Frankly, you aren't illustrating a superb grasp of the realities of either open or closed source development, or the businesses that survive on those models.
I will presume that my lack of eloquence is the reason that you failed to grasp the first point, because it is very simple: the OSS model is good at some things. The closed source model is good at others. One of the places where open source has demonstrated the most significant advantages over closed source is where the developer and user base ARE closely aligned. That is all.
As for your second point, it's just plain illogical. A company exists therefore its customers must be happy with its products- obviously and flatly untrue, and, if I may, any level of experience in the software industry would enlighten you to that fact.
Furthermore, your point that developers are akin to production line workers (which is certainly not the case in all but the largest software shops) ignores the reality that it takes experience at more than one level of your organization to make it effective. It seems significant to me that the portions of the software industry that have the highest levels of bottom-to-top experience are the ones that have the highest customer satisfaction.
As for your last statement, you are partially correct, though I hope you'll forgive my ignorance when I say that I don't see what that has to do with the point you quoted. Many top developers are paid by someone to write code for OSS projects, but you are incorrect when you presume that the controller of the code is paying their salaries. Usually it is third parties dependent upon the software ecosystem; the example of the relationship between the Linux kernel and the paid developers at Red Hat and Canonical comes to mind. That is the illustrative dynamic here- that a free and open project is created, then becomes commercially successful, rather than the relatively recent trend of companies buzzwording their source in an effort to get free development help. Again, however, I fail to see the relevance of that comment to my point about code as feedback.
I'm not talking about sending everybody though. I'm talking about taking mankind to the stars again. I'm talking about pushing the boundaries of known space. Is that so crazy? Personally, I that we should be doing everything in our power not just to infuse our flagging economy with R&D dollars and great jobs, not just to bring prestige and interest to the sciences and mathematics, but to prove ourselves as equal to the greatest challenges of our species as our forebears, and to bequeath to future generations the legacy of a people whose courage took them into the forbidding unknown? Certainly, for right or for wrong we are the beneficiaries of a culture of exploration, from Magellan to Aldrin and Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, our power and prestige has not come from shrinking back from the unknown, but rather from when we leap into the darkness and wrested from it the spoils of our victory. You and I are ourselves children of a post-space-race age, accustomed as we are to the myriad technologies developed in that effort. At what cost, glory? At what cost, opportunity?
We are eight years into the new millennium. We chose to go to the moon forty-six years ago. I want you to think about that. Not a decade ago. Not even a generation ago. Forty-six years. In some places, two full generations have been born, lived, and passed into history since John F. Kennedy spoke those words to a packed crowd in Houston. And yet here we are, nigh on a half a century of unimaginable innovation later, and we have lost our courage and our way. Not when the stakes were high, not when the risk was great, but now, when bolder men than we have already faced the greatest challenges, we find that we no longer dare to set foot into the void.
It isn't that we don't have the technology. And certainly no newfound danger has emerged to lend credence to the sophists' snivelling. We have, indisputably, the technology, the capital, and the infrastructure to once again walk among the stars. Butt he truth is that we have shrunk away from it, that our collective cowardice and the braying of the bean-counters has emasculated the quintessentially human pursuit of the unknown in its most compelling form. I hate to see what it has done to our country, to our stature in the world, and to the dreams common to all men whose eyes behold the stars- that space seems no nearer to us today than it did on the eve of Apollo 1. I fear that somewhere above us, in the cramped tube that has become the locus of all our space-bound endeavours, those dreams have gone to die. I can say no more than that it appalls me, and that for all the world our hopes are that much less bright for having abandoned the challenge of our age.
Your argument is predicated on the idea that your end user is not a developer. In many of the areas that open source shines, there is at least significant overlap between those groups. To say, for instance, that getting code as feedback for a project like GCC is a 'net negative' would be quite foolish, ditto for projects like Apache or Emacs. Of course, developers need desktops too, but the success of OSS in developing desktop software has been somewhat more limited than in the more technical communities, doubtless at least in part to the perceived weakness you point out, so in that case I would say you may be right.
As for the assumption that "closed source vendors aren't delivering what their customers want", I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the fact is that they aren't. That doesn't in any way diminish the fact that open source vendors aren't either, but if everybody was absolutely hunky-dory with every piece of software on the market, nobody would sell anything and we'd all get to find new jobs. The software market, however, is far from placidly sterile, with fiercely competitive entities (both closed and open) fighting for users and market share. In large part, it will be the group that delivers the most and most relevant features who will 'win' in such environments, and that means that having this kind of feedback can be the difference between a successful company or project, and a chapter 11 filing or 404 page. Again, I hesitate to speculate, but the odds that what one customer wants another one does too seem pretty good to me. The fact that the first one wanted it badly enough to write the code for it, or to hire somebody to write the code for it, is a even stronger indication that there is a need for software that does that.
Speaking to the point about not all developers being equal, I think you may have misunderstood. My point was that code that comes from people using the software is more likely to reflect the needs of people who use the software than code that comes down from on high. Obviously, many development teams are required to go through exhaustive testing processes before their software is allowed out into the wider world, but lets face it- startlingly few developers in corporate programming actually use the code they write. That's a problem, and it's not one that's going to be solved by any specific remedy I can think of, otherwise I'd be in Monte Carlo sipping a drink and being fawned over by skinny brainless women instead of writing this little diatribe.
All I'm saying is that OSS seems to be on to something when it comes to certain types of development. It is definitely working, and I can tell you that most of the people I do business with don't give a tinker's damn what the initial cost of their software is if it doesn't save them money down the road. There is a compelling argument to be made for code as feedback, and for the competitiveness of software developed by its own end users. What remains to be seen now is whether the OSS community can withstand the inevitable uptick of consumers who are not developers that have come with its incursions into desktop software.
Not all developers can contribute equal value to your project, however. One of the big benefits to open source is that your developer base and your user base coincide a lot more. I wouldn't care to estimate the odds that if one customer wants a feature badly enough to code it, somebody else wants it badly enough to switch to your product for it, but they seem pretty good for something that's free.
This is going to sound snarky, but it's not intended that way- if you don't already know the answer to that, you probably aren't going to choose FreeBSD. The reason I say that is because the advantages of FreeBSD are really only relevant at the point where you're making your living off of the care and feeding of servers, and even there it seems to be largely opinions or software availability that drive the decision between UNIX variants and Linux. Some say that BSD is better put together than Linux (I disagree, but that's beside the point), most agree that it has a better security track record, and nearly everybody acknowledges that it has some advantages as a server operating system. Truth in advertising warning: I personally use Linux on all but two of my servers (both are FreeBSD), and advocate it to my clients, while my familiarity with Solaris has bred a contempt entirely divorced from the technical merits of the project, and so I will refrain from comment there. Hope that helps.
Any halfway decent sysadmin has about a dozen ways to punch holes in that particular scheme, and particularly at a bank you're almost certainly not going to get that to work. ARPtables, captive portals, fwknop, ssh, the list is endless of ways to stop that from working.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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lol man that brings back memories... remember the sizzling noise it used to make if you screwed up your vsync?
good times, good times.
I disagree. It may take more time, but I don't think that it takes any more skill or ingenuity, seeing as how the conversions between high-level thought processes and low-level code are pretty much mechanical. It does of course require a different knowledge set, but that knowledge set isn't necessarily harder to obtain. In the end, this argument strikes me as one more salvo in the endless 'my-language-is-better' flamewar, subtly hamstrung with the fallacy that programming is mostly about syntax.
You're right.
The last time I tried it, it repeatedly failed with error messages that were, to say the least, unhelpful- but my information seems to be out of date. Using those instructions it was, indeed, trivially easy.
Not sure how much traction KVM is going to get here unless Ubuntu can wrap it well. I'm no expert but I know my way around most virtualization technologies and KVM seems to be one of-if not the- hardest to use productively. Ubuntu has a great track record with this kind of thing though, and *if* this signals a new push in that direction I eagerly await the results.
I'm not an expert here, but on HPC clusters below 1k nodes I've never had any major problems with channel bonded gigabit and PVFS, however, the simulations we're running are not very I/O intensive.
If better is worse if different, I for one hope Linux continues to get worse. Innovation will always drive technology- new ideas, new implementations, new ways of solving old problems, and new problems that need to be solved. If Linux ceases to innovate, there are others who wait quietly in the wings that will not.
Well, at least I don't have to worry about viruses;)... and for the record I actually DO have a tiny stuffed penguin sitting on top of my Linux server.
Ever heard the expression "you may have won the battle, but you've lost the war"?
Winning a tiny number more delegates (as Obama did) is trivial at this point. In a race this close, after losing two previous Presidential elections to a thoroughly despised man, the candidate who appears most likely to win, will win- the nomination if not the presidency. Look back to the Kerry candidacy- the man had next to no actual support, but he won the nomination on the appearance of inevitability. The same dynamic is playing itself out right now. The size of Clinton and Obama's committed voter base is roughly equal, but in exit polls the issue ranked as being the most important to voters who decided in the last week (ie, undecideds) was whether they had the best chance to win the general election.
You can claim otherwise all day long, but without a *decisive* victory, the group which walks away with the bigger PR boost in this contest is the actual winner.
I'm sorry, but you're very, very wrong. First off, factually, Obama won yesterday- coming out ahead in the -actual- delegate counts. Superdelegates continue to shift until the convention. Secondly, this is politics, not policy, and good PR is all-important. Simply discounting the effects of bandwagon politics because you don't like them is flatly ridiculous.
Let me say this: Linux is my job, and I love my job. I hate the people who get morally righteous on me in the Linux vs BSD flamewars, and there are some design decisions that I disagree with, especially in NetBSD.
Having said that, damn the BSDs can be cool. Its good to see some competition in the field, and I wish there were more code borrowing going on between the different free OSes. I'd love to see ZFS or secure runlevels on Linux, and of course if you could get VirtualBox to run on OpenBSD I'd be your friend forever.
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Frankly, you aren't illustrating a superb grasp of the realities of either open or closed source development, or the businesses that survive on those models.
I will presume that my lack of eloquence is the reason that you failed to grasp the first point, because it is very simple: the OSS model is good at some things. The closed source model is good at others. One of the places where open source has demonstrated the most significant advantages over closed source is where the developer and user base ARE closely aligned. That is all.
As for your second point, it's just plain illogical. A company exists therefore its customers must be happy with its products- obviously and flatly untrue, and, if I may, any level of experience in the software industry would enlighten you to that fact.
Furthermore, your point that developers are akin to production line workers (which is certainly not the case in all but the largest software shops) ignores the reality that it takes experience at more than one level of your organization to make it effective. It seems significant to me that the portions of the software industry that have the highest levels of bottom-to-top experience are the ones that have the highest customer satisfaction.
As for your last statement, you are partially correct, though I hope you'll forgive my ignorance when I say that I don't see what that has to do with the point you quoted. Many top developers are paid by someone to write code for OSS projects, but you are incorrect when you presume that the controller of the code is paying their salaries. Usually it is third parties dependent upon the software ecosystem; the example of the relationship between the Linux kernel and the paid developers at Red Hat and Canonical comes to mind. That is the illustrative dynamic here- that a free and open project is created, then becomes commercially successful, rather than the relatively recent trend of companies buzzwording their source in an effort to get free development help. Again, however, I fail to see the relevance of that comment to my point about code as feedback.
I'm not talking about sending everybody though. I'm talking about taking mankind to the stars again. I'm talking about pushing the boundaries of known space. Is that so crazy? Personally, I that we should be doing everything in our power not just to infuse our flagging economy with R&D dollars and great jobs, not just to bring prestige and interest to the sciences and mathematics, but to prove ourselves as equal to the greatest challenges of our species as our forebears, and to bequeath to future generations the legacy of a people whose courage took them into the forbidding unknown? Certainly, for right or for wrong we are the beneficiaries of a culture of exploration, from Magellan to Aldrin and Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, our power and prestige has not come from shrinking back from the unknown, but rather from when we leap into the darkness and wrested from it the spoils of our victory. You and I are ourselves children of a post-space-race age, accustomed as we are to the myriad technologies developed in that effort. At what cost, glory? At what cost, opportunity?
Alright, I just have to rant about this.
/rant over
We are eight years into the new millennium. We chose to go to the moon forty-six years ago. I want you to think about that. Not a decade ago. Not even a generation ago. Forty-six years. In some places, two full generations have been born, lived, and passed into history since John F. Kennedy spoke those words to a packed crowd in Houston. And yet here we are, nigh on a half a century of unimaginable innovation later, and we have lost our courage and our way. Not when the stakes were high, not when the risk was great, but now, when bolder men than we have already faced the greatest challenges, we find that we no longer dare to set foot into the void.
It isn't that we don't have the technology. And certainly no newfound danger has emerged to lend credence to the sophists' snivelling. We have, indisputably, the technology, the capital, and the infrastructure to once again walk among the stars. Butt he truth is that we have shrunk away from it, that our collective cowardice and the braying of the bean-counters has emasculated the quintessentially human pursuit of the unknown in its most compelling form. I hate to see what it has done to our country, to our stature in the world, and to the dreams common to all men whose eyes behold the stars- that space seems no nearer to us today than it did on the eve of Apollo 1. I fear that somewhere above us, in the cramped tube that has become the locus of all our space-bound endeavours, those dreams have gone to die. I can say no more than that it appalls me, and that for all the world our hopes are that much less bright for having abandoned the challenge of our age.
Your argument is predicated on the idea that your end user is not a developer. In many of the areas that open source shines, there is at least significant overlap between those groups. To say, for instance, that getting code as feedback for a project like GCC is a 'net negative' would be quite foolish, ditto for projects like Apache or Emacs. Of course, developers need desktops too, but the success of OSS in developing desktop software has been somewhat more limited than in the more technical communities, doubtless at least in part to the perceived weakness you point out, so in that case I would say you may be right.
As for the assumption that "closed source vendors aren't delivering what their customers want", I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the fact is that they aren't. That doesn't in any way diminish the fact that open source vendors aren't either, but if everybody was absolutely hunky-dory with every piece of software on the market, nobody would sell anything and we'd all get to find new jobs. The software market, however, is far from placidly sterile, with fiercely competitive entities (both closed and open) fighting for users and market share. In large part, it will be the group that delivers the most and most relevant features who will 'win' in such environments, and that means that having this kind of feedback can be the difference between a successful company or project, and a chapter 11 filing or 404 page. Again, I hesitate to speculate, but the odds that what one customer wants another one does too seem pretty good to me. The fact that the first one wanted it badly enough to write the code for it, or to hire somebody to write the code for it, is a even stronger indication that there is a need for software that does that.
Speaking to the point about not all developers being equal, I think you may have misunderstood. My point was that code that comes from people using the software is more likely to reflect the needs of people who use the software than code that comes down from on high. Obviously, many development teams are required to go through exhaustive testing processes before their software is allowed out into the wider world, but lets face it- startlingly few developers in corporate programming actually use the code they write. That's a problem, and it's not one that's going to be solved by any specific remedy I can think of, otherwise I'd be in Monte Carlo sipping a drink and being fawned over by skinny brainless women instead of writing this little diatribe.
All I'm saying is that OSS seems to be on to something when it comes to certain types of development. It is definitely working, and I can tell you that most of the people I do business with don't give a tinker's damn what the initial cost of their software is if it doesn't save them money down the road. There is a compelling argument to be made for code as feedback, and for the competitiveness of software developed by its own end users. What remains to be seen now is whether the OSS community can withstand the inevitable uptick of consumers who are not developers that have come with its incursions into desktop software.
Not all developers can contribute equal value to your project, however. One of the big benefits to open source is that your developer base and your user base coincide a lot more. I wouldn't care to estimate the odds that if one customer wants a feature badly enough to code it, somebody else wants it badly enough to switch to your product for it, but they seem pretty good for something that's free.
lighten up, francis. Its a joke.
I expected this thread to be full of calm, collected reasoning, and was not disappointed!
I mod randomly.
The dice have decided- you get 'Insightful'. Congratulations.
This is going to sound snarky, but it's not intended that way- if you don't already know the answer to that, you probably aren't going to choose FreeBSD. The reason I say that is because the advantages of FreeBSD are really only relevant at the point where you're making your living off of the care and feeding of servers, and even there it seems to be largely opinions or software availability that drive the decision between UNIX variants and Linux. Some say that BSD is better put together than Linux (I disagree, but that's beside the point), most agree that it has a better security track record, and nearly everybody acknowledges that it has some advantages as a server operating system. Truth in advertising warning: I personally use Linux on all but two of my servers (both are FreeBSD), and advocate it to my clients, while my familiarity with Solaris has bred a contempt entirely divorced from the technical merits of the project, and so I will refrain from comment there. Hope that helps.
Any halfway decent sysadmin has about a dozen ways to punch holes in that particular scheme, and particularly at a bank you're almost certainly not going to get that to work. ARPtables, captive portals, fwknop, ssh, the list is endless of ways to stop that from working.
lol man that brings back memories... remember the sizzling noise it used to make if you screwed up your vsync?
good times, good times.
I disagree. It may take more time, but I don't think that it takes any more skill or ingenuity, seeing as how the conversions between high-level thought processes and low-level code are pretty much mechanical. It does of course require a different knowledge set, but that knowledge set isn't necessarily harder to obtain. In the end, this argument strikes me as one more salvo in the endless 'my-language-is-better' flamewar, subtly hamstrung with the fallacy that programming is mostly about syntax.
You're right.
The last time I tried it, it repeatedly failed with error messages that were, to say the least, unhelpful- but my information seems to be out of date. Using those instructions it was, indeed, trivially easy.
Not sure how much traction KVM is going to get here unless Ubuntu can wrap it well. I'm no expert but I know my way around most virtualization technologies and KVM seems to be one of-if not the- hardest to use productively. Ubuntu has a great track record with this kind of thing though, and *if* this signals a new push in that direction I eagerly await the results.
I'm not an expert here, but on HPC clusters below 1k nodes I've never had any major problems with channel bonded gigabit and PVFS, however, the simulations we're running are not very I/O intensive.
Jesus, it's a term with two meanings, just crawl back under your bridge already.
If better is worse if different, I for one hope Linux continues to get worse. Innovation will always drive technology- new ideas, new implementations, new ways of solving old problems, and new problems that need to be solved. If Linux ceases to innovate, there are others who wait quietly in the wings that will not.
Art of War sucked. If you want a book on how to think for security, get House of Leaves.
Well, at least I don't have to worry about viruses ;)... and for the record I actually DO have a tiny stuffed penguin sitting on top of my Linux server.
Ever heard the expression "you may have won the battle, but you've lost the war"?
Winning a tiny number more delegates (as Obama did) is trivial at this point. In a race this close, after losing two previous Presidential elections to a thoroughly despised man, the candidate who appears most likely to win, will win- the nomination if not the presidency. Look back to the Kerry candidacy- the man had next to no actual support, but he won the nomination on the appearance of inevitability. The same dynamic is playing itself out right now. The size of Clinton and Obama's committed voter base is roughly equal, but in exit polls the issue ranked as being the most important to voters who decided in the last week (ie, undecideds) was whether they had the best chance to win the general election.
You can claim otherwise all day long, but without a *decisive* victory, the group which walks away with the bigger PR boost in this contest is the actual winner.
I'm sorry, but you're very, very wrong. First off, factually, Obama won yesterday- coming out ahead in the -actual- delegate counts. Superdelegates continue to shift until the convention. Secondly, this is politics, not policy, and good PR is all-important. Simply discounting the effects of bandwagon politics because you don't like them is flatly ridiculous.
I'll take the fluffy penguin, please.
If that's sarcasm, I agree.
/Even I'm not sure what that means.
Let me say this: Linux is my job, and I love my job. I hate the people who get morally righteous on me in the Linux vs BSD flamewars, and there are some design decisions that I disagree with, especially in NetBSD.
Having said that, damn the BSDs can be cool. Its good to see some competition in the field, and I wish there were more code borrowing going on between the different free OSes. I'd love to see ZFS or secure runlevels on Linux, and of course if you could get VirtualBox to run on OpenBSD I'd be your friend forever.