to say that while it may mutate in form from time to time (its latest variation being better organization and application of project management tools) it will probably always be around as long as there are hobbyist programmers. The fact that it has given us usable tools makes it a "success" by any standard that's true to the form itself.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
The closest this article gets to criticising any of Eric Raymond's studies of Open Source is saying that the gift culture analogy is simplistic - a point which most people would probably accept.
/., but I think its underestimating ESR to attribute this view to him. Noone says the Bazaar model is universal (indeed RMS is very cathedral person). Very few people seriously think we can destroy MS and I personally don't even very much want to. There is no way anyone thinks the gift economy can be universal, and you only need to look at the interactions of ESR, RMS and Bruce Perens to see a lack of "ideal cooperative people".
The points at the top of the article do represent a "vulgar" (the author seems fond of that word) view of open source which is quite common on
The author goes on to tout a model of the open source community as a scientific one, which is quite a good analogy I think, but in no way contradicts the CatB view. The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder about "vulgar Marxism", something I suspect ESR would disown. However, if "vulgar Marxism" is a belief that labour creates value, then frankly count me in (actually all socialists, including Benjamin Tucker, believe(d) this, it predates Marx by quite a long way).
Finally, the author goes on to endlessly list every kind of problem ever seen in an OSS project. Surely this is only criticism if you were some kind of loony optimist to begin with. None of the problems listed applies only to open source.
The whole thing seems to be an attempt to create a straw-man argument of the CatB thesis and throw mud at it.
for christ's sake. you don't need 100% market share for a monopoly, heck you don't even need 50%.
"It depends what you consider rich."
How about "I own my own jet". Until that happens you can't call yourself rich.
War is necrophilia.
If the academic community and OSS are so similar, why does most of the OSS software I use come in a programmer friendly package (./configure;make;make install) and have very few if any bugs, while almost without exception code coming from professors (whether it be SPIM, the mips simulator, or the abysmal compiler code we used in my compilers class) is buggy and poorly packaged?
I know that professors are not necessarily interested in their software for the software for the software's sake, but neither are most OSS developers.
Is it because academics are used to putting their theories in only roughly useable form, or only producing for a very limited audience (how many people actually read the average journal article?)
Or is it the tradition of doing experiments where you are just trying to see if it can be done, so as long as you get a successful result eventually, the process is good enough (anyone want to guess how many "tries" they needed before they got a "success" implanting electrodes for that cat vision article the other day? I'd be willing to wager that no sane human would put up with the odds of success they get for that surgery).
I don't think these are necessarily bad things (we need people to put together creeky experiments to prove theorems that will get polished and made practical by people in industry) but I think there are some very different goals in what is being produced. In The Practice of Programming Kernighan and Pike talk about "production code" versus prototypes. I would suggest that science is in the business of producing prototypes, which is inherently different from producing "production code" (K&P describe it as needing 1-2 orders of magnitude more effort to produce). How can a person used to making a prototype and saying "that's good enough" understand something aimed at producing production code?
In the commercial world I see Open Source from a totally different perspective.
Rather than writing everything from scratch, I can make new, obscure, hardware work by modifying an existing OS; and I get a robust OS working on my obscure hardware in the least amount of time.
Rather than being helpless to a vendor's technical support; I can fix problems myself or ask a community of knowledgeable people. When my customers call with a problem, no need to play the blame game (i.e. "it's the other software you're running -- go ask their tech support). Instead, I can find the solution!
Open Source is a fundamental change. It is a new paradigm. It's software as a service, not software as a product.
Bezroukov chastises Raymond for seeing OSS from Raymond's perspective, then turns around to claim that the right way to view open source is from an academic perspective.
What does the world look like from an ivory tower? Bezroukov knows!
Chris
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
...get their ideas from?
Where did you hear this "ideal" Celtic psuedo-history bullcrap from?
You might want to stop attending Renaissance Faires.
You shouldn't be surprised to hear ESR's writings compared to Marxism by scholars. He's analyzing the world in a similar way as Marx did: he's looking at groups of people and what their economic interests are, and he assumes that economic interests (in a general sense) are primary, and he's looking at the dynamics of the relationships between these groups or classes.
The difference between Marxists, capitalist-libertarians, and Randroids isn't in the way they analyze the world; they only disagree about which class of people should triumph.
Look at "Atlas Shrugged". It's very close in structure to many socialist realist fantasies: the class that does all the work rebels against oppression by the shiftless rulers. Rand just split the population in a different way, moving all the common folk into the "shiftless ruler" camp and having the technologists rebel.
In fact, the writings of a lot of pro-capitalist folk these days is just inverse Marxism: like Marx, they assume that human beings are fundamentally economic creatures and act out of economic motives, and that the ideas people hold are closely linked to their class interests. The only difference is about who should win.
The is a great critism. I, myself, have often wondered about the cases where the OSS development model doesn' work. The reasons are usually often and ignored, until now.
Also, I really hate the whole Press thing OSS supporters have need doing. "Fight for the dream, not the competition." Say it. Remember it. Eat it.
--
OK, I might be totally off-target. But here is my 0.02$ on the "OSS community is just scientific community revisited" idea.
In scientific circle, peer review process is meant to validate your result. If your hypothese can't be proven wrong, they are assumed right (or vice-versa). Ultimately, the scientist is looking for understanding and truth. I might be totally wrong, but that's the way I understand the scientific process.
Peer review in OSS is not about trying to be proven right/wrong. It's about recycling your code, serve your business interest (think RH or Cygnus) or improve the quality of your work. You're building tool, not understanding (well, you end up with better understanding of the problem being solved, but it's not the point).
Honestly, I have not read the whole article (his "CatB Postulate" was enough for me). The author might have adress my concern. Feel free to correct me.
:wq
Linus is not qualified to run a project the size of Linux. He lacks vision, has no prior experience in system software architecture and design, and his ego is always getting in the way.
The ideal open source OS would have a commercial entity with a proven track record of innovation and outstanding design at its core. They would have the resources to implement the "boring" stuff, they would be able to set and keep deadlines while preventing code forks and providing leadership and vision to the community.
That's why I'm hoping that Apple's Darwin/MacOS X efforts will be successful in the end.
After reading the conclusion of this text, I feel that the author has a valid message. It also seems to me that he has chosen CatB as the hook from which to hang his message.
It's a good hook, well lit and right at eye-level for a lot of people.
Unfortunately, he has chosen a way that we have seen a lot of authors go down recently -- slam the Linux community and watch what comes out. Constructively written, this could have been very informative, and I urge the author to try to formulate his thoughts in this manner.
--
Donate food with your index finger!
ZZ
Ever read 1984? Or Animal Farm? In each of these books (basically cautionary tales against totalitarianism) the ruling class trots out the spectre of a common enemy to unite the masses. In 1984 it's (the probably nonexistent) Goldstein; in Animal Farm it's first Farmer Jones, then Snowball. Let's face it, people seem to have more of a reaction toward "we have to defeat this common enemy" than "we have to work toward this common good."
Around here, the common enemy is Microsoft, which is trotted out as the cause behind all software evil (just for kicks, do a Google search for the phrase more evil than Satan himself and see what the first entry is). There's a problem with that, though, even if it's true (which I don't personally believe, though I will say that they have done a few uncharitable things, in much the same way a wolverine occasionally gets mildly ticked off). If Microsoft is gone as the enemy, what then? If they ever decide to embrace open source (I agree, this isn't likely to happen, and a recent company-wide memo from Bill Neukom tends to bear that out), and do it wholeheartedly for the right reasons, do you continue to hate them because Bill Gates still has more money than all but about 50 countries? Do you turn on someone else, someone from the community perhaps who isn't living up to perceived standards of OS correctness? Do you have to have hate as your motivating force? We have words for people like that, and they're not very nice words.
I really wish we could all agree on working toward the goal of World Domination Through Software That Doesn't Suck rather than Mow Down Microsoft (and I agree with the previous post, eventually MS will fall by the wayside just like every other empire). I think we, and the world, would be better in the long run.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
Was Sinz really referring specifically to Open Source? Or did the author of this paper just add the part in brackets to "support" his thesis?
Part of my job involves maintaining closed source code that has some parts going back almost 16 years, and believe me: I am supporting some very old mistakes (some of them were even made by me ;-) and I will never be able to get rid of them. I fail to see any relationship between this phenomenon and the open-vs-closed issue.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But I don't think that professional academic economists would take CatB seriously enough for what you propose. And I don't blame them. CatB is propaganda, not scholarship. And so is this essay.
"Calling for the downfall of Microsoft" is just showing the attitude - my observation concludes that the attitude seems to be "anti-corporate-greed" and "pro-consumer". In this perspective /. is an excellent customer-right news site.
We bash AOL when it is not opening up its messaging protocol. The whole recording industry for SDMI. CircuitCity for DIVX. Sun for not opening up Java. SCO for FUD.
We report new cool toys like Aibo, Visor, Rio...
Calling Microsoft a primary driving force of OpenSource is simply too narrow minded.
Empowering the consumer is the ultimate goal.
The writer spends most of the article debunking claims that ESR never made, and the tone is too personal - It doesn't sound anything like a proper critique.
One of the few valid points he raises, though, is the one about Microsoft's importance to open source culture...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I think the biggest lesson we have learned from Mozilla is that it is very hard to write a large Applications from scratch with the OSS model. Most of the big OSS projects that exist now (Linux, The Gimp, GNOME) start with a few dedicated souls churning out 90% of the code, until there is a useable foundation for others to build on. For instance, the reason there is no free word processor yet is people have written little pieces of them, but not a real, useable, 50% featured application. Once that happens, the community will add its little patches.
OSS projects grow with little patches, but they can't start out that way.
"forking is a kind of plagiarism" :)
I've never seen process creation described like that before!
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Comparisons to Maxism are valid when looking for analogs to ESRs CatB. I though the use of the term 'vulger marxism' pointed out rather clearly that the author was distinguishing marxist theory from the actual communist/socialist implementations.
Since when is OpenBSD a split from FreeBSD??? And ESR a "vulgar Marxist?" LOL This guy needs to get his facts straight..
... if you define it as cooperative communally oriented economic activity which is what so many pundits do.
;-) (Beta format is still used in high-end editing so there!
Your family, credit union, labour union, food coop, even large corporations operate in ways that emphasize cooperation, non-market based transactions, and all that stuff. Of course some people fall in love, raise children, or care for the elderly for profit (I guess) but many don't - and you don't generally start a coop or credit union in order to get rich.
What makes people think that the failure of Communist Party central committee style planning in the Soviet Union (and the dissolution of parts of that political union) equates to "cooperation and communal, non-profit oriented activities don't work".
The idea that "nothing works unless profit is involved because people are naturally greedy" is in the same league as the silly assumptions made by central committee planners. The central committee assumed they could rationally plan, say, national shoe production with "on command" production organization, not realizing that factory bosses would actually hoard production instead of distribute it (they did this so they could fulfill later economic commands more easily). The free marketeer philosophers (they must be philosophers - no real economist would stretch assumptions about markets that far) seem to assume everyone operates according to some rational individual plan for getting rich. Sorry even with the "success stories" of the free market like Yang and Filo (Yahoo!) this doesn't hold. They didn't create their web site search engine based on the assumption they would become billionaires in 5 years. Their wealth was generated by investors' (often irrational) expectations of future profit. Sure later they were motivated by profit - I guess - but after you've got a billion dollars are you still motivated by profit? Many wealthy entrepreneurs who get that way by flukes of history seem to be more creative than profit driven - even after the fact. (Actually I would argue that "getting rich quick", and wild rides to wealth based on the stock market are *not* the most valued part of an open economy: in the production of private goods it is the mostly decentralized "planning" and adoption of policy that embraces the complexity and diversity of economic production that is to be most valued and which needs the most protection under law. The interests of banks, stock markets, and quasi-monopolists in the industrial sector should be made subservient to those principles).
Of course many people organize their entire lives around different principles than pursuit of wealth (and what or how much is wealth anyway?). People's decision to make something for free and cooperate in its development can have any number of motives - including self interest. Yes, tricky point, but it can be in one's own self interest to cooperate and define oneself primarily as part of a community instead of as just another individual seeking profit - which is supposedly our "natural state".
Well one could just as easily say our natural state is to cooperate: the scale and methods of organizing that are debatable but to deny its fundamental role in political economy is silly. Pundits beware predicting the collapse of opensource and the doomed fate of any form of cooperation based on the fall of communist Soviet Union sounds really dumb.
... and VHS didn't wipe out Beta either
could not have said it better myself.
Good call. I stopped reading when I saw him citing that trash.
:)
I haven't seen a good argument in this rag yet, and it isn't particularly well-written.
All of his points are generally well-known, many of them already answered with a careful reading of CatB. Most of the other ones are just plain wrong.
Of course most of the 'net is a bunch of losers. So is your average university. But guess what? Most losers don't volunteer to do useful work. That cuts them out right there.
Different problems require different approaches, but I think that "The Open Source Model", or even a little bit of peer review, could have made a good article instead of this. Take a lesson from Jane's.
(1) The internet allows collaboration on an entirely new scale, an exponential increase over previous methods. This is a case where an extreme increase in quantity is truly a jump in quality.
(2) Collaboration in software devlopment is very different from collaboration in science. I would say that scienctific collaboration involves a lot of subtraction, meaning that much work in science turns out later to be wrong or merely besides the point. The ultimate contributions of the individual scientist are usually small. How many published articles sit in the college library unread? Efforts in software development produce a much higher yield, each contributed line of code is more likely to end up in the finished product (I think, maybe someone else has some info on that). Thus collaborative software grows much quicker than collaborative science. Furthermore, some scientific advances requires little collaboration. It is interesting to note that Albert Einstein once said that an ideal job for a theoretical physicist would be that of isloated Lighthouse Keeper, because it left plenty of time for private thought.
Because Microsoft is a monopoly (whether you believe in antitrust legislation or not, MS is a monopoly), they can thrive by not offering viable solutions. Frankly, they can and do ram garbage down our throats and make money. This is an abuse of capitalism, it is damage to the software and online industries, and that is the problem.
Microsoft is currently the company exploiting this problem; it usurped the throne from IBM. If Microsoft folded and nothing else changed, another company would likely take Microsoft's place as monopolistic vendor of garbage you must buy anyhow. Indeed, Larry Ellison of Oracle considers himself heir apparent.
Often, people will confuse Microsoft's current position with the company itself; it is certainly easy to equate the two. IMHO, a true open-sourcer wants to see Microsoft forced to play fair, not necessarily eliminated. Then again, it is unclear whether Microsoft can survive in such a competitive environment, forcing it to play fair may destroy it. That is not the aim, however.
It is not enough for Linux to work very well. The utility of a piece of software is directly related to the size of the community that it allows you to connect with. That is, mindshare is key. Linux would be relatively useless if it only had fifty users.
Linux is anti-Microsoft in one very important way: Microsoft is at competitive war with Linux. Microsoft perceives (rightly so) Linux to be a threat to Windows mindshare, and are taking action to destroy the power of Linux to take mindshare away from Windows. They are attempting destroy the mindshare because they currently do not see a way to destroy the actual code (hard to do in the OSS world).
Linux and Microsoft are competing for the same scarce resource: would-be users and developers. Thus, Microsoft and Linux are at war.
--The basis of all love is respect
i found many of the insights of the article on point. methinks there may have been an agenda behind it. but i'd worry if i hadn't noticed an agenda. i tremble to speculate that it was high-class fud: some of the info was unattributed accusations of Linux being unstable and buggy and no different than IBM's mainframe strategy. sounded exactly like a M$ fudpiece i read last summer.
one pertinent observation needs to be made. the author said that democrasy is the first thing that gets sacrificed for speed. then he made the claim that Linux needs speed to compete with Microsoft. I think that is not true in the least.
If Microsoft was continually putting new technology and innovation into things like Office, and Windows, that might be true. But what have we seen Microsoft do lately? The changes of Office97 over Office95 and maybe (we'll see) Office2k are not essential to the functionality of word processing, spreadsheets and databases. Instead, they're the 90s equivalent of sheet-metal and tail fins: The planned obsolescence of the 50s Detroit/General Motors reborn in the 90s in Redmond, WA.
Open source efforts do not need to track sheet-metal changes and anti-competitive incompatibility versions. Open Source projects need only develop the best possible editor, compiler, etc. and improve upon it incrementally.
I started to read the article...and, as I'm at work, have only gotten a few pages in. What I find is an excellent example of why academia, and academic criticism, has so little respect outside its own little pond.
Among the reasons I say this are his beginning with a false quote...with, of course, no link, *nor* does he offer a bibliography. I first heard that quote (one mistake...) in the early 80s, at *least*, and it was about *commercial*, closed-source code. It makes literally no sense in the open source arena (vide the ping-of-death affair).
He procedes to follow this with continual misquotes, rephrased quotes, and allegations with no evidenciary support.
In addition to all the above faults, he clearly does not even understand either ESR, the profession of programming, nor politics. As someone who *is* a socialist, *and* who has known Eric for something like 20 years, the continual references to him as being a "vulgar Marxist" are both amusing and horrifying.
Amusing, in terms of ESR, because as most folks know, he is what is currently referred to in the US as an active 'libertarian', and extremely anti-socialist. I, on the other hand, find the open source movement much more along the lines of 'real' socialism (as opposed to what the right-wing owned media would like y'all to belive), but that it has nothing to do with any form of Marxism, allegedly vulgar or otherwise.
Horrified, as this ejournal seems to be associated with the U of IL (please correct me if I'm wrong), and that it claims, on its home page, to be peer-reviewed. This says *very* little for the reviewing peers who allowed this article, with such flagrant misstatements, unsubstantiated claims, misspelled quotes ("Experiences is what..."), mostly with incomplete attributions, to be published under their byline.
As soon as I find the time, somewhere in the coming week, I intend to respond to this article in full, and submit that as a letter to the journal...and, as I doubt the auther did, intend to copy both ESR and the author, as well slashdot, if y'all want something that long.
mark
If it's repeated often enough it will, hopefully, overwhelm the idea that any of the major players in the OSS movement are in it for the good of the community.
We'd all be wise to look at where the money is comming from, and who it's going too, before we line up for the big group huge in the ol 'bazaar'.
Uh, this guy wasn't moderated up, his posts default to 2, as can be clearly seen in his User Info.
plese don't complain about a system you don't understand
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Any Open Source (or open source) project is infinitely better in quality than a closed source project. Take the Object Management Group, OMG, for example... this is a consortium of a few dozen companies that can't get CORBA's act together to save their lives. It's the world's best documented non-interoperable system in the history of computing. Not only is it tedious and cumbersome to code with - competing ORBs from different vendors can't communicate with each other - except under very strict and contrived conditions. They went 5 years before they realized that they needed a well-known port to find a Naming Service for crying out loud! How do you find distributed objects when you can't find the darn naming service in the first place?! What a bunch of first-class fools! Every vendor has released their private naming services that are incompatable with the rest (orbixd, osagent, etc). Despite the proliferation of firewalls their lousy CORBA specification could not work with them until late 1998 - and we are STILL waiting for good, solid implementations of this spec. BOA vs POA is another incompatability nightmare. And can they possibly make this CORBA stuff any more needlessly complicated than it is? Not likely. Any open source project would steer very clear of this stupidity and let the best solution win. TAO, a free ORB, is kicking the commercial ORB's butts down the street. Open Source is a great thing if for no other reason to raise the quality of all software - both commercial and free.
"Obvious parallels with the hacker `gift culture' as I have characterized it abound in academia. Once a researcher achieves tenure, there is no need to worry about survival issues (Indeed, the concept of tenure can probably be traced back to an earlier gift culture in which ``natural philosophers'' were primarily wealthy gentlemen with time on their hands to devote to research.) In the absence of survival issues reputation enhancement becomes the driving goal, which encourages sharing of new ideas and research through journals and other media. This makes objective functional sense because scientific research, like the hacker culture, relies heavily on the idea of `standing upon the shoulders of giants', and not having to rediscover basic principles over and over again.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that hacker customs are merely a reflection of the research community's folkways and have actually (in most cases) been acquired there by individual hackers. This probably overstates the case, if only because hacker custom seems to be readily acquired by intelligent high-schoolers!
There is a more interesting possibility here. I suspect academia and the hacker culture share adaptive patterns not because they're genetically related, but because they've both evolved the one most optimal social organization for what they're trying to do, given the laws of nature and and the instinctive wiring of human beings. The verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally optimal way to cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality creative work.
This point, if true, is of more than (excuse me) academic interest. It suggests from a slightly different angle one of the speculations in The Cathedral And The Bazaar; that, ultimately, the industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed to be outcompeted from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture."
This is the best comment in this entire thread, far better than that silly "scientific" post that got moderated up to 5.
If you are smart you can use force of your mind to get better out of it and USE it. It's not things TALKING about; there are THINGS to do.
All those abbreviated creatures (ex., ESR :) not all humans any more -- they are the voice of the principle. Maybe, this principle is yours. Maybe -- not. But WHAT for you are fighting/dying? Your time is most favoured spicy after your personal blood.
The lesson I learned from this story - if you are a programmer, just go and code. You needn't be a phylosphopher (arhg!) but should have good typing skills. Let's Linus become a demiurg, that's all. HE will show YOUR code, guys. Not YOU
...they're not so sure that Lamarckism was completely wrong. There is some evidence that a organism might pass on a few things related to the environment that organism lived in.
I have heard things to that effect too. IIRC, though, it was in microscopic organisms. When microbes divide, their descendents inherit not only DNA, but also protoplasm and organelles. Seems to me that acquired characteristics of these parts - not the code that creates them - might be what is inherited by subsequent generations.
Was the part that talked about "as many versions as there are people who use it".
This is the old fragmentation argument popping up again. It's rubbish; I wish people would stop wittering on about it, because it's flat out not true. There are weaknesses in Linux that need to be addressed and this isn't one of them. Fix the fscking file system calls (the ones that aren't 64-bit safe) and stop worrying about some mythical phenomenon called fragmentation.
The other passage I didn't like was the bit that went out of its way to characterise Linux users as aggressive, evangelical zealots. I was personally offended by this. Pick an OS, any OS, and you'll be able to find people like this.
The whole tone of this article felt wrong to me. It wasn't a careful deconstruction of The Cathedral And The Bazaar. It was a careful and painstaking attack on OSS via ESR, and I don't like that.
Bah.
--
Peter
It's nice to know that you have decided to refuse to face reality. There is already a term for what GNU/Linux is. It's a clone. Why? Because it did not evolve from the original Unix code. *BSD and their predecessors, however, did. That is why they are referred to as "derivatives". You'll find that the definitions for these words are rather widely accepted beyond the court room, and somehow I doubt that it was a lawyer who coined them in this particular context (i.e., with regards to software, code, whatever).
A note to others who believe they can refute facts with opinions: I'm not interested. Go sit in a corner obsessed with your denial of the truth somewhere else.
~ Kish
The quote kinda loses it's original meaning when misquoted as "Linux doesn't scale".
The "Linux doesn't scale" argument and many of the other examples he presents about personality problems aren't really problems in the open source model itself- they are inherent problems with people working together. In fact, it is a testimony for the robustness of the model that it works as well as it does IN SPITE of these problems.
When such personality problems hit a closed project you usually don't get to hear about it. You can often tell by the result, though...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
This is pretty ridiculous. Nobody ever implied that CatB espouses a complete political theory, but if you had actually read Marx (not simply accepted the american high school textbook version), you would clearly see the parallels.
It's a short book and is probably available online. Take a few hours and read it and then re-read CatB.
I do not mean that this comparison invalidates or diminishes OSS. It can, however, give a better perspective on the practical limits of its utility.
First off, dude seemed like he had some sort of axe to grind. I don't have the time or inclination to refute everything, but it seems like many things were crouched in half-truth and blanket statements that aren't necessarily true.
For example:
>All open source projects are the same and employ the so-called "bazaar model".
I didn't read this in CatB. In fact, Raymond argues that the FSF development model (developed by a tight knit group, no beta before its time) is a cathedral type development style. He says that the release early, release often is the bazaar model.
This statement by the author if *FALSE*, and wrongheaded. He is obviously trying to paint ESR in a bad light.
> This model is inherently good compared to methods developed by commercial software developers.
There are methods that may work better than the bazaar method, but they are fiendishly expensive and time consuming. The above statement is true for the vast majority of all software development organizations (not counting patently internal development, like workflow processing, etc.), even if the author is trying to show ESR to be some sort of fundamentalist bigot.
> All alternative models (considered to be one and called the "Cathedral model") are infidel and doomed.
Yeah, Yeah, haven't we already been over the fundamentalist bigot stuff? Why doesn't the author provide some quotes to show just what an extremist ESR is? The way that the author writes, you'd expect ESR to start sending bombs from his cabin in Montana. Sounds like a real scientific analysis to me.
> Nothing can compete in quality with open source.
I'm going to pretty much agree with that one.
if you submit buggy code to an OSS project it usually means that some other idot will have to fix it, not an easy task in many cases.
"Open source is like Communism. Communism failed. Therefore, open source is doomed to failure." In fact, he is quoting /Metcalfe/ as saying this. He does not believe it himself. /He/ believes that open source is NOT like communism, but INSTEAD is like an academic environment. This article is blatently ANTI-political. He imparts that the OSS community NOT be swayed by politics. He is renouncing politics.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I totally agree with you and thanks for making clear so many points that were begging to be made.
How could anyone not agree that M$ strong-armed competitors and used unfair trade practices that *finally* were brought under governmental scrutiny?
At least the author of the prior comment agrees Linux is a better product. I really didn't expect to see that bit of reason.
One especially valid point is that the failures of open source do not get any attention. For every Apache there are probably dozens of aborted projects that never worked out.
[...]
But it does give us a skewed view of how effective the open source methodology is (because the successes are far more visible than the failures). .
Well I have to say especially this is a point which is not valid IMO.
We are comparing open vs. closed source. I think nobody argues that danger of dying a premature death of an opensource project is smaller than with closed source. The real statement in this area in favor of open source is:
"If an OSS Project dies - NO CODE/IDEAS IS/ARE LOST!!!"
OTOH, you can't tell whether OSS projects die more often than commercial project, because most commercial projects don't die in front of the public (Uhm, except amiga and ms bob). You are probably deeply wrong here.
I bet some people here can tell some personal expiriences of putting alot of work in closed projects only to see the killed off by upper management after a year.
Further, count the numerous shareware, freeware (as in free beer) projects, small companies or indivuals which canceled their product cause they couldn't compete against ms, adobe and other wealthy companies - even if their product may have been better. We will never ever see one line of source code.
There are a number of good points being brought up that I don't want to waste time by repeating. I think the article is interesting, but that one of the basic arguments is flawed.
It seems obvious to me, especially given certain statements by ESR, that CatB and the related essays are definitely optimistic and romantic versions of the open source movement by design. ESR and some others of the OSS are trying to sell the idea so that it becomes a reality. They are trying to create a meme that will propagate and overwhelm some of the less useful capitalistic conventions of the modern software world.
That the article attacks on these points is valid, but it misses the entire purpose of ESR's writing.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I would have to agree completely with the point of not being able to tell how many closed source projects die. While we can see (although probably wouldn't notice) products that are released and flounder, we have no way of seeing projects that are killed before being released.
The point about when OSS projects die, the code and/or ideas can live on is a good one. If an OSS project dies, then any good code and/or ideas can be recycled in another OSS project.
Another point I'd like to add is that OSS projects seem to die for reasons other than being beat by a commercial product. They tend to die by either being replaced by another OSS project, or because for one reason or another the developers lose interest in continuing the project. Most closed source projects die because they are either killed by a competing product, the company thinks that they will be killed by a competing product or something similar. There are some important differences.
1) I agree that CATB is oversimplified, particularly the ideas of gift culture and ego-motivation; however,
2) I think this article is a form of subtle FUD. it contains mainly a series of assertions, going way beyond the scope of CATB, supported by quotes from prominent people disgruntled with Open Source - but with little logic to back them up. It covers itself by debunking long-dead FUD, whilst in the hand you're not watching it sets up a fresh batch. Reference to authority (or celebrity) isn't proof.
GNU/Linux is implemented to mostly follow standard SYS V AT&T Unix API's/system calls
. asp?String=derive.from*1%2B0&ACT=SELECT
GNU/Linux has (almost) no AT&T code.
GNU/Linux builds on the works of other coders.
Based on these (what will be called facts for the sake of this posting) you refer to GNU/Linux as a CLONE.
4.4 BSD is implemented to mostly follow standard SYS V AT&T Unix API's/system calls
4.4 BSD lite has (almost) NO AT&T code.
4.4 BSD builds on works of other coders
(These are facts)
Therefore, using your own criteria, BSD is ALSO a CLONE. There is *NO LEGAL TRACE* of AT&T Unix left in present day BSD.
based on:
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary/default
Do you dispute this statement:
Gnu/Linux is/was formed by a process of derivation from existing AT&T Sys V system and userland programming specifications.
How about this one:
GNU/Linux was/is DERIVED from APIs created for use in AT&T SYS V Unix.
What about the shorter:
GNU/Linux is derived from AT&T Sys V Unix
'Reality' in this case is where you decide to draw up your definitions. Its the OLD debate of is Unix a philosophy, (pipes, small tools linking together to make bigger tools), a set of API's (if you conform, you are Unix), a set of source code (if its not THAT code, its not Unix), or the registered trademark of AT&T/Novell/SCO/Open source group. Mr. Richie was attempting to get past the LEGAL "Unix is a registered trademark" issues by calling things that function overall like a Unix(tm) system "Unix Derived". Smacks of the newer debate of is 'Linux' a kernel, the kernel + 'userland', or a SPECIFIC distribution.
The older question that applies here is:
"If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and when you eviscerate it - looks like a duck, is it a duck?"
And, being that GNU/Linux has most of the features/attributes one 'expects to find on a Unix(tm) platform' *AND* can't be called Unix(tm) (because Unix(tm) is a registered trademark), not to mention the SOURCE of the API format, the SOURCE of the talent that writes GNU/Linux, and the reason Linus started this was to have a Unix of his own, calling GNU/Linux a derivative of Unix(tm) is a correct statement. There are too many links to a Unix(tm) past to deny the word derived.
I'm happy for that you Mr/Ms Sushi, that the world is so black and white, so clear cut, that the only reason GNU/Linux is not derived from Unix is something as simple as sourcecode.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
> misquoted as "Linux doesn't scale
/ 168/
I agree. I checked it out and indeed its misquoted.
http://www.linux.com/featured_articles/19990925
"Again it's pretty obvious, just like Linus, Corel doesn't scale."
How Nikolai Bezroukov gets "Linux doesn't scale" from the above is beyond me.
Also, where are the REST of the references that Linux doesn't scale? Mis-quoting someone's opinion doesn't make it true !
Cheers
When I learned science at school, which feels like a long time ago (but in reality isn't), we learned that if the premise upon which you're trying to prove something is wrong then the proof itself must also be wrong.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The premise of this discussion seems to be the points at the top of the article - none of which I see exactly touted in CatB (although I'm sure ESR leans towards some of the points). The article makes out ESR to be an open source fundamentalist. I think he's anything but a fundamentalist - ESR by his many discussions in the past can be shown very clearly to be a pragmatist.
Nowhere in CatB does ESR state that the Bazaar model is a silver bullet (IIRC it very carefully states that it is _not_ a silver bullet). Nowhere does it state that open source is an ideal community without disagreement (IIRC it states that disagreements are out in the open and so you'd better be right on your point or smarter people will show you to be wrong).
I think criticism of CatB is important. I don't think open source is a silver bullet. But I think the premise of this article is wrong.
Now I'm going to go read the rest of it
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
The essay , as others might have noticed, delivers constructive criticism of the open source software development model. I was impressed with the objectivity and clarity of the arguments, and the fact that it is criticism: it
isn't FUD. Neither are any of the quotes used out of it's intended context or meaning (correct me if i'm wrong: i'm only human. ) In particular, i'll like to draw attention to a line in the conclusion:
"The success of open source programming is less a function of the technical skill and imagination of the members of the open source community. It correlates more exactly to those all too human characteristics that not easily programmed away or ignored. "
Perhaps the greatest challenge to OSS success, is the challenge of all of us getting along.
Criticism, diversity and variety, choice, are all important. However, the pursuit of these objectives should not be pursued with a illogical fervour that only leads to division within the community.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
So much in this article was negative, and I sensed a political agenda in it. Particularly repeated comparisons (of Open Source) to Communism and Socialism, apparently to inspire faulty logic like the following:
Open source is like Communism.
Communism failed.
Therefore, open source is doomed to failure.
The conclusion does not neccesarily follow from the arguments... even if we accept that both arguments are true (not everyone will).
There was also a comparison to Lysenkoism. Now Lysenkoism is a politicized (Stalinist, to be precise) version of Lamarckism, which proposed that acquired characteristics could be inherited by subsequent generations. It was wrong. It doesn't work, as thousands of starving Siberians could attest. It doesn't work for living things. Genetics simply doesn't work that way. But DNA code is fundamentally different from binary code. Acquired characteristics can be "inherited" by later, improved versions of binary code. Using the loaded word "Lysenkoism" in describing open source is misleading at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.
As I stated above, I detect a political agenda.
This should NOT be listed as a critque of the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's a much deeper analysis of the open source development model. I did, however, really enjoy some of his shots at C&B. I know that that paper is important for historical reasons (e.g. its importance in the Mozilla decision), but otherwise it's never struck me as a particularly interesting piece. Arguments by analogy are inherently weak; even if the argument is airtight, one can always attack the link between the real world situation and the metaphor. That's partly what this author did by demonstrating that the "bazaar" image is not always appropriate for OSS projects. --JRZ
As I have mentioned previously, I do not attempt the impossible and highly paradoxical task of disproving an opinion. And since I don't design my comments to entertain (but rather to make my thoughts known and occasionally troll - even I get bored), I'm not particularly concerned. Be bored. I'm not forcing you to read my commentary.
~ Kish
I don't believe I stated that *BSD was a derivative because it included any of the original Unix code. I said that it evolved from the original Unix code. This does not mean that the original Unix code will remain inside of it. By your reasoning, a clean-room implementation of a JVM like Japhar is a 'derivative'. If you would like to think so, that's fine, I guess. However, I would call it a clone. Why? Because it did not evolve from the original code.
When you clone an animal you take a single cell and grow it into a full animal (or whatever). When you clone a piece of software, you take the idea (or specifications) and 'grow' the code from there. Will the implementations look the same, source-wide? Probably not. Will they act, do, and be very much the same end-user wise? Well, if the 'cloning' hacker is not in serious need of a clue-by-four upside the head, yes.
Saying that GNU/Linux was derived from Unix/POSIX/whatever specifications would be a more accurate statement, although a cumbersome one to make. Saying it is a Unix clone would be the preferred statement in terms of brevity and clarity.
Oh, well, I'm convinced. I'll go back to playing around on my MacOS derivative (Windows) now, seeing as it is derived from the idea of a graphical point-and-click hell. =P
Seriously, and more technically accurate, I would have to say that I'm about the last person to say the world is completely black and white. It's interesting that you have decided to enlighten me of your rather narrow and short-sighted view, however.
One day someone will actually read my posts and ponder what I said before replying. I'm rather offended that someone would think that I thought NetBSD, etc. was chalk full of the original Unix code. Gah. I think it's funny that everyone reads between the lines of what I say when there's almost nothing there to read. ;)
~ Kish
I am not distracted by grammar and spelling errors in my own writing. ;-)
Also, I am quite willing to draw a distinction between an impromptu Slashdot posting and an academic paper when it comes to matters of spelling and grammar. I do not think my comments were unfair or hypocritical.
I have to say that my favorite aspect of this essay is the ABM/BTM (Anything But Microsoft/Better than Microsoft) attitude it points out. Microsoft is a company. They make products. People use them. Just because they are commercial and closed doesn't mean they do not offer viable solutions. Too often I see an entire group of intelligent, pro-Linux people become very obsessed with `fighting back' against MS. Why? Has Net/Open/Free-BSD had to turn MS into Satan in order to feel good about itself? When this is done, it makes Linux no better than OS/2 to quite a few people out there. Linux is good. OS is good. They work. They work very well. That alone is enough to ensure that Linux is taken seriously.
I guess if I could fix one thing that the article mentions, it's the anti-MS stumbling block that I see in front of us.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Too bad that ESR and RMS seem to have their squabbels. I think that without RMS (a workable distribution of) Linux would not have been possible. As such the OSS community owes RMS a debt of honor: for providing the code to all the GNU tools and compilers, and for starting the FSF and devoting a few years of his life to build a free/open software infrastructure.
...
Yes, RMS is an extremist in his own way, but basically RMS, ESR and the entire OSS community have a common background and interest in this matter and should stop squabbling and focus on the things that unites them rather than bickering about minor differences. We're all approaching this from our own perspective, but we need to realize that we're all rooting for the same team; something that seems to be forgotten from time to time
Ok, this is ironic, but Mozilla just munged the entire first part of my post. I basically said /didn't/ believe that quote, that he was merely quoting Metcalfe as believing that.
that he
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
C&B is ESR's personal response to the open source movement he witnessed during the development of fetchmail. It conveys the unconventional spirit of OSS very well, so well, that it has itself become an icon of the open source movement. Treating C&B as an academic treatise, however, is counterproductive.
Just the facts Maam.
This guy, ESR and Katz and countless others
need to dispose of the flowery language and
write for information's sake.
Don't try to sway me emotionally, prove yourself
with logic and sound reasoning, lest my eyes
glaze over with boredom and I'll not read it
at all.
I could have embedded this message in 500 pages
where we would laugh and cry together but what's
the fucking point!?
Matt, your reasoning and your reading comprehension are sloppy. First, you mistakenly assume that the paper is discussing CatB and ESR and nothing else. The author is seeking to describe the entire movement, not just ESR, and quotes dozens of people. You seem to think that it is a premise of the paper that ESR is a fundamentalist, and that if he is a pragmatist, the entire paper falls.
The paper refutes many points that ESR has made quite effectively, but it is a refutation of specific writings by ESR, not of ESR as a person. So ESR's beliefs that don't appear in the papers don't matter that much (after all, surely ESR has changed his opinion on some matters since he wrote CatB).
Then, you admit that you haven't read the article! (This is fairly obvious).
But that isn't nearly as lame as the fact that at least three moderators wasted their bonus points on you.
This article deals with software development, focusing on a specific development type (open-source community development model)
however - note what this article isn't. it is not a comparison. and there's a good reason why it is not a comparison, too.
most of the problems attributed to opensource development are well-known problems in regular commercial development.
how would a given microsoft project do, if developers started to lose interest?
how can *any* project overcome a loss/burnout of a head developer?
this article does a great service to the opensource community, putting a mirror infront of our faces - something that should have been done quite a long ago.
but the conclusions it draws upon are wrong. you cannot deduct opensource is inferior to normal development, without doing a comparison.
and as far as my observations have taught me - opensource is nonetheless superior to normal commerical software development.Mbr Regarding the MS issue:
Opensource always seemed to me like a natural filling of a gap. when we clients, can barely dicatate our desires and wishes on the supplier.
linux was created to fill a genuine need for the home user desiring free, specifically-typed software - something MS doesn't supply. not because it can't - because it doesn't want to.
it's more than safe to assume most slashdot readers do not share computing needs with the common computer user. look at hardware reports coming in drawing so much interest - not to mention software.
last but not least, the field proves this does work, and work nicely.
opensource has managed to produce some of the finest software around, by any scale (even commercial).
we should just treat this document as an (excellent) TODO list concerning our culture and behavior
-
Just my two Agorot.
(wtf is an agora)?
While I do think he is right in emphasizing the scientific/academic nature of open source, something which isn't really addressed in CatB,
he does clearly worry too much about fragmentation. People have a tendency to look for the "best" among equals and prefer it to the point of irrationality. This trait almost guarantees redhat's future success.
And he does fall in the FUD a little asserting that developers who work with Microsoft systems get to develop to a unified, known standard. Anyone who's worked with win APIs - and then found the bugs that erupt once an application is released into the wild - knows that this is a comforting delusion, but still a delusion. Microsoft has the blessing of being big enough to seem inevitable, which makes their flaws seem to most people like "Acts of God" rather than human SNAFUs.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I think OSS operates on a model that is neither democratic nor autocratic but (little-r) republican.
Individuals vote (by using software, by advocating it, by testing it, and above all by contributing to it) for *people* (project leaders), not individual decisions. Members of most "democratic" nations don't vote on every law; similarly, "members" of open source projects entrust authority with leaders who make the decisions.
Yes, Linus is an autocrat. But he's an autocrat the users and developers of Linux support, and his decisions are generally popular. If he started abusing his power and making widely-unpopular decisions, someone else could start a fork and hope to gain more support. (Consider this a form of "impeachment", maybe?)
This seems to me like a pretty ideal mixture of the accountability of democracy with the strong leadership required for conceptual integrity and direction. Saying "OSS isn't democratic because Linus calls the shots" misses the point.
You write: I don't think one can dismiss ESR's ideas merely because they will never become reality ....
Excuse me: in his series of papers (CatB, the Noosphere paper, etc), ESR was claiming that he was describing reality. That's what the paper was discussing! Does Open Source actually work the way ESR says it does?
The paper makes a good case that Open Source works a lot more like academic science than like the Potlatch. It would be nice if the paper were better organized, true.
Oh, come on. The paper is a better refutation of Noosphere than it is of CatB. Eric says Open Source is like the Potlatch (a gift economy). The paper shows that it is more like the scientific community, that this is a much better model.
Excuse my language, but it's true.
Even Microsoft's PR dept would have the decent to get their quotes right. You have at least one misatributed, and added words to at least two others _which changed their meanings_. This is from reading only four of the quotes, two (the fourth one I didn't recognize).
Specifically: the addition of the word "computer" to Feynmann's quote, the addition of "[Open Source]" to the "programming is like sex" quote (hint: _all_ programming is like that), and jdstone@ingr.com was quoting either Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, I forget.
If you wish to be taken at all seriously, checking the references is a must.
The rest of the paper displays an equivelent slipshod approach to argument that the quotes do to citations.
I think that this would have been a better article had the first few paragraphs, which seemed to be little more a misinformed attack on ESR's politics than anything else, been omitted altogether.
I miss Meept.
Couldn't help wondering why a journal that advertises itself as being "peer reviewed" would publish an article with so many typo's/grammatical errors. Don't peers know english?
The article's description of ESR's thesis as "[a] socialist interpretation of software development" really interested me. I've never associated ESR with anything socialist - he's never bothered to disguise his anarcho-capitalist views in his writings. "Having a better/different way" != Marxism. Certainly ESR's view of open source is rosy, but I don't think he ever described a Workers Paradise.
Neutron
I get my kicks above the
From Dennis Ritchie..
It seems odd that he would refer to GNU/Linux as a derivative of Unix (I would assume from the context that he is referring to the entire system), since it is clearly not. If it was, it wouldn't be any different from the 80 or so flavors of Unix already out there.. What makes it so different is that most of it was built from practically the ground up (for example, the compiler, gcc). Which rock has Dennis been hiding under lately? Or is he just full of ego these days..?
Not meant to incite (for all you DR fans out there.. ;), but to me this comment seems a little odd.. Otherwise a nice gesture, however.
~ Kish
This was basically inspired by an annoyance with the statement:
"When I learned science at school, which feels like a long time ago (but in reality isn't), we learned that if the premise upon which you're trying to prove something is wrong then the proof itself must also be wrong. "
Actually, the premises being wrong do not disprove the conclusion, if..then.. not being the same as equivalent. It would, however, call the conclusion into question.
And even more definitely, the truth or falsity of the premesis have nothing to do with the accuracy of the argument. Valid agruments based on improper premises can yeild either valid or invalid conclusions. This is first year logic.
If you are referring to rhetoric rather than to logic, of course, the rules are different. Cicero reccommended using and/or saying anything necessary to convince the audience, and don't worry about truth. From his point a view, a valid argument was one that resonnated strongly with the audience to which it was addressed. I think that "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" has been proven extremely valid from this viewpoint.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Very interesting article, with some valid points. I find it fascinating that he uses Fred Moody's article as source on the shortcomings of OSS, particularly when that same article was roundly destroyed here on /.
In fact, THAT discussion spawned a discussion on how best to engage in Linux/OSS advocacy.
So, you tell me--is this REALLY evidence that the OSS community is broken?
It seems that if you are going to use this as a source, you ought to at least see if any responses exist.
The general sez: do your research, Mr. Bezroukov...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
If you take this all in terms of the ideas set forth in the Programmer's Stone (Which is an excellent document but is also flawed in many respects) you might say that Open Source is a Mapper phenominon and that most companies are still in Packer mode and can't see the potential benefits of Open Source because of that. That may also be a gross oversimplification as well, but you can't really keep the whole model in your head if you're right down in it and if the 25:1 scale model conveys enough of the idea to push you in the right direction on your own mental maps, that's the way we're going to do it (It had better, since I don't have time to write a book on the subject anyway.)
Finally, I don't really see how it matters ultimately. Open source software benefits me. I like to look at how other people do things, and my coding skills have improved more from doing that than anything else. There are different problems associated with this development model, but there are different (And in at least my case, better) solutions to problems not addressed by the old ones. There is still plenty of room for programmers to make money (Which is good since I'd really hate to do anything else.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
brain fart combined with EAU (excessive acronym use)
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
.
If something could be done to Microsoft as a corporation to de-claw the beast, then perhaps some other groups of people would be so bold as to innovate, with a clear hope that their blood, sweat and tears will pay off in the end.
The other hope is that this whole situation is introducing a little healthy fear into Microsoft. They obviously have a lot of paranoia, but that's not the same as fear. Real fear is, "If we don't do a better job, someone else will come along and replace our product with a better one." This is opposed to the current feeling of, "If we let anyone else innovate, then we will lose our total domination of this market."
However, I have a feeling that the DoJ trial came at just the right time. Whatever ends up happening to Microsoft in the short term, the trial has (1) raised the Spector that, perhaps the industry can survive without bowing morning and evening in the direction of Redmond, and (2) distracted Gates and his minions long enough to let some of the mice out of the cage. Now, it's anybody's guess what the future will bring.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
The author first states that (A)
and later (B)
It seems impossible that booth of these statements
are true. Did the author miss something here?
This leads to one major difference between
science and (Open Source) software development
which N.B. didn't touch:
It can be described with hill climbing.
When scientists work together to do research on a
topic, they try to climb a hill. There exists only
one hill and they know when they have reached the
top of it because they can proof it by something
like a formula.
(Open Source) software design is like hill
climbing too, but there are many different hills
you can climb on and you have to choose one of
them which is good enough for you. You usually
never reach the top, because the hill grows as you
climb. Therefore a dictator which has a good
feeling for the right direction is of great value.
(Therefore sentence B seems to be true).
Science and software design may have some
things in common. But I'm not sure if software
design isn't related more to philosophy than to
the scientific world.
--
I don't think this essay is an example of particularly cogent criticism. It consists largely of a series of quotes that appear to lend credence to a series of opinions about the nature of "Open Source," but it is well thought out and lucid. I know it is declasse to bring it up, but I found the the spelling and punctuation errors a serious distraction.
All of that said, however, I think we (meaning the human race) need to do a great deal more thinking then discussing how we organize our labor for personal and community gain. As an example of that phenomenon I enjoyed the essay a great deal.
I, too, think that much of the current thought on free software and open source is somewhat utopian and idealisitc, but I think that is a good thing. Reality will always modify theory, but to change reality requires ideas that lie beyond attainability. I don't think one can dismiss ESR's ideas merely because they will never become reality -- they have and will continue to change the limits of reality, even if they are never fully attainable.
My own personal belief (and, I will admit, slightly utopian hope) is that the economic need for commerical software has ceased to exist. Instead I think programmers will work as professionals (like lawyers and doctors), paid for their knoweldge and skill. Because production and distribution of software can now be done at nearly zero cost, there is no longer any need for companies to produce shrink-wrapped software.
Given that, I think the work started by RMS, and considerably furthered by Linus, Alan, et. al., will continue -- programmers writing code they want to write and then giving it away. That fits the "scientific research" view of the author of the essay discussed here.
I do, however, also think that companies will begin to use and need such software. As they do so, they will have specific needs that are not addressed by that "research software." These companies will pay programmers (as professionals, not employees) to produce those programs. We professionals will insist that such programs be open source/free software -- contributed back to the professional community.
I use surgery as an example. When a doctor (perhaps employed in a univeristy hospital) develops a new surgical technique, he or she does not keep it a secret and then package and sell it to other doctors (Triple Bypass 98?), instead it is published in a medical journal and taught to other doctors. The discovering doctor becomes more valuable, gains prestige, brings contributions to his or her hospital, etc. No economic disaster is portends. Quite the reverse.
Please note that I believe this applies to software only, (or to technique only). The analogy does not extend to drugs or medical devices because these DO have considerable manufacturing costs -- they are not zero cost distributable.
I'm very glad to see discussion such as this essay, and I hope to see more of it.
The dismissal of CatB as being 'oversimplified' without taking into account that ESR is still writing new essays (such as the NooSphere article) which expand on the ideas presented in CatB. Its pretty obvious that CatB was intended just as a beginning, not as an end unto itself. CatB is also not frozen in stone, as ESR has occasionally revised and expanded it.
Perhaps most troubling is dismissal of CatB as being socialist rhetoric. Since ESR is, if anything obviously much more predisposed towards capitolism than much of the rest of the free/open software world, this seems tome come from way out in right field.
One perceived difference is that many OSS developers do it for the love of coding. This misses the point that many scientists work for exactly the same reason. I could double my salary if I left science, and have spent more than one year working with no income at all, living off savings, just to stay in the field.
I think we both have a point. The point I was trying to raise was that the author is trying to make CatB invalid based on a number of bulleted points (and then sets out to elaborate on those points). But the points themselves were in fact not existant in the Cathedral and the Bazaar - so how could the whole article be correct.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Anyway - I'm nearly through it now so I'll post a follow up.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
RMS gets FAAAARRRRRRR to much credit for OS,
sure he started FSF, but hell, real open source did excist long before he taged it on his forhead.