Open Source Not That Open? 339
mstansberry writes "At the Open Source Business Conference last week, Microsoft's Shared Source mouthpiece Jason Matusow argued the point that open source isn't really open. He said you can't just go changing code on supported Linux offerings without paying extra to companies like Red Hat or Novell. So as Linux is commercialized, it becomes less open. While Matusow made good points during his presentation, many in the open source community are skeptical of the idea at best."
Err... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, presuming that he is disregarding any ideas of software being closed to *hem* increase profit, he doesn't really seem to get the idea...
I'd say that if anything, you should need to understand why you want to _close_ certain software.
What? (Score:1, Interesting)
There are far, far too many forks of existing packages just because people didn't like the way they were headed ande split off a development track to reach what they considered the goal.
I tell you, if there was a similar track to split off "geegaws" from real GUI development on XP, that's what I would be running! Instaed, I run Gentoo, 'cause Microsoft is in control!
Pure FUD & other assorted bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
I read the article and it's as thin as water. Nothing to see here (move along), not even anything real to discuss here (except perhaps that
Re:I'm sold (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worse than that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, but there's more. If your mods are excellent and usefull, they might be rolled into the upstream sources and officially "supported" by having others continue to mod and improve things for you. That's why programs like the GNU debugger have 87 authors, which is way more resources than any "traditional" company can afford to lavish on any program.
This is a typical Microsoft smear that should backfire every time. They take their perceived weaknesses and project them onto others. This form is more insulting than most. The unstated argument is, "When X grows up, they will be just like us in all the bad ways but lack our strengths." Everytime some M$ spokesvole says something like this, rest assured it's an admission they don't have something people really want, they are not going to provide it and someone else does it better.
Re:It all depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
If they think it's hard to get code in, that's pure nonsense. As a Fedora Extras contributor (fortune-firefly, and coming soon Nethack: Vulture's Eye/Claw) the process is relatively simple, and the people very supportive and responsive. Now, Fedora Extras is certainly less picky than RHEL, but I can't imagine it being too difficult to get code in. If it's not your own package, just simply a package carried by RedHat, you don't even have to deal with RedHat - you just deal with the developers of that package. If they take your patch, then your patch ends up in the distro.
If he's talking about "you make changes and then expect RedHat to immediately support your changes for you without merging it into the distro", however, that's a pretty preposterous thing to expect. That's not asking for a supportive vendor - that's asking for consultants.
Re:It all depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Red_Hat != Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
So? Roll your own distro. Can you do that with Windows? No. Can I tweak XP and sell it as my own? No. Better yet, can I tweak the codebase for Windows Server 2003 so that I have a company wide distro for our internal systems? Hell no.
I'm sorry but this Microspin Doctor's argument looks to be in beta still. As per usual, I don't expect Microsoft's final argument to be worth anything until the third release.
Re:I agree: GNU is M$ (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, GCC supports things like a smart assembler inliner and packed structures. But I ask you, why doesn't MSVC? In this day and age it still uses the "we put code in verbatim with params" model that Watcom made famous in the EARLY NINETIES.
With GCC I can say "pass me these variables in registers" and then mix with C and ASM code in the same routine. GCC will sort out which registers to assign and even alias the variables automatically as possible.
With MSVC it's totally atomic. You can't tell it to alias registers with variables and once you leave your asm block you're totally fucked.
HOWEVER, when striving to write portable code GCC is a hell of a lot more compliant. Where are "long long"s in MSVC? Where are VLA and other C99 keywords?
Speaking as someone who actually works on a diverse set of platforms I'd like to qualify your post as "cheapshot".
Tom
It All Depends... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, regarding paid support... I have yet to have a paid support response that I feel warrants the highly expensive support contract fees we pay where I work. If we're paying thousands a year for support I want 24x7 and I want qualified support staff. I just had an experience over the weekend (involving the migration of software from one system to another) for software that we pay a LOT for support services. It was dismal as usual. We called the company's after hours support line at about 9:30PM on Saturday night. It was automated and stressed that we'd better be in a down/critical situation. We left our message with the correct information regarding contact and the problem being experienced.
The message on their end stated as 60 minute response time. However, their support person managed to call the wrong number and we didn't hear anything. So we called back and actually got a human this time. After talking to the support person for a while, the person said they would call us back after doing some research. Since this product is HIGHLY PROPRIETARY, my Google searches only brought back two responses to the error message we were getting on our server. And those search results were only viewable in cached form. They were... cached web sites that use the same producvt who were experiencing the same error. That is to say the cached pages were just those sites displaying the same error at one point. No forum discussions. No knowledgebase articles. Nothing helpful.
Eventually we got a call back from support and this person had tripped through their internal knowledgebase which gave the most common cause of the error with no other suggestions. We verified that it wasn't the most common factor causing our error after which the support person said, "Well, I'm sorry folks. Maybe you should move back to the old system". WTF?! Fortunately, we pressed them to find someone else to give us a better answer and we eventually got a call from someone else who asked more pointed questions that eventually led to a solution but it took three hours to get to that point.
Ideally, we should have gotten a call from the second person right off the bat since our details were very specific. And that person should have been knowledgable enough to know for certain what was causing the problem. For god sakes, we're paying a LOT of money for support. Enough to staff one person yearly very comfortably. We should have had an answer within no more than 90 minutes. If this had been a FOSS project instead of proprietary crap, I would have had an answer in minutes since the error is definitely caused by a very finite list of factors. Sadly, that is not the case with proprietary software. And this is one of the BETTER experiences I've had with paid support!
The usual is more along the lines of me calling an issue in and having to hound them every few hours or days until I get an answer. Many times the answer is just, "uhhhhh... hmmmm... it SHOULD work...". I'm sorry but I'm more than willing to replace proprietary stuff with well known, well supported FOSS offerings: Apache, BIND, ISC DHCP, the Linux kernel, Bash, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, etc... And if I really need a fast answer that I didn't find with a Google search, there are always FOSS coders that will fix stuff for a reasonable fee that ISN'T the equivalent of a year's salary. This Microsoft guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
... and blazing hypocracy (Score:3, Interesting)
This is really nothing more than another Microsoft expression of arrogance.
I mean they do have the singularity OS....
You're telling me. FYI, there was once a large retailer who had over 1000 stores whose customer value cards authed thru a central farm of NT servers. The problem was that these servers would crash on a regular basis and arguably cost the company over a million dollars per hour in downtime when it happened.
To get to the root of them problem, they bought expensive specialized hardware, put up big money for a custom tcp/ip stack, and scheduled nightly reboots, but still nothing helped. So they flew in experts from all over thw world, who eventually came back to them and said there was a flaw on the OS. Then they went to Microsoft, and in not so many words got the finger even though they would have certainly been willing to pay big bucks to fix it if they could.
So how do I know about this? because I was one of the people hired to help the move over to Solaris at great great! expense to them. But their reboot problem was finally resolved.
So really, at least Red Hat is willing to take your money and not leave you screwed. And why is that? Because if RedHat won't do it someone elese would because Linux is FOSS and that forces people to compete off of merits and not by giving customers the finger when service and support don't fit into a companies master monopoly strategy.
So excuse me, but this has got to rank as the most blazing hypocracy I've ever seen. I'm sorry to see that your post is rated as flamebait at this time, because Microsoft truely is ARROGANT by the words very definition. They're gonna get what's comming to them, and nobody is going to cry a tear.
Re:It all depends... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, that's what he's talking about. You have hit the nail correctly about its being preposterous, and that's exactly the point: it ain't gonna happen. People get Open Source marketed at them (by the
Re:I was at the conference and was in the audience (Score:3, Interesting)
1. RedHat's distros come with (backward) compat libraries and compilers packages (optional to install) with their enterprise products. I believe the that between the two you have most things covered. The compat libraries are typically required by Oracle ...
2. You might get away with core upgrades, if it lives on an extras disk. I haven't explored them... anyone? However, if people complain loudly enough and the change isn't that major, they have been known to include things that were intended for a future release, or were even being deliberately excluded. A good example is their reluctant support for the features of QLogic FC HBAs. It took months to get them to stick it into EL3. AFAIK no clients actually paid for it (all they really had to do was incorporate the vendor's own code, and that doesn't taint the kernel), and even though the vendor's drivers were eventually compiled in, the user had to know what symbolic links and modules.conf changes to make to get it to work... before that I was downloading the source and compiling in the vendor's driver. RedHat wouldn't have supported any I/O related issues to those disks, I'm sure, but they would still support configuration of the web server!
3. RedHat have deliberately left lots of things they will refuse to support out of their kernel releases. Reiserfs is a good example of this. If you want it, you have to install the source rpm, reinstate the config and compile the modules for yourself. I do however find it very annoying that we need to in the first place. But then if you don't like it, you can always go with SuSE.
The downs may seem very significant, but the only issues this causes to the likes of me is when the hardware compatibility matrix is affected. I like to be able to dial 1-800-REDHAT and have the expectation of a reasonable answer to a reasonable question in a reasonable amount of time. Now if only they could get the answers right more often! :)
What being "Open Source" really means (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, there's the Fedora Legacy project [fedoralegacy.org] which has picked up RedHat 7.3 as well, providing yet another option for administrators of "axed support" distros.
Let me ask you this - what companies or groups have stepped up to the plate to support Win9x after Microsoft's abandoning of the platform?
I guess Windows is really not that open, is it?
Re:The catch is this: change something, lose suppo (Score:3, Interesting)
The EULA you agreed to says they can. In practice this means they will still take your money, blame the other software and close the case. Either that or like you said they will ask you to install a new server with only MS software on it, load all your data to it and then try to replicate the problem. After a week of blowing your sysadmin's time you won't be able to replicate the problem, they will take your money and close the case.
Yes, I have been there, done that. They once asked us to ship our entire database to them. The CIO flipped. Imagine sending all your customers, vendors, transactions and all kinds of sensitive data to MS!. Trust me they know how to get you to close those pesky tickets.
what people will believe (Score:3, Interesting)
There also wasn't anyone to sue if something went wrong. And there wasn't documentation. And there wasn't a 5 year road map so nobody was in control of its future. And more recently, you could be exposed to legal uncertainty.
Well, people aren't buying that old FUD anymore. So now we've got the new and improved FUD.
Now you can't get support if you've modified the code.
Next thing you know, there won't be documentation available for your own modification.
And then there won't be anyone to blame/sue if your own modifications don't work.
Your whole company will have an uncertain future because your modifications don't have a 5 year roadmap from an industry leader in the software biz (that consistently misses its own goals, but nevermind that detail). No 5 year roadmap = uncertain future.
Worst of all, your own modifications might have legal uncertainties, possibly infringing upon someone else's patents or other so-called intellectual property. You could be exposed to lawsuits or other frightening uncertain legal woes.
Be affraid. Very affraid. And also uncertain and filled with doubt!
Microsoft understands! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like how the unions are saying that Proposition 75 [smartvoter.org] is a way to silence union members. What is is is to say that the union can only take money out member's paychecks for political campains, after they get permission. Not jump through hoops to get a refund of polical dues. Or Proposition 75 [smartvoter.org] will cut school funding. But it actually limits the amounts of spending increases.
Re:It all depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, I dunno what he's been smoking...
1. The code is open, you can change it as much as you want (it just might not get adopted upstream)
2. If you make a good patch to fix a bug then it usually does get pulled in upstream (either by the packager, or by the author - if it gets to the author then *all* the packagers get it)
3. Tied in with (2), if you join the project that's developing a piece of software and submit code then (assuming the code is of a good quality) that code usually goes into the trunk of the project and then filters down to all of the packagers.
I've written bugfixes, enhancements and completely new chunks of code for the kernel, squid, etc. This code is packaged by most of the distributors and I've never paid them a penny. I've also worked on projects such as MythTV (i.e. stuff that's not usually packaged by third parties) and my code is in the trunk there too. Again, I've not paid anyone to incorporate my code.
It is in the interest of the developers, distributors and their customers to incorporate high quality patches. And even if they don't, that doesn't take away your ability to modify a project for your own use.
Re:The Point (Score:3, Interesting)
That's like me saying "I created a program on my computer, can someone offer me support without seeing the code or knowing much about it?"
Actually I think it's more like buying a car, modding it to hell and back, and then expecting the local garage to do a full service for the same amount. You would have to be a complete loon to think they wouldn't charge you more. This M$ guy has stated the obvious and made it sound like a bad thing.
Not really. (Score:4, Interesting)
The argument in this case is closer to the strategy the cigarette companies used on tobacco's addictiveness. In that one you pick an arbitrary definition of your own -- a straw man -- then quickly move on and hope your audience doesn't have time to realize the definition you've used is loaded. You help this process by passing over it quickly, or by referring to it without ever stating it explicitly, and moving on to emotional or inflammatory rhetoric.
The distinction is this: in one case you force the other side to provide you with the faulty definition. In the other you rely on the other side carelessly accepting a definition you supply.
Re:No Additional Value... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem of getting locked in to a vendor still remains. When one vendor gives you closed source programs, and then decides that he no longer supports your version, your only choice is to switch to another product. That is a software manufacturer has a monopoly on supporting that software. In open source, any company can support the software...and no one can claim that they will be bad at it because they do not own the code. As the code is publicly available, they can claim that they are as good at supporting the product as the company that sells the software.
Less lock-in as far as I can see is a good thing.
Re:Finally... (Score:1, Interesting)
You're wrong about everybody having heard of Linux except Microsoft, though. The first Halloween document was dated Aug 11, 1998. They've been removed from the OSS site, supposedly to Raymond's site, but I was unable to find them there.
http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/halloween.shtml [softpanorama.org]
is a working link, though.
This is just Matusow in full-on shill mode.