According to the open source movement [this article is concerned with open source, not free software (although free software certainly shares some of the funding problems), to clear up any ambiguity], considering a piece of software someone has written, one should not use it unless one has the source code. The reasoning is that if one
has a problem with it, one cannot resolve the issue without outside help. As far as I can see, although this is certainly a distinct advantage for say Google, who with a staff
of highly trained engineers could easily tweak the Linux or BSD kernel to suit their requirements, its advantages in ensuring quality and reliability are far from assured. For
example, in propounding the open source solution in John Goerzen's paper on the ethics of free [open source] software he says that the
famous case of the USS Yorktown, that the 'problem behind all this is proprietary software'.
This claim is one that Mr. Goerzen fails to adequately establish. His arguments can be summarized as follows:
lack of peer review means that closed source software is intrinsically untrustworthy
the 'fact' that closed source means knowledge is not shared, something he says is unethical
By contrast he argues that from utilitarian grounds open source is better insofar as it tends to maximize the sum total of happiness, and, most specifically that 'free software is the most beneficial for the greatest number of people.'
To consider his first argument, namely that the absence of peer review makes closed source software untrustworthy, I would argue that in fact peer review is *more* rather than less
common with closed source software. To take an example, Microsoft operating systems typically spend upwards of a year in external testing, whereas open source software tends to follow Eric Raymonds's famous
Bazaar principle, where software is released little and often. The difference between the two can easily be seen. Anyone who used an open source OS and GUI environment, simply by
clicking through each option. In my experience there would also be a considerable number of software crashes.
There are a number of reasons for this as I see it:
lack of money
Since the open source movement is associated with software that is without price, there is little money to fund fulltime programmers, marketing to attract new people to the project,
or commercial testing.
lack of direction (i.e. the ability to be able to say: 'Right, you get that bit done or you're fired')
For example, let us consider one of the top open source games, Freeciv, and its nearest commercial competitor, which is probably Alpha Centauri. In the making of Alpha Centauri, the software house would work something like this:
'We need x programmers, x video guys, and x voiceover artists.'
They will then hire those staff and the product will be produced. By contrast, the free equivalent works on a haphazard basis whereby that which is produced is determined by those people who happen to volunteer for the project.
Thus Freeciv is without any sound effects, video, etc., and also has inferior graphics, all of which detract from one's enjoyment of the game (not to mention that it exhibits one of the major problems with open source, namely lack of innovation). Indeed it is my contention that open source is a fundamentally incorrect model for software aimed at the consumer.
Characteristics of the consumer:
little or no programming knowledge (and therefore the so-called advantage of having the source code is no such thing)
low tolerance of technology for its own sake
little understanding of computers
For them, open source software holds no benefits compared to the leading commercial equivalents from Microsft and Apple. As such, the consumer Linux distributions I believe are
doomed. The problems are:
insufficient funding. Open source businesses typically depend on business models that stand no chance of ever making any money. Because of the mistaken believe that making money
out of software is somehow immoral (a bizarre belief, considering that everyone must make money to survive), they rely on 'donations', on selling services, and on limited and voluntary sales
of products they could download for free. Although to a certain extent the market has wised up to this, as seen by the fact that Corel's Linux division was sold for a miserly £5million,
I still believe that businesses like thekompany.com, and Nautilus, which rely on selling vague services or on giving the core product and charging for addons, it still persists.
It is unfortunate for open source that this socialist tendency persists so much - Microsoft would not be able to afford produce the world's best word processor if they had given
Word away and just charged for the thesaurus.
Still further, the belief that making money out of software is somehow damaging is fundamentally misconceived. While closed source software has grown up, so to has the economy -
high software spending is a *good* thing, not bad.
The massive growth in the economy has been fueled by commercial companies making money, whereas open source ultimately aims at making all software 'free', which would undoubtedly be harmful.
inadequate product - whereas commercial companies such as Microsoft have armies of people employed in usability testing, the fact, as explained above, that open source can *never* match
the resources of closed source means that the product will never be as advanced or as easy to use as the paid-for alternative [note that there are certain circumstances where open source can compete].
The common reply to this is that absence of resources is not an impediment, since open source depends on volunteers, but this makes the fundamental assumption that there are enough
people who would rather make software for free than make money making commercial software.
Thus:
the pool of volunteers or the quantity of their free time will never be large enough to build a 'complete' open source software ensemble
as explained above, commercial companies producing open source are not typically viable, and so do not have anything like the resources of the commercial sector with which to compete.
the lack of money and commercial incentive means that open source produces very little innovation, and so is always playing catchup
Having, I believe, debunked the myth that open source can ever produce a sustainable and complete consumer software ensemble, I return to one of the first arguments made, namely that
closed source impairs does not allow people to learn.
This is a very flimsy argument, and I would in fact argue the reverse - at present colleges and learning schemes are heavily funded by profit-making businesses, but if open source succeeded
these businesses would be redundant, which would in fact cause even greater damage to learning since this funding would stop.
Furthermore, the net result of this would be that people would be discourage from software production as a career, since it would no longer represent a profitable career path, and so they
would probably pursue a career as a doctor or a lawyer. This would be a great loss to the nation, since the quality of software would decline, as highly intelligent students
would go elsewhere.
In conclusion, I'm not arguing necessarily that open source is always necessarily inappropriate, but rather that for consumer software it certainly is.
In more specific cases, it might present a useful solution - for example, for high-end military applications or servers maintained by experts there are certainly advantages to
an open system; however, these cases are relatively restricted - since I see little commercial potential in free software, these have to return to the roots of open source - to
the limited number of highly dedicated hackers producing a small range of software (such as Unix kernels). It is here that there can be union between the two opposites - a movement
that believes in free software, and those who make money out of it. Thus OSX represents a good example of the sort of project open source is ideally suited for - a defined Unix kernel
is the ideal project for open source, in that it requires relatively few resources other than programmer time.
And people like to pretend, probably because they enjoy porn and violence, that it doesn't harm people, but anyone who can seriously believe this is quite frankly mad.
If you consistently expose people to sex and violence they grow to accept it. It's as obvious as anything. It's conditioning. For instance, in Muslim countries women aren't leered at and treated as sex objects, because society conditions them not to. In Western societies, women are objectified through their portrayal as breasts on a stick on TV.
That's how conditioning works, and that's what's happened here. There is no way that violence has no effect. Just as kids exposed to lots of swearing swear more than those in environemnts where swearing is taboo, those exposed to violence are more violent. Anyone who says otherwise is only doing so because they enjoy violence and sex so much.
> Loki continues to do really good things. I know things are tough, but hopefully they can make it. Good luck guys.
No they can't. Open source-related projects have consistently proven to be loss making ventures. Loki is working for an open source operating system. There is no culture of paying for things. There is on the Mac, which is why Mac games are profitable.
On Linux however, people want something for nothing (open source games are unworkable, because of the sheer amount of effort, artists, musicians, etc., required), which is why all open source-related companies are either failing (VA Linux systems, Eazel, etc. - they are all worth a fraction of earlier values) or already failed.
An operating system based on communist principles of shared ownership doesn't offer much potential for making money. It's really only people's optimism (the same optimism that drove the price of website's relying on meager advertising revenue to billions of dollars) that somehow, by some miracle, giving stuff away, rather than maximizing revenue (as is traditional in capitalism), keeps these companies around.
Communism and capitalism don't mix (hence the failure of a capitalist firm in the world of Linux), and in a few years the venture capital firms will have tired of throwing good money after bad and the commercial interest will have died away.
Ruby is sold on the basis that it's a correct language. Unlike say perl or PHP, Ruby has a 'correct' object implementation, with full polymorphism and other advanced features.
Unlike perl, which is sold on the basis that it's expedient - quick and easy syntax, or PHP, which is sold on the basis that it's perl for morons, ruby makes no bones about doing things the right way.
This is where it falls down. Ruby is, in effect, the esperanto of programming languages - all fine and correct in principle, but completely useless in practise. Just as esperanto serves no purpose because people already speak English, so too Ruby is useless because it's correct where correctness doesn't matter.
Ruby stands to perl (quick and dirty programming) or PHP (perl for people to stupid to perl) as Objective C does to C++ or Lisp to a useful programming language. They are great in the laboratory, and for pointy-headed geeks to play with, but they are completely useless in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that Slashdot chose to report it.
Here's an article I wrote on the subject:
According to the open source movement [this article is concerned with open source, not free software (although free software certainly shares some of the funding problems), to clear up any ambiguity], considering a piece of software someone has written, one should not use it unless one has the source code. The reasoning is that if one
has a problem with it, one cannot resolve the issue without outside help. As far as I can see, although this is certainly a distinct advantage for say Google, who with a staff
of highly trained engineers could easily tweak the Linux or BSD kernel to suit their requirements, its advantages in ensuring quality and reliability are far from assured. For
example, in propounding the open source solution in John Goerzen's paper on the ethics of free [open source] software he says that the
famous case of the USS Yorktown, that the 'problem behind all this is proprietary software'.
This claim is one that Mr. Goerzen fails to adequately establish. His arguments can be summarized as follows:
By contrast he argues that from utilitarian grounds open source is better insofar as it tends to maximize the sum total of happiness, and, most specifically that 'free software is the most beneficial for the greatest number of people.'
To consider his first argument, namely that the absence of peer review makes closed source software untrustworthy, I would argue that in fact peer review is *more* rather than less
common with closed source software. To take an example, Microsoft operating systems typically spend upwards of a year in external testing, whereas open source software tends to follow Eric Raymonds's famous
Bazaar principle, where software is released little and often. The difference between the two can easily be seen. Anyone who used an open source OS and GUI environment, simply by
clicking through each option. In my experience there would also be a considerable number of software crashes.
There are a number of reasons for this as I see it:
Since the open source movement is associated with software that is without price, there is little money to fund fulltime programmers, marketing to attract new people to the project,
or commercial testing.
For example, let us consider one of the top open source games, Freeciv, and its nearest commercial competitor, which is probably Alpha Centauri. In the making of Alpha Centauri, the software house would work something like this:
'We need x programmers, x video guys, and x voiceover artists.'
They will then hire those staff and the product will be produced. By contrast, the free equivalent works on a haphazard basis whereby that which is produced is determined by those people who happen to volunteer for the project.
Thus Freeciv is without any sound effects, video, etc., and also has inferior graphics, all of which detract from one's enjoyment of the game (not to mention that it exhibits one of the major problems with open source, namely lack of innovation). Indeed it is my contention that open source is a fundamentally incorrect model for software aimed at the consumer.
Characteristics of the consumer:
little or no programming knowledge (and therefore the so-called advantage of having the source code is no such thing)
low tolerance of technology for its own sake
little understanding of computers
For them, open source software holds no benefits compared to the leading commercial equivalents from Microsft and Apple. As such, the consumer Linux distributions I believe are
doomed. The problems are:
out of software is somehow immoral (a bizarre belief, considering that everyone must make money to survive), they rely on 'donations', on selling services, and on limited and voluntary sales
of products they could download for free. Although to a certain extent the market has wised up to this, as seen by the fact that Corel's Linux division was sold for a miserly £5million,
I still believe that businesses like thekompany.com, and Nautilus, which rely on selling vague services or on giving the core product and charging for addons, it still persists.
It is unfortunate for open source that this socialist tendency persists so much - Microsoft would not be able to afford produce the world's best word processor if they had given
Word away and just charged for the thesaurus.
Still further, the belief that making money out of software is somehow damaging is fundamentally misconceived. While closed source software has grown up, so to has the economy -
high software spending is a *good* thing, not bad.
The massive growth in the economy has been fueled by commercial companies making money, whereas open source ultimately aims at making all software 'free', which would undoubtedly be harmful.
the resources of closed source means that the product will never be as advanced or as easy to use as the paid-for alternative [note that there are certain circumstances where open source can compete].
The common reply to this is that absence of resources is not an impediment, since open source depends on volunteers, but this makes the fundamental assumption that there are enough
people who would rather make software for free than make money making commercial software.
Thus:
Having, I believe, debunked the myth that open source can ever produce a sustainable and complete consumer software ensemble, I return to one of the first arguments made, namely that
closed source impairs does not allow people to learn.
This is a very flimsy argument, and I would in fact argue the reverse - at present colleges and learning schemes are heavily funded by profit-making businesses, but if open source succeeded
these businesses would be redundant, which would in fact cause even greater damage to learning since this funding would stop.
Furthermore, the net result of this would be that people would be discourage from software production as a career, since it would no longer represent a profitable career path, and so they
would probably pursue a career as a doctor or a lawyer. This would be a great loss to the nation, since the quality of software would decline, as highly intelligent students
would go elsewhere.
In conclusion, I'm not arguing necessarily that open source is always necessarily inappropriate, but rather that for consumer software it certainly is.
In more specific cases, it might present a useful solution - for example, for high-end military applications or servers maintained by experts there are certainly advantages to
an open system; however, these cases are relatively restricted - since I see little commercial potential in free software, these have to return to the roots of open source - to
the limited number of highly dedicated hackers producing a small range of software (such as Unix kernels). It is here that there can be union between the two opposites - a movement
that believes in free software, and those who make money out of it. Thus OSX represents a good example of the sort of project open source is ideally suited for - a defined Unix kernel
is the ideal project for open source, in that it requires relatively few resources other than programmer time.
And people like to pretend, probably because they enjoy porn and violence, that it doesn't harm people, but anyone who can seriously believe this is quite frankly mad.
If you consistently expose people to sex and violence they grow to accept it. It's as obvious as anything. It's conditioning. For instance, in Muslim countries women aren't leered at and treated as sex objects, because society conditions them not to. In Western societies, women are objectified through their portrayal as breasts on a stick on TV.
That's how conditioning works, and that's what's happened here. There is no way that violence has no effect. Just as kids exposed to lots of swearing swear more than those in environemnts where swearing is taboo, those exposed to violence are more violent. Anyone who says otherwise is only doing so because they enjoy violence and sex so much.
> Loki continues to do really good things. I know things are tough, but hopefully they can make it. Good luck guys.
No they can't. Open source-related projects have consistently proven to be loss making ventures. Loki is working for an open source operating system. There is no culture of paying for things. There is on the Mac, which is why Mac games are profitable.
On Linux however, people want something for nothing (open source games are unworkable, because of the sheer amount of effort, artists, musicians, etc., required), which is why all open source-related companies are either failing (VA Linux systems, Eazel, etc. - they are all worth a fraction of earlier values) or already failed.
An operating system based on communist principles of shared ownership doesn't offer much potential for making money. It's really only people's optimism (the same optimism that drove the price of website's relying on meager advertising revenue to billions of dollars) that somehow, by some miracle, giving stuff away, rather than maximizing revenue (as is traditional in capitalism), keeps these companies around.
Communism and capitalism don't mix (hence the failure of a capitalist firm in the world of Linux), and in a few years the venture capital firms will have tired of throwing good money after bad and the commercial interest will have died away.
Ruby is sold on the basis that it's a correct language. Unlike say perl or PHP, Ruby has a 'correct' object implementation, with full polymorphism and other advanced features.
Unlike perl, which is sold on the basis that it's expedient - quick and easy syntax, or PHP, which is sold on the basis that it's perl for morons, ruby makes no bones about doing things the right way.
This is where it falls down. Ruby is, in effect, the esperanto of programming languages - all fine and correct in principle, but completely useless in practise. Just as esperanto serves no purpose because people already speak English, so too Ruby is useless because it's correct where correctness doesn't matter.
Ruby stands to perl (quick and dirty programming) or PHP (perl for people to stupid to perl) as Objective C does to C++ or Lisp to a useful programming language. They are great in the laboratory, and for pointy-headed geeks to play with, but they are completely useless in practice.