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SAP Exec Disparages Open Source As IP Socialism
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Nov 11, 2005 06:01 AM
from the code-envy dept.
from the code-envy dept.
FlorianMueller writes "According to a VNUnet report, Shai Agassi, the president of the product and technology group at SAP, disparaged open source as 'more likely to break applications' than to deliver innovation. He also equated the open-source development model with 'Intellectual property [IP] socialism,' which he says 'is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society.' In Europe, it isn't a secret that SAP's management primarily views open source as a threat to its business, and that SAP is politically on Microsoft's side. SAP and Microsoft co-financed certain pro-patent lobbying activities in Europe, and recently co-founded the European Software Association, an entity that is expected to lobby for software patents and against open-source adoption by European governments."
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Never works? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Never works? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Never works? (Score:5, Interesting)
An irony in this is that the Ark. Dept. of Health serves something like 2,200 users with a Wang VS mainframe cluster that runs like a clock -- it keeps on ticking. The VS cluster has a repository of about 50,000 programs, some 38,000 of which are actually utilized by users of the system. A very small group of five or six programmers maintains the code and accommodates all legislative and regulatory changes, often in a tiny fraction of the time it takes for adaptations of newer software technologies, especially those provided by outside firms. Of course the State of Ark. wants to "get rid of the Wang" ASAP (or should that be "A sap?").
It's unclear how it would even be possible to spend money like $60 million creating VS clusters because the stuff just doesn't cost that much. A single VS to serve 500-1000 users can't cost more than low six figures, and new VS technology puts the largest, fastest VS into 3.5" of rack space using industry standard hardware in a Linux host.
Parent
Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'm not an apologist for Stalinism, but socialism, in it's most basic form means "sharing." It means looking after your fellow man, particularly those who have nothing. Attach a bearded guy, and a couple of nails and it turns into Christianity.
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
For larger countries, say Germany and France, it's a disaster waiting to happen-- all the benefits that they dole out have to be funded from somewhere, and when your taxpaying base is shrinking, it's not a good thing. (Of course, knowing France, they'll probably find a way to make the EU pay for all of this.)
Finally, standard of living-wise
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, compared to the much more sensible US social security system?
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3)
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:4, Insightful)
Take also the Semantic Web - our research effort (on which both myself and SAP work) is indeed publically-funded research, but one of the building blocks in OWL, which directly descends DAML - DARPA Agent Mark-up Language...
What I'm saying is that in both areas the government sets the agenda for a lot of research and innovation, the real difference in that in Europea good deal of this is funded for the good of the people (how socialist - bleurgh!), whereas in the US it is funded for the good of the war machine!
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of this is a legacy of a socialist leaning system, or continued pains from absorbing East Germany into a new country, or other factors, is up for debate. The fact is, however, that Germany is NOT doing just fine right now.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:4, Insightful)
Germany's economy is dropping down the tubes.
http://www.willisms.com/archives/2005/11/social_s
Meanwhile America's economy shows the best growth in 60 years.
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20051108-102830-74
Although if we can't get social security under control we could be heading the same place. The problem with things like social security, and welfare is that they remove incentive to work. If you work you make less money due to taxes while if you don't work you get "free" money. Private accounts would put incentive back because the amount of money you put in to the system guarantees the amount of money you get from the system. Right now congress controls the amount you get from SS, and they can raise or lower rates in order to panic people who depend on SS for their retirement.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
Germany has ridicolous unemployment, over 10% on average and well over 20% in some areas. Those are the offical numbers excluding tons of people (for example underemployed, people who've given up getting a job, people who are studying *because* they couldn't find a job, people on different reeducation-projects, people doing 1-euro-jobs, people doing a minijob etc) if you define "unemployed" as "is able and willing to work, but still has no job from which (s)he can live" then the unemployment is easily twice the offical numbers.
Population is sinking, in some districts drastically. Where I live the population has fallen 30% since 1990, leaving literally thousands of apartments empty. One problem is, there's not even enough money to tear down some of the useless buildings.
Savings are across the board. I live in a city of around 100.000 people. It doesn't even have a *single* public swimhall. (it does have a single privately owned "funbath" that receives some public funds) Social Security is definitely in the range where it's "Too much to die from, to little to live from". Huge amounts of money are wasted in a humongous, inefficient, nonrational, surreal bureaucracy.[1] At the same time Germany will break the EU stability pact for the 4th year in a row, and have already announced they'll not be able to keep it next year either.
Most people have had a massive reduction in buying-power over the last few years, and the trend continues. These days they want to increase the VAT by 2-3%, meaning everyone will efficiently get 2-3% less for their money.
If Germany are doing fine, I don't want to know what your standard of reference is supposed to be. Oh, and before you start: Yes I know Germany, I've been living here for the last 4 years.
Socialism ain't the problem though, it's not really defensible to call the current SPD/CDU/CSU government "socialist" even though I guess the SPD is on paper.
[1] Basic problem is, no "amt" is capable of communicating with any other "amt", not even itself. This results in absurdities like when you want to register a newly born child you need to go to "standesamt", get a marriage-certificate for the parents, then give the same piece of paper back to the same person as a proof that the parents are married. The "Beamte" is prevented by law from trusting himself unless he's first printed the certificate out, handed it to you, and received it back. I could give literally dozens of such absurd examples from first hand accounts after less than half a decade in germany.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
1st. Year 2003. In my application field, in North America (U.S. & Canada) ~650 start-up were founded. Europe? - 25!
2nd. My company - start-up - has made on exhibit to top 10 european start-ups. How? BY DEFAULT! We haven't yet managed to produce or sell something! It's just there were no other start-ups to compete against.
I'm living in Germany last 4 years - I yet to seen any progress at all. My poor home country Belarus - classified as "poor", "third-world" & "dictatorship" - sees more investments in development than "rich" Germany.
"Stagnation and protectionism" are two words I can use to describe local social and political systems.
And SAP actually is traditional German business working on traditional German principles. IOW. If complete idiot was hired - he will never be fired. (Competence of personel in Germany is really last thing anyone cares about. I'm working for third company and nobody - except staffers - ever looked into my CV.) All bugs are there to stay, since it can break numerous customer applications. 'Customer feedback' is something mythical, non-existent and ignored. Everything what have workaround is considered to be not bug, but feature. Ergonomics (it's over all German) doesn't ring any bells. Thick unpenetratable wall of management, secretaries, sales, service peresonel effectively shields any knowlegeable engineer from ever communicating with customers. And so on. I worked for similar company for some time.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the Russians, under the Soviet rule, had the brains to see through the propaganda.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly, you get what your parents deserve.
Why should I be penalised if my mother is a crack whore? That's not my fault, is it?
Simple fact is, the standard of living/health care/education of 99.9% of the the children in America is not attributable to the children. Children of the poor, are getting punished through accident of birth, not for any other reason.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Funny)
It is if you sold her the crack.
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not a fallacy. It's a moral principle (unfashionable as moral principles are these days).
If you don't share that principle, that's OK. It means that I consider you a self-centred boob, and detrimental to a healthy, fair society, but I don't suppose you care about my opinion on that matter.
But please, please, please don't pretend that there's something "logical" in putting yourself before everyone else, because (despite what the Randroids tell) moral
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, they are human beings. And you too. Because it is the way the world works. Because without generous help from other people you would be nothing. And I'm not talking about money.
That's just going to promote laziness and dependence on me.
No, if you think carefully about how are you in fact helping. Giving an alcoholic money is not helpful in any way, while giving it to poor woman, who has many children and whose husband died is a real help.
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like, say, orphaned children or the premanently disabled.
You get what you deserve and all in a world where it's possible for an immigrant to this country to become one of its richest men.
This, stupidly, assumes that there is any relationship whatsoever between one's wealth and "deserving" of thereof. By this token a lottery winner or a spaced out on crack hier
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like children of poor families who can't even afford to go to school? Poverty is a vicious circle.
Socialism doesn't necessary have to mean that people are given liquor money. It can also mean free or inexpensive health care, food, schooling and accommodation as basic rights to everyone. Ideally, a social society would only make sure that a) no one needs to die because of poverty and b) everyone has a realistic chance to work their way towards a better life. How do you go about finding a job if you can't even afford clean clothes? It's so much easier to shout "it's their own fault" than to take actual responsibility.
Parent
Re:Bogeyman... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's important to remember the difference between "possible" and "probable".
It's *possible* a poor immigrant might become rich & famous.
It's *probable* a poor immigrant will have to work 3 jobs, 14 hour days and 7 day weeks - and/or turn to crime - to scrape together enough money to feed himself every day.
"Being employed" is not the be-all and end-all of society.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, I'll give you a polite one: socialism has never existed in Soviet Russia.
Parent
Socialism (Score:5, Insightful)
If he believes that OSS is "socialist", and also believes that it is a threat to his business, then isn't he saying that the socialist model can come up with a market solution that is more competitive than the capitalist model? I thought to capitalist types that type of thinking was heresy.
It's all nonsense of course. OSS is the open market coming up with the most efficient solution to an expensive problem. Nothing socialist about it at all, unless you believe businesses sharing development costs for stuff that helps them run their businesses is socialist.
He got it all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
No, one of the worst things that can happen to our society is that it's turned into an IP-based society.
Re:He got it all wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
The transfer from an industrial society to an IP based is purely based on the fact that the current economical system drives manual labour to countries with cheap labour costs, no unions and poor economies. When we cant have our own industry our only option in the rich countries is to put a pricetag on all our current knowledge and sell that to the emerging economies. We can have them inventing things and selling it without paying us can we. The IP market is more of a defense against the now emerging countries like China. If we cant sell goods we sell ideas, IP and culture to them.
The proper way would be to fix the system so that it isnt that much benefit in putting all the workforce abroad and keep on manufacturing our own goods. Seen from a global non economic perspective its not a good idea to ship things around the globe.
Parent
Re:He got it all wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You are absolutely right of course. I would only add that it is also a futile and self-destructive "defense" in a long-term. It assumes, arrogantly, that the others are too dumb to match your R&D efforts or to produce their own culture. I hope I do not need to explain the frightening idiocy of that folly.
What is amazing and depressing to me is the number of otherwise bright people who buy into this IP sham. It is an economic and social disaster in the making, in the name of short term greed of the corporates and their paid-for, albait brainless, politicos.
Parent
What do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are also a corporation, and pretty much a monopolist riding a one-trick pony. Of course they see Open Source as a threat! And as a competition, they must combat whatever threatens their bottom line.
In other words, they had to say this or something like it, sooner or later. You could say they're legally obligated to.
Nothing new or unusual, in other words. Just the usual FUD. *sigh*
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in many ways you can see that socialism appeared as a reaction versus totalitarian and/or oppresive regimes (yeah, I know this oversimplifies things, don't chew me up for it). So if you see Open Source as "IP Socialism," perhaps you should reflect for a second on why we have gotten to this point.
this is expected (Score:3, Interesting)
SAP (Score:3, Informative)
The costs are typically astronomical to start with, but the costs just go up as you need a band of specialized software liason managers to manage the system.
Just so you know where they are coming from. My take? Bullshit/FUD from another closed-source software vendor.
http://www.sap.com/index.epx/ [sap.com]
SAP should tell SAP it doesn't work... (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly of course SAP has actually had a history of doing Open Source, including releasing its own product (sapdb, now MaxDB) and certifying R/3 on Open Source platforms including Linux, and the MaxDB database. They probably also use some of the Apache libraries in Netweaver.
So far from breaking their product suite SAP actually enable you to rely on Open Source to deliver the sort of availability you'd expect from a proper ERP.
A Beautiful Mind, socialism and cooperation (Score:4, Insightful)
The general principle is that cooperation can produce better results for everyone than competition. Calling this socialism (which appears to be an insult in America) does not make it any less true.
What we need to consider is when cooperating works, and when it doesn't. For most application developement, giving free assistance to others will not actually result in a cost. They will not neccesarily be competing for exactly the same customers and in many cases, the other party is obliged to offer tit-for-tat cooperation. This means the whole industry moves forward faster, costs go down, and the potential number of customers will go up. Everybody wins.
This does not apply neccesarily so well to the IP based commercial software industry, especially when there is a single company dominating the software. But it doesn't have to. Free software has its place, and can bring benefits.
Best disinformacija quote (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe because Linux is a kernel, not a desktop.
SAP uses open source (Score:5, Informative)
I can't logon on to work at moment and check (UPS maint), but it is full of it.
It is possible this bloke doesn't speak for the whole company.
the difference (Score:3, Insightful)
SAP is worried (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh and open source and free software have nothing to do with socialism and every thing to do with supply and demand...
Does he know nothing about the technology? (Score:5, Insightful)
"IP Socialism", eh? Yet they use Apache. (Score:3, Interesting)
The same old FUD from a new party member (Score:5, Insightful)
When will they figure out that "Open Source is socialism' line just doesn't work?
Free and Open Source software is about as socialist as "We The People", or "E Pluribus Unum".
Free software is about a community forming and providing the solutions to their own problems. You know, "By the people, of the people, and for the people".
I guess that SAP has joined with the opposition party. They all speak with one voice. They all spread the same party line lies and propaganda. Their followers believe the lies.
What's more socialist, expecting all of your solutions from big brother named Bill, or developing them on your own? Monopolies are illegal can only continue to exist when government allows them to. They oppose democratic grass roots solutions and try to mandate solutions from the top down. They act for their own interest and not for the consumers. That pretty much describes socialism and closed source software.
Give it up already. Free and open source sofyware is a force of market economics. It is a better way to design, deliver and support software. It is lowering costs and improving the bottom line of the consumers of software. F/OSS is leading the way in the commoditization of software, and the profit margins of the closed source vendors are being threatened.
Too bad!
Compete fairly or get out of the game.
it's rather "IP communism" not "IP socialism" (Score:5, Insightful)
actually, as a communist i kind of appreciate this kind of FUD.
these people equate free software with communism/socialism as a means of spreading FUD against free software, but as a side effect they make the idea of communism/socialism interesting for people who do not like the idea of "intelectual property".
and the equation is not that far off:
where of course the therm "socialism" is not really exact here because the "in the hand of the public" means in the phase of socialism that it should be owned by the state. where "free software" means not owned by the state but really owned by the public, that is: belonging to anyone who wants to make productive use of it. this form of "free association of working people" is a hallmark of communist socity and not of socialist:
so the SAP Fud is wrong i think. it is rather not "IP socialism" but "IP communism". where the P in "IP communism" is still an oxymoron of course.
A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism. [...] Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? (from the communist manifesto)
Re:Why against open? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Open source is great for debugging, but it's crucial not to touch [the code]," said Agassi.
If it's "crucial" not to touch the code, what kind of a hous-of-cards are we dealing with here?
Parent
Re:Why against open? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Why against open? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's even simpler then that-they're afraid someone will write something better, and not be afraid to show it to the world. Is that a threat to their business model? You bet it is! Is that a -bad- thing? Doesn't capitalism eulogize choosing the best, most efficient option, all of the time?
Parent
Eulogize? (Score:4, Insightful)
Come to think of it, you may be right. Modern Capitalism and the way it is curtailing freedom of intellectual property may be in the process of burying the best and most efficient in favor of the most advertised, best funded, most highly FUDded, what have you.
Parent
Re:Why against open? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, what were those "bottled water" idiots thinking?
Parent
Re:Why against open? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent