Yes of course it is fine if MobilExxon is *paying* the developers to create the software. What we are discussing is that with the OSS model such software would be freely available for other companies, like Shell Oil to use for FREE. This means that Shell Oil would not pay any developer for this. Good for Shell Oil, bad for us.
Keep your insults to yourself. I am civil, why can't you be?
The fact that their costs outwiegh the profits on the product doesn't mean that software should be free. All those companies tried to charge as much for those OSes as the market would bear at that time, even though they were and are making money off of support. Really in those cases the R&D costs of the OS were hidden in the hardware costs anyway.
Of course, now Linux has pretty much destroyed that market and now Sun, Dec, at al are under pressure and have lost another revenue stream. This means less developers, more layoffs. Everyone is now going to run commodity Intel hardware with Linux for their low end needs.
Meanwhile I am discussing the software industry in total, operating systems are a very small part of that.
Please don't insult me by saying I have no clue. It is simply rude.
Stop being paranoid. We are try to convice people, not force people, particularly those how want to have a profession in the software industry. We aren't try to legislate your "freedoms" away or take away your choices. I am glad you apparently have found your niche in the OSS world.
"Value" in this case refers to the FINANCIAL value of the product from the PRODUCERS perspective. Obviously the value of any product from a CONSUMERS perspective is based on the utility of the product.
As we have already established, OSS is good for the CONSUMER because they get the product (utility) for free - but bad for the PRODUCER since the financial rewards have been much reduced (or even eliminated).
"The open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved"
One of the reasons I am rewriting the paperm originally written in 1999, is to clarify some issues.
The above statement should read "The open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved in the production of software"
It actually doesn't work for consumers of OSS software in the long run, but that is another topic entirely.
"well, how do scientists protect their IP when they publish their results anyway?"
The method used are called PATENTS and COPYRIGHTS. Scientists frequently are granted patents and authors and musicians use COPYRIGHTS.
As for for your paranoid assumption that I am going to legislate your "freedoms" away, don't worry. I am simply trying to inject some rational thought into the illogical OSS world. I want all existing and upcoming software engineers to think about how much value they are producing by streamlining the business processes of corporations. Isn't that worth fair compensation?
Well the market can't support a large number of engineers if illogical people are going to give away their work for free. Hopefully the OSS movement will die out.
Imagine company A who is willing to buy an openoffice plugin and company B who is willing to buy the same openoffice plugin. In a closed source scenario a developer or TWO developers would have the ability to get paid for their efforts. In the OSS scenario, only company A is going to pay for the development. Company B, C, F, G, H, etc.. get it all for free. All opportunities that the developer had for making a living wage off of the plugin is gone.
The value of the plugin in the OSS case is $X. The value of the plugin in the closed case is $(X*N) where N is the number of companies willing to pay for the product.
I'm glad you are looking at saving ExxonMobil a few bucks though. I am sure they will put it to much better use than a poor developer would.
"Folks really can make money off of Apache. Consultants who install it; and there are a few commercial versions that have some added features, mostly easier management. The things is, nobody can make obscene amounts of money on software anymore"
Yes, I addressed this in my paper. As I pointed out, the people making the money are not nescessarily the developers who produced the product. I know I don't want to make a living INSTALLING SOFTWARE because writing software is not valued.
As for making obscene amounts of money, there will still be people making money off the software - just not the tech people. They will be ekeing out a living.
I would prefer to have the option of writing X, Y AND Z. Why limit yourself to 33% of the available options? What happens when someone adds feature Z and releases it as OSS? What happens when 10,000 developers are competing to bid on implementing feature Z, because X and Y are freely available?
Well said again! Those of you who are in college today take note of what we are saying here. We have been in the trenches of the software industry and it is slowly disintegrating as a feasible profession. Thats is what software engineering is anyway, a PROFESSION, not a job.
Hopefully the spread of OSS will slow when the "dotcom bubble fueled" finances of the companies that support OSS run out.
"Clients will still need someone to install/configure/customize their systems. And the terms of the license are as such that such customizations/upgrades are encouraged to be shared back into the common resource pool."
Guess what? I don't want the programming profession to devolve into a simple IT support guy. A professional software developer is a noble position.
Well said! And that is why my mantra has always been "Don't Support Open Source, Support Open Standards!"
We are rapidly coming to a point where programming will become so devalued that compensation will diminish to a point where the profession is not feasible for high quality people.
Ah, I do think of Open Source as science and I do contribute to R&D type Open Source projects.
However OS really has made inroads where it is used as a cheap (free as in beer) replacement for closed source commodity software. Apache, JBoss, et al is destroying the web server/application software market in an age where sales should be soaring. Of course the big businesses love it! Why would ExxonMobil spend $800,000 in Netscape Web Server licenses when can get Apache for free? That money is much better spent on executive bonuses than supporting common Netscape code monkeys right?
"Only companies that want to make money by selling software (like Microsoft) can be hurt by open source software"
Yes, and they will get hurt. Why is this good? They are a major employer of programmers. I have no idea why people at Slashdot seems to equate closed source software with only Microsoft. There are TENS OF THOUSANDS of closed software companies out there. There will be TENS OF THOUSANDS more if we do not devalue software production to the point where it is not feasible to enter a market.
"That is why every non-software company should be embracing GPL open source software whenever they can"
WELL SAID. Why is this true? Because now those non-software companies get their software and associated labor for FREE. What a good deal it is for Mobil/Exxon. Of course, it is bad for us the developers - but we aren't worth anything anyway.
"They could assign a small team of developers to focus on that aspect and improve it. The work these developers are doing may not give Exxon Mobil a competitive advantage over the other oil companies, so they might decide to release the changes under the GPL and receive peer review on the changes, bugfixes and other improvements that come from outside the company, and some good publicity for helping the community. Because they only distribute the changes internally, they would also have the option of keeping the source internal and never releasing the changes, but there are times when that isn't the best option."
Yes, it definitely is good for the corporation who uses the software. They get free licenses and free bug fixes. FREE LABOR. Corporations love that! The question is what does the SOFTWARE PRODUCER and DEVELOPERS get out of it? Less developers are now needed since the work is theoretically spread around to multiple companies. Your value has been reduced.
Everyones obsessions about Microsoft around here is becoming apparent. No one said anything about creating robber barons. I am just talking about making a living creating software. Imagine a future where all software was devalued to zero cost. Where would the DEVELOPERS receive financial compensation from? Governments? Corporations who compete to sell support on products? Profit margins would be razor thin and your compensation would be reduced dramatically.
All you kids in college right now who are considering a future in software development should think about this issue.
I am not claiming that Shared Source is better. It is not better vs. closed source for US THE DEVELOPERS. Both OS and SS are flawed concepts. They both devalue software and therefore those of us that work on software.
The reasons that people work on OS projects is varied. For some few it is a paid job. For others it is because they are at a university and do not need to generate income. Others are simply naiive and believe in the OS dogma. Others do it for their ego. All are valid reasons.
The reason I work on OS projects is to share knowledge and to work on cutting edge research that for-profit companies will not tackle due to a lack of profit making potential. However I will not work on OS projects such as web servers, application servers, and other commodity software etc because it is ridiculous to give away such labor for free so a relatively few can profit.
Not familiar with TrollTech, but under the GPL rules they would have to own every scrap of code (or get every contributor to agree) if they wanted to relicense it under a different license.
The originator of the code loses financially because they now they have eliminated the artifical scarcity, and therefore the financial value of that version of the software.
From my seminal paper, written in 1999 (BEFORE the dotcom collapse):
The High Priests of the Bazaar
This paper presents a case against the open source movement and explains why the open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved. There are several arguments against the OS (open source) model.
Open Source Doesn't Make Economic Sense For Most
The open source organization has presented a few cases that supposedly explain why OS works economically. However, if you examine the cases objectively you will find that the cases are flimsy and non-specific and do not address any specific concerns. They attempt to bolster their case by pointing out a few "successes", among which Caldera and Red Hat are displayed as shining examples.
The real economic question of the OS model is how is money made, and who is making the money. Who is being rewarded financially for the enormous development effort? The open source initiative claims that there are at least four different models that allow someone to reap rewards. Oddly, it is not mentioned that it is not necessarily the people who did the development work that gain financially.
The four primary business cases mentioned by OS proponents are "Selling Support", "Loss Leader", "Widget Frosting" and "Accessorizing."
The first case proposes that money can be made via selling support for the free software product. This is by far the strongest case and is proven to work, for a few small companies. The two companies that are shown as positive examples of this business model are Red Hat and Caldera, who distribute and support the Linux operating system. What is never mentioned is that neither of these two companies has contributed significantly in relative terms to the Linux development process. Its important to note that using this business model, the people that make the money are usually not the ones who have invested in the development process. So much for the strongest case.
The second case is based on the idea that you give away a product as open source so you can make money selling a closed source program. This also can work, but it should be noted that the money is being made off the closed source product and not off of the open source. An example of this model would be Netscape, who gives away the source code of their client browser so the OS community can do development, but keeps their "cash cow" products completely closed. Obviously, this case may only work if you have a software product that lends itself to this sort of "give away the razor and make money on the blades" system. The truth is that the vast majority of software is monolithic. So much for the loss leader case.
The third case, "Widget Frosting", sounds completely practical. The premise that hardware makers produce open source software so that the OS development community will work for free to produce better drivers and interface tools for their hardware products. It sounds great on the surface, especially for the company that produces the hardware: they get free drivers and do not have to pay for expensive developers. The OS community wins by getting presumably stable drivers and tools. What is not mentioned is the reason hardware makers usually don't do this is because they do not want to reveal trade secrets regarding their hardware design. Production of efficient drivers requires an intimate knowledge of the hardware the driver is for. It is almost always the case that it is in the hardware developers' best interest to keep their hardware secrets close to home. This also brings up the question of why isn't hardware "open"? So much for the frosting case.
The final case, "Accessorizing", is similar to the first, but throws in the idea of selling books and complete systems with the open source software, and other accessories as well. It is obvious that selling books qualifies as support, and that it really belongs in the first case. The idea of selling computer systems, T-Shirts, dolls, again begs the question: "Who is making the money?" As with the first case, it is not necessarily the people who have done the development work. Additionally, the question of how much money can be made selling books, t-shirts, mugs, etc, is never answered. O'Reilly Associates is frequently used as an example to be a company who has made money using this case. The reader should notice that O'Reilly Associates are not the people doing the development work. Indeed, it is never asked why all the O'Reilly books are not available for free or at least at manufacturing cost? This also brings up the question of why isn't book production "open"? Perhaps they are waiting to see if they could sell enough O'Reilly T-Shirts to pay their bills. So much for the accessories.
Open Source Does Not Necessarily Produce Better Software
The open source proponents frequently state that OS necessarily produces better software. This statement is made without any evidence. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. GCC is a standard compiler produced by the GNU organization. It lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features. The reason behind is illustrates the largest weakness in the OS plan. It is very hard to convince qualified engineers that they should do such boring and unglamorous work without any sort of financial reward. The idea of throwing large quantities of people at the source does not work in this case, since there are not large quantities of qualified individuals available.
Open Source Did Not Make the Internet Successful
Another statement made by the OS community is that somehow open source was responsible for the success of the Internet. The reason behind this is probably a result of the confusion between what is open source and what is an open protocol. It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols. This does not equate to open source, for the two are quite different. The vast majority of the machines on the Internet run on closed source operating systems running mostly closed source software, which communicate using open protocols.
Where Does Open Source Work?
Open source does work in certain cases. A good example of where it may work well is Netscape. The act of giving away the source to the OS community so they can work for free and produce a product that helps the sales of their server software was a stroke of genius and proved very profitable for the relatively few at Netscape. But is this truly making money off of open source? Isn't the money is made off of the closed source software?
Another example of where it does work is the aforementioned Red Hat. Red Hat has been successful making money off of the work of thousands of others who have contributed to the Linux operating system and the associated GNU programs that have shipped with the Linux distributions. The question is: do those who work at Red Hat deserve to be rewarded, or do the people who do the actual development work deserve to be rewarded? Should the money go to the few, or to the many? It seems that the High Priests of the Bazaar believe the former.
THIS DOCUMENT CAN BE RECOPIED AND REDISTRIBUTED WITHOUT RESTRICTION, HOWEVER ADDITIONS/MODIFICATIONS/CORRECTIONS SHOULD BE LABELED AS SUCH WHERE THEY OCCUR.
Another thing I would like to point out, and which I will include in an updated version of the paper, is the fact that by contributing to Open Source you are decreasing the financial value of software. The reason for this is because you have eliminated the artificial scarcity of the product. This only serves to lessen the financia value of the product, which leads to lower compensation for those that produce software.
Music and book publishers create scarcity via the copyright mechanism, the software industry should be no different.
For those of you who have bit hit hard by the recent economic downturn in the software world may want to consider this before giving away your efforts to the corporations for free.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said that anyone was being forced to write code for free and give it away. Where did you read this?
Exactly -- welcome to the real world. Lets make the situation worse by working for free so others may profit.
Ahh, personal attacks when you cannot refute the arguments. How very Slashdot like!
Yes of course it is fine if MobilExxon is *paying* the developers to create the software. What we are discussing is that with the OSS model such software would be freely available for other companies, like Shell Oil to use for FREE. This means that Shell Oil would not pay any developer for this. Good for Shell Oil, bad for us.
Keep your insults to yourself. I am civil, why can't you be?
Ah, personal insults and anecdotes. The stuff of Slashdot finally comes out!
The fact that their costs outwiegh the profits on the product doesn't mean that software should be free. All those companies tried to charge as much for those OSes as the market would bear at that time, even though they were and are making money off of support. Really in those cases the R&D costs of the OS were hidden in the hardware costs anyway.
Of course, now Linux has pretty much destroyed that market and now Sun, Dec, at al are under pressure and have lost another revenue stream. This means less developers, more layoffs. Everyone is now going to run commodity Intel hardware with Linux for their low end needs.
Meanwhile I am discussing the software industry in total, operating systems are a very small part of that.
Please don't insult me by saying I have no clue. It is simply rude.
Stop being paranoid. We are try to convice people, not force people, particularly those how want to have a profession in the software industry. We aren't try to legislate your "freedoms" away or take away your choices. I am glad you apparently have found your niche in the OSS world.
"Value" in this case refers to the FINANCIAL value of the product from the PRODUCERS perspective. Obviously the value of any product from a CONSUMERS perspective is based on the utility of the product.
As we have already established, OSS is good for the CONSUMER because they get the product (utility) for free - but bad for the PRODUCER since the financial rewards have been much reduced (or even eliminated).
"The open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved"
One of the reasons I am rewriting the paperm originally written in 1999, is to clarify some issues.
The above statement should read "The open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved in the production of software"
It actually doesn't work for consumers of OSS software in the long run, but that is another topic entirely.
"well, how do scientists protect their IP when they publish their results anyway?"
The method used are called PATENTS and COPYRIGHTS. Scientists frequently are granted patents and authors and musicians use COPYRIGHTS.
As for for your paranoid assumption that I am going to legislate your "freedoms" away, don't worry. I am simply trying to inject some rational thought into the illogical OSS world. I want all existing and upcoming software engineers to think about how much value they are producing by streamlining the business processes of corporations. Isn't that worth fair compensation?
Well the market can't support a large number of engineers if illogical people are going to give away their work for free. Hopefully the OSS movement will die out.
Imagine company A who is willing to buy an openoffice plugin and company B who is willing to buy the same openoffice plugin. In a closed source scenario a developer or TWO developers would have the ability to get paid for their efforts. In the OSS scenario, only company A is going to pay for the development. Company B, C, F, G, H, etc.. get it all for free. All opportunities that the developer had for making a living wage off of the plugin is gone.
The value of the plugin in the OSS case is $X. The value of the plugin in the closed case is $(X*N) where N is the number of companies willing to pay for the product.
I'm glad you are looking at saving ExxonMobil a few bucks though. I am sure they will put it to much better use than a poor developer would.
"Folks really can make money off of Apache. Consultants who install it; and there are a few commercial versions that have some added features, mostly easier management. The things is, nobody can make obscene amounts of money on software anymore"
Yes, I addressed this in my paper. As I pointed out, the people making the money are not nescessarily the developers who produced the product. I know I don't want to make a living INSTALLING SOFTWARE because writing software is not valued.
As for making obscene amounts of money, there will still be people making money off the software - just not the tech people. They will be ekeing out a living.
"Why should you keep reaping the rewards of one occurance over and over?"
Why SHOULDN'T I? Authors do, musicians do, inventors do, scientists do, anyone who produces IP does!
I would prefer to have the option of writing X, Y AND Z. Why limit yourself to 33% of the available options? What happens when someone adds feature Z and releases it as OSS? What happens when 10,000 developers are competing to bid on implementing feature Z, because X and Y are freely available?
Well said again! Those of you who are in college today take note of what we are saying here. We have been in the trenches of the software industry and it is slowly disintegrating as a feasible profession. Thats is what software engineering is anyway, a PROFESSION, not a job.
Hopefully the spread of OSS will slow when the "dotcom bubble fueled" finances of the companies that support OSS run out.
"Clients will still need someone to install/configure/customize their systems. And the terms of the license are as such that such customizations/upgrades are encouraged to be shared back into the common resource pool."
Guess what? I don't want the programming profession to devolve into a simple IT support guy. A professional software developer is a noble position.
Well said! And that is why my mantra has always been "Don't Support Open Source, Support Open Standards!"
We are rapidly coming to a point where programming will become so devalued that compensation will diminish to a point where the profession is not feasible for high quality people.
Ah, I do think of Open Source as science and I do contribute to R&D type Open Source projects.
However OS really has made inroads where it is used as a cheap (free as in beer) replacement for closed source commodity software. Apache, JBoss, et al is destroying the web server/application software market in an age where sales should be soaring. Of course the big businesses love it! Why would ExxonMobil spend $800,000 in Netscape Web Server licenses when can get Apache for free? That money is much better spent on executive bonuses than supporting common Netscape code monkeys right?
"Only companies that want to make money by selling software (like Microsoft) can be hurt by open source software"
Yes, and they will get hurt. Why is this good? They are a major employer of programmers. I have no idea why people at Slashdot seems to equate closed source software with only Microsoft. There are TENS OF THOUSANDS of closed software companies out there. There will be TENS OF THOUSANDS more if we do not devalue software production to the point where it is not feasible to enter a market.
"That is why every non-software company should be embracing GPL open source software whenever they can"
WELL SAID. Why is this true? Because now those non-software companies get their software and associated labor for FREE. What a good deal it is for Mobil/Exxon. Of course, it is bad for us the developers - but we aren't worth anything anyway.
"They could assign a small team of developers to focus on that aspect and improve it. The work these developers are doing may not give Exxon Mobil a competitive advantage over the other oil companies, so they might decide to release the changes under the GPL and receive peer review on the changes, bugfixes and other improvements that come from outside the company, and some good publicity for helping the community. Because they only distribute the changes internally, they would also have the option of keeping the source internal and never releasing the changes, but there are times when that isn't the best option."
Yes, it definitely is good for the corporation who uses the software. They get free licenses and free bug fixes. FREE LABOR. Corporations love that! The question is what does the SOFTWARE PRODUCER and DEVELOPERS get out of it? Less developers are now needed since the work is theoretically spread around to multiple companies. Your value has been reduced.
Everyones obsessions about Microsoft around here is becoming apparent. No one said anything about creating robber barons. I am just talking about making a living creating software. Imagine a future where all software was devalued to zero cost. Where would the DEVELOPERS receive financial compensation from? Governments? Corporations who compete to sell support on products? Profit margins would be razor thin and your compensation would be reduced dramatically.
All you kids in college right now who are considering a future in software development should think about this issue.
I am not claiming that Shared Source is better. It is not better vs. closed source for US THE DEVELOPERS. Both OS and SS are flawed concepts. They both devalue software and therefore those of us that work on software.
The reasons that people work on OS projects is varied. For some few it is a paid job. For others it is because they are at a university and do not need to generate income. Others are simply naiive and believe in the OS dogma. Others do it for their ego. All are valid reasons.
The reason I work on OS projects is to share knowledge and to work on cutting edge research that for-profit companies will not tackle due to a lack of profit making potential. However I will not work on OS projects such as web servers, application servers, and other commodity software etc because it is ridiculous to give away such labor for free so a relatively few can profit.
Not familiar with TrollTech, but under the GPL rules they would have to own every scrap of code (or get every contributor to agree) if they wanted to relicense it under a different license.
The originator of the code loses financially because they now they have eliminated the artifical scarcity, and therefore the financial value of that version of the software.
From my seminal paper, written in 1999 (BEFORE the dotcom collapse):
The High Priests of the Bazaar
This paper presents a case against the open source movement and explains why the open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved. There are several arguments against the OS (open source) model.
Open Source Doesn't Make Economic Sense For Most
The open source organization has presented a few cases that supposedly explain why OS works economically. However, if you examine the cases objectively you will find that the cases are flimsy and non-specific and do not address any specific concerns. They attempt to bolster their case by pointing out a few "successes", among which Caldera and Red Hat are displayed as shining examples.
The real economic question of the OS model is how is money made, and who is making the money. Who is being rewarded financially for the enormous development effort? The open source initiative claims that there are at least four different models that allow someone to reap rewards. Oddly, it is not mentioned that it is not necessarily the people who did the development work that gain financially.
The four primary business cases mentioned by OS proponents are "Selling Support", "Loss Leader", "Widget Frosting" and "Accessorizing."
The first case proposes that money can be made via selling support for the free software product. This is by far the strongest case and is proven to work, for a few small companies. The two companies that are shown as positive examples of this business model are Red Hat and Caldera, who distribute and support the Linux operating system. What is never mentioned is that neither of these two companies has contributed significantly in relative terms to the Linux development process. Its important to note that using this business model, the people that make the money are usually not the ones who have invested in the development process. So much for the strongest case.
The second case is based on the idea that you give away a product as open source so you can make money selling a closed source program. This also can work, but it should be noted that the money is being made off the closed source product and not off of the open source. An example of this model would be Netscape, who gives away the source code of their client browser so the OS community can do development, but keeps their "cash cow" products completely closed. Obviously, this case may only work if you have a software product that lends itself to this sort of "give away the razor and make money on the blades" system. The truth is that the vast majority of software is monolithic. So much for the loss leader case.
The third case, "Widget Frosting", sounds completely practical. The premise that hardware makers produce open source software so that the OS development community will work for free to produce better drivers and interface tools for their hardware products. It sounds great on the surface, especially for the company that produces the hardware: they get free drivers and do not have to pay for expensive developers. The OS community wins by getting presumably stable drivers and tools. What is not mentioned is the reason hardware makers usually don't do this is because they do not want to reveal trade secrets regarding their hardware design. Production of efficient drivers requires an intimate knowledge of the hardware the driver is for. It is almost always the case that it is in the hardware developers' best interest to keep their hardware secrets close to home. This also brings up the question of why isn't hardware "open"? So much for the frosting case.
The final case, "Accessorizing", is similar to the first, but throws in the idea of selling books and complete systems with the open source software, and other accessories as well. It is obvious that selling books qualifies as support, and that it really belongs in the first case. The idea of selling computer systems, T-Shirts, dolls, again begs the question: "Who is making the money?" As with the first case, it is not necessarily the people who have done the development work. Additionally, the question of how much money can be made selling books, t-shirts, mugs, etc, is never answered. O'Reilly Associates is frequently used as an example to be a company who has made money using this case. The reader should notice that O'Reilly Associates are not the people doing the development work. Indeed, it is never asked why all the O'Reilly books are not available for free or at least at manufacturing cost? This also brings up the question of why isn't book production "open"? Perhaps they are waiting to see if they could sell enough O'Reilly T-Shirts to pay their bills. So much for the accessories.
Open Source Does Not Necessarily Produce Better Software
The open source proponents frequently state that OS necessarily produces better software. This statement is made without any evidence. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. GCC is a standard compiler produced by the GNU organization. It lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features. The reason behind is illustrates the largest weakness in the OS plan. It is very hard to convince qualified engineers that they should do such boring and unglamorous work without any sort of financial reward. The idea of throwing large quantities of people at the source does not work in this case, since there are not large quantities of qualified individuals available.
Open Source Did Not Make the Internet Successful
Another statement made by the OS community is that somehow open source was responsible for the success of the Internet. The reason behind this is probably a result of the confusion between what is open source and what is an open protocol. It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols. This does not equate to open source, for the two are quite different. The vast majority of the machines on the Internet run on closed source operating systems running mostly closed source software, which communicate using open protocols.
Where Does Open Source Work?
Open source does work in certain cases. A good example of where it may work well is Netscape. The act of giving away the source to the OS community so they can work for free and produce a product that helps the sales of their server software was a stroke of genius and proved very profitable for the relatively few at Netscape. But is this truly making money off of open source? Isn't the money is made off of the closed source software?
Another example of where it does work is the aforementioned Red Hat. Red Hat has been successful making money off of the work of thousands of others who have contributed to the Linux operating system and the associated GNU programs that have shipped with the Linux distributions. The question is: do those who work at Red Hat deserve to be rewarded, or do the people who do the actual development work deserve to be rewarded? Should the money go to the few, or to the many? It seems that the High Priests of the Bazaar believe the former.
THIS DOCUMENT CAN BE RECOPIED AND REDISTRIBUTED WITHOUT RESTRICTION, HOWEVER ADDITIONS/MODIFICATIONS/CORRECTIONS SHOULD BE LABELED AS SUCH WHERE THEY OCCUR.
Another thing I would like to point out, and which I will include in an updated version of the paper, is the fact that by contributing to Open Source you are decreasing the financial value of software. The reason for this is because you have eliminated the artificial scarcity of the product. This only serves to lessen the financia value of the product, which leads to lower compensation for those that produce software.
Music and book publishers create scarcity via the copyright mechanism, the software industry should be no different.
For those of you who have bit hit hard by the recent economic downturn in the software world may want to consider this before giving away your efforts to the corporations for free.
Well developers will always be needed. The problem is that with Open Source less are needed and they are less highly valued.
This is presumably good for the corporations, but bad for the developer.