ESR talks in Dublin 54
egnarts writes "As some people know, ESR gave a talk in Dublin last Thursday, the Irish Times has this perspective on the event. " As always, good to see more and more people taking this stuff seriously, and the meeting sounds like it went really well.
Good, but not surprising (Score:3)
That major figures in the whole "Open Source" movement are now doing the talk circuit there is, therefore, only to be expected. What =IS=, perhaps, rather more surprising is that it's taken so long.
I'm going to extrapolate from this event, and say that one or more key figures involved with Linux or "Open Source" will tour India and/or Mexico, within the next year or two.
ESR Article... (Score:1)
I'm not sure he could've said it any better! He really understands that just because there is a large following for Linux there are still issue like to make K/Gnome so easy my mother could install it.
"...To put that in perspective that's 10 million lines more of code than the entire bulk of the Star Wars missile defence system that people said was unworkable."
This is kind of scary though. I was out to lunch with a friend on the w2k project and he told me he doesn't see the SRC tree and gets a new page of code with compile errors after each check in!
I had fun (Score:2)
So, the good points:
I knew linux and OSS were popular in Ireland, but I was surprised to be in a large auditorium where everyone laughed at a 'vi vs. emacs' joke.
His talk was based on the stuff we've all read, but that didn't stop it being entertaining and informative.
He went to the pub afterwards, and was charming and entertaining to all, especially my girlfriend.
The bad point:
He went to the pub afterwards, and was charming and entertaining to all, especially my girlfriend.
The Article - pre /. effect (Score:3)
In computing, you have definitely arrived when you become a three-letter acronym. Eric S. Raymond (ESR) is among a handful of people whose initials are as familiar to the cognoscenti as FAQ, FYI and IRQ. When TCD's Internet Society went to advertise his talk there last week the only headline on the poster was the letters ESR in 240point type.
It was enough, and there was standing room only in the lecture hall. Before he began he asked how many people present wrote software for a living. A show of hands said almost half. These days his world audience is not just the true hackers who knocked the Internet into existence over the last 30 years. Major companies are among the most rapt listeners.
They listen because he is their contact with the hackers and what they have achieved. Listening to him may help to achieve the same quality, resilience and flexibility in their corporate computing projects that ESR's tribe, the hackers, have achieved in theirs.
In fact, he reckons that collaboration of the kind that built the Linux operating system is the only way forward for most major software projects. In a seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar two years ago he set out the basis for this belief.
Basically, he argued that the closed, traditional method of software development (the cathedral) simply cannot compete with the bazaar of open-source development. In the former, the source code "recipe" used to create a program is kept secret and the resulting program is sold as expensively as possible. That model has made Microsoft's Bill Gates the richest man in America.
Open-source, on the other hand, depends on voluntary work by many programmers collaborating over the Internet. They give away not only the resulting binary program, but also the source code used to create it. Every contributor, and every user, can see the innards of the program. If there is a bug they can help to track it down, or to fix it.
The Cathedral & The Bazaar analysed hacker culture and gave its members a new consciousness about their work. More significantly, it was the springboard for a massive marketing push into the mainstream for open software. Since it came out, Netscape has made its browser open source, IBM has taken the opensource Apache web-server on board, one major software company after another has made its software run on Linux.
It's not easy to interview someone who has already covered the relevant issues at length and very lucidly in his writing. There are of course the tech equivalents of the sort of questions that rock stars or footballers get asked: The first computer he set hands on was a Univac 1108 mainframe, back in 1968, by the way.
Then there is the chance to indulge curiosity. He is a hacker and proud of it, but has the battle for the proud meaning of that word been lost to the much more widespread one of computer vandal? "Actually, I think we're in better shape than we were five years ago. I remember when it seemed totally hopeless and now it seems only partially hopeless." He says that greater awareness of the World Wide Web and of the culture behind it has done a lot to rescue the word.
On his role of accidental revolutionary in the uptake of open source he's deadpan, and characteristically funny. "It's been pretty much as I expected. Some good, some bad and a job that needed to be done. . . some very amusing moments. At Atlanta Linux showcase, last month, for the first and I hope the last time in my life I was actually mobbed by screaming groupies. This is an experience everyone should have once - exactly once."
And there's the inside take on what it feels like to be instrumental in a revolution in thinking. Was he surprised at the speed with which so many traditional computer companies came around to releasing their programs for Linux? "Yes I have been surprised. The rate of change has generally been not generally faster than I expected, but just a little faster than I expected. Like the big database manufacturers flipped over about three months before I expected it.
"The other thing that's been surprising about the process is that I naively expected that business people in general would be very slow to get it but quick to act once they got it. Instead, it's been the other way around. A lot of business people have gotten it fairly quickly but have taken a long time executing on that knowledge."
One reason he considers himself an accidental revolutionary is that his insights in The Cathedral & The Bazaar could as easily have been formulated by someone else years earlier. He says he has only just figured out why this didn't happen, even though the basic information was available. "My tribe was not motivated to look into the systematics of what it was doing because we had a hypothesis about why we wrote better code that satisfied us. Of course we wrote better code - we're geniuses!"
Once the infectious laugh has died down he says that his first encounter with Linux jolted him out of many firmly held beliefs about how good software should be created. "Because of my shocking experience with Linux, I was the first person to consider the possibility that our superior genius just might not be the whole story."
Then there's the news of the day. Asked what the likely end of the US government case against Microsoft will be, he says: "I'm going to make a bold prediction. I think Microsoft as we know it is going to die before the final appeal, the final verdict, in the antitrust suit comes down."
He gives a talk on "the seven bullets Microsoft has to dodge to survive the next 18 months" and "of these the most important is the fact that the price of hardware is dropping like a rock, while Microsoft's requirement for revenues to sustain the rise in its stock price is perpetually rising. This means that every quarter Microsoft has to claim a larger and larger share of its business partners' margins.
"That's not a trend that can be continued indefinitely. There are already signs that Microsoft is pricing itself out of its own markets. . . As Microsoft's increasing requirement for margins collides with the decreasing average cost of hardware, the breakpoint in the market below which PC integrators can't make any money is going to rise. When that breakpoint rises past the price of the average consumer PC: game over.
"I think that's going to happen before the final verdict in the anti-trust lawsuit."
Closer in time is the launch of Windows 2000, now three months away, which he has predicted will be a train-crash. He sees no reason to change his mind. "The train-wreck is already in progress. It's slipped for two years. And the major management consultancies have caught wise. They're telling all their Fortune 500 customers `don't touch this thing when it comes out in February - if it comes out in February.' You don't want to go near it - outfits like the Gartner Group and DH Brown are saying - until service pack 1 comes out which won't be until June or July.
"We're not going to see substantial Windows 2000 adoption - if we see it - until the fall of the year 2000. And that's assuming that it doesn't turn out to be a mess. Which I think it will be. The amusing statistic about Win- dows 2000 is that according to Microsoft's own press releases it has 35 million lines of new code in it. Never mind the old modified code. To put that in perspective that's 10 million lines more of code than the entire bulk of the Star Wars missile defence system that people said was unworkable."
As for the future of software being open, even in the sort of desktop applications that have always been closed, he has no doubts. "We're going to reach a point, as hardware prices plummet, where it's not going to be economical for system integrators to put any software on their machines that isn't free."
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Re:Dublin? What I can't understand.... (Score:1)
OT: Typical.. (Score:1)
Concerts, prominent Open Source speakers giving talks. As soon as I go home, poof, they've all gone, until the next time I go to university.
.
Just not fair
I'm going to sulk now.
Re:I had fun (Score:2)
Kudos to the author, too, for stooping to the "usual tabloid questions" only to provide the humour slant.
cheers
marty
Re:Dublin? What I can't understand.... (Score:1)
From the my-city's-better-than-your-city department:
No, no, Cambridge is the IT capital of Europe.
The downfall of MS and the rise of OS (Score:2)
[OS as in "Open Source". :-)]
Interesting how ESR predicts that MS is going to collapse before the antitrust lawsuit gets settled. Personally I'm not that confident of that -- "bad" as MS may be, they aren't dumb, and I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive. But I agree with ESR that MS won't be quite what it is today. My prediction is that MS will just slowly pale into insignificance. It won't be a dramatic, overnight thing, it will be more of a gradual decline as MS drops from its currnet monopoly position into "just another company". But regardless, I must admit I'm happy that the oppressive monopoly, the buggy OS's, and the closed, blackbox software that tries to be "smart" when it's not (like the annoying way Word makes illogical lists and screws up your formatting, and you don't have the source code so that you can fix the stupid behaviour), will soon be all over.
Also interesting is ESR's prediction that open source will soon be globally adopted. Although I like that prospect, I'm afraid it sounds too good to be true. I've always believed that to do something well, your central goal must be focused on that thing. This is why Open Source is successful: the people who do it do it because their goal is to make good software more than anything else. But when Open Source gets into the commercial sector, the bottomline is more $$$ than anything else. If making good software is a lesser priority than making $$$, eventually software quality would be sacrificed for $$$. Perhaps ESR is right, and Open Source will be adopted by everybody. But I fear that day, lest the original quality, robustness, and just the pure fun of it all, may that day come to an end.
But of course, I may just be paranoid... perhaps there will be a "balance" between people who do Open Source for $$$ and those who do it for quality, so that on one side, you have the commercial sector publicizing and making $$$ to support Open Source, and on the other side, you have the hacker group who aren't into the $$$ but they're still adding improvements to the "less than best" code produced by the commercial sector. So there will be a kind of "equillibrium" that prevents code quality from degrading due to $$$ having higher priority, and OTOH retains Open Source in the mainstream, as opposed to just being a niche culture that it started in, by monetary contributions from the commercial sector.
Re:Dublin? What I can't understand.... (Score:1)
Re:OT: Typical.. (Score:1)
we (netsoc [netsoc.tcd.ie]) have had a no. of other good interesting speakers, Peter Molyneaux springs to mind especially.
If you want OSS figureheads we are hoping to get RMS some time in the new year (still to be confirmed).
Commentary on writing (Score:2)
Re:OT: Typical.. (Score:1)
Re:Dublin? What I can't understand.... (Score:1)
To my mind Dublin's focus is on Software and Support, many IT companies base their call centres there. Cambridge tends to attract technology based start ups that are research spin-offs
Of course Cambridge have their very own M$ presence now...Re:The downfall of MS and the rise of OS (Score:1)
...I must admit I'm happy that the oppressive monopoly, the buggy OS's,
A comment rarely found in
Good fun....ESR is a character... (Score:2)
ESR is really nice to get on with, and he's obviously very used to people contradicting his opinions - he has a credible comeback for any argument the audience had for him...and I felt that he liked the audience testing his conclusions and beliefs 100%. Despite being in a pub with 50 Irish geeks, he said "I don't drink - it doesn't mix well with the two things I like most - Guns and Women".
It was a great talk, and I can't wait for the RMS talk in the spring.
It's happened already! (Score:4)
The talk was fantastic. He never stooped to Microsoft bashing, but when asked, he convincingly drove home the very why he thought MS would be come irrelevent: it's happened before!
Eric told us a story, of the three ages of networking.
The first age, from about the mid-sixties until some way into the seventies, networks were a big experiment. IP was around, but TCP wasn't - the top layer was NCP.
Then networking got popular and companies like DEC and IBM and countless others brought out their own proprietary protocols. And you had to choose. And if you chose DECnet over another, you were making a bet that DECnet would eventually succeed and the others would fail, because they were all incompatible and you could only talk with other DECnet users.
So the market split into a series of monopolies where the cost of moving from one protocol to another was way too high to justify the advantages. And like in any monopoly situation, prices proceeded to rise.
And then along came this strange little open standard called TCP. Because it was open, it started to spread, and because it spread, prices started to fall.
So while the costs of the proprietary systems were continually rising, the cost of running a TCP network kept falling, until the difference was greater than the cost of transitioning - at which point the bottom fell out of the proprietary protocol market! (and ESR practically leaped off the stage, and I nearly fell out of my chair).
And so it's not just that it looks like open systems will prove themselves over closed systems - it's that it's already happened.
That's just one small part of an amazing talk. I've never seen anyone who really believes in Open Source as strongly as he does, or argue its merits as coherently. If you listen to him for a while you can't help but think a little differently about things when you leave.
Dave
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Re:Dublin? What I can't understand.... (Score:1)
Dublin has the dubious pleasure of having M$'s European HQ...IIRC. :O
So all Cambridge needs to do is get decent Guinness
Re:The Article - pre /. effect (Score:2)
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Funny how the system fails to work both ways (Score:2)
Re:Good fun....ESR is a character... (Score:1)
For more on Irish NetSocs/CompSocs check out intersocs IRELAND [nuigalway.ie].
The real reason they had ESR over to Ireland... (Score:1)
(Calm down, it's a joke!)
Re:ESR Article... (Score:2)
Software projects in defense industry are characterized by conservative design. Often the so called layers architecture is applied even when its not appropriate. Without knowing anything about the star wars project, this allows me to conclude that 25 million lines of code written like this probably is a mess. It's just not fair to compare that to win2000 which is based upon a very sound component model: COM.
If you want to make a comparison, take the source code of an entire linux distribution into mind rather than just the kernel. So ESR's main argument for discarding win2000 as a failure are not sound. Even though I don't like MS business practices, I cannot help but note that a lot of users of the release candidate versions of win2000 are generally happy with it.
Probably the major management consultancies' argument that you should wait until the first service pack is released is good advice. It applies to nearly every software package that you should wait until it has proven itself in practice before adopting it on a large scale.
I have to give ESR credit for the argument that ms software is taking an increasingly large marketshare of the system integrators since hardware prices are dropping. I have to add though that win2000 is not targeted at the bottom of the market but at more expensive workstations and servers.
It seems like ESR is using FUD practices to promote the virtues of OSS. While I don't think there's anything wrong with OSS, I'm not convinced that it will take over the whole software industry.
Re:Funny how the system fails to work both ways (Score:2)
[Discl: I know nothing about BSD, and less than I ought to about Linux devel. Below is a misquote of what I heard on Thursday. Feel free to correct.]
He got called on that one. There were a fair number of BSD followers in the audience. (And someone selling BSD CDs at the start...)
His point was that BSD has one really nice feature that's gorgeous on the surface but has a huge hidden cost. One make can build the whole system.
This is really good - but it's brittle.
If you submit a patch to Linus, and it's rejected - it's a patch, it's not too painful to apply manually, and it's not too painful to keep up to date. This, and the general taboo against forking, help keeps Linux moving in one direction.
However, if you submit a change to one of the BSD development groups, and it is rejected, then because you have to fit it into this huge, single structure - it's actually easier to clone that structure and spin off in your own direction.
He was pressed further, and in the end, everyone was right - the BSD people made good points about BSD (the userland is the same), and Eric and others made good points about Linux (the kernel is the same).
But I don't take your point about FUD. He doesn't like the look of Win2K - fine. But that doesn't invalidate his arguments. He has sound philosophical reasons for his beliefs, the condition of W2K does not invalidate those reasons. Unless W2K works miracles, it's possible that it may bear them out.
Dave
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Re:Why? (Score:1)
Like it or not, marketing of a product is just as crucial (if not more than, (think AMIGA))as the writing of the software. ESR produces wonderful positive mindshare.
Microsoft, among other practices which need not be discussed (disgust?) in this particular thread, are very,very good at marketing. We need people like ESR to place Linux in the spotlight and give it the public awareness that it deserves.
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Re:The Article - pre /. effect (Score:1)
But, what's the difference between post it on
If they do make money by selling ad space, didn't I do them a favor by not having their server
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Re:The downfall of MS and the rise of OS (Score:1)
Oops! :-P
I suppose I can give the lame excuse that the two acronyms appear in different contexts, but I think I screwed up this time. :-) I should've attached "(as in Operating System)" to the second occurrence of "OS" there.
ESR talk - recorded (Score:3)
Juan Flynn [mailto] Netsoc PRO.
Re:Funny how the system fails to work both ways (Score:1)
Report from the talk (Score:2)
If he gives a talk here again, I'm there.
Re:Eric gets the chicks (Score:1)
Ok, who the hell are you people/person? Damned cyber stalkers after me again...
By the way, I got bored over the weekend and dyed it red.
Um, to keep this post from being totally off topic, the talk was excellent, and they aren't exaggerating in the article when they say it was standing room only. Apparently it was the biggest turn-out for a TCD netsock event ever. Wow.
Re:OT: Typical.. (Score:1)
Oh well.
Re:OT: Typical.. (Score:1)
Re:The downfall of MS and the rise of OS (Score:1)
Interesting how ESR predicts that MS is going to collapse before the antitrust lawsuit gets settled. Personally I'm not that confident of that -- "bad" as MS may be, they aren't dumb, and I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive. But I agree with ESR that MS won't be quite what it is today.
I actually took his prediction to be catious. The antitrust lawsuit can take a long time before it is settled.
I happen to think that once the troubles for MS comes, it will hit hard and fast enough to surprice most of us. Why? Because MS is too dependent on beeing a monopoly for its income, and thereby also the value of its stocks. Once there is an alternative that looks good enough for major costomers to begin to switch - the monopoly power is gone.
Once your marcet share has reached 100%, it can only go one way.
But this is really an *economic* argument (Score:2)
At the point where Linux becomes easy enough to use for office workers, IHVs are going to start bundling it to save themselves $80 a box. Corel Linux may be the distribution that makes this possible, or perhaps the next RedHat. How can you possibly absorb $80 per unit on a product that costs $400? It's a real problem for Microsoft; don't underestimate it.
Now, if Sun lets IHVs bundle StarOffice without licensing fees, I don't need to tell you what kind of a threat that represents to Microsoft Office revenues.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org].
Re:ESR Article... (Score:2)
from the article: "35 million lines of new code in it."
Add that to the 35 million lines of code already in NT, and you've got 70 million lines of code. Even if it is modularized, it's still going to be a cast-iron bitch to manage. And let's say that Win2k includes the OS, IIS, and some management tools, in addition to all of the other things that come with NT.
Everything but the OS ~ 25 Million lines (rampant speculation)
The OS ~ 45 Million lines
I don't know about you, but I'd rather not try to make all of that play nice. And linux is nowhere near that large (for the OS by all of the `Ask Slashdot' definitions of OS).
"It's just not fair to compare that to win2000 which is based upon a very sound component model: COM"
COM is nice and all, but to take full advantage of it, Microsoft would have had to rewrite NT to utilize it. Do you think they did? Not very likely, or else thay would be touting it as a ground-up rewrite, not just as NT 5.0. That would lead me to believe that there is a bunch of old C code stuffed in
"I cannot help but note that a lot of users of the release candidate versions of win2000 are generally happy with it."
I've noticewd this too. Everyone who uses it as a client is really happy with it. Everyone I know who works for Microsoft who uses RC3 (or even RC2) refuses to use it as a server. Why? Unstable. Buggy. Acts really wierd. Unusable as a web server. The list goes on.
Specific example: a friend of mine works for Microsoft. He has eight boxes at home. One is a file server and proxy. That is his NT box (4.0 SP 4.0). He won't use Win2k as the file server. Why? Win2k is not robust enough for use as a file server for a seven node network. Seven nodes. Imagine an enterprise environment.
Ok, time for me to get back on topic. I don't think ESR was spouting FUD. I believe that he was making remarks based on experience, logic, and reasoning. If you have an OS that has 35 million lines of code (NT 4.0) and has stability problems, and you then add an additional 35 million lines of code, and you code the additional bits in a different manner (COM), don't you think that there would be problems?
Just a thought...
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
ack ack ack (Score:1)
but its a good thing our
Re:But this is really an *economic* argument (Score:1)
Re:But this is really an *economic* argument (Score:2)
No, Windows won't have to be priced the same; as ESR pointed out, it will have to be even *more* expensive, otherwise they are going to take a serious revenue hit.
Microsoft has no incentive to lower the price on their OS as the market has no real alternatives at the moment. I'm sure that if alternatives arise then Microsoft will hurry and slash their prices. Suddenly for the average office worker that free Linux install may not seem as attractive as the $20 Windows install.
If they cut licensing to $20, they are going to have some serious revenue issues. They may not have much choice, though.
Also remember that OEM manufacters get windows at a discount. Microsoft may be incompetent in court, but they're hardly buisness idiots
No one's saying they're "business idiots." What we're talking about here is a fundamental shift in the way software is distributed. Their paradigm is obsolete.
And, I already took the discount into account. What's the list price for Windows 98? $179 or something? Through discounts they get that down to $80-90, or if they're Dell, maybe to $55. $400/50=8. So, even if you got down to $50, you'd be talking about 1/8 the price of a cheap box for the OS. I think that's going to prove to be too much. OEMs will make the final decision, but this isn't 1991; there are a lot more competitors.
Microsoft will be able to collect their Windows tax only as long as it takes OEMs to start shipping preconfigured Linux boxes in any appreciable volume. I really think it's inevitable; it has nothing to do with what anyone wants to happen.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org].
Re:The real reason they had ESR over to Ireland... (Score:1)