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Linux Business GNU is Not Unix

The Business Value of Open Source Examined 192

Posted by michael from the intellectual-capital dept.
jg21 writes "'Open source developers have the opportunity to influence technology that is being used by companies and do it on a global scale in a way that cannot occur with any other type of software,' contends Bill Claybrook, writing in the current issue of LinuxWorld. The article is a historical overview of the open source revolution, starting in the 80s with the GNU Project, BSD, and TCP/IP and then moving into the 90s with Red Hat, StarOffice, and coming right into the 21st century with the Ximian Desktop and Sun's Linux-based Sun Java Desktop System."
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The Business Value of Open Source Examined More

The Business Value of Open Source Examined

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  • That's great that OSS developers can influence technology. If that's enough for you, that's great. But if I write something that influences technology on a global scale, I want something more than a pat on the back and my name buried in the source code. I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. I can't afford to be altruistic until I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments any more.
    • Who's altruistic? If we didn't have open source code to spend our free time on, we'd all be surfing your most excellent website instead. Being a sperm donor doesn't pay as much as some people earn working on open source.

      Open source is built for fun mostly, not profit.
      • Open source is built for fun mostly, not profit.

        This may have been true in the past, but I think it's moving rapidly away from this.

        • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris.traversNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:23PM (#9934778) Homepage Journal
          Open source is built for many reasons. One of the real strengths of open source software is that the community becomes the powerhouse of production rather than a single corporation. Profit is one motive that someone may bring to the community but it is not the only one. Helping customers, just plain fun, altruism, and hurting competitors are all common motivations for contributing to open source.

          What I see as really funny is how often people complain about open source losing its soul because companies participate in open source to hurt their competitors. WTF? Open source development means you will have an organic self-governing network of developers which will include developers who have all manner of motivations.

          This isn't about any one thing, people...

          Funny, yesterday, I started a blog on this same topic (or one closely related). It is at http://ossne.blogspot.com

          Let me tell you about my motivations for contributing open source software:

          1) Fun of learning new technologies
          2) Profit-- by minimizing the money my customers spend on software licenses, I can control more of their IT spending. First mover advantage comes into play here.
          3) Hurting competitors: Microsoft, Siebel, Oracle etc. might make decent software, they are taking money I would rather get from my customers. So hurting them is good business.
          4) Altruism. I actually think that freedom is a good thing. I think a world where open source software dominates would be better than one that doesn't.

          So all these can co-exist.
          • I think that most Microsoft execs think that their work is altruistic as well. Most execs really believe that they are making the world a better place. They have to in order to do their job effectively. So altruistic motivations and what I consider to be right action are not necessarily to be equated.

    • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Compholio ( 770966 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:29PM (#9933581)
      I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. I can't afford to be altruistic until I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments any more.

      Some people do programming projects because they enjoy them, not everyone requires payment. Just like some people participate in sports for enjoyment (though in this country that is declining), not everyone requires a 10 mil salary just to play sports.
      • In which country is the number of amateur athletes declining? I drive by crowded golf courses, softball, baseball and soccer fields every day. I doubt many of those people are getting paid to play. I think the small number of athletes making money on their sport would be playing their respective sports for the fun of it even if they didn't get paid .
      • Did you just compare programming to sports??? Wow.
      • Some people do programming projects because they enjoy them, not everyone requires payment. Just like some people participate in sports for enjoyment (though in this country that is declining), not everyone requires a 10 mil salary just to play sports.

        I wish more people would think this way. Do what you love, and if you get paid for it, great! But those that are motivated by money alone usually reflect it in their work (i.e. Microsoft).

    • Only if you follow the licensing business model (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MarkEst1973 ( 769601 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:31PM (#9933604)
      I somehow doubt that the Next Big Thing in software will be something that would require selling of licenses to change the internet.

      I think Google is a fantastic example. They use commoditized hardware and open source software. They built a better mousetrap in a world full of entrenched corporate behemoths.

      The Next Big Thing will come from someone enterprising who can use the tools and open internet standards to create the next Google. You won't have to worry about selling licenses if that person is you.

      • They *use* open source software, true. I *use* VNC and Firefox and Thunderbird in my retail business. That doesn't mean that Open Source is successful, or quite frankly, has anything to do with my success. Google's main product, the one that brings in the money, their search engine, is very, very proprietary.
        • but if they had to BUY thousands of MS or proprietary unix licenses, I doubt they would have gotten off the ground - selling their search engines came late in the game - after they were the de facto search engine on the internet. they leveraged that success into selling their engine separately.

          In your case perhaps a few licenses for operating systems and a few applications would be a few thousand dollars - quite a different story for google...

      • And where can I get Google's source for their search engine technologies?

        I love google as much as the next guy, and they use OSS, but to my knowledge they don't give code or patches back.

    • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:32PM (#9933624)
      Developing free open source programs will not make you rich, but if you develop something everyone uses, it will often get you name recognition in the industry. That name recognition can help you to land better-paying jobs than you might have otherwise had access to. Granted, the vast majority of open-source programmers remain relatively anonymous, but there is the possibility, especially if you create an entirely new project that does something useful and innovative.

      Obviously, you probably still won't get the millions you could (emphasize COULD) get if you wrote it closed-source and patented it, but it's also much more likely to get wide distribution, and has a far greater chance of becoming the standard way of doing whatever it is it does, if it's open source and free.

      Not that I'm advocating one choice over the other. What direction you decide to go depends entirely on your own situation, your tolerance for risk, and what you expect to gain from coding whatever project you're coding.
    • Nmap, for instance, is GPL'd Open Source software, and it is also sold to security companies for large amounts of money under a different license.

      Narrow thinking is for narrow minds.

    • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mateito ( 746185 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:35PM (#9933667) Homepage
      Welcome to the world of the corporate slave. If you only live to serve your mortgage, consider selling you house.

      The reality is that chances are you wont ever write something that influences technology on a global scale. Maybe you are doing amazing stuff, but then I have to ask why got got a first post on slashdot.

      Your outlook is valid, and open sourcing probably won't work for you. But it did work for Linus and Alan Cox and Andrew Tigwell (sp?) and a lot of other people. Linus in particular is worth a hell of a lot more now that he would be if he'd elected never to release his hard work as open source.

      These are the highest profile examples, and of course there are shades of grey down to the little guy who never even submitted a bug report because he regard his time as too valuable to donate.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:35PM (#9933668)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @04:06PM (#9934045)
        What about the model where your business really needs a program that doesnt exist. You know others could use it.

        So you write it, and it works, but you dont want to maintain it, and no one else in the company can, although they need it!

        Release it as open source - the payback is that you get to use the program, well maintained and all, even after the developer has moved to higher places, be he engineer or student on day-release.

    • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daniel_Staal ( 609844 ) <DStaal@usa.net> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:35PM (#9933669)
      Ah, but what if, by releasing it as Open Source you could get it to influence technology on a global scale, but you couldn't by releasing it in a closed-source model? What would you do then?

      (And it should be pointed out that quite a few people do make a living writing Open Source software, and if you can create something great you most certainly will be able to get someone to pay you to work on it.)

      The point of the article is that OSS has greater leverage than closed-source. Not really new, but neat to see documented.
    • No one says you have too. A lot of OSS programers are working for people like IBM, Red Hat and Novell/Suse. You also can get paid for OSS software. The GPL does not prevent you from chargeing it just says that you have to include the source and not prevent others from giving away the code if they want to. Sendmail seems to make a good amount of money on GPL stuff as does RedHat. There are some sort of free software compaines out there that claim to be "free" but I do not consider them free. QT is one. You c
    • Yes, and without your tremendous skill and abilities, the world of open source will surely shrivel and die. Because really, it's all about you.
    • Working on commercial software and on Open Source projects doesn't have to be an either or situation. You can earn your living writing software and still spend some free time improving an OS project just because you want it to do something it doesn't do yet, or doesn't do the way you want it to. Then, you can send your patch to the project to be rolled in and get some egoboo as payment. I'd bet that most of the code added to the average OS project is developed exactly that way.

    • Re:That's great and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pavon ( 30274 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:54PM (#9933892)
      People have been making comments like this on slashdot for as long as I can remember, and I have to wonder how many of them really get paid to write shrink-wrapped software. Statistically, it is a very small amount, with very many more writing in-house software. The thing is, for all of that large majority of software developers, open source software won't hurt you at all. The only people who will use your code are paying you up front to write it, so it's not like you need the copyright protection to allow you to make money selling it. The code you are writing is probably very tailored to the specific needs of your employer and so "the competition" really wouldn't be helped much by having access to it. In most cases your code might as well be open source, and wouldn't make any difference whatsoever to the business model which is feeding you and paying your mortgage. If anything, having the common bits - things you would otherwise license from a third party - open source will just make your life easier.

      And if you really want to, you can make money directly writing open source software as well. It isn't easy, and you have to be something of an entrepreneur. But it certainly can be done, and from what I can see, the people doing it are living thier dreams, and are being compensated quite well for it. If you don't want that sort of risk, than shrink wrapped software isn't really the place to be anyway. Trying to make it big creating the next killer app is just as hard, if not harder, than creating a career around OSS programing. If you want to change the world, it will be a risky no matter how go about it - that's just life. If you want a stable job, those are going to be in IT and they will only gain from open source software.
      • The code you are writing is probably very tailored to the specific needs of your employer and so "the competition" really wouldn't be helped much by having access to it

        What absolute bollocks. The only thing that seperates even a service based software house from it's competitors is time to implement and quality of implementation. If a company does well in the, say, taxation market because it has developed a suit of well tested libraries it can rapidly redeploy in various situations, it has a significan

      • The code you are writing is probably very tailored to the specific needs of your employer and so "the competition" really wouldn't be helped much by having access to it.

        I hope you were being funny, but I fear that you were not.

        Let's consider a fairly standard in-house development product: a data-driven expense reporting web application. We'll spec it to use a web-service that receives a csv, checks the columns, adds them, and routes to the submittor's manager for OK. It should also check against the back

        • There's a distinction between DATA and PROGRAMMING.
          Supplying the source for a login program does not imply supplying all your usernames and passwords.
          Confidential information about the company shouldn't be hardcoded into the programming anyway, otherwise every salesman who files an expense report exposes your confidential information much more so than the programming itself.
          • He didn't say anything about usernames and passwords. He said that the reading the source code would reveal aspects of the business. Explain how you can implement business logic without some traceability to your business processes?
    • But if I write something that influences technology on a global scale, I want something more than a pat on the back and my name buried in the source code. I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. I can't afford to be altruistic until I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments any more.

      Err, yeah, all of the OSS programmers are homeless people that write code at public libraries and on peoples computers at net cafes while they are looking in the other direction.

      I mean, even RMS, who inte
    • "But if I write something that influences technology on a global scale, I want something more than a pat on the back and my name buried in the source code. I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. "

      Yea good luck with that. Why don't you quit your job and start writing the next great big app. If you write it while working for somebody they are going to get all the money.

      Once your product becomes popular hire lawyers so you can sue MS when they steal all your ideas and bundle it with windows.
    • I have contributed in small ways to several OSS projects, and all of them were enhancements to things I already used, and wanted particular functionality in. With one exception (something I worked on as a student), all were done on work time.

      Just because it's OSS, you're not necessarily working for free...

      My company pays me to improve the OSS tools we use for development, and I release my changes to the main project once they're done.
      The argument I make for releasing the changes (none of them are license
    • Let me get this straight..

      Are you saying you want to get paid what you think your code is worth or its overall economic value to society?

      What if your software automated a fleet of robots that did ALL of the work that our society wanted. These robots made our fast food, built our roads, and even repaired themselves and went out to search for more resources to keep our products coming. How much would you like to be paid then?

      Its impossible for 1 person to write production quality software like that on th

  • I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dracolytch ( 714699 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:32PM (#9933625) Homepage
    I think in many cases, these kinds of effects can be seen with FREE software, instead of Open Source. Instant Messengers, for example, are mostly closed source, but have had the same kinds of wide-spread effects.

    ~D

  • Business model? (Score:4, Informative)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:33PM (#9933637)
    In this article, the sole example as a working business model is Red Hat:


    Red Hat, on the other hand, achieved amazingly high brand recognition with its Red Hat Linux distribution and developed a successful business model around high volume and support subscriptions along with professional services and training. In the book, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Robert Young, one of the Red Hat founders, chronicles how he and others determined that Red Hat was in the commodity product business where brand recognition is extremely important. As a result, Red Hat developed a business model to exploit the commodity business.

    If this [yahoo.com] is his idea of a "successful business model", then this guy needs to go back to school. The company has just *barely* started to show profits, and has virtually no profitable history to speak of and massive debt. I think it's about 5-10 years early to start calling Red Hat "successful".
    • They're not making much money now, but there is a STRONG upward trend. At that rate, they will be making a strong profit fairly soon.

      Trends aren't everything, but look at the history. That is what the market does. It is always better to be on the way UP rather than the way DOWN.

    • Re:Business model? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Soko ( 17987 )
      I think it's about 5-10 years early to start calling Red Hat "successful".

      By whose standards are you judging success?

      Are they unbelievably rich? No, and probably never will be. However, they've so far weathered the DotBomb era, are making money on something relatively new, can pay thier debts and still have the most recognisable commercial brand in OSS. They're also growing in size and sales. I'd say thy're a success so far, YMMV.

      I agree that it will be 5 to 10 years before they "make it big" like Oracl
      • I think the problem is that people assume that if you have a few quarters of profit, you're a successful company. You're minimally successful when the amount of profit made exceeds the amount of investment that has been made over the life of the company. Of course this minimal requirement is still less profitable then a simple savings account would have been.

  • The one thing that should NOT happen ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by for_usenet ( 550217 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:34PM (#9933640)
    I have agree with some of the previous postings here, in that Free and Open software no longer exists in the "hobbyist space" - we have real technological and economic implications to deal with. The one thing that we should NEVER comprimise on is quality of the code produced, either to serve a certain company, standard or set of interests. Within a company, with closed projects, this ideal is most likely impossible. But it is this very same ideal that has made a lot of the high-profile projects into the high-quality pieces of software we recognize them as. So no matter how much we get pushed towards more business-like models/applications/environments, we need to keep the quality of code in these projects as high as possible. And in the end - we ALL come out ahead.

    • Re:The one thing that should NOT happen ... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The one thing that we should NEVER comprimise on is quality of the code produced, either to serve a certain company, standard or set of interests.

      Yeah... quality... like this relatively well known OSS library that I am trying to use right now and have spent the last two days debugging. Absolutely full of memory and resource leaks. I don't have time to debug other folks' code. If it is available, it should work reasonably well at least. The types of bugs I'm seeing are bugs that folks who just started

  • Take it, package it, sell it, support it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:36PM (#9933677)
    OSS is great, but many people (myself included) sometimes want it to Just Work. Look at the junk that is shovelled out of Redmond. Half-baked, half-assed authentication and directory services, insecure-by-design operating systems, no proper privilege separation, etc. etc.
    But plonk down 49 USD on a USB printer and click Print, and it prints!
    If I plug my USB 10/100 NIC into my laptop under RH 9, it kernel panics and dies.
    If I want to use my Radeon AIW under Solaris x86, I'll be lucky to get it to even work in text mode.
    The business model is to take the product and make it useful, just like a steel mill or lumber yard. Take raw material, make it accessible to the common man (consumer), who trades you the money value of his time for the product.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've been using Linux since the pre 1.0 days, back when you had to download the stack of Slackware floppies.
        I've trashed boxes rebooting them when XFree86 hung the console, because it wasn't stable on S3 Virge cards, and there was no such thing as ext3fs.
        I've uttered prayers to both Andre Hedrick and Donald Becker.
        I've recompiled kernels more times than I want to count.
        So unless you mean "you" in the general sense, please don't paint "me" with such a broad brush. You may inadvertently expose YOUR (lack of)
    • "But plonk down 49 USD on a USB printer and click Print, and it prints!"

      That has nothing to do with Microsoft or linux and everything to do with the maufacturer of the printer.

      The manufacturer printer is just as capable of writing drivers for linux as they are for windows. They choose not to do that. If I bought a printer and it didn't work with my OS I would take the printer back and get another one but then that's me.

      Other people will just whine on slashdot and blame it on the operating system.
    • I've never quite understood this:

      But plonk down 49 USD on a USB printer and click Print, and it prints!
      If I plug my USB 10/100 NIC into my laptop under RH 9, it kernel panics and dies.

      Everyone I've ever heard say "I want it to 'Just Work', and it doesn't undre Linux" has had a system that they "customized" into inoperability.

      I have installed a countless amount of USB hardware on a great many Linux machines (running Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, and even Gentoo), and the most work I ever had to do was install v

  • No business model required. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by auferstehung ( 150494 ) <tod@und@auferstehung bei gmail@com> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:44PM (#9933784)
    Many people ignore the fact that no business model is required for open source to be successful. Confederations of users can drive successful open source projects. Internal developers of non-software businesses pooling their resources to produce software to make their jobs easier and more productive. Apache comes to mind.
    • Exactly. Why is everyone concerned with the business side of the SOFTWARE INDUSTRY? Most people, even in the IT field, are making money (or making their employer money) with the USE of software, not its creation. Software vendor profits, revenues, are almost NOTHING compared to those that USE software. The companies which use the software can support open source. Independent Software Vendors are not necessary, and do not make even a reasonable percentage of the profits made off of software.

      Here is an examp

  • Where's the beef? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DamnYankee ( 18417 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:45PM (#9933787) Homepage
    This article fluffs over how open source is a viable business model but the "success stories" and business models described are skeletal. So where's the beef? Redhat - that no longer offers a Linux distribution, RedCarpet that has all but disappeared, Stallman and GNU - the guy that can't even afford a haircut - come on guys. If you're gonna talk about the "successful open source business model" you better put some more meat on the bone. This article makes open source look postively scary from a business perspective.

  • Sadly... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xenostar ( 746407 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:47PM (#9933816)
    ...Open Source desktop software has been pretty stagnant in the past few years. All the great OS dekstop programs are playing catch up with their commercial relatives and most of them are lagging well behind. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge open source zealot, but it seems that innovation has been mostly confined to server related software. There are of course exceptions to this, with some truly innovative software like Dasher, but most of the flagship OS projects still feel like imitations of their popular commercial counterparts.

  • Poor examples of free software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @03:51PM (#9933869) Journal

    Ximian Desktop and Sun's Linux-based Sun Java Desktop System.

    I can't say these projects come to mind when I mark progress in Free Software in the 2000's. The Ximian Desktop is arguably inferior to KDE, XFCE, and other substantial window managers, including my favorite WindowMaker. I still haven't seen Sun's Java Desktop. Come to think of it, I have never seen a usable Java Desktop program at all.

    Here's my list of the seminal programs of the last three decades:

    • 1980's - Emacs, GCC, GDB, GLIBC, X, HURD
    • 1990's - Linux Kernel, X Desktops, Guile, Ghostscript, HURD
    • 2000's - Xine, Grub, Emerge, HURD

    • HURD is a seminal project? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      HURD - the OS that has been in development for nearly 20 years and still doesn't work makes your list of seminal projects for all of the last three decades?

      By this standard Minix has gotta be the project of the century :-)
    • My current favorite free software project is readline. It's 146k, and it's the best thing I've seen for getting text from the user. I'm only sorry that it only has a termcap interface, because that means that it's painful to type anything in a GUI.

      It also has an insane range of features. It has keyboard macros, custom keymaps, four kinds of history search, application-specific tab completion, etc. If you don't like how backspace works, you can switch it to a bunch of different things.

      If Microsoft had bee

    • Re:Poor examples of free software (Score:5, Funny)

      by Frank T. Lofaro Jr. ( 142215 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @04:30PM (#9934291) Homepage
      And for the next 3 centuries:

      2100 Nanotechnology software, Home genetic engineering software, HURD
      2200 Warp engine controller software, HURD
      2300 Mental telepathy software, HURD

      And HURD will still be in development and "almost ready". ;)

  • Just a few tidbits .... (Score:5, Informative)

    by airrage ( 514164 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @04:10PM (#9934091) Homepage Journal
    My pet peeve is articles that paint a lot of wild brush strokes. My company is seriously considering a Linux strategy, but a big MS shop currently. I think this article dumbs down the debate too much.

    The pioneers of open source were more interested in building software that helped them achieve both social and technical goals than in taking advantage of the business aspects of open source.

    -- I hear this argument alot, I assume the social goals are reducing crime, homelessness, poverty, etc. What social goals can you achieve through an operating system? This goes for Microsoft as well. Seems a little overreaching.

    The open source model offers the promise to help businesses thrive in an Internet-based economy provided there is an understanding of the economic, cultural, and political factors that comprise an effective open source strategy.

    -- Does it offer the promise or deliver on it? Microsoft offers a lot of promises too!

    Providing greater value to customers than competitors can is the key to building a successful business. A successful software business model requires a number of elements that are just as important for open source software as for proprietary software.

    -- So open source operates under the laws of economics. I actually applaud this paragraph, shows some realism.

    Standards: To promote collaboration.

    -- I'm beginning to decry standards. With standards you wouldn't get the giraffe or the duck-billed platypus. OS should evolve.

    External contributors are usually motivated by the prospect of working with software that solves important problems for them and others, by the possibility of future gain via the provision of related service and products, by the opportunity to increase their own personal knowledge, or by the satisfaction of building a good reputation among their peers.

    -- so we are motivated by intellectual pursuits, money, learning, and ego.

    Open source promotes standards and interoperability to the degree that we have not seen in the past.

    -- I think I could argue either way on this one.

    This usually leads to competition for resources and talent with each software development group acting as a separate company. Open source re-unites development efforts because people throughout a company have access to code.

    -- So at RedHat they don't compete for internal resources -- there are no politics? -- and people have access to DEVELOPMENT code. I think you underestimate the power of the dark side. People are people.

    This creates high efficiencies in the development of software products and reduces time-to-market.

    -- Again, money is a good motivator. Early you said OS operates under the law of economics. Why wouldn't a PS (proprietary sofware) company?

    Open source, when it works well, can produce high value, high quality, low cost, portable, and no vendor lock-in software that can be exploited by a number of business models.

    --What happens when it works badly? Can it turn out the same garbage I get from MS?

    As a result, Red Hat developed a business model to exploit the commodity business.

    --Probably the single greatest sentence to be uttered in any article anywhere on the topic of technology. So much could be said about that...

    This allows customers to continue to scale their infrastructure at a lower cost than before, and in some cases at a lower cost than they were predicting six or even three months ago. The business value provided by open source translates into savings for the customer.

    Developers receive value from open source, but it is more personal value than business value.

    --Are we talking Indian programmers or US programmers?

    Open source developers have the opportunity to influence technology that is being used by companies and do it on a global scale in a way that cannot occur with any other type of software.

    --So the guy who came up with Internet Explorer doesn't influence technology?
    • "I assume the social goals are reducing crime, homelessness, poverty, etc. What social goals can you achieve through an operating system? This goes for Microsoft as well. Seems a little overreaching."

      How about making computing available to as many people as possible even the poor. I guess that's not a good enough goal for you. There is an entire world for whom a $100.00 for an operating system is a half years salary.

      "Does it offer the promise or deliver on it?"

      Time will tell. So far it seems to deliver i

    • Re:Just a few tidbits .... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      I'm beginning to decry standards. With standards you wouldn't get the giraffe or the duck-billed platypus. OS should evolve.

      ASCII is evolving into unicode. SGML has spawned HTML and XML. Open standards do not imply stagnation of standards, they imply equal access to standards, whatever they may be.

      Thus allowing software to freely evolve, because standards aren't equivilent to animals, they are equivilent to the basic rules of genetic coding. DNA.

      Thus we have vi/emacs/pico/OpenOffice Writer/Kword/etc

      Whi

  • OSS is a viable strategy against Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There was a commentator on the Nightly Business Report recently who didn't mention OSS but talked about the relationship between Microsoft and other computer industry companies

    MS has a monopoly. The other companies don't. If MS doesn't have to worry about its monopoly (and doesn't have to spend money and time protecting it), it can raid the other companies' turf. That's what has been going on for several years.

    OSS puts MS's monopoly in jeopardy. It has to spend money and time to protect the monopoly.

  • Late to the party! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @04:23PM (#9934233) Homepage Journal
    The article is a historical overview of the open source revolution, starting in the 80s with the GNU Project, BSD, and TCP/IP
    A historical overview of the open source revolution should start in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Open source isn't something that was invented in the 1980s.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • It could be argued that because university geeks were passing out AT&T UNIX between themselves freely during the early 1970s, the free software movement actual pre-dates any ideas of commercial software-only vendors.

        That isn't an example of free software or open source software.

        I was thinking of things like TECO and DDT, developed at MIT in 1961 for the DEC PDP-1. And the original Emacs, which considerably predates GNU Emacs.

        There are also many examples with early software for IBM computers. I

    • I once had the opportunity to talk with one of the founders of SAP [sap.com]. He was telling me that when they started their business, people considered it a really strange idea to sell a piece of standardised software. At that time software was tailored for every single customer. Some components for these unica were retrieved from huge open source code archives (open archive not open source).
  • "The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source" by Martin Fink provides a much better prospective on the subject.

    So here's my problem with Open Source from a business prospective. The same issue applies to a variety of industries, not just software, but open source software is a particularly good example.

    I've heard claims that the best developers are as much as a thousand times more productive than the worse developers. Open Source might actually prove that contention; all of open source seems to be the contribution of a relatively small group of highly productive developers.

    I also believe it because I've seen for myself the difficulty of scaling up a successful development organization. It's usually a case of diminishing returns as you add more staff.

    This applies to any industries where a small group of highly skilled super-contributors can add a tremendous amount of value to a company.

    So what is the long-term value of a company if the reality is that there is a relatively small group of super-contributors that actually add most of the value? What happens to the value of the company if that group leaves?

    This is not an argument for close source. Unless you're an uber-profitable company that can afford to use nuisance tactics to protect your market share, some group of super-contributors will clone your success eventually even without violating your IP rights. Particularly given the relatively low capital requirements of a software start-up.

    I've heard concerns that Google will suffer when many of its long-term super-contributors find themselves suddenly able to cash out and retire. How many dot-coms seem to have evaporated overnight shortly after their super-contributors were able to cash out?

    So given that indentured servitude is still illegal in most developed countries. How do companies build long-term value of the form that venture capitalists and long-term shareholders are willing to invest in?

  • it's all young... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 3seas ( 184403 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:35PM (#9935275) Homepage Journal
    though FOSS came along something like a decade after the introduction of proprietary consumer/commercial products, we are still talking not even thirty years old the consumer/commercial computer industry is.

    That's still quite young for an industry. And there is yet to be realized any real industrialization of software development.

    So what is going to happen when the level of abstraction in software development ease of doing, becomes at least a young adult? (currently its still a kid playing head games in marketing).

    I think its only logical that an open base line of well established software will contine to grow. Even if it was only a matter of expiring copyrights and patents... thanks to FOSS I won't be dead and long gone when better things finally come, or at least I'll be able to experience better due an improved open base line..

    A good indication of this is that MS is now being forced to improve their products due to linux competition, rather than playing non productive games.

    So, its possible something will happen that changes everythings, say for example autocoding of a level that anyone who can use a calcuilator can program... leaving far more challenging innovation up to the real software engineers (rather tann the psuedo coders). In this event you have programming as a part of ones other duties...just like using a calculator...

    The calculator didn't put scientist out of work, but only allowed them to even way cooler stuff...

  • From the summary:

    The article is a historical overview of the open source revolution, starting in the 80s with the GNU Project [...]

    There is no reasonable interpretation of history that can make this claim about GNU true: GNU was started to pursue software freedom. The open source movement did not yet exist. When GNU began, the open source movement would not exist for over another decade.

    I do not say this to flamebait or to raise suspicions of malevolence but to clarify and prevent people from bei


    • The open source movement did not yet exist.

      Hogwash.

      What caught on the '90s was open source licensing, because a license was needed to keep open source going. People were freely sharing source code long before that, because no significant commercial/proprietary value was generally recognized for software source. Once "intellectual property" became the name of the technology game, the open source world needed tools like the GPL.

      Nothing has changed, except the lawyers got involved. In the end it looks lik

      • People were freely sharing source code long before that, because no significant commercial/proprietary value was generally recognized for software source.

        Sure, in fact RMS talks about this in his talk on the beginning of the free software community. But it wasn't anything to do with "open source" that recognized that this community of hackers who shared code was dying. During the time when hackers freely shared code (often not putting copyright notices on it at all), sharing was the norm. There was

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