I think the authors are looking at one kind of software development and proclaiming that it's the only one that matters. Full disclosure: I did study comp-sci, but I don't have a comp-sci degree. I did, however, have a mom that was a human resources manager an embedded systems company through a formative part of my childhood. Many of the engineers who worked with her were my friends. I learned a lot from them. But I did not grind my way through all of Knuth's work before I started coding. Certainly not before I began to make a living at it.
There are many people for who building valuable systems, even beautiful ones, will never need the kind of knowledge you proclaim "matters". The most interesting program I've seen was written by someone who knew about another field of knowledge very deeply and by the force of his intellectual will he coded something that worked well for him that I would likely have taken much longer to do, even though I can code circles around him. Knowledge about something other than programming can -- and often does -- matter more than knowledge about Computer Science or even software does. If we all waited until we knew enough to know what we were doing, we would never do very much.
As far as Java is concerned, the idea of Java is very important: that your investment in software need not necessarily fall victim to Moore's law in that your hardware can move forward while your code doesn't need to know the difference. Many languages have tried to solve the problem in different ways, some better than others. Java is the only language that seemed to take it seriously to the level that the binary is actually portable and the abstract CPU can be optimized to perform better than the down-to-machine-code compiled ones with "knowledge" of the native CPU. So now Java routinely out paces other languages (including C!) in real world problems. I, for one, think this is great!
You have your finger on it: Peter Drucker, the godfather of business management theory says this (paraphrasing):
A corporation makes shoes, for instance. It doesn't make 'money'. Money may or may not be part of the formula, but the fact that the company exists to give value to it's customers, that's it's purpose. As far as making money, that's what finanacial people think a company does, they are wrong, and that's why financial people will never understand the corporation.
Just because Open Source isn't making money for some people (even if it's not making money for _most_ people) doesn't mean it's not having a huge impact, that the impact has value. It may be small in terms of tracable monetary transactions, but it's large in terms of changing the world we live in.
IOW, Don't confuse size with impact, impact with profitability, profitability with value. A company can have huge profits and contribute little. A company can be hugely profitable and have little impact on the industry that its in.
The title of the C|Net article should be changed to "Companies leveraging open-source approach as a revenue generating model fade in tough times", instead of "Open source fades in tough times"
They are confused: Open Source is bigger and better than ever. And it will continue to grow. C|Net is making the classic management mistake of confusing impact with profitability, profitablity with value. Here's a hint: "It's more profitable (for sellers of proprietary software) when things _don't_ work".
Remember, open source is about solving problems, about interoperability. When I want to solve a problem, I just do it. I don't need Microsoft's
permission, although they would like to change that. As much as I hate Microsoft, I still feel sorry for them when I see them fail to solve a
problem that E.F. Codd solved 30 years ago. Yet Microsoft would love to have the Internet to never go beyond MSN and TCP/IP be the idle dream of reseach scientists.
The Internet will continue to be the largest software development community in the world, contributing more to the computer industry than ever before. The most important, critical software you interact constantly with on the Internet is open source, based on open standards and open implementations, not Microsoft code.
Many companies, large and small, have made tons of money on open source. They will continue to do so if they know what's best for them.
Wow, I can't believe how ignorant of a comment that is. Patents are designed to encourage innovation. When companies use them to stop their competitors from entering their market space, do you think anyone is helped by the company litigating them out of existence?
Put another way, you buy a screwdriver from Stanley. You don't like the screwdriver, so you modify it to suit your needs. You share your screwdriver modification technique to your friends. Stanley now sues you because you modified their tool. This is how patent law is applied to open source projects.
Patents were invented to encourage innovation, assuming fair market practices. Howver, large corporations use software patents to halt innovation that is a perceived threat to the exisiting technologies they are making money off of. This is a crazy situation! We are going to hang ourselves as a culture unless this is thrown out!
And considering I will never be in "fair market" position to sell my software like Microsoft does, how is any patentability helpful to anyone except companies who have large war chests and near-monopolies?
Until the focus of innovation is understood to be Intellectual Process and not Intellectual Property, we will remain in a legal morass under the thumbs of corporate giants.
Re:Benchmark Becomes Bellyache
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
I read somewhere that the fastest Intel chip clocked in at 450 Megaflops while the G4 is at the 1.3-4 Gigaflop range. Intel always had the raw speed of the processor faster than anything else, but they sucked in the math compared to almost any other chip, including PPC.
And, yeah, Macs are slow to the user, but they have always run photoshop filters faster than PCs since the early 90's and Photoshop 1.8.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the authors are looking at one kind of software development and proclaiming that it's the only one that matters. Full disclosure: I did study comp-sci, but I don't have a comp-sci degree. I did, however, have a mom that was a human resources manager an embedded systems company through a formative part of my childhood. Many of the engineers who worked with her were my friends. I learned a lot from them. But I did not grind my way through all of Knuth's work before I started coding. Certainly not before I began to make a living at it.
There are many people for who building valuable systems, even beautiful ones, will never need the kind of knowledge you proclaim "matters". The most interesting program I've seen was written by someone who knew about another field of knowledge very deeply and by the force of his intellectual will he coded something that worked well for him that I would likely have taken much longer to do, even though I can code circles around him. Knowledge about something other than programming can -- and often does -- matter more than knowledge about Computer Science or even software does. If we all waited until we knew enough to know what we were doing, we would never do very much.
As far as Java is concerned, the idea of Java is very important: that your investment in software need not necessarily fall victim to Moore's law in that your hardware can move forward while your code doesn't need to know the difference. Many languages have tried to solve the problem in different ways, some better than others. Java is the only language that seemed to take it seriously to the level that the binary is actually portable and the abstract CPU can be optimized to perform better than the down-to-machine-code compiled ones with "knowledge" of the native CPU. So now Java routinely out paces other languages (including C!) in real world problems. I, for one, think this is great!
You have your finger on it: Peter Drucker, the godfather of business management theory says this (paraphrasing):
A corporation makes shoes, for instance. It doesn't make 'money'. Money may or may not be part of the formula, but the fact that the company exists to give value to it's customers, that's it's purpose. As far as making money, that's what finanacial people think a company does, they are wrong, and that's why financial people will never understand the corporation.
Just because Open Source isn't making money for some people (even if it's not making money for _most_ people) doesn't mean it's not having a huge impact, that the impact has value. It may be small in terms of tracable monetary transactions, but it's large in terms of changing the world we live in.
IOW, Don't confuse size with impact, impact with profitability, profitability with value. A company can have huge profits and contribute little. A company can be hugely profitable and have little impact on the industry that its in.
The title of the C|Net article should be changed to "Companies leveraging open-source approach as a revenue generating model fade in tough times", instead of "Open source fades in tough times"
They are confused: Open Source is bigger and better than ever. And it will continue to grow. C|Net is making the classic management mistake of confusing impact with profitability, profitablity with value. Here's a hint: "It's more profitable (for sellers of proprietary software) when things _don't_ work".
Remember, open source is about solving problems, about interoperability. When I want to solve a problem, I just do it. I don't need Microsoft's
permission, although they would like to change that. As much as I hate Microsoft, I still feel sorry for them when I see them fail to solve a
problem that E.F. Codd solved 30 years ago. Yet Microsoft would love to have the Internet to never go beyond MSN and TCP/IP be the idle dream of reseach scientists.
The Internet will continue to be the largest software development community in the world, contributing more to the computer industry than ever before. The most important, critical software you interact constantly with on the Internet is open source, based on open standards and open implementations, not Microsoft code.
Many companies, large and small, have made tons of money on open source. They will continue to do so if they know what's best for them.
Put another way, you buy a screwdriver from Stanley. You don't like the screwdriver, so you modify it to suit your needs. You share your screwdriver modification technique to your friends. Stanley now sues you because you modified their tool. This is how patent law is applied to open source projects.
See how stupid that is?
And considering I will never be in "fair market" position to sell my software like Microsoft does, how is any patentability helpful to anyone except companies who have large war chests and near-monopolies?
Until the focus of innovation is understood to be Intellectual Process and not Intellectual Property, we will remain in a legal morass under the thumbs of corporate giants.
I read somewhere that the fastest Intel chip clocked in at 450 Megaflops while the G4 is at the 1.3-4 Gigaflop range. Intel always had the raw speed of the processor faster than anything else, but they sucked in the math compared to almost any other chip, including PPC. And, yeah, Macs are slow to the user, but they have always run photoshop filters faster than PCs since the early 90's and Photoshop 1.8.