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No Competition Between Open and Closed Source?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 07, 2007 03:43 PM
from the fight-for-the-right dept.
from the fight-for-the-right dept.
techie writes "MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications. The author writes, 'Is there really the level of competition in the open source world that we see in the closed source world? This is something that has been stuck in my mind lately as I have been told so many times by closed source developers that by opening the code you are creating your own competition. Today, I'm here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it's false.'"
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Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
What a great article. Maybe one day someone will write a relevant one about how and why GNOME and KDE compete, for example, and why. I'll be looking forward to that one.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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Church of Emacs (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's a penance
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Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Mozilla (Score:4, Informative)
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(Some geek had to point this feature out, so why not me?
yeah, it's obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
If you see a piece of OSS that you want to see X feature in and you're a coder you have 3 options:
- Write a competing piece of software
- Fork it
- Join the development
And people will choose? 3. Exactly. Or, maybe, if they have personality differences, 2. Unless they've looked at the source and decided "this is an unsalvageable piece of crap" they won't be doing 1, and even if they have, the developers have probably done that too, and that leaves options 2 & 3 open again.Re: (Score:2)
Things like gnome/kde, mozilla/konqueror, emacs/vi linux/various bsds
Right now I'm doing "1" (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. I'm currently in the pre-alpha stage of a project to create a racing car simulation. There are two great projects in this area right now, torcs [sourceforge.net] and rars [sourceforge.net]. I've used both and I like them both, I have nothing against them. But I just thought that, first, I would like more emphasis on the physics simulation part that neither of those projects emphasize much, and, second, by starting my own project I would have a much better control on several other parts that I'd like to give more priority, such as network play, for instance.
Maybe nothing will come out of my project, after all I'm doing it in my spare time, but if I do eventually publish it, there will exist a third FOSS car racing simulation out there. OK, it will be more like a sixtieth or so, but most of the other projects are stopped at a rather preliminary stage. Take a quick browse through sourceforge and you'll see that there is no lack of competing pieces of software in the FOSS arena.
Parent
You forgot number 4 (Score:3, Funny)
There is competition (Score:2)
Re:There is competition (Score:4, Insightful)
What? Beryl is by far the finest window manager available, and window management is separate from widget sets on all major operating systems (you can use custom widgets all day in Windows if you want) so I have no idea what you're talking about. Certainly Ubuntu with Beryl has been no less reliable than Windows or OSX (I have both here available to me, in fact surrounding my Ubuntu system...)
Beyond that, it's not true at all. Blender is neato but there are several commercial packages that do more. CAD/CAM is another area owned by proprietary software. (I'm not even aware of a Free/free feature-based 3d modeling package.) Whatever else you say about Microsoft and Sun, M$ Office kicks the crap out of Open/StarOffice in more ways than it falls behind. There are other examples, but I'm bored.
Remember Unix? Yes, I use it today, in the form of Linux.
Linux is not UNIX but it is Unix. And if you don't know the difference between the two then you're not qualified to complain about me splitting hairs; if you DO know the difference between the two, then you will surely agree with my statement. Unix is to UNIX as Open Source is to the Open Group. Or something.
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How does competition help? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does competition help? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell me again how OSS teams aren't reinventing the wheel?
(Also, I like how "supported" file systems seems to mean anything that may read some data from some type of files off of the target FS. Let's forget about writing, or supporting some of the esoteric oddities that have been developed.)
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Apples to Oranges (Score:2, Interesting)
Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an e
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
Then again I've never reviewed any of those for life-critical applications.
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Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:4, Informative)
Check out Quiken's tax software EULA (if the software makes a mistake Quiken pays the IRS fines for making the mistake. One year they laid out some serious cash over a bug.)
As someone that has paid very little for software in the last five years, I would seriously consider buying quicken for linux the EULA would make it worth a look, to me at least.
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Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, take a look at Linux. You can buy support for an embedded Linux project from the same company that will sell you support for several closed source embedded OS's. There are plenty of projects with commercial backers who will sell you support and service contracts including taking on legal liabilities.
No two of anything will ever be equivalent in every way. OSS tends to have restrictions attached to redistribution of the code, while it also provides a guarantee of competition in future bidding and an emergency exit strategy.
Actually, open source code is simply a feature of software. There is nothing inherent in OSS that gives it any negatives compared to closed source software, although a given offering from a given company or organization may well have negatives compared to other open and closed source offerings. They are inherently different, but only in that OSS has a feature that closed source offerings do not.
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Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummmm, Apache vs. IIS? Is this a trick question or something?
Service and support: the best and worst I've gotten were on commercial products; the free software I've used has tended to have good support, and you can buy service and support for free software. With proprietary software, either you can get support from the vendor, or you can't get support. Moreover, an organization selling support for free software needs to do a good job to stay in business, unlike normal commercial customer support, which is usually considered a cost center by the software vendor.
Legal responsibility: to the best of my knowledge, all software is equal here, in that nobody will accept legal responsibility. If you think any commercial vendor accepts responsibility, you've never read an EULA. The most I've seen one of those accept responsibility for is that there is, in fact, enclosed media, and the floppy or CD-ROM or whatever will remain such for sixty or ninety days.
Software has its own characteristics, and there are good reasons not to accept legal responsibility when distributing it. They apply both to free software and proprietary software.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any software where the creating company is liable for its effects. This means that this is a false comparison. One could just as well claim that unicorns are more suitable than horses for commercial purposes.
I don't know about every piece of software in the Universe, so if somebody could point me to a piece of software that is sold normally (as opposed to requiring a written and signed contract for distribution) that accepts responsibility for any problems, I'd be very interested.
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Firefox. Back when I was using IE and I had an MSDN account I didn't get any more support than the Firefox user community has given me. Patches for Firefox are released a lot faster and all known vulnerabilities are announced. IE s
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Legal responsibility? Show me the closed source company that takes legal responsibility for the functioning of their product. Every single o
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, take a look here [kernel.org]. The first Linux kernel was released in October 1991. If you had any reservations about its shortcomings, you can still get fixes for those today.
Let's compare that to a closed source equivalent. In 1991 I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 3.0 for $40. It had several bugs and I used their support service to complain. Their answer? Those bugs would be fixed in version 3.1. So I asked, when would they send me my version 3.1? Their answer: I could buy version 3.1 as soon as it came out. No, I said, I didn't want to buy version 3.1, I wanted the bugs in version 3.0, for which I had paid $40, fixed. I wasn't interested in paying $45 more to get the additional features in Windows 3.1, all I wanted was the Windows 3.0 for which I had paid $40 working correctly. Can't be done, was their answer.
Now, let's see again, how exactly do you define "service, support, AND legal responsibility"???
And you know what's the worse of it? Although they have, 16 years ago, disclaimed all responsibility for the bugs in Windows 3.0, its copyright won't expire for several decades... Oh, yeah, *LEGAL* responsibility, indeed!
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No competition between open and closed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever chosen between using MySQL and DB2?
Have you ever chosen between using OpenOffice and MS Office?
Have you ever chosen between using PHP and Active Server Pages?
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Internet Explorer vs. Firefox
Thunderbird vs. Outlook
Xvid vs. DivX
h.264 vs. x.264
WordPress vs. TypePad
Linux vs. Windows
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lameness filter (Score:5, Insightful)
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i agree completely. unless i missed a third or fourth page where he explains how all that crazy crap ties in it was largely incoherent.
feature catch up (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they do, they must care about the competition then.
Re:feature catch up (Score:4, Funny)
Man, the crazy things people post to slashdot these days...
Parent
Weird Summary, Weird Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, no it isn't. The article talks about the difference between the amount of competition among closed source applications versus the amount of competition among open source applications. It doesn't really mention competition between open and closed source applications.
With that cleared up, I had a hard time understanding exactly what the article was supposed to be saying. It seemed like a "Rah! Rah! Linux is Cool!" piece, but without any really well defined thesis. There were statements like "Appealing to the 'Home-sumer.' Hate them or love them, Linspire has proven that OEM can be a sustainable business model for their Linspire OS, based on the Debian code base " in a section entitled "Forget Windows and OS X: Just Try Linux." The weird part of this being, it doesn't mention anything about why a person should try Linux instead of Windows or OS X, just that it is profitable for the company selling it. I'd almost think it was intended as a comment for the OEM crowd, but OEMs have no option to purchase OS X, so that doesn't make sense.
I'd say that was my major problem with this article. It didn't make sense. Sure it made a statement or two that made sense and included some facts, but as a whole it just didn't add up to anything. What was the author trying to prove and to whom?
Re:Weird Summary, Weird Article (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a real problem with the lack of language and composition skills in people today, especially Americans. I'm a pretty bright guy and have never gotten anything but an A in an English class in which I made even a cursory attempt, and I couldn't tell you the difference between a past participle and a blasted asspimple. The only reason I am able to compose writings with any sort of skill is that I learned by example; I'm a speed-reader, and I've put that skill to good use over the years. In fact, I began reading when I was about two years old, so I think we can safely assume that I have some very useful deep structures when it comes to parsing or assembling English.
The point is that school prepared me very poorly for the real world - my preparation came from myself. English class wasn't a place where I learned - and frankly, no one ever really tried very hard to teach me anything mechanistic about English. It was just a place in which I did stupid human tricks. In fact I never really had anyone tell me much about the structure of an Essay until I revisited college just a couple years ago (in my late twenties.) I had read enough to understand that you should provide an introduction and a summary, and that paragraphs are points while sentences are complete thoughts, but most people in this country have serious problems with these concepts.
It's only going to get worse in the next few years, as we feel the backlash from the teenybopper IM crowd. They're going to grow up and shower us with idiocy in written (or typed) form.
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Re:Weird Summary, Weird Article (Score:5, Funny)
2 l8
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It's already happened. Last month I placed a housing ad online, and about half the responses contained such bad English that they were close to unintelligible. All of the responses were presumably from adults.
What a load... (Score:3, Insightful)
Should you, who wrote the software, be best placed to support and develop the product? Yes.
So does the competing fork stand much of a chance? Only if you drop the ball.
Think MySQL. We could fork it, but why bother?
Of course, sometimes forks do succeed - like Xorg. Which turns out better for the community. And that only happens when there is trouble with the original that can't be rectified.
P.S. Please don't link Matt Hartley articles, he has not been insightful in any article I have ever read. Feel free to look back through his previous nonsense.
Re:What a load... (Score:4, Funny)
Good point. Why would we need two shitty RDBMSes?
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Closed Source vs Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
Open Source is admittedly more about co-operation and some degree of competition. This is why you have projects like Gimp which seem to overshadow other OSS image editing software. If you want a feature and you already use a software you are more likely to submit the idea to the project or if they are knowledgeable in coding do it themselves and offer it.
After all Open Source is all about not having to reinvent the wheel everytime you want to build a car.
Article == spam link (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out the evaluation guidelines for the Web Spam Challenge [yr-bcn.es] (final results to be announced tomorrow) and tell me that you would not say the article is spam.
Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
In the open source world, the competition is to create the most useful product for any given niche.
In the closed source world, it's (generally) to drive out all the competition from your niche, to increase your market share and thereby your profitability. This is why they're paranoid about their source code falling into the wrong hands. Oracle is a prime example of a company that doesn't really understand this distinction - yes, they "stole" a Linux distro to get into the Linux service provider game. Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell are giving a collective yawn - they're in business to provide the best product for a given niche, and by engineering it, they know customers will come to them before they go to a "me too" distro vendor for support on a codebase they didn't even engineer. Oracle would have done better for itself if it decided to adopt one of the non-commercial distros like Debian or Gentoo and advertised support services for it rather than trying to gain a "jump" on Red Hat by swiping their distro. Not only does Red Hat not care, they're likely to clean up by competing with Oracle as the best service provider for Oracle's own produic. (Whether or no Red Hat =is= the best service provider, or is rusting on its laurels is not within the scope of discussion.)
SoupIsGood Food
The biggest difference is... (Score:2)
Re:Uhhggggg (Score:5, Insightful)
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What a pisspoor interpretation of the statement. You are obviously biased. Precisely the same description applies to Apple. Apple computers are just PCs (more literally now than ever) and especially now that they've gone away from SCSI and so on, the only thing that separates them from anyone else's PCs is the OS.
Granted, they have EFI, but most people don't care and frankly, when was the last time you needed a feature of EFI that BIOS doesn't support?
Apple might claim to be a hardw
Re:Terrible Article (Score:4, Interesting)
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