No Competition Between Open and Closed Source?

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.'"

Wow!

[dedazo]

Mozilla made $70M last year! Three apps based on Mozilla exist! Ubuntu is appealing to home users! [Click here to see the latest prices on Linux!] Conclusion! Open source has no competition!!

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!

[slashbob22]

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.

I look forward to that one as well. Any clue as to the text editor they plan on using?

Church of Emacs

[matt me]

Talking about the Church of Emacs, Richard Stallman was asked whether it was a sin to use vi.
No, it's a penance

Re:

[toleraen]

I submit that they will use gedit when describing GNOME, and kedit when describing KDE.

Re:

[marcosdumay]

<flame>Kedit is lame... They'll probably use Kate when describing KDE!</flame>

Now you can complete it with Gnome editors, because I don't them.

Mozilla

[jshriverWVU]

" Mozilla was reported making roughly $70MM for 2006" I'm curious how in the heck did it make that much? More power to them if this is true, but I thought the only way to make money in the FOSS arena was via support lines. As for competition I dont think it's the same as in the closed source world. In FOSS, there might be friendly competition, but that just drives a better product.

Re:Mozilla

[MindStalker]

Apparently from adclick revenue. They get money from google when you use the google search bar next to the url bar.

Re:Mozilla

[jshriverWVU]

Sweet, I've never actually used that, but if it'll help fund their work I'll use it instead of just using google.com as my homepage.

Re:

[stoomart]

CTRL+K will do the trick.

Re:

[yahwotqa]

I just tend to type "g search terms" in the URL bar - much faster, as cursor is in that bar when opening new tab in firefox. Ohnoes, I am stealing money from mozilla!

(Some geek had to point this feature out, so why not me? :) )

Re:

[jsolan]

nope, not faster... same number of keystrokes as " search terms" which is what i use

Re:

[jsolan]

bah... my bad, forgot to preview

i meant "tab search terms"

Re:

[Mandrel]

"g search terms" is exactly what I use, using the keyword feature of Firefox for bookmark "http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%s".

I prefer this to the search box because it allows me to hide the search box, allowing me to see either a longer URL box or an extra line of content.

I didn't realise this was doing Mozilla out of revenue.

Re:

[Man Eating Duck]

This is really nitpicking, but isn't it just as fast to hit <Tab>search terms, which will take you to the search bar? One key instead of g<Space>.
Oh well. Somebody please beat my nitpicking by pointing out that using your index finger and thumb is as fast as your pinky, as you can hit g<Space> almost simultaneously.

I really need to get some sleep now :)

Re:

[StringBlade]

My understanding is that if you use Google from Firefox (identified by the user-agent string) then Mozilla gets money. Perhaps though it's simply limited to searches done from the Firefox / Google start page or the Google search bar in Firefox. Either way, I believe it's quite easy to generate revenue for Mozilla by using Firefox and searching Google in a variety of ways.

Re:

[MindStalker]

Mozilla is a not-for-profit. They never intended upon making money, at least not originally. And the money they do make has to go back into development.

In general open source apps have made money from support, or else they were commissioned from the start. Also, some companies need special in house apps and they don't care if other companies benefit from their work, and can often get cheaper pricing from open source developers than closed source ones)

Re:

[tassinari]

Firefox makes it's money through google search. When you search through their toolbar and their default google home page, they get a cut of the ad revenue.

Re:

[moderatorrater]

Google pays to be the default search engine.

yeah, it's obvious

[Anonymous Cowpat]

(no, obviously, this soon, I've not RTFA)
If you see a piece of OSS that you want to see X feature in and you're a coder you have 3 options:

1. Write a competing piece of software
2. Fork it
3. 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:

[jonbryce]

There is competition between free software programs.

Things like gnome/kde, mozilla/konqueror, emacs/vi linux/various bsds

Right now I'm doing "1"

[mangu]

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

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Cowpat]

and why have you decided to make your own with improved physics rather than use the code for torcs or rars and change its physics? Because in the end torcs & rars physics engine are unsalvageable crap (for what you want the program to do, I'm sure they're beautiful physics engines for what the torcs and rars people want) - admittedly, in this case, the developers haven't reached this conclusion yet (I assume), but that may be because their aims are different.
To some extent, you're not competing with to

Re:

[node 3]

and why have you decided to make your own with improved physics rather than use the code for torcs or rars and change its physics? Because in the end torcs & rars physics engine are unsalvageable crap (for what you want the program to do, I'm sure they're beautiful physics engines for what the torcs and rars people want)

I got absolutely no indication whatsoever from mangu's post that he looked at their code and decided they were "unsalvageable crap". Quite the contrary. He just wants to do it his own way.

To some extent, you're not competing with torcs or rars, because you're producing a physics simulation with cars, rather than a racing simulation with half-plausible physics (again, I assume).

No, he wants to make another racing car simulation, and his project will compete with the two he mentioned (if his project gets up to speed, so to speak).

Your original post was flawed. You provided a pretty solid list of options for a certain scenario, and stated that no one would ever pick the first option, and mangu pr

Re:

[rbanffy]

In other words, there is competition when there is no mature solution (your example) or when the only mature solution is showing its age (Blender comes to my mind).

You forgot number 4

[ClosedSource]

4. Do nothing because X feature isn't important enough to interrupt your quest for survival (this doesn't apply if you're living in your parent's basement and they handle the survival part).

Re:

[node 3]

4. Do nothing because X feature isn't important enough to interrupt your quest for survival (this doesn't apply if you're living in your parent's basement and they handle the survival part).

It's possible to provide for one's own "survival" (what strange verbiage) and work on Open Source software at the same time, without relying on charity from others.

Re:

[ClosedSource]

Yes, but this list is about covering all the cases.

There is competition

[seanadams.com]

It's just that for pretty much everything except GUIs, open source always wins so there isn't much of a competition for long. Remember in the nineties when there were scores of startups all making web server software? Remember Unix?

Re:There is competition

[drinkypoo]

It's just that for pretty much everything except GUIs, open source always wins

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?

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.

Re:

[TheMeuge]

Mod parent up... Beryl has changed the way I do work, and is the primary reason why most people would switch to Linux, whether the main attraction is based on aesthetics, or usability.

How does competition help?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

In closed source/commercial land, there is significant competition because companies are trying to out do eachother. Unfortunately though, this often makes companies (particularly MS etc) competition focussed rather than customer focussed. Thus, more effort seems to go into disrupting competition rather than making truely meaningful customer experiences. From a whole industry perspective, this is rather wasteful since many teams end up doing pretty much the same work just competing with eachother making "me

Re:How does competition help?

[Score Whore]

...OSS teams tend to focus on adding real value and focussing on differentiation, rather than reinventing wheels.

....

Linux supports at least... well you count! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems [wikipedia.org]

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.)

Re:

[EmbeddedJanitor]

When OSS teams "reinvent the wheel", they are doing it because the existing wheels don't do something that is required. Yes, sometimes OSS projects sets out to replicate the functionality of a different OSS project - sometimes intentionally, but typically because they are not aware of eachother, but these quickly whither and die or amalgamate. This tends to make OSS far more efficient and is better for the customer. Commercial teams just need to reinvent to get to exactly the same state as their competitors

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Many of the filesystem in Linux began their life as a proprietary filesystem - NTFS, JFS, ZFS, XFS, to name a few. NTFS is a competing, reverse-engineered implementation. And at that, there are three competing implementations! The original (now deprecated) had read support and limited write support which would not allow creating files, only altering their contents. It was enough to put a filesystem image and/or swapfile on your NT filesystem. The others in my list were all donated by their corporate masters

Re:

[ClosedSource]

"Does this mean a lack of diversity in OSS? No! If anything it means more diversiity because instead of many teams all making "me-too" products, OSS teams tend to focus on adding real value and focussing on differentiation, rather than reinventing wheels"

Sure, that's why typical Linux distros include only a single text editor, a single window manager, etc. No "me-too" stuff there.

Re:

[ClosedSource]

Since there is no non-GUI software in the minds of 90% of computer users, that doesn't seem to be a big competitive advantage for open source.

Re:

[Dan Ost]

The average computer user may not benefit, but I sure do, both as a user and a programmer.

The current OSS environment is perfect for how I like to do things. As long as there are enough
people like me such that OSS has a critical mass of users and developers, I'm set. I see no need
to woo the general public.

That said, if we can bring in more users without sacrificing the very things that make the current
OSS environment so great, then it's good to do so. I think things like Gnome and KDE, which make the deskto

Apples to Oranges

[Adambomb]

How on earth CAN one compare open source to closed source software in any meaningful way when it comes to competition? Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version? I'm not just talking about technical specifications or functionality of the app itself, but also service, support, AND legal responsibility.

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

[Applekid]

I haven't seen an EULA yet, closed or open source, that didn't waive any and all responsibility or fitness for any purpose.

Then again I've never reviewed any of those for life-critical applications.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[micheas]

I haven't seen an EULA yet, closed or open source, that didn't waive any and all responsibility or fitness for any purpose.

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.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[Kjella]

Legal responsibility? You mean that big blurb in every EULA about a page long which says in so many words that they will never, ever take any responsibility for anything this product may or may not do? Show me someone that's gotten a dime out of a bug in any off-the-shelf software that fucked their business. They're there so the PHB can blame them, but they'll never pay damages. At best you get some free help so you won't make a stink and/or keep drinking the kool-aid, that is all.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?

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.

Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an equivalent good in terms of the commercial world.

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.

Note that I'm not saying open source is bad, or that closed source is better, merely that the two tend to be completely different when you look at all sides.

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.

OSS doesn't interoperate with 3 things

[tepples]

There is nothing inherent in OSS that gives it any negatives compared to closed source software

What about inability to interoperate with a color printing press? Use of Adobe software in prepress work is way ahead of G* or K* software, in large part because unlike free software, proprietary software such as Photoshop can implement the patented PANTONE algorithms for consistent prepress color.

What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of copyrighted entertainment works? There's no way in heck that the DVD CCA would license CSS for use in a copylefted software product.

What ab

Re:

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What about inability to interoperate with a color printing press?

Again, that is not at all inherent in OSS. An OSS project or company creating it can license the PANTONE algorithms. Alternately a partially open and partially closed project, such as one that uses plug-ins can incorporate a closed version of the algorithm. Let me stress again, however, that nothing is inherent in OSS that prevents interoperability. That is simply an issue of licensing with the creators of the color scheme.

What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of copyrighted entertainment works?

That is also not inherent in OSS. The fact that the cartels have not licensed co

Are you talking about a hostile takeover?

[tepples]

An OSS project or company creating it can license the PANTONE algorithms.

Pantone Inc. has shown no willingness to license the (broad) patents that cover the PANTONE Matching System on terms that are compatible with the four freedoms that define free software [gnu.org]. Or are you claiming that some major company that distributes free software has the resources to acquire Pantone Inc.?

That is also not inherent in OSS. The fact that the cartels have not licensed content to any OSS project does not mean they cannot or will not in the future.

This sentence supports the assertion "That may not be not inherent in OSS in the future", not the assertion "That is not inherent in OSS."

In fact an OSS DRM scheme that relies upon standards may well be the compromise the industry settles upon in the next decade or so.

It is impossible for free software running on an end user's machine

Re:

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

PANTONE Matching System on terms that are compatible with the four freedoms that define free software.

We were discussing Open Source Software, not "free" software. Do not confuse the two.

Or are you claiming that some major company that distributes free software has the resources to acquire Pantone Inc.?

Apple Inc. develops open source software, and certainly integrate with Pantone color schemes. I'm sure any number of commercial enterprises could license Pantone for an OSS project, if they so desired.

This sentence supports the assertion "That may not be not inherent in OSS in the future", not the assertion "That is not inherent in OSS."

Ha ha ha! Do you know what the word "inherent" means? I supported the assertion that it may not be in OSS future and that it is not inherent in OSS. Inherent means it is a fundamental property of OSS. It is not.

It is impossible for free software running on an end user's machine to correctly implement technical measures that allow an end user to play back a copy of a work but not to make and distribute more copies of the work.

It i

Please define "open source software"

[tepples]

We were discussing Open Source Software, not "free" software. Do not confuse the two.

We now have what proponents of (for example) Scientology study techniques would call a misunderstood word [wikipedia.org]. By "open source software", do you refer to open source software as defined by Open Source Initiative [opensource.org]? If so, OSI's definition of open source software parallels Debian's definition of free software [debian.org]. I assume that you did not intend to make a distinction without a difference [wikipedia.org], so what definition of "open source" are you using?

Apple Inc. develops open source software, and certainly integrate with Pantone color schemes.

But is the part of Apple's software that integrates with Pantone technologies

Re:

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

By "open source software", do you refer to open source software as defined by Open Source Initiative [opensource.org]? If so, OSI's definition of open source software parallels Debian's definition of free software [debian.org]. I assume that you did not intend to make a distinction without a difference [wikipedia.org], so what definition of "open source" are you using?

By "open source software" I refer to software whose source is open. That is to say, software whose source is available for viewing and modification (with a wide variety of limitations that can be placed on redistribution of said modifications).

But is the part of Apple's software that integrates with Pantone technologies open source software as defined by OSI, or is color management one of the proprietary parts of Mac OS X?

You were originally talking about printing and Apple's printing component is CUPS, which is OSS by any definition of the term you can come up with. Not that it matters, as the whole thing is merely an example of a company that could license Pantone if there was a

Can you help me emigrate?

[tepples]

By "open source software" I refer to software whose source is open. That is to say, software whose source is available for viewing and modification (with a wide variety of limitations that can be placed on redistribution of said modifications).

So you're talking about a computer program distributed as source code licensed under terms that permit private use of modified versions (GNU freedoms 0 and 1) but not necessarily distribution of modified versions (GNU freedom 3). Examples of such works include Pine and Qmail. This roughly corresponds to "free or semi-free software" in my own vocabulary. Some of the rest of your points depend on whether your definition of "open source" allows distribution of unmodified versions to third parties (GNU freedom

Re:Apples to Oranges

[david_thornley]

How on earth CAN one compare open source to closed source software in any meaningful way when it comes to competition? Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?

Ummmm, Apache vs. IIS? Is this a trick question or something?

I'm not just talking about technical specifications or functionality of the app itself, but also service, support, AND legal responsibility.

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.

Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an equivalent good in terms of the commercial world. Can we say that a program where the creating company is liable for the effects of its software on your system is truely equivalent in the business world versus the exact same functionality but "NO RESPONSIBILITY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART.." yadda yadda yadda.

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.

Re:

[maxume]

My understanding is that IIS 6.0 is no longer unimaginably bad.

Re:

[dave562]

It isn't. It's significantly better than IIS 5. But when you compare it to free offering, you have to wonder why'd you spend the money for IIS if you can have Apache for free. That is, unless you develop in Visual Studio want to integrate with what say... 85% of the servers in the world are running?

Re:

[maxume]

Yeah, I misread your original comment anyway. (But I have decided that software in general is so cheap that for people that actually need it and make good decisions about what to use, quality is essentially the only factor in consideration(Apache would bear this out))

Re:

[dhasenan]

If you're willing to restrict yourself to .NET 1.1 (with C# 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0), you've got Mono for Apache. Now if only I could get an IDE that offers the features of Visual Studio but was stable, didn't run like shit with 2GB of RAM and a 3GHz processor, and ran on Linux.

Re:

[dave562]

No. I'm trying to say that 85% of the world is running a Windows infrastructure and if you're developing to target that infrastructure using Visual Studio, then your backend web server is going to be IIS 6.

Re:

[truthsearch]

Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version? I'm not just talking about technical specifications or functionality of the app itself, but also service, support, AND legal responsibility.

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

Re:

[Chris Burke]

There are plenty of open source companies that offer service and support for open source products. That's become one of the basic open source business models -- create the app as open source, and have a company that provides paid support contracts for it. This is how mysql and postgresql operate, for example. Red Hat makes their bank off support contracts for RHEL.

Legal responsibility? Show me the closed source company that takes legal responsibility for the functioning of their product. Every single o

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version? I'm not just talking about technical specifications or functionality of the app itself, but also service, support, AND legal responsibility.

Just to fill in one point that others have missed: that covers every piece of Microsoft software ever written.

Aside from the indemnity clause in basically every EULA ever [slashdot.org] (no need to go over it here, linked to a sibling comment) the

Re:Apples to Oranges

[mangu]

Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?

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!

No competition between open and closed?

[Lockejaw]

Have you ever chosen between using Apache and IIS?
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?

Re:

[jest3r]

Zimbra vs. Exchange
Internet Explorer vs. Firefox
Thunderbird vs. Outlook
Xvid vs. DivX
h.264 vs. x.264
WordPress vs. TypePad
Linux vs. Windows

Re:

[tepples]

Xvid vs. DivX

Slashdot is on United States soil. Any free software that encodes MPEG-4 video is in violation of numerous U.S. patents.

Re:

[StikyPad]

No.

Re:

[Tatisimo]

I for one chose GIMP over Photoshop, and am migrating from CorelDRAW to Inkscape. The comercial software hogs up the ram too much, and "calls home" nearly every time it's started to look for updates (which slow down the system when installed). The only thing I need now is Corel cdr format support on inkscape, then I can ditch Corel without sacrificing compatibility with the people I work with. Oh, and as soon as inkscape (or Karbon 14, perhaps) gets usable at a professional level, I can FINALLY ditch M$ Win

Re:

[It'sYerMam]

That's what I miss on Linux - a decent art-creation application. The GIMP is alright in its way, but for creating media as opposed to editing photos (since the GIMP is designed mainly for the latter) I don't think there's any real free, Linux-compatible option.

Re:

[oyenstikker]

I have used MS Office and OpenOffice. OpenOffice is usable, but cannot touch MS Office in terms of stability, speed, or features.

I have used MySQL and DB2. They are both frustrating to use, but MySQL cannot touch DB2 in terms of power and performance for large scale use. Postgres v. DB2 would perhaps be a better comparison, but I suspect DB2 would still win.

Re:

[smellotron]

Have you ever chosen between using Apache and IIS?

No, but I've chosen between Apache and Lighttpd.

Have you ever chosen between using MySQL and DB2?

No, but I've chosen between MySQL and Postgres.

Have you ever chosen between using PHP and Active Server Pages?

No, but I've chosen among PHP, Perl, and Python.

Huh, I guess all of the choices I listed are open-source.

lameness filter

[bcrowell]

This article is pretty lame.

• It seems to be mostly a plug for the author's own open-source project.
• It doesn't string together any interesting thoughts in any logically coherent way.

Re:

[teh_chrizzle]

It doesn't string together any interesting thoughts in any logically coherent way.

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

[phrostie]

Do the new versions of IE have tabs?

Yes they do, they must care about the competition then.

Re:feature catch up

[truthsearch]

You're implying Microsoft didn't invent browser tabs. Or interface tabs at all for that matter. Next you'll probably be telling everyone they didn't invent the web browser!

Man, the crazy things people post to slashdot these days...

Terrible Article

[CheckeredShirt]

This article was terrible. How in the heck did it make to the main page? It was poorly written, didn't address the supposed topic very well, never really reached a conclusion and sure didn't convince me that the premise that open source has no competition was false.

Re:Terrible Article

[Radres]

The same way that 90% of the articles make it to Slashdot: by making broad, controversial claims sure to spark click-through and reader responses which in turn garner more click-through and ad revenue. Most people don't read the articles anyway, so each new article posted is just a chance for people to regurgitate the same old arguments they've already had thousands of times with the same people winning with the same ideas.

Weird Summary, Weird Article

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications.

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

[drinkypoo]

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?

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.

Re:Weird Summary, Weird Article

[AKAImBatman]

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.

2 l8

Re:

[ettlz]

2 l8

Right, checking the teenybopper IM codebook. OK, here we are:

2--18: can i has mp3 of "Convoy" lollll! kthxbye

Re:

[PitaBred]

I'm already seeing typos and repeated misspellings (ex. loser vs. looser) on the pages of things like CNN and Reuters. I fear that it's only the tip of the iceberg, though.

Re:

[hab136]

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.

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.

Re:

[MikeBabcock]

In my observations, I've found the problem is even deeper than basic language skills. The problem appears to in fact be a lack of thinking skills. I took a logical thinking course in college and it was excellent -- we had to disassemble sentences, trace the logic (with cute little lines & symbols) and work out what the facts were and whether the resulting statements were valid (which is not the same as 'true') or not. Most of the class stared blankly for several weeks as the professor slowly explaine

What a load...

[Bert the Turtle]

Does opening your product up risk a competing fork? Yes.

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...

[drinkypoo]

Think MySQL. We could fork it, but why bother?

Good point. Why would we need two shitty RDBMSes?

Re:

[AusIV]

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.

People say the same thing every time slashdot links to a Dvorak article, and while I agree that that articles are generally trolling, I find that the slashdot discussion is often relatively interesting. And really, who reads slashdot for the articles? (For that matter, who even reads the articles?)

Misleading title/summary

[moderatorrater]

The article actually examines whether or not open source projects tend to have competition. It's not a matter of whether open and closed source applications compete, it's whether you create your own competitor when you open your source code. For the most part the author concludes that you don't. However, in many instances this is not the case. KDE and Gnome, for example, compete a lot and fiercely at times. The author's point is that, once a really good app comes out, often it dominates heavily and no comp

Re:

[SaturnNiGHTS]

most of the commercial market are applications competing to complete the same task...whereas open source is filled with applications trying to fulfill the name of "killer app"...say, fetchmail, apache, busybox, etc. it is pretty much king in that area because it fills that "application void". in open source, when an application fills that void, it pretty much has a lock on that arena because it does it, and does it well. there's no incentive [read: money] to go develop another application like it to comp

Closed Source vs Open Source

[Tuoqui]

Closed Source is all about competition. If you want to make a new image editor in a closed source model then you are going to end up competing with Photoshop at some point or another. You can compete based on price, features, etc... And lets face it at $600 a copy for Photoshop it isnt that hard to compete in terms of price.

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.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

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.

Well you forgot a force as well: if you use a compatible license, then even if you develop the functionality in a competing project, the other project is

Useless article, but a funny jab

[Lightborn]

From TFA: Why try to take existing code, only to duplicate it with minor changes? Unless you are starting a company around an operating system, there is really little motivation to do so, even from a financial perspective.

Nice shot at MS there.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Nice shot at MS there.

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

Plenty of competition

[BlueParrot]

No competition? Mentioning Mozilla as an example? Hmm, let me see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers_ for_Unix/Linux [wikipedia.org] There is plenty of competition. During the last year I've switched my distribution of choice more times than I switched web browser ( yes, that includes the browser version number ). You just don't do that with closed source software. You don't just try out a Mac for the evening and use the package manager to download the latest version of Office for it. When you switch betw

Article == spam link

[gvc]

The linked-to article is web spam. Meaningless gibberish laden with sponsored links. I'm not even convinced that it was written by a human.

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

[SoupIsGood Food]

Of course there's competition, and it can be quite fierce. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comes immediately to mind. These projects have developers and users that are in fierce competition with each other. See also emacs vs. vi, Apache vs. Lighttpd, Python vs. Ruby. The difference is that Postgres "stealing" MySQL code would be pointless... it doesn't fit in with the project direction. This is why the vim project hasn't eagerly taken all of GNU's emacs code and rolled it into their latest realease... "vi - now with emacs!"

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...

[Kjella]

...that you're competing against yourself, all the time. Sure you have competitors, open and closed source, and closed source can feel it too but then there's planned obsolesence. If Windows or Photoshop or whatever stopped innovation today, they'd still be printing money by selling copies for quite some time. With open source software, you're dead in the water if you don't offer upgrades, service and support. Most companies like to come to a point where they have a solid product, keep updating the polish b

open source is the playground for innovation

[Device666]

Ofcourse there is enough room for open source projects to compete with closed source. It depends all who is developing for what kind of user to fit some purpose.

A software product satisfies some need for some target users. This is a very different motivation comparing with business driven development and thus leads to different kind of software and innovations. Because the most of the developers of open source software products have only as targetgroup: themselves. These developer-users have at some point

Flawed from the very beginning

[zhrike]

The author states:

"Today, I'm here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it's false."

You simpy do not go into an examination of a thoery with a bias and expect to come up with any significant
objective findings.

15 minutes of my life which I'll never get back...

[vrmlguy]

"And even when some of you wish to exclaim that this is not that cut and dry, one thing that no one can argue is that their effort behind the notion that open source cannot be profitable."

Can someone please parse this sentence for me? It seems to be short a verb.

Lame

[mapkinase]

Both the abstract and the article are very poorly written. Basically, the subject of the article is the cash flow, not competition.

There is competition between CS and OS of course. That is obvious. THere is competition with OS, and that is obvious too.

Lame as lame goes. Bad submission, ScuttleMonkey. Very very bad.

Re:Uhhggggg

[SirTalon42]

Better to know the bias than have no clue what their bias is. Everyone is biased, might as well know up front what theirs is.

Re:

[fitten]

I know that being a Slashdot reader you rarely get past the first line of a post, but I thought the combination of

a) getting 'nothing to see here, move along'
2) the actual link being a blank page
D) the article supposedly being about the 'lack of competition'

was funny because it was a blurb about nonexistent competition referencing a nonexistent article with a nonexistent thread to discuss it. That doesn't happen nearly as often as the 'simple nothing to see here joke'.

Are we that fucking lame?

You're readin

Re:

[JoeCommodore]

Sounds like somebody is having a case of the Mondays!