In every case that I can think of other than ActiveX, it was a good thing!
How is that possible - unless you are shooting for a browser monoculture?
Have you even used Windows since 98/ME?
I use it often enough in the course of work to know it's junk^H^H^H^H not really up to par. Of course, I prefer to use OS X most of the time. The comparison is not flattering to 'doze.
I've never been victim to any exploits in XP.
Nor have I - as far as I know, but how would I tell? By the sound of it, the anti-spyware is as bad as the spyware. It's so nice to have environments where one doesn't have to waste time with that nonsense.
When did we start talking about exploits? If you want to win an argument about W1ndows it's probably best if we stay off the topic of security. Two words: Spam zombies.
Both browsers have a weakness in the arena of memory leaks
An obvious fact which I actually repeated in my own post.
during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?
You say that like it's a good thing(!)
"Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?
No; for some pretty obvious reasons: one obvious one being, you exclude anyone not using that particular browser. I thought everyone realised that was a Bad Thing - or maybe you haven't been one of those people who can't use their online bank because the bank decided to arbitrarily depend on IE. One can only hope that accessibility laws will put an end to such stupidities.
It's not surprising that both browser products have memory leaks. However one could reflect deeply on the differences in responsibility and approaches to remediation. In Firefox's case - being open source - you have complete transparency; you can file a bug on it, check the bug db, or even fix it yourself (don't laugh). In M$'s case, all you can do is kiss your money goodbye and hope they fix it "one day".
The same goes for all the rest of their system, too. It is not always obvious what a disturbing abdication of rights using a closed system is. A friend recently told me of a Visual $tudio crash triggered by a few \b backspace characters in a print statement. Not such a big deal, I thought at the time; but I found myself reflecting on his story later. Eventually the true horror of the situation sank in, which is that we have to completely trust the ability and goodwill of the vendor to deal with any and all issues in their O/S. That is no small responsibility and there is not much evidence that M$ is capable of fulfilling their end of the bargain. I would postulate, after RMS of course, that no closed and proprietary system on the scale of M$ products can be adequately maintained by one vendor. And of course maintenance becomes irrelevant when major "rewrites" are involved, such as have been prescribed by Longhr0n to fix W1ndows' fundamental ills (ref Spolsky on rewrites, Things You Should Never Do).
The thought that one has no recourse and indeed not even any way to inspect the system one uses (livelihood, etc), is deeply, deeply disturbing, and I again have to thank RMS for pointing out long ago what a dead-end that is, and for putting in place viable alternatives.
This "they're XML so they're open" is an utter smokescreen, and has been dissected here before. It's really no better than saying "the Intel instruction set is published, therefore our applications are open!"
As other posters have pointed out, and is usually the case with M$ rhetoric, if they had really meant to be open, there are much better directions they could have taken. Let's be reminded that the document-format issue is crucial PR to M$ because they are at risk of losing business (as they should be!) due to legislation protecting the public from government use of closed tools. We have to stop governments hiding our data in proprietary ghettos. Let's get M$ out of public office, where it does not belong. They've fed at the public trough too long already. Then let's finish the job and put them out of business entirely.
Enderle yesterday, M$ today, why is this propaganda being funneled straight to the front page? When did/. policy become, "They make sh1t up, and we print it"? It's an insult to the intelligence.
does this mean that Microsoft will eventually have to remove every component which can be produced by a competitor from their Windows distros? All the while Linux and Mac users enjoy all the bundled software that comes for free with their OSs
Linux and Apple do not hold monopolies on their markets, so even if they wanted to, they can't break the relevant laws. The findings in the US and Europe were that M$ has broken those laws, and even a casual familiarity with their business practices would hardly leave anyone in doubt!
If M$ won't respect the law, they should be penalised. Of course, I'd rather see them penalised by a total market boycott, but that probably assumes an unrealistic level of common sense from their customers and potential customers...
too idealistic and disconnected from reality. I buy commercial software only when there isn't an open source program that does the same job,
Fine: Now try to get a bug fixed in it. My experiences with proprietary software over the last decade or more perfectly bear out what RMS predicted. I would say that he is better connected with reality than most people; and that his ideals are essential. Without him, we'd have very little.
I have seen this phenomenon but it certainly doesn't have to be that way. One of the best kept secrets of having both cleanliness and portability is to eliminate #ifdefs from sources as far as possible. The obvious ideal is to have identical source and abstract platform differences by other means (e.g. macros instead of #ifdefs, and using identical APIs on different platforms, supplying only platform dependent implementations).
Keeping it clean probably also requires occasional refactoring and I guess some projects shun this as a matter of policy. The projects I would cite that achieve a high level of portability typically have no machine dependent code at all (TeX, for example). Not all code has that luxury but it's not as difficult as many people think - apparently including our friend Drepper.
No, it definitely doubled for each bug report, in the notice that I recall. (Knuth had more than one policy. One of them is a flat $2 per typo.) Yes, it was eventually capped; I was aware of that but it wasn't a relevant detail. Knuth did not begin with the intention of capping it:-) and it was that confident attitude to which I was alluding.
In my experience, porting is like the water of a river washing over river stones. Over time, every port makes the stone smoother. This applies whether it's a new architecture, O/S, compiler, or even just the unfamiliar box of some other user.
There are bugs that just don't get flushed out until you port to: non-x86; 64-bit; bigendian; Win32; OS X; etc, etc, etc. Drepper should know better: All the world's not a VAX, etc. (though a VAX port is a fine start:-)
Also, every port makes the process of porting itself easier. It's no coincidence that the most reliable and defect-free software is typically the most-ported software. This has always been true: TeX and METAFONT (where the monetary bug bountydoubled for every bug report, so assured was Knuth of its quality); Apache; Linux itself; NetBSD; GCC and friends; etc.
thanks Nokia for making a step in the right direction but theres a way to go yet.
Why should Stallman hold his tongue? He laid out the rationale for free software 20 years ago; everything he foresaw has come to pass. I'm amazed he has any patience left. At some point, there's only so much that one man can do. Sooner or later, you, I, the rest of us who write (or use) software are going to have to choose whether to stick up for those beliefs, or bend over and be screwed. To Stallman's credit, he hasn't given up yet.
They're certainly in the same vein, but the citation I'm thinking of is not among them. Churchill could probably add one or two lines to the family, such as his famous "democracy" epigram.
The funny thing is I probably saw it in a/. sig:-)
There is a truism, I'm not sure what the source is, that we are safe so long as we have an incompetent government and/or police force. If they're betting the farm on.NET, we have relatively little to fear. If they start doing things properly, get very worried.
But seriously. National ID? What part of 1984 don't you guys understand? That book was even part of our school curriculum...
These are people who are completely frustrated by Windows but stick with it only because it's what they know and cannot even fathom an alternative.
The polite explanation for this might be Stockholm Syndrome*. The impolite explanation is pig ignorance.
(* "The Stockholm Syndrome comes into play when a captive cannot escape and is isolated and threatened with death, but is shown token acts of kindness by the captor. It typically takes about three or four days for the psychological shift to take hold.
"A strategy of trying to keep your captor happy in order to stay alive becomes an obsessive identification with the likes and dislikes of the captor which has the result of warping your own psyche in such a way that you come to sympathize with your tormenter!")
in some sense the services model IS based on the idea that you are giving your customers crap. It is how you define that word crap. For instance, does it mean something that works poorly or something that doesn't do what the user wants even though it was advertised to do it. In either case, from a user point of view, it sucks, especially if you have to pay to just get it to work. Great software should be easy to configure and do what is wanted/promised. Granted, it's not limited to open source.
I agree with most of that. But Larry's wrong to slur open source as "shipping crap". He knows perfectly well that paid-for and shrinkwrapped software is no better and often worse. It's a transparently dishonest slur meant, of course, to give proprietary developers such as himself a superior glow. In other words he's slinging the same old inglorious muck: FUD.
In my earlier posts I did gloss over the difference between "fixing stuff that's already paid for so it works as advertised" and "adding new stuff that I want". It's interesting to compare the implications of these two needs in the proprietary and open source spheres.
In the proprietary world, many companies will provide free fixes to features that users already paid for, as a matter of policy or principle. (Many users expect this, being accustomed to warranties on tangible goods - "why should paid-for software be any different?" Despite EULAs I imagine there is still even some statutory protection.) Examples include Apple and even Micro$oft. However, as I mentioned, this is becoming less true; Adobe is a notable counterexample. By and large they no longer distribute bug fixes, so if you bought a broken feature, you are screwed and must pay for the next release and pray for a fix. This attitude ("we're not going to make it work as advertised") creates tremendous ill-will and is (I hope) self-defeating in the marketplace.
In the free world, if a feature is broken, the professional pride of the developer normally results in a quick fix. In those two respects, the two spheres are similar; policy or attitude dictates the response to "broken features". The exceptions might be where resources (funding) is not available, and the developer must wait for support or sponsorship in order to fix existing features.
When it comes to adding functionality or initiating a new project, of course, the proprietary world invariably exacts payment. This is true, for instance, when Apple does a new major release of OS X, or when Adobe revs Photoshop. In the free world, new stuff appears magically if the developer is motivated (maybe scratching an itch of their own), or if the developer is unresourced, it appears when sponsorship appears (maybe their employer has an interest in the feature, and subsidises development).
I see the "services" model as referring to "packaged" agreements which cover developer sweat on behalf of a customer. Depending on the package in question, that could include tech support of an educative nature ("how do I do this?"), bug fixes ("this doesn't work") and even additions ("I need this"). In my case - and that of many other free software developers - I usually provide all these with no expectation of payment, since I care deeply about reputation, and helping customers.
Certainly Larry seems to have a crazily warped view. I don't see what is so hard to grasp, or far-fetched, in the above. Having such a phobia of service-oriented business, unless he meets RMS on the road to Damascus, it's doubtful he'll ever stop spreading FUD and join us. One might at least hope that the media does a little more credibility checking before they blindly quote self-promoters like him. (As if!)
The reason us "open source guys" hate it when he says that is because its a fucking insult straight to our face
That's only ONE of the insults. How did you like this:
Larry: One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap
But the article writer is no better: A line like Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy is missing the point entirely, besides being obviously incorrect. They really should go do basic research such as reading the GPL before making fools of themselves.
he's also deeply concerned about feeding his family and keeping a roof over their head
This is repeated ad nauseam not only by Larry but now by his supporters. The problem is, it's based on (IMHO) the premise that his company comes crashing down if he ever went open source.
1. That may even be true. But even if he tried it and BitKeeper folded and he had to (horror!) get another job, he could NOT therefore conclude that Open Source is a flawed model and no open source business can survive (which appears to be his contention).
2. He's never going to try it, which further disqualifies him from commenting on the topic.
3. Even if the sun turned green and Larry open sourced BitKeeper, my bet is that he would make a decent living doing support for it. The problem appears to be that he cannot stomach any challenge to his cash flow. If one dollar less reaches his pocket, he blames open source. That's what all this is about. The almighty buck. It's time to mod McVoy down - especially since he's not even an open source groupie, let alone a contributor.
A great writeup of relevant OSS history
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
OK, I just read the FA. This guy really hates open source, doesn't he. It's outrageous that the article is constructed to paint a picture of McVoy as an open source expert, because his comments reflect either a profound lack of insight into OSS, or he is simply trying to be inflammatory (seeking publicity?), or he really is out to destroy it. Let's call him an Anakin Skywalker type, and I hope McVoy's fate is no more rewarding. He is not entitled to speak on behalf of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of programmers working in open source today. In lieu of an apology - which will never be forthcoming from this type - we can only pray he keeps his destructive tendencies to himself in future.
In any case, to say McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet is plainly bullsh*t.
"We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six months" - the key words there are "we believe". This is nothing more than flimsy opinion which does not seem borne out by a survey of the open source marketplace. Again, the article puts this rubbish forward as gospel.
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?" - again, this is simply nonsense. It's hard to imagine someone who's spent his career in software not grasping the 'free software/paid support' model. Certainly plenty of customers understand and use it. It sure makes sense to me. Then again, maybe all those years just closed his mind.
McVoy says... building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money. - Perhaps he can try his hand at explaining the success of Linux? Sure, today there is some corporate sponsorship, but there is plenty of 'trial and error' going on that is not directly paid for. And in its early years, before sponsorship, how does McVoy explain its high quality and consequent success?
'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free,'" McVoy says. "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me." - Well, Larry, you can live in your world where Windoze runs everything including your heart defibrillator. Good luck to you but I won't be joining you. "Quality software + support" beats "Crap software + support" any day. Try getting a bug fixed in an Adobe or M$ product, Larry. I have had many experiences in the past year where open source developers have fixed bugs within 48 hrs of me reporting them (thankyou JavaSVN developers, Subclipse developers, and others!) Larry, you cannot get bugs fixed by Adobe or M$ unless you are God himself - and I invite you to try. Furthermore, the trend is to charge the user for bugfix releases (thanks Adobe). That's just nonsense.
most of the money funding open source development... is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves - he clearly doesn't realise that funding open source (for instance, on the scale IBM does) means you are an open source company - a viable participant in the community. Does Larry think IBM would be doing this if it were losing them money? Guess what runs on their servers (Linux). Guess what applications people want to run (Apache, OSS databases, etc, etc).
If you are IBM and you're paying 1000 programmers to write open source, you are an open source company. What part doesn't he understand?
the popular Linux operating system would suffer if hardware makers stopped their sugar-daddy support for its development - LOL! Linux thrives despite the obstructions of people like Larry who won't provide interoperability information. Thanks for nothing.
McVoy wants to be on the side that innovates and makes money. - All evidence seems to indicate that Larry only cares about the latter. To Hell with him.
In a 2001 essay discussing the interface of M$ Word, Matthew Fuller wrote, inter alia,
Free Software is too content with simply reverse-engineering or mimicking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary software. Copying Microsoft Word feature by feature and opening up the source code is not freedom. Mimesis is misery.
Whilst there is at least the beginnings of a move to collaborate with designers and other users to produce replica DTP packages... there is a need to go further. Where it seems open or free approaches are most fruitful at present is in small software, making specific interventions to precise technical, economic and social problematics.... Geek drives to innovation must, as awkwardly and confusingly as it will happen, be coupled with the drive to make language, to cut the word up, open, and into process.
That said, I don't think McVoy is necessarily coming from the right place, and I am not convinced that Free Software is inherently imitative. Certainly RMS started with a project to create free alternatives to useful software, and such an objective seems useful in many fields. And it has also been proven time and time again that open source can match and exceed the quality of proprietary products... I tend to agree with RMS that until we can do our daily work using free tools, innovation (at least radical innovation) maybe needs to take a back seat - not that it is in any way excluded!
Take Subversion for example. It's easy to see it as a "cvs clone" - although it adds substantial value. Sometimes a free work-alike is a very valuable thing in itself (probably the best example of this is Linux).
Everything I've heard from McVoy makes him sound like an avaricious, self-interested twit, and this latest serving of hyperbole seems very well timed to boost interest in his product right at the moment when his destructive antics are leading a lot of smart people might have second thoughts about a product with such capricious licensing.
we have to thank the US for pouring so much of it's investment into
Yeah, it's so much more important than sustainable food production so most humans have enough to eat and drink; so much more important than shelter and sanitation; so much more important than renewable non-polluting energy sources. Yay US.
I'm not even going to mention the absurd military budget or why it's there.
the giant lizard ridden by Obi Wan was not that good
It's ok: In the 2010 Special Edition re-release, it gets replaced with a really good CGI lizard (think Jabba the Hutt)....And everyone bitches about ruining the flavour of the original.
And they edit the scene in the Jedi temple so that the youngling goes for Anakin first! And the massacre was just self-defence... etc.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that possible - unless you are shooting for a browser monoculture?
Have you even used Windows since 98/ME?
I use it often enough in the course of work to know it's junk^H^H^H^H not really up to par. Of course, I prefer to use OS X most of the time. The comparison is not flattering to 'doze.
I've never been victim to any exploits in XP.
Nor have I - as far as I know, but how would I tell? By the sound of it, the anti-spyware is as bad as the spyware. It's so nice to have environments where one doesn't have to waste time with that nonsense.
When did we start talking about exploits? If you want to win an argument about W1ndows it's probably best if we stay off the topic of security. Two words: Spam zombies.
Both browsers have a weakness in the arena of memory leaks
An obvious fact which I actually repeated in my own post.
You say that like it's a good thing(!)
"Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?
No; for some pretty obvious reasons: one obvious one being, you exclude anyone not using that particular browser. I thought everyone realised that was a Bad Thing - or maybe you haven't been one of those people who can't use their online bank because the bank decided to arbitrarily depend on IE. One can only hope that accessibility laws will put an end to such stupidities.
It's not surprising that both browser products have memory leaks. However one could reflect deeply on the differences in responsibility and approaches to remediation. In Firefox's case - being open source - you have complete transparency; you can file a bug on it, check the bug db, or even fix it yourself (don't laugh). In M$'s case, all you can do is kiss your money goodbye and hope they fix it "one day".
The same goes for all the rest of their system, too. It is not always obvious what a disturbing abdication of rights using a closed system is. A friend recently told me of a Visual $tudio crash triggered by a few \b backspace characters in a print statement. Not such a big deal, I thought at the time; but I found myself reflecting on his story later. Eventually the true horror of the situation sank in, which is that we have to completely trust the ability and goodwill of the vendor to deal with any and all issues in their O/S. That is no small responsibility and there is not much evidence that M$ is capable of fulfilling their end of the bargain. I would postulate, after RMS of course, that no closed and proprietary system on the scale of M$ products can be adequately maintained by one vendor. And of course maintenance becomes irrelevant when major "rewrites" are involved, such as have been prescribed by Longhr0n to fix W1ndows' fundamental ills (ref Spolsky on rewrites, Things You Should Never Do).
The thought that one has no recourse and indeed not even any way to inspect the system one uses (livelihood, etc), is deeply, deeply disturbing, and I again have to thank RMS for pointing out long ago what a dead-end that is, and for putting in place viable alternatives.
As other posters have pointed out, and is usually the case with M$ rhetoric, if they had really meant to be open, there are much better directions they could have taken. Let's be reminded that the document-format issue is crucial PR to M$ because they are at risk of losing business (as they should be!) due to legislation protecting the public from government use of closed tools. We have to stop governments hiding our data in proprietary ghettos. Let's get M$ out of public office, where it does not belong. They've fed at the public trough too long already. Then let's finish the job and put them out of business entirely.
Enderle yesterday, M$ today, why is this propaganda being funneled straight to the front page? When did /. policy become, "They make sh1t up, and we print it"? It's an insult to the intelligence.
Why? Why? Why?
Linux and Apple do not hold monopolies on their markets, so even if they wanted to, they can't break the relevant laws. The findings in the US and Europe were that M$ has broken those laws, and even a casual familiarity with their business practices would hardly leave anyone in doubt!
If M$ won't respect the law, they should be penalised. Of course, I'd rather see them penalised by a total market boycott, but that probably assumes an unrealistic level of common sense from their customers and potential customers...
Fine: Now try to get a bug fixed in it. My experiences with proprietary software over the last decade or more perfectly bear out what RMS predicted. I would say that he is better connected with reality than most people; and that his ideals are essential. Without him, we'd have very little.
I have seen this phenomenon but it certainly doesn't have to be that way. One of the best kept secrets of having both cleanliness and portability is to eliminate #ifdefs from sources as far as possible. The obvious ideal is to have identical source and abstract platform differences by other means (e.g. macros instead of #ifdefs, and using identical APIs on different platforms, supplying only platform dependent implementations).
Keeping it clean probably also requires occasional refactoring and I guess some projects shun this as a matter of policy. The projects I would cite that achieve a high level of portability typically have no machine dependent code at all (TeX, for example). Not all code has that luxury but it's not as difficult as many people think - apparently including our friend Drepper.
No, it definitely doubled for each bug report, in the notice that I recall. (Knuth had more than one policy. One of them is a flat $2 per typo.) Yes, it was eventually capped; I was aware of that but it wasn't a relevant detail. Knuth did not begin with the intention of capping it :-) and it was that confident attitude to which I was alluding.
There are bugs that just don't get flushed out until you port to: non-x86; 64-bit; bigendian; Win32; OS X; etc, etc, etc. Drepper should know better: All the world's not a VAX, etc. (though a VAX port is a fine start :-)
Also, every port makes the process of porting itself easier. It's no coincidence that the most reliable and defect-free software is typically the most-ported software. This has always been true: TeX and METAFONT (where the monetary bug bounty doubled for every bug report, so assured was Knuth of its quality); Apache; Linux itself; NetBSD; GCC and friends; etc.
Why should Stallman hold his tongue? He laid out the rationale for free software 20 years ago; everything he foresaw has come to pass. I'm amazed he has any patience left. At some point, there's only so much that one man can do. Sooner or later, you, I, the rest of us who write (or use) software are going to have to choose whether to stick up for those beliefs, or bend over and be screwed. To Stallman's credit, he hasn't given up yet.
The funny thing is I probably saw it in a /. sig :-)
But seriously. National ID? What part of 1984 don't you guys understand? That book was even part of our school curriculum...
The bigger bigger issue here is some people's definition of stealing - not to mention rhetorical abuses of the word...
The polite explanation for this might be Stockholm Syndrome*. The impolite explanation is pig ignorance.
There's something about the juxtaposition of the two concepts "M$" and "free" that doesn't feel right.
I agree with most of that. But Larry's wrong to slur open source as "shipping crap". He knows perfectly well that paid-for and shrinkwrapped software is no better and often worse. It's a transparently dishonest slur meant, of course, to give proprietary developers such as himself a superior glow. In other words he's slinging the same old inglorious muck: FUD.
In my earlier posts I did gloss over the difference between "fixing stuff that's already paid for so it works as advertised" and "adding new stuff that I want". It's interesting to compare the implications of these two needs in the proprietary and open source spheres.
In the proprietary world, many companies will provide free fixes to features that users already paid for, as a matter of policy or principle. (Many users expect this, being accustomed to warranties on tangible goods - "why should paid-for software be any different?" Despite EULAs I imagine there is still even some statutory protection.) Examples include Apple and even Micro$oft. However, as I mentioned, this is becoming less true; Adobe is a notable counterexample. By and large they no longer distribute bug fixes, so if you bought a broken feature, you are screwed and must pay for the next release and pray for a fix. This attitude ("we're not going to make it work as advertised") creates tremendous ill-will and is (I hope) self-defeating in the marketplace.
In the free world, if a feature is broken, the professional pride of the developer normally results in a quick fix. In those two respects, the two spheres are similar; policy or attitude dictates the response to "broken features". The exceptions might be where resources (funding) is not available, and the developer must wait for support or sponsorship in order to fix existing features.
When it comes to adding functionality or initiating a new project, of course, the proprietary world invariably exacts payment. This is true, for instance, when Apple does a new major release of OS X, or when Adobe revs Photoshop. In the free world, new stuff appears magically if the developer is motivated (maybe scratching an itch of their own), or if the developer is unresourced, it appears when sponsorship appears (maybe their employer has an interest in the feature, and subsidises development).
I see the "services" model as referring to "packaged" agreements which cover developer sweat on behalf of a customer. Depending on the package in question, that could include tech support of an educative nature ("how do I do this?"), bug fixes ("this doesn't work") and even additions ("I need this"). In my case - and that of many other free software developers - I usually provide all these with no expectation of payment, since I care deeply about reputation, and helping customers.
Certainly Larry seems to have a crazily warped view. I don't see what is so hard to grasp, or far-fetched, in the above. Having such a phobia of service-oriented business, unless he meets RMS on the road to Damascus, it's doubtful he'll ever stop spreading FUD and join us. One might at least hope that the media does a little more credibility checking before they blindly quote self-promoters like him. (As if!)
Because it's crap?
That's only ONE of the insults. How did you like this:
Larry: One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap
But the article writer is no better: A line like Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy is missing the point entirely, besides being obviously incorrect. They really should go do basic research such as reading the GPL before making fools of themselves.
This is repeated ad nauseam not only by Larry but now by his supporters. The problem is, it's based on (IMHO) the premise that his company comes crashing down if he ever went open source.
1. That may even be true. But even if he tried it and BitKeeper folded and he had to (horror!) get another job, he could NOT therefore conclude that Open Source is a flawed model and no open source business can survive (which appears to be his contention).
2. He's never going to try it, which further disqualifies him from commenting on the topic.
3. Even if the sun turned green and Larry open sourced BitKeeper, my bet is that he would make a decent living doing support for it. The problem appears to be that he cannot stomach any challenge to his cash flow. If one dollar less reaches his pocket, he blames open source. That's what all this is about. The almighty buck. It's time to mod McVoy down - especially since he's not even an open source groupie, let alone a contributor.
See Peter Salus' excellent series, The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin serialised at Groklaw.
In any case, to say McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet is plainly bullsh*t.
"We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six months" - the key words there are "we believe". This is nothing more than flimsy opinion which does not seem borne out by a survey of the open source marketplace. Again, the article puts this rubbish forward as gospel.
"One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?" - again, this is simply nonsense. It's hard to imagine someone who's spent his career in software not grasping the 'free software/paid support' model. Certainly plenty of customers understand and use it. It sure makes sense to me. Then again, maybe all those years just closed his mind.
McVoy says ... building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money. - Perhaps he can try his hand at explaining the success of Linux? Sure, today there is some corporate sponsorship, but there is plenty of 'trial and error' going on that is not directly paid for. And in its early years, before sponsorship, how does McVoy explain its high quality and consequent success?
'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free,'" McVoy says. "I'd rather pay someone to take care of me." - Well, Larry, you can live in your world where Windoze runs everything including your heart defibrillator. Good luck to you but I won't be joining you. "Quality software + support" beats "Crap software + support" any day. Try getting a bug fixed in an Adobe or M$ product, Larry. I have had many experiences in the past year where open source developers have fixed bugs within 48 hrs of me reporting them (thankyou JavaSVN developers, Subclipse developers, and others!) Larry, you cannot get bugs fixed by Adobe or M$ unless you are God himself - and I invite you to try. Furthermore, the trend is to charge the user for bugfix releases (thanks Adobe). That's just nonsense.
most of the money funding open source development ... is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves - he clearly doesn't realise that funding open source (for instance, on the scale IBM does) means you are an open source company - a viable participant in the community. Does Larry think IBM would be doing this if it were losing them money? Guess what runs on their servers (Linux). Guess what applications people want to run (Apache, OSS databases, etc, etc).
If you are IBM and you're paying 1000 programmers to write open source, you are an open source company. What part doesn't he understand?
the popular Linux operating system would suffer if hardware makers stopped their sugar-daddy support for its development - LOL! Linux thrives despite the obstructions of people like Larry who won't provide interoperability information. Thanks for nothing.
McVoy wants to be on the side that innovates and makes money. - All evidence seems to indicate that Larry only cares about the latter. To Hell with him.
That said, I don't think McVoy is necessarily coming from the right place, and I am not convinced that Free Software is inherently imitative. Certainly RMS started with a project to create free alternatives to useful software, and such an objective seems useful in many fields. And it has also been proven time and time again that open source can match and exceed the quality of proprietary products... I tend to agree with RMS that until we can do our daily work using free tools, innovation (at least radical innovation) maybe needs to take a back seat - not that it is in any way excluded!
Take Subversion for example. It's easy to see it as a "cvs clone" - although it adds substantial value. Sometimes a free work-alike is a very valuable thing in itself (probably the best example of this is Linux).
Everything I've heard from McVoy makes him sound like an avaricious, self-interested twit, and this latest serving of hyperbole seems very well timed to boost interest in his product right at the moment when his destructive antics are leading a lot of smart people might have second thoughts about a product with such capricious licensing.
Yeah, it's so much more important than sustainable food production so most humans have enough to eat and drink; so much more important than shelter and sanitation; so much more important than renewable non-polluting energy sources. Yay US.
I'm not even going to mention the absurd military budget or why it's there.
(Damn, I'm going to miss that Good Karma...)
You're getting your scifi universes mixed up...
It's ok: In the 2010 Special Edition re-release, it gets replaced with a really good CGI lizard (think Jabba the Hutt). ...And everyone bitches about ruining the flavour of the original.
And they edit the scene in the Jedi temple so that the youngling goes for Anakin first! And the massacre was just self-defence... etc.