What makes you so sure that we're not? here in the US, the greatest population growth comes from families involved with Christianity, which strongly encourages both obedience and having kids. This is occuring all the while more intelligent people (better educated, not religious and more inclined towards disobedience in all aspects of their lives) tend to have smaller families. Personally, not one of my friends with at least one graduate degree have any kids at all, while my friends that are either A. religious or B. less educated have one or more kids. I'm not speaking necessarily from personal experience, alone, either. The demographic numbers across the country say the same thing.
And you'll probably see that kind of growth for a while longer, too. What you're talking about (the span of a year or so) isn't investing... it's speculation. And while I don't deny that Red Hat has had decent returns recently, and may continue to in the near future, the parent said that Red Hat is a "solid" company. My main point of contention is that two years of profit doesn't define a "solid" company in the financial sense, regardless of industry. The dot-coms all had tremendous growth as far as market capitalization goes (stock price), but very few of them had "solid" financials, hence the dot-bomb. New businesses can't even APPLY for most bank loans until they've been open and profitable for at least 3 years (this is coming from a business owner).
That might be considered "solid" in the Open Source industry, but as a business in general, they're still considered a relatively unproven start-up. I want to see at least a solid 5-10 years of profitability before I'd consider investing a dime, personally.
There should really be 10 different OS out there competing and 10% of that is pretty good.
You're obviously too young to remember the OS wars... C64, IMB-compatible, Apple (Mac), Amiga, etc. It used to be a real nightmare to buy and even more of a pain to develop software. As someone who was a geek during those days, I can say that things in the world of PC's are MUCH better today than they were when we actually had a lot of OS competition.
1. Developers always develop on machines better than most clients. However, testing should be done on normal machines.
2. "Viewed at their best"? I've got several games collecting dust that I've bought over the past few years that aren't even playable on a Pentium 2 with a basic 8-64 MB graphics card. Hell, my GF can't even run The Sims 2 on her Pentium 3 with 512K RAM and a shiny new 32 MB graphics card! It technically works, but it's so slow and choppy that it's useless. The thing is that the "recommended requirements" used to be much more in the realm of regular computers that people actually did other things on. Now if you want to play a modern game, you really do need a top-end machine.
3. I buy PC's at my local thrift store for use in my business that handle ALL of my business apps (heavy duty accounting, point of sale, web browsing, office apps, the occasional bit torrent client, etc.) just fine, but try to launch ONE game on them, and forget it. There's no excuse for such sloppy, shitty programming.
There are far better alternatives than using mickeysoft
Like what, exactly? I'd need an OS that runs and runs on lots of generic hardware, and has plenty of robust business apps that I need for my business (specifically accounting, payroll, and point of sale). Oh yeah, and it has to cost less than $200/workstation and be usable with little to no outside assistance.
I think that you're confusing "everybody" with Linux zealot kids that troll Slashdot. Windows 2000 is quite frankly, a pretty damn good OS, and it's what I and my 6 employees rely on every single day to run my business. Of course, there are a few little things here and there I'd like to see improved, but by and large, Windows 2000 (and Windows XP, I assume) work just fine. When I hear normal people (ie: non-geeks) complain about Windows, it's always because they're using Windows 95/98/ME which were absolute nightmares.
... instead I'll play my older games until game programmers learn how to program again. It's absolutely insane that in order to get a new game to play these days, you have to have a $1000 PC with a $200 video card. That's simply bullshit. Back in the day (before the Net got big), games that one would buy in a store would play on most machines. These days, you gotta take out a second mortgage just to buy a machine just to play fucking GAMES on. These are just GAMES.
Look, even console games get better over time because the programmers get better. Newer PS2 games look better and feel better than older PS2 games. The developers learn to do more with the same resources. Game developers these days simply don't give a shit, apparently. Do they really think that every potential customer is a spoiled 12 year old?
I have a feeling that if they got back to programming again, that there'd be a lot of people such as myself who have to work for our money who'd be a lot willing to buy games again.
Until then, I'll be happy shopping in the bargain bin.
More imporantly, are "Linux" and "AJAX" the new "Synergy" and "Enterprise-class" (buzzwords)? If so, then I'm announcing my new company will be using Linux and AJAX to do wireless stuff with audio players. Give me money.
One I can think of standards(most of them) are well implemented, Firefox STILL and NEVER will use ActiveX so that is another, XUL mozilla's Javascript/XML based alternative to IE's ActiveX.
Considering the number of Active X applications that I use via the web on a daily basis (several) vs. the number of XUL applications that I'm aware that exist (0), how is NOT having Active X a bonus?
I'd like to see their "blog spotting software" used in conjuction with search engines so that I can NOT find blogs. They could either work with the big search guys, or incorporate it into a dekstop search client. Either way, I know that there'd be a ton of people such as myself who would use it to avoid the glut of crappy fake-journalist blogs.
If you're not using an MS language, you're going to probably be connecting to it using ODBC, which is slow and often buggy.
You're absolutely right about it being slow. That's why ODBC has been the least favored method for connecting to any data source for about the last decade (since OLE DB came out). It's bugginess is due to the ODBC provider you're using. For instance, connecting to Oracle from a Windows machine using any Oracle written ODBC or OLE DB provider sucks ass. The API's aren't even documented correctly. However, the MS written Oracle drivers have always been much better. Just find a new (OLE DB) driver.
Now that F/OSS is becoming more famous, it's actual market value is becoming more apparent, leading investors to pump more money into it. Clearly there will be open source flops, just as in any industry, but for the most part, I don't think we'll see people in 10 years saying "wait a minute, this open source company really is worth $0, just as it was valued before the bubble!". In fact, with the help of VC funds, I bet open source will actually develop into a stronger, more stable market presence.
That's what I'm talking about now... where's the value to a software company where anybody can very easily just reverse engineer their entire product and re-package it in an afternoon? The barrier to entry for the competition is virtually -zero-. What is an investor buying? There's no physical assets and no intellectual property to speak of. How does an open source company maintain any kind of value, at all? We haven't seen any open source companies that are anywhere near large enough to have to contend with this issue, which is another reason why I'd stay away from OSS as an investment. I understand what OSS is, and I own a business, but I still I don't understand how an OSS company can maintain any value besides the money they have in the bank.
I'm not debating that there is some demand for it. What I'm debating is that there's money to be made doing it this way. Right now, Red Hat is the shining example of financial success for the Open Source industry, and we're looking at what... 2, 3 profitable years? And just barely at that? OSS is still a VERY risky investment any way you cut at. At least with the dot-com bubble, there were quite a few companies making money that you could point to. With OSS, I can count the number of marginally profitable companies on my fingers.
I think this is more of a give a little get a lot scenario, not a bubble. If you (company A) give 1000$ to open source solution X and company B gives 1000$ to open source solution Y then both companies who donate (and presumably use the software) benifit. This is just a win win thing for people and they are realizing it.
And so, what happens to the value of Company A's previous software-based competitive advantage? That had to have gone somewhere (it did: it's gone). In this situation, software actually becomes LESS important to companies. OSS software developers are programming themselves right out of a job. If companies don't get any competitive advantage from their software anymore (assuming that competitors are using the same open source software), then the software becomes just another cog in the wheel.... important, but not important enough to pay a premium for. It becomes like electricity... a cheap commodity that while important, certainly isn't given a second thought. People make a living producing electricity, but very few get wealthy, nor is it an exciting, innovative job.
You do know that postgresql starts automatically when you install it? But that's beside the point. If you are installing server software, you should be reading the manual before you do it. You wouldn't expect to install Oracle and have it just work would you?
No, but I would expect PostgreSQL to since the install on a Windows 2000 box works perfectly fine. It starts, there's a service that I can easily find, there are shortcuts to the admin tools, etc.
But then again, this is just one insurmountable problem that I found withing 30 minutes of putting the linux CD in my drive. I was responding to the parent post about usability being a non-issue. My one half-assed example is blows that argument out of the water. If I were to spend time with the OS, I'm sure that there'd be lots and lots of other things that I couldn't figure out, too.
You're right. Things are much different now. Instead of investors investing in technology they don't understand, now they're investing in technology they don't understand and in companies that have really no way of turing a profit.
And yes, I know that Red Hat is making a few million a year. That's pretty weak proof that the whole OSS + $$ thing can even work on a large scale. Red Hat is still a small company.
Not only is there little proof that open source makes money, there's very little reason to believe that Red Hat will continue to make money. With everything open, there's theoretically not any reason to go with Red Hat support. Right now, there aren't really a whole lot of alternatives, but there may be eventually, if people can figure out how to make a buck from this whole thing.
I would argue that open-source, as it is today, is actually undervalued, and had a huge amount of economic potential that hasn't even begun to be tapped. This is not true of, say, the housing market, which many say is a bubble.
Housing: Absolutely limited supply. Ever growing demand.
Open Source Software: Virtually no track record of producing profit. Very shaky business model (if any). Unlimited supply. Limited demand.
I pray to all that is holy that you're not some poor schmuck's financial advisor.
So what's with all these people who for the most part don't even use linux, let alone contribute anything to it, trying to dictate to us changes we should make to our operating system (mostly in order to homogenise it with windows).
Because I don't use Linux, and there are lots of reasons why. I think that letting developers know why I'm not using Linux is a positive thing and should lead towards improvement and wider adoption.
Also, the usability issue is long dead. I've used Mandriva and SuSe, and I lost IQ points as a result - that's how absurdly easy they are to use. They piss all over windows software installation, which starts at google, and ends at "Next", "Finish", and are full of little touches that literally astound windows users, like having an icon appear on the desktop for your USB stick, instead of that frankly useless little window (even though this obviously uses the same mechanism, it amazes everyone I've showed it to so far - they actually ask how it's possible, just because windows doesn't have dynamic icons).
Last time I played with Linux with about 2 months ago. I wanted to install several apps, but after I installed them, there was no way to launch said applications (started with postgresql). There's just one HUGE usability issue that I ran into within the first 30 minutes of using Ubuntu. I'm sure that there are many more, but at that point, I realized that Ubuntu was still useless to me, and I decided to try back again in abother 6 months or so. To say that usability isn't an issue is just 1. Completely clueless (ie: have never used Linux before) or 2. Utterly naive as to what "usability" means (too dorkified to understand what non-IT geeks can understand).
You can't treat an IT geek the same way you treat a marketing guy. They respond to different things. The geek wants reassurances that he's doing a good job all of the time, especially when things are going smoothly. A marketing guy wants to be adequately rewarded for the big numbers.
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Like if it would have been bred for obedience.
What makes you so sure that we're not? here in the US, the greatest population growth comes from families involved with Christianity, which strongly encourages both obedience and having kids. This is occuring all the while more intelligent people (better educated, not religious and more inclined towards disobedience in all aspects of their lives) tend to have smaller families. Personally, not one of my friends with at least one graduate degree have any kids at all, while my friends that are either A. religious or B. less educated have one or more kids. I'm not speaking necessarily from personal experience, alone, either. The demographic numbers across the country say the same thing.
And you'll probably see that kind of growth for a while longer, too. What you're talking about (the span of a year or so) isn't investing... it's speculation. And while I don't deny that Red Hat has had decent returns recently, and may continue to in the near future, the parent said that Red Hat is a "solid" company. My main point of contention is that two years of profit doesn't define a "solid" company in the financial sense, regardless of industry. The dot-coms all had tremendous growth as far as market capitalization goes (stock price), but very few of them had "solid" financials, hence the dot-bomb. New businesses can't even APPLY for most bank loans until they've been open and profitable for at least 3 years (this is coming from a business owner).
and already has a pretty solid presence in the business space.
Yeah. 2 years of profits. That's solid.
That might be considered "solid" in the Open Source industry, but as a business in general, they're still considered a relatively unproven start-up. I want to see at least a solid 5-10 years of profitability before I'd consider investing a dime, personally.
It's a relatively easy feat to increase profits from Zero just two years ago.
There should really be 10 different OS out there competing and 10% of that is pretty good.
You're obviously too young to remember the OS wars... C64, IMB-compatible, Apple (Mac), Amiga, etc. It used to be a real nightmare to buy and even more of a pain to develop software. As someone who was a geek during those days, I can say that things in the world of PC's are MUCH better today than they were when we actually had a lot of OS competition.
1. Developers always develop on machines better than most clients. However, testing should be done on normal machines.
2. "Viewed at their best"? I've got several games collecting dust that I've bought over the past few years that aren't even playable on a Pentium 2 with a basic 8-64 MB graphics card. Hell, my GF can't even run The Sims 2 on her Pentium 3 with 512K RAM and a shiny new 32 MB graphics card! It technically works, but it's so slow and choppy that it's useless. The thing is that the "recommended requirements" used to be much more in the realm of regular computers that people actually did other things on. Now if you want to play a modern game, you really do need a top-end machine.
3. I buy PC's at my local thrift store for use in my business that handle ALL of my business apps (heavy duty accounting, point of sale, web browsing, office apps, the occasional bit torrent client, etc.) just fine, but try to launch ONE game on them, and forget it. There's no excuse for such sloppy, shitty programming.
There are far better alternatives than using mickeysoft
Like what, exactly? I'd need an OS that runs and runs on lots of generic hardware, and has plenty of robust business apps that I need for my business (specifically accounting, payroll, and point of sale). Oh yeah, and it has to cost less than $200/workstation and be usable with little to no outside assistance.
I think that you're confusing "everybody" with Linux zealot kids that troll Slashdot. Windows 2000 is quite frankly, a pretty damn good OS, and it's what I and my 6 employees rely on every single day to run my business. Of course, there are a few little things here and there I'd like to see improved, but by and large, Windows 2000 (and Windows XP, I assume) work just fine. When I hear normal people (ie: non-geeks) complain about Windows, it's always because they're using Windows 95/98/ME which were absolute nightmares.
... instead I'll play my older games until game programmers learn how to program again. It's absolutely insane that in order to get a new game to play these days, you have to have a $1000 PC with a $200 video card. That's simply bullshit. Back in the day (before the Net got big), games that one would buy in a store would play on most machines. These days, you gotta take out a second mortgage just to buy a machine just to play fucking GAMES on. These are just GAMES.
Look, even console games get better over time because the programmers get better. Newer PS2 games look better and feel better than older PS2 games. The developers learn to do more with the same resources. Game developers these days simply don't give a shit, apparently. Do they really think that every potential customer is a spoiled 12 year old? I have a feeling that if they got back to programming again, that there'd be a lot of people such as myself who have to work for our money who'd be a lot willing to buy games again. Until then, I'll be happy shopping in the bargain bin.
I agree. The mouse had yet to be invented when I lived through what I think was the Golden Age of Computing.
Sorry, but this is Slashdot where facts and level-headed discussions are not welcome.
More imporantly, are "Linux" and "AJAX" the new "Synergy" and "Enterprise-class" (buzzwords)? If so, then I'm announcing my new company will be using Linux and AJAX to do wireless stuff with audio players. Give me money.
One I can think of standards(most of them) are well implemented, Firefox STILL and NEVER will use ActiveX so that is another, XUL mozilla's Javascript/XML based alternative to IE's ActiveX.
Considering the number of Active X applications that I use via the web on a daily basis (several) vs. the number of XUL applications that I'm aware that exist (0), how is NOT having Active X a bonus?
As soon as this thing gets into online leagues, I'm afraid that my social life will be finished. This rocks.
I'd like to see their "blog spotting software" used in conjuction with search engines so that I can NOT find blogs. They could either work with the big search guys, or incorporate it into a dekstop search client. Either way, I know that there'd be a ton of people such as myself who would use it to avoid the glut of crappy fake-journalist blogs.
This is a good thing. This case could be a precident for attacking the DMCA.
If you're not using an MS language, you're going to probably be connecting to it using ODBC, which is slow and often buggy.
You're absolutely right about it being slow. That's why ODBC has been the least favored method for connecting to any data source for about the last decade (since OLE DB came out). It's bugginess is due to the ODBC provider you're using. For instance, connecting to Oracle from a Windows machine using any Oracle written ODBC or OLE DB provider sucks ass. The API's aren't even documented correctly. However, the MS written Oracle drivers have always been much better. Just find a new (OLE DB) driver.
Now that F/OSS is becoming more famous, it's actual market value is becoming more apparent, leading investors to pump more money into it. Clearly there will be open source flops, just as in any industry, but for the most part, I don't think we'll see people in 10 years saying "wait a minute, this open source company really is worth $0, just as it was valued before the bubble!". In fact, with the help of VC funds, I bet open source will actually develop into a stronger, more stable market presence.
That's what I'm talking about now... where's the value to a software company where anybody can very easily just reverse engineer their entire product and re-package it in an afternoon? The barrier to entry for the competition is virtually -zero-. What is an investor buying? There's no physical assets and no intellectual property to speak of. How does an open source company maintain any kind of value, at all? We haven't seen any open source companies that are anywhere near large enough to have to contend with this issue, which is another reason why I'd stay away from OSS as an investment. I understand what OSS is, and I own a business, but I still I don't understand how an OSS company can maintain any value besides the money they have in the bank.
I'm not debating that there is some demand for it. What I'm debating is that there's money to be made doing it this way. Right now, Red Hat is the shining example of financial success for the Open Source industry, and we're looking at what... 2, 3 profitable years? And just barely at that? OSS is still a VERY risky investment any way you cut at. At least with the dot-com bubble, there were quite a few companies making money that you could point to. With OSS, I can count the number of marginally profitable companies on my fingers.
I think this is more of a give a little get a lot scenario, not a bubble. If you (company A) give 1000$ to open source solution X and company B gives 1000$ to open source solution Y then both companies who donate (and presumably use the software) benifit. This is just a win win thing for people and they are realizing it.
And so, what happens to the value of Company A's previous software-based competitive advantage? That had to have gone somewhere (it did: it's gone). In this situation, software actually becomes LESS important to companies. OSS software developers are programming themselves right out of a job. If companies don't get any competitive advantage from their software anymore (assuming that competitors are using the same open source software), then the software becomes just another cog in the wheel.... important, but not important enough to pay a premium for. It becomes like electricity... a cheap commodity that while important, certainly isn't given a second thought. People make a living producing electricity, but very few get wealthy, nor is it an exciting, innovative job.
You do know that postgresql starts automatically when you install it? But that's beside the point. If you are installing server software, you should be reading the manual before you do it. You wouldn't expect to install Oracle and have it just work would you?
No, but I would expect PostgreSQL to since the install on a Windows 2000 box works perfectly fine. It starts, there's a service that I can easily find, there are shortcuts to the admin tools, etc.
But then again, this is just one insurmountable problem that I found withing 30 minutes of putting the linux CD in my drive. I was responding to the parent post about usability being a non-issue. My one half-assed example is blows that argument out of the water. If I were to spend time with the OS, I'm sure that there'd be lots and lots of other things that I couldn't figure out, too.
You're right. Things are much different now. Instead of investors investing in technology they don't understand, now they're investing in technology they don't understand and in companies that have really no way of turing a profit.
And yes, I know that Red Hat is making a few million a year. That's pretty weak proof that the whole OSS + $$ thing can even work on a large scale. Red Hat is still a small company.
Not only is there little proof that open source makes money, there's very little reason to believe that Red Hat will continue to make money. With everything open, there's theoretically not any reason to go with Red Hat support. Right now, there aren't really a whole lot of alternatives, but there may be eventually, if people can figure out how to make a buck from this whole thing.
I would argue that open-source, as it is today, is actually undervalued, and had a huge amount of economic potential that hasn't even begun to be tapped. This is not true of, say, the housing market, which many say is a bubble.
Housing: Absolutely limited supply. Ever growing demand.
Open Source Software: Virtually no track record of producing profit. Very shaky business model (if any). Unlimited supply. Limited demand.
I pray to all that is holy that you're not some poor schmuck's financial advisor.
So what's with all these people who for the most part don't even use linux, let alone contribute anything to it, trying to dictate to us changes we should make to our operating system (mostly in order to homogenise it with windows).
Because I don't use Linux, and there are lots of reasons why. I think that letting developers know why I'm not using Linux is a positive thing and should lead towards improvement and wider adoption.
Also, the usability issue is long dead. I've used Mandriva and SuSe, and I lost IQ points as a result - that's how absurdly easy they are to use. They piss all over windows software installation, which starts at google, and ends at "Next", "Finish", and are full of little touches that literally astound windows users, like having an icon appear on the desktop for your USB stick, instead of that frankly useless little window (even though this obviously uses the same mechanism, it amazes everyone I've showed it to so far - they actually ask how it's possible, just because windows doesn't have dynamic icons).
Last time I played with Linux with about 2 months ago. I wanted to install several apps, but after I installed them, there was no way to launch said applications (started with postgresql). There's just one HUGE usability issue that I ran into within the first 30 minutes of using Ubuntu. I'm sure that there are many more, but at that point, I realized that Ubuntu was still useless to me, and I decided to try back again in abother 6 months or so. To say that usability isn't an issue is just 1. Completely clueless (ie: have never used Linux before) or 2. Utterly naive as to what "usability" means (too dorkified to understand what non-IT geeks can understand).
You can't treat an IT geek the same way you treat a marketing guy. They respond to different things. The geek wants reassurances that he's doing a good job all of the time, especially when things are going smoothly. A marketing guy wants to be adequately rewarded for the big numbers.