Slashdot Log In
Has Open Source Jumped the Shark?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 30, 2007 02:34 PM
from the 100-yard-shark-hurdles dept.
from the 100-yard-shark-hurdles dept.
AlexGr writes to tell us that Jeff Gould has a somewhat jaded look at the commercial push of Open Source and what that may be doing to the overall Open Source movement. "I've been a Linux fan for years, but lately I wonder if the drum beating from the big IT vendors in favor of open source hasn't finally slipped over the edge from sincere enthusiasm to meaningless — or in some cases downright hypocritical — sloganeering. The example that brought this gloomy thought to mind was a recent IBM press release touting a 'new open client solution' as an 'alternative to vendor lock-in'. Wow. Imagine that. An alternative to vendor lock-in."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of companies use Open Source to make a buck in some way, and some of them either mis-represent what is Open, or they don't get it at all. I saw an Oracle representative give a talk on "Free Software from Oracle" in Belfast last year. It turned out that he thought Free Software was software they don't charge for. Fortunately, Richard Stallman was out getting a massage, he gave his own talk an hour later. The audience tore the Oracle guy to shreds and insisted that he say "cost-less" instead of "Free" for the rest of the talk. IMO it was a pretty low moment for Oracle.
But what does this have to do with the Open Source / Free Software community? Not too much. IBM and Oracle would say the same thing about "Data Mining" or "Self Healing" if that was the buzzword that would help them make a buck that day. It's just outsiders misrepresenting themselves. Yes, outsiders. Even if IBM participates in Open Source projects, selling Lotus is an outsider activity. The best thing you can do is point it out, but don't blame it on Open Source.
His sympathy for Red Hat being "exploited" is wildly absurd and shows his failure to understand who made the software in Open Source products. Red Hat did not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did, and Red Hat did not pay us for it. And if you want to use that software in Debian or CentOS, that's fine with us.
Overall, he doesn't show much of an understanding of how Open Source is paid for and where the innovation comes from.
Bruce
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what the rest of the world thinks when they hear "free". Just because the OS community has a different meaning for it, doesn't mean the word's definition has been permanently changed. "Buy one get one free" doesn't mean the second one is promised to be hand-crafted by the community.
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bruce
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... in spite of Richard Stallman's rather pathetic attempt to redefine the English language, that is what the term "free software" actually means. You cannot legitimately criticize the Oracle representative for using the English language correctly.
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
And he's right!
If he had said "open source software", then you'd have a point. But he just said free software, which only means software that is provided without charge. Sorry Bruce, I normally agree with everything you say, but not this time. The open source community has no right to redefine common English words.
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny, when I look up the meaning of the word "free," I see many definitions:
1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty.
2. Not controlled by obligation or the will of another: felt free to go.
3.
1. Having political independence: "America . . . is the freest and wealthiest nation in the world" (Rudolph W. Giuliani).
2. Governed by consent and possessing or granting civil liberties: a free citizenry.
3. Not subject to arbitrary interference by a government: a free press.
4.
1. Not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance: a healthy animal, free of disease; free from need.
2. Not subject to a given condition; exempt: income that is free of all taxes.
5. Not subject to external restraint: "Comment is free but facts are sacred" (Charles Prestwich Scott).
6. Not literal or exact: a free translation.
7.
1. Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
2. Publicly supported: free education.
8.
1. Not occupied or used: a free locker.
2. Not taken up by scheduled activities: free time between classes.
9. Unobstructed; clear: a free lane.
10. Unguarded in expression or manner; open; frank.
11. Taking undue liberties; forward or overfamiliar.
12. Liberal or lavish: tourists who are free with their money.
13. Given, made, or done of one's own accord; voluntary or spontaneous: a free act of the will; free choices.
14. Chemistry & Physics.
1. Unconstrained; unconfined: free expansion.
2. Not fixed in position; capable of relatively unrestricted motion: a free electron.
3. Not chemically bound in a molecule: free oxygen.
4. Involving no collisions or interactions: a free path.
5. Empty: a free space.
6. Unoccupied: a free energy level.
15. Nautical. Favorable: a free wind.
16. Not bound, fastened, or attached: the free end of a chain.
17. Linguistics.
1. Being a form, especially a morpheme, that can stand as an independent word, such as boat or bring.
2. Being a vowel in an open syllable, as the o in go.
So I guess context is important.
In Bruce's example, the context was a conference organized by FSF Europe and the talk was on ""Free Software from Oracle." Which definition of "fee" do you think attendees of such a conference might consider relevant?
Parent
Zero INITIAL cost (Score:4, Insightful)
I think of a lot of zero-initial-cost proprietary software that way. If you're not going to pay for it, you'll pay for the limited set of stuff that it's compatible with. It's interesting how many corporations are addicts, and how their management isn't faulted for that.
Thanks
Bruce
Parent
It all costs, even F/OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
With all due respect, it seems to me that all software costs. Your distinction about initial costs would directly apply to F/OSS too.
I used to work for a company where vendors were excited to say "used by company XYZ" or they wanted us to assess whether the product was worthwhile for enterprise deployment. Even assessing the compatibility of those tools costs something - our time ain't free, even if the vendor asks for no money!
You also mention "the limited set of stuff that it's compatible with" My experience with F/OSS as a whole is that it tends to be compatible only with the one use case that represents the itch the author needed to scratch. Of course, it is possible to take the source and scratch my own itch - if I want to invest the labor to customize a hack to solve my problem, but many times it's less time and hassle to pay for the packaged work.
There was a time when I thought "who would pay for a TV show on iTunes?" I found myself in the middle of a "part one of two" episode, and didn't see part two on the program guide in the near future. I started to think about illegitimate P2P downloads, and then realized that for a mere $2 I could save myself the time and hassle of downloading for "free" (copyright violations aside.) My time and my integrity were well worth $2, and that's been my experience with software, too. Many times the "fit and finish" of commercial code is worth much more than the actual dollar cost to me.
All software costs. Sometimes F/OSS costs more, sometimes less. Sometimes commercial software is a better deal than F/OSS. There's room in the ecosystem for lots of business models.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stallman hasn't been made dictator yet, you know, not even in Cuba. We're still allowed to use "free" in its normal meaning.
Parent
Re:He doesn't understand Open Source at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Portability != Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Commercialization (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the vendors who (they're not fooling anybody here) are in the end loyal only to their shareholders. If their motives overlap with the community's then suddenly it's an open source project. Problem is, that project cannot fail for it would hurt the company's edge and prospective foothold. As a result, you see hilarious press releases like you cited.
Once again, the community is usually in good standing with good intentions until a member (usually a vendor or large company) mangles something. Blame the mangler, not the group working together. They're the attention whores and their motives are not to promote open source but are really shady/hilarious Machiavellian moves to deepen their pockets.
Re:Commercialization (Score:4, Informative)
Openness has nothing whatsoever to do with commercial/non-commercial status. In fact, the term 'Open' was originally applied to commercial systems which were nonetheless based on open standards, or whose source code was available to purchasers of the system on much more restrictive terms than the GPL or BSD licenses.
Open Source was always commercial. If it wasn't done by a commercial company, then it involved the ability to interoperate with commercial software and/or standards. Now, if you want to talk about the commercialization of Free Software, well, that's a slightly more interesting topic (although, I think, done to death.)
Yes, that sounds quite logical to me. Where there is congruence of interest there can be confluence of effort.
How is this different from any other system, natural or not?
Or put in a totally different way, how does one company's misuse of the term "Open Source" ruin it for the rest of us?
Parent
It is possible to overuse the Cavuto (Score:3, Funny)
What a pointless rant (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM is simply announcing a client offering that will run more-or-less identically on multiple OS platforms. No, this isn't very big news, but it isn't as bad as the article author made it out to be.
SirWired
Takes One to Know One? (Score:5, Funny)
Nonetheless, for some of us who are old enough to have done business with IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, having them talk about avoiding "vendor lock-in" is a useful test to see if the old irony detector is still working.
No, it's just the nostalgia that's gone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it's just the nostalgia that's gone (Score:5, Insightful)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Parent
One burned out blogger doesn't mean a trend (Score:4, Insightful)
Any coder-- any human for that matter-- can get burned out. Self-rejuvenation is a good thing and isn't limited to programming, development, and engineering. All of his diatribe points to frustration and stress. The basics haven't changed, but they have matured. Along the way, we get to shape this. He's seemingly feeling powerless against the Big Boys. That's natural, and the basics of doing code because you love it and want to contribute haven't changed. ANYBODY gets to use the code, subject to licensing-- little guys like me, and big guns like IBM and so on.
New converts vs Old Preachers (Score:4, Insightful)
And keep in mind (and I know I'm about to get flaming causes I can feel the heat), we are still a minority when it comes to people outside of IT. Those people still have never even heard of open source, have no idea what it is or what ir means and don't even know that they are already using it and what the benefits are.
However, due to the fact that even politicians in several states now are calling for open voting machines, open document formats and other open processes and formats, it seems that they are beginning to get it and for them, it hasn't even begun to jump the shark. In their world, Fonzy just got his first leather jacket.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Is that gonna be like hippie-love-fest-1.0 except with even more user interaction? If so, count me in!
Re:Jumping the Shark (Score:4, Funny)
Correct, I much prefer the Tom Cruise inspired phrase "jumped the couch."
Parent