McVoy Strikes Back 777
cranos writes "Fast on the heels of his previous article claiming the kernel is at risk of Bad Things over the BitKeeper fuss, Daniel Lyons has released a new article where Larry McVoy attacks the Open Source movement as non-innovative and dependent on the kindness of corporations. The following quote says it all: 'The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.'"
McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
To begin with, software these days is quite complex and it really is impossible to have a full-blown operating system with all the applications people expect and not have some sort of issues. Secondly, the vast majority of people out there are not computer savvy and are going to need help regardless of how well built their OS/applications are. Red Hat isn't dead yet so I wouldn't be so quick to proclaim them as such, although their demise wouldn't entirely surprise me.
"The other problem is that the services model doesn't generate enough revenue to support the creation of the next generation of innovative products.
That's one of the great things about open source software; it doesn't have to. Companies like Red Hat are packagers, not necessarily creators. What they provide is a nice, neat package of what others are already creating.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
But McVoy says open source advocates fail to recognize that building new software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of money.
But none of them can show me how to build a software-development house and fund it off open source revenue. My claim is it can't be done."
This statement really says everything about why McVoy feels the way he does; he's only thinking about money. He has completely forgotten that open source software doesn't require a profit to exist or be innovative. People write free/open source software because they enjoy it not because it is going to make them rich.
"Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around?
Nothing. I will continue to use Firefox, OpenOffice, X Windows, and all the other software I have come to rely on. This is another great aspect of open source software; it isn't going away because someone else can always pick up a dead project and run with it themselves.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Strong AI (Score:5, Funny)
Luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time.
Re:Strong AI (Score:5, Funny)
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that getting the prototype up and running is the interesting bit - getting it polished, fully QAed and packaged is the dull slog that no-one really wants to do. Witness all the incomplete projects on sourceforge. Once it's got just enough function to scratch the author's itch they move on to other things.
There's a wide gulf in what people will do because they want to and what they'll do because they're paid to - or at least in how many people you'll get at each end of the spectrum.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people are lazy whether they are payed or not.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure. I've had a few similar replies so maybe I needed to quote more of the guy I was replying to. Roughly:
Larry: Money drives software innovation
GGP: Hobbyist time works just as well
Me: Hobbyist time will only get you so far
As another AC pointed out, yes, the innovation often will happen in the hobbyist bit. But you're not going to get complete, visible innovative software unless you go full cycle. Sure, someone else can pick it up an run with it but it's hard to get those people to notice your project unless you've got it so far.
Yes, there are plenty of OSS projects that do go full cycle but they're often the popular-closed-source clones that Larry's complaining about. The ones you cite all are, arguably.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
The point of larry is that decent software can't be created by a student in a couple of weekends. It takes some programmers working full-time to create a "perfect" product - just look at the state of the "documentation" of most of software projects
However I think that lack of resources is not that bad, sometimes. Students who write software on weekends need to b
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Note again that I am not saying that quality software can be or is accomplished by a student in a couple of weekends, but I'll bet that Innovative software often is.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Other examples would be libz, libpng, etc.
GZip and PNG were "invented" for opensource use and now everyone uses them.
Here's what he really doesn't get (Score:3, Insightful)
Non-OSS companies like IBM fund OSS because they benefit from it. IBM makes tons of money by packaging Linux as part of their business solutions. They package Apache as IBM HTTP Server as part of their Websphere solution. They aren't going t
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing about the services model is this... Not everyone wants the same set of features. With proprietary software, if it doesn't have a feature you want, you might be able to submit a request, but usually, you just have to suck it up and deal. With open-source software, you can pay someone - usually the creator - to implement any features you need on top of their (presumably) mature codebase.
Never, ever underestimate the massive value of this.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You didnt quite nail it - so lets see if I can...
The reason us "open source guys" hate it when he says that is because its a fucking insult straight to our face. You basically just told me that I cant innovate, my software is reverse engineered from others, and if it wasnt for others my software would suck. I dont spend thousands of hours of my time in order to be told that I cant innovate.
And the twit wonders why we hate it.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe your OS software is different, but I would say that most OS software has little innovation in it. A majority of the time its an "embrace and extended" version of some closed source code.
Offhand, I cannot recall a GNU licensed product that is innovative. OK, I'm trying hard here. Maybe rsync, could be seen as innovative in its day. I'm still trying, and I can't think of anything else offhand. For the record, I'm a UNIX/Linux admin, and have been for a few years now. I use and often prefer OS products over commercial ones, but I believe that I prefer the lack of innovation and the tools are more simple and chainable for scripts and whatnot.
Now that I was frank about the situation, mod me as a troll like always.
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:3, Informative)
wouldn't need to (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously.
That's the IBM model, and why they're so eager to support OSS. Don't pay money for licenses, just our army of Global Services.
Re:wouldn't need to (Score:5, Insightful)
See, that's my plan. I have a really great lightweight templating system for Apache that makes me design websites twice as fast and makes maintenance and updates even easier, especially sitewide changes which become O(1).
It's a pretty small piece of code (about 1500 lines), but definitely innovative in that it solves many of the problems larger content management systems try to address, but with the absolute minimum of overhead and sticking very close to the dominant Apache paradigm of static files.
If I thought there was a market for this sort of thing I would sell it in a heart beat, but it makes more economic sense to open-source it, build a small community around it to see where it can go, then it becomes a very powerful selling point to my consultant business. Much more so than if I just kept it proprietary and said, "Hey, I have this really cool software that will make your site twice as easy to maintain, but no one's ever seen it so you just have to take my word for it."
Re:wouldn't need to (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok I'll bite... where is this mystery project of yours?
Re:wouldn't need to (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.websaviour.com/templation/ [websaviour.com]
Re:wouldn't need to (Score:4, Informative)
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's somewhere between a templating system and a content-management system, but it's core idea has very little to do with either. I just posted the announcement as a reply to the original reply, and that page explains the system better than I can in a brief response. The best analogy I can make is that the system is like database normalization for HTML sites, although the system leverages the natural site hierarchy more than set theory, so the parallel is not exact.
You're just attempting to lock your customers in to something for which no one else may even have the source or documentation.?
Although changes are most efficient to make when the system is run live, it produces static HTML or PHP files in its cache which can actually be deployed statically. The whole system is designed with the core goal of no lock-in, no new languages to learn, and no administrative tools necessary.
Re:wouldn't need to (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all software is a shrink-wrapped product you know. What "product" can GM use to keep track of inventory, sales, and the success of new advertising campaigns?
Software products are tools to many of us. We use Apache, Linux, Windows, IIS, Perl,
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all the software written in the world
Anti-OSS idiots (that's you) think that the world revolves around the shiny boxes whereas the rest of us know that the first two are an order of magnitude more important
As long as the middle one exists then people will need
components - this is the OSS stuff : apache, libgtk, mozilla, linux
customisers - hey that's me, unless I'm too busy flipping burgers
The idea is that any customisation done to apache, libgtk, mozilla & linux are shared with everyone and, by this token, everyone wins : as laid out in the GPL.
If you want to build a bespoke web server, feel free.
If you want to pay for IIS, feel free.
If you want to feel free, use one of Apache, thttpd, etc.
It is in the interests of larger companies to have in-house developers for the components and likewise in their interest to offer their changes back to the pool.
For the life of me I can't understand why so many people confuse this simple principle. It is almost self-evident !!
I wouldn't lose mine (Score:3, Informative)
I remember one time, the managers tried using a reporting tool they bought to make a daily report. Unfortunately, it took 26 hours to run. After one of the programmers rewrote the report by hand, it ran in under 2 hours.
And there's lots of web development that can't be done with webpage writting programs. I wrote lots of serverside scripts at my last job.
General purpose office applicat
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Interesting)
I will not cry anything.
There are 196 contributors listed on the Linux credits [kernel.org] at kernel.org
That's not many branches of your favourite fast food joint.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Insightful)
For many custom apps, they're just so custom that no one else would probably be interested. That's why OSS works better for software which lots of people use: OSes, media players, office software, etc. It provides enough of a base of interested people who will submit
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
My job consists of writing software that the company I work for will never earn a dime from. (directly) We don't write software for the sake of earning money from it. We write it to solve a business need.
The majority of our time is not spent doing software development. It's spent supporting our users, fixing bugs, adding small features, or modifications. All of which would still be required if we were using OSS.
I'm valuable to the company I work for not so much because I'm a programmer, but because I understand our business environment and can apply that knowledge to software. It's unlikely management would ever be able to surf over to Freshmeat and download something that could replace what I do.
Besides, I wouldn't work for McDonalds, I'm partial to driving trucks. I'm already used to long hours and low pay.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
I probably continue at my work, getting paid to write Open Source software. And some customized stuff based on our OS tools.
No, it is not a way to make millions. But an all right living, and some extra job satisfaction.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Informative)
Capitalism (Score:4, Interesting)
1. It's free to make lots of copies of software and production cost is less than say writing a book or making an episode of Simpsons. In fact, people are willing to program as a hobby or, in 3rd world countries, for very low pay by our standards.
2. As McVoy pointed out, users of the software - big companies like Apple (hardware maker) or IBM (making money on service and support) - have interest in open source to free customer's money for themselves and soak up other people's contributions. There are more software users than software sellers. Oops!
3. On consumer side, intellectual property that has similar costs to software - TV shows and newspapers - has long been free and makes money on advertisement or convenient delivery (cable or newspaper subscriptions). There are all signs Google is trying to get into both models.
Microsoft and music record companies are seemingly beating this trend by selling IP which is relatively cheap to produce at increasing prices. I say it's because they operate under corpitalism - government rules that favor otherwise unsustainable business models of big corporations - rather than true capitalist open market.
For one thing, piracy is impossible to control without unreasonable laws like DMCA that prohibit studying mathematics and allows invasive snooping of Internet by private entities. In a normal society, content produces would have to come up with reasonable prices and attractive distribution channels to encourage honesty. Also, control of limited distribution channels - like buying all radio stations so that independent music can not be heard - would be illegal in a society that promotes free competition. So would be patent lock-in of trivial ideas, like Amazon's 1-click.
The most extreme case of corpitalism is bankrupt airlines that continue to operate as usual while being allowed to break any contracts that they voluntarily accepted (like employee pension plans). You would think if government gets into social protection, the target would be poor individuals rather than huge companies. PanAm ran out of money and folded and air travel is generally better/cheaper because of that.
Fortunately, it just takes one country in the world to switch to true capitalism instead of corpitalism. After a short time, everyone else would leach their software and domestic companies would have to switch to better business models to compete.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell those companies that save money from free software could (and many do) hire a developer or two to customize/improve the software for their needs. And they would still save money.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the one hand it's actually great that Office at least partially supports what we do. But it does so reluctantly, and I guess we spend more time programming around bugs in PPT and Excel than driving our own ideas forward. In truth they are a piece of shit internally.
We s
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
We use money as an instrument to guide what is made and where we should spend our effort. Money in itself is useless. If Free Software can make the same (or equivalent) software than Microsoft, but cheaper, that is good. It means that our economy as a whole just got more efficient.
Yes, thay may mean less money for programmers and computer scientists (I am one), but on the other hand, we all benefit from the additional efficiency (Ford can make cheaper cars, as it spends less money on Word. Wal-Mart can drop prices as their database backend is cheaper. Microsoft....ok, dies ;-).
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs? (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't a deficiency of capitalism per se, but rather the flawed implementation of it that we currently have. There are two reasons Ford can be successful profitwise by making poor quality cars:
1) The market values cheaper priced cars over higer-quality cars - that is good capitalism because the market demand is being satisified. You may not agree wit
Re:McVoy doesn't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
RedHat is a major contributor to both GCC and glibc, not to mention the kernel.
Regarding subversion, that is bollocks. The subversion people used to program CVS, which is opensource, and which larry also copied significantly to make his beloved subversion.
Nothing is created out of a vacuum.
If only we could mod the articles... (Score:2)
Re:If only we could mod the articles... (Score:2)
yep (Score:2)
It's true because I say so (Score:3, Insightful)
But.... (Score:5, Funny)
People don't seem to realize... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's unfortunate that many people - even open source advocates - don't realize that "open source" is a methodology. Software freedom is the goal and the end result of the FSF/GPL.
It's just a standard response to Freedom. (Score:4, Informative)
Let's see some examples:
Microsoft. The OS, Webserver and IE are all classic examples.Their attacks on Open Source are in a league by themselves, including the "stifle innovation" argument of McVoys'.
Windriver. These folks bashed Linux mercilessly while their marketshare dropped from 35% in 2000 to 14% today. They threw in the towel and went with Linux last year (though VxWorks is still around, it's clearly not the priority).
GreeenHills. These folks have been bashing gcc for years, as the embedded market has moved away from speciality development tools except in certain small areas where the performance is required.
So McVoy's response is nothing new here. He must be feeling the pinch of people moving away from his software.
Now, if Slashdot would only stop giving him free publicity, we'd be all set. McVoy has already stated that everytime he's mentioned on Slashdot, his "sales go up".
Counter examples (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact I think the situation that will kill innovation is one where only one proprietry vendor wins. Without competition there won't be the need to innovate. Bring on software rental and patent protection and then innovation in the industry will die. That scenario will bring about legally enforced vendor lock-in with the vendor able to just sit back and rake in the rentals.
Don't believe me? Look at how Internet Explorer stagnated when Microsoft thought it had no competition. Look at the innovation in Firefox.
Re:Counter examples (Score:3, Informative)
Corporate-esse (Score:3)
Wha..?
Not in terms of man hours, nor tools require, nor expertise of the people involved.
I'm calling this one: Bullshit.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.
I'm trying, I'm really trying, to see how this one works. If I can have the source to anything I'm working on, and I decide that I like it better this way, and everybody else agrees with me, isn't that innovation? Hell, isn't it innovation even if NOBODY agrees with me? So, by the sheer numbers of casual programmers like myself in the world, doesn't this mean innovation actually sky rockets with the more code we have access to?
Newsline next week ( and remember, you heard it here first! ): MS buys out bitkeeper!
Ok, that was supposed to be a joke, but it makes a weird sort of sense, doesn't it?
It wasn't even reverse engineering the program (Score:3, Informative)
No innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a curse of open source, just the way things are made.
Not that these things matter, since Free software is about making good software available to everyone, not about innovations.
Chortle... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Chortle... (Score:4, Interesting)
All of this activity is hosted on a small relatively inexpensive PC. We build our own machines here and this one cost about $1500 in 2001; a similar rack mount machine would probably cost about $3000 today but be about 3 times faster. The fact that such an inexpensive machine can handle this level of activity underscores our message about total cost of ownership.
What a twat.
Re:Chortle... (Score:3, Interesting)
Phillip.
Re:Chortle... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, indeed, any developers, other than to fix any bugs are revealed by using Linux as a free stress testing tool.
It's true (Score:2)
importance of git (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Linus is a limited resource, and if he takes time to work on a development tool, kernel releases are delayed, but that doesn't mean overall kernel development has delayed overall.
But the importance of git should not be overlooked.
Linus and friends have been making a custom tool designed to fit their hands perfectly and accompany them in the way that they (the developers) work. In the long run, git will be a better tool for them because they designed it to meet the way they work instead of using an existing tool and changing how they work to match the functionality and nuances of that tool.
Look forward to more efficient development in the next year, that's what I say.
Re:importance of git (Score:3, Insightful)
disrupt the kernel development process by pulling
BK he has engendered a much more capable competitor.
Smart move Larry!
Larry Must Be a Bad Programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
Git's done [kerneltrap.org]. Linus thinks it needs some polish, but he calls it "Feature Complete". If Linux can do in weeks what McVoy took 5 years to do, just imagine how mature and innovative BitKeeper could be.
Mozilla Innovates (Score:2)
Open Source doesn't make money (Score:3, Insightful)
To be sure, a few open source companies are successfully generating revenue and even (possibly) profits. But none of them generates enough money to do anything really innovative, says McVoy, 43, an industry veteran who has developed operating system software at Sun Microsystems, SGI and Google.
Of course, having working at Google, he would know what a curse open source is. No wonder Google make no money with all that OSS they use (and create).
Non-innovative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see... BitTorrent?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
OpenBSD's pf? CARP?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
Rsync? SpamAssassin? Encrypted file systems, such as cgd? Zope? Stable journaling file systems, such as ReiserFS and ext3fs? Or even Arch, Monotone and other source management programs?
Well, I guess some innovations come from the Open Source community, after all...
Frankly, big corporations (Microsoft comes to mind) do not 'innovate' either. They slavishly copy whatever worked for the competition.
I think this gentleman is just angry that some people decided to copy his precious SubVersion. But guess what? That is the nature of Open Source. If the 'community' likes something, it is going to copy it, and then improve on it.
And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.
Re:Non-innovative? (Score:3, Informative)
(just doing fact-checking....we now return you to your normally scheduled slashdot discussion)
Necessity is the mother of. . .what? (Score:5, Insightful)
$ is not the only motive in the universe (Score:5, Insightful)
Later, Doug McIlroy would write of this period [McIlroy91]: "Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations". But it would take another quarter century for all the implications of that observation to come home.
There really are other motives besides money!
As a troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
Define innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
There are truely innovative apps that began as open source. But there are also a lot that have been created specifically to provide an alternative to commercial equivalents. Every new application is not meant to be about innovation. It's meant to fill a need. Clearly open source fills a need, otherwise it wouldn't exist.
This guy's an idiot.
Everyone in SW industry wants to get rich fast (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that software is service. This guy complains that if you make some program easy to use, most of the users will never call you for service. Ok, they will not call you, but how they hurt him? They use his software, but does that takes money from his pocket? Did they burned his house using his product?
Let us make some example. Guy 'A' spends 1000 hours making some program, for general purpose. His software is somewhat complicate to use, so his user base is 1000 people, but every 10th has to call him to for some kind of support. It makes him, say, 100 x 2h x(his rate) per month of possible income. There is second guy with his own program, which is better, so only every 100th user needs some support. But as a result, his user base is larger, so he may have 100.000 users, so he may get more consulting hours. We cannot say for sure, but it may also happen to him to have actually less consulting hours comparing to the first guy. But as a result (not taking into account initial investment of time spend for writing code[*]) both of them get paid for time they spent working.
What's wrong with that concept? Why should I expect for someone to pay me for doing nothing? When they spend an hour for their costumers, costumers pays them. Is this guy McVoy too noble to be paid per workhour?
[*] Initial time investment could be significantly decreased if you use open source development model, as we know.
Well, let's take a look at the highest profile OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux kernel = Unix knockoff
KDE = Windows knockoff
GIMP = Photoshop knockoff
Open Office = MS Office knockoff
Gaim = AOL knockoff
Firefox = innovative (sorta, see below)
Apache = innovative
PHP, Python, etc. = innovative
Firefox is shaky because tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera (a commercial comany). It didn't bring the browser into mainstream awareness like, say, Adobe did with graphics and DTP software. It is, however, the freshest face on the browser scene which has seen a much-needed revitalization as a result so I'll throw it in on the innovative side. Yes, IRC was around before AOL but AOL brought internet chat awareness to the masses so they get the credit. History is written by the victors
Don't get me wrong, open source is a fantastic and vital field in computing. Having access to a software library that is free in both the money sense and the libre sense is a big deal and in particular, those that cannot afford a quality commercial version such as developing countries.
On the other hand, commercial software is where most of the innovation and R&D takes place. They have to offer fresh and compelling reasons for us to part with our money. They have to be better than their competition (including open source). I know, I know, Microsoft isn't better than the competition nor are they innovative. True, but they are one company in a sea of thousands that would fall under the software industry umbrella and their monopoly status makes them an exception.
Open source needs commercial software and commercial software is recognizing the importance of and becoming more reliant upon open source. There is room for both. McVoy is right. 100% OSS would stagnate as its current model seems to be copying the work of others. Its strength lies in its license, not its feature set. As for the other extreme, we only have to look at Microsoft to see the effects of a commercial software dominated world.
Monoculture is bad and that goes for Linux as well as Windows.
Open source is bad for innovation: The proof! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, how insightful! What wisdom!
There are plenty of examples to prove the man right. Take a look, for instance, at the unfortunate, stagnating world of physics. For some silly macho reason, all physicists have to provide their experiments, their data, their calculations, their data and their conclusions in excruciately detailed papers that are submitted to journals for all to see. This process is glorified with noble-sounding terms such as "peer review", "refutability" and "sound science". Physicists pretend this allows them to build on their predecessors' results.
But, as you have guessed, this is just another example of open source. That's right, folks, physics is plagued by a generalized use of the dreaded open source! The source is not code here, it's data, theories and calculations, but the principe is the same: let's face it, physicists don't know how to keep things proprietary.
Which explains why the field is so totally devoid of innovation. Ah, if only physics was practiced with a decent proprietary attitude, like back in the good old time when Galileo taunted his colleagues by hinting about wonders he had observed with his new expensive telescope! Or when alchemists jealously kept their recipes and processes a secret! By now, we would have wonderful machines, such as vehicules flying in the air, devices carrying your voice on a wire, and calculators weighing only a fraction of a ton!
Verily, physical sciences needs to get rid of its openness to finally become innovative. And that is also true for computer sciences, of course.
Never a Friend of OS (Score:4, Insightful)
McVoy does get it.At least part of it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly a lot of what he has to say makes perfect sense. The world will never be 100% open source. And unless you make it illegal "so much for freedom" to charge for software closed source will always be around. That is not a bad thing.
Open source will also never die.
I work for a company that produces closed source software. Not one of our customers has ever asked for the source code. They also pay us $600 a year for tech support and updates. Most of them are happy with our software and we provide documented file formats so their data belongs to them. There is not a single open source product that competes with us. So guys the market is wide open if you want to jump in.
One thing that really ticks me off in the FOSS community is the idea that OSS has to be free as in beer. It does not. What it does mean is if you pay for OSS you get the source and the right to give it and the source to whom ever you want. And yes you can charge them as much as you want.
The other thing is if you do not contribute code, money, documentation, or at least good bug reports to the project you are a freeloader. I want to smack people that I hear complaining that this free program or that lacks this or that feature or that the guy that wrote it is an idiot. SHUT UP AND ADD THE FEATURE YOURSELF! Or pay the developer to add it if you want it. But do not sit on a message board complaining about what you are getting for free.
Before any of you RMS fan boys jump on me let me say one thing. I have released a few FOSS programs I wrote. The first couple where not GPLd because the GPL was not written yet but I gave away the source. I have contributed to a few more GPL programs since then. The world will never be all open or closed source. People that think it should be are like those that think the world should forced to all be one faith.
who is actually paying for innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Software companies don't make those investments at all. The institutions that make those investments are the government and a few large private research labs. Almost all the software and almost all the innovation you see around you ultimately comes from those sources.
People like McVoy and other self-proclaimed innovators are adding little gimmicks and tweaks on top of that massive, publicly funded innovation. The question we should be asking is why we should let people like McVoy continue to leech off the investments that taxpayers and a few private labs are making.
I have a feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with commercial software. I think it's a good thing. I think ol' Larry was just absolutely stupid for the way he has handled this whole thing. The guy is obviously a smart and innovative programmer, he is just business stupid. It's why you keep real techie types out of the board room. (most of the time anyhow)
It's like when all those companies release versions of products for other countries not realizing their logo, trade mark phrase or whatever else is "inside" is insulting to that culture. Larry wants the OSS community to use his product. His view and OSS view didn't line up. instead of working to get something worked out (beyond the half assed attempt made) He insulted the OSS community and he is getting burned in the process.
Cause and effect Larry. "Think before you speak" isn't just a word jumble. It's how you are supposed to conduct yourself.
Re:I have a feeling (Score:3, Interesting)
Guess what McVoy, lots of us read the Kernel Traffic [kerneltraffic.org] summaries who aren't necessarily involved. I don't like companies with bad attitudes, period.
Look, I kinda hate saying it... (Score:3, Insightful)
He had this tool he teased the OSS crowd with. When some of them decided there were other fish in the sea, he got royally pissed because his tease no longer held any power. So not only did he run away pouting, he literally joined up with some of the worst hacks out there...specifically, Daniel Lyons. Mr. Lyons is well regarded as a talentless hack who hates anything that brings to light the truth of the matter: his relevence is waning and soon he can fade to black and nobody will miss him.
Can't say that I blame them. If my career were pinned to the software publisher business model of the 80's and 90's, I'd be scared as shit right about now and willing to say anything, stretch any number, exaggerate any claim, and basically claw and scrape as long as I could to maintain my position before I found myself out of work, out of money, and out of options.
Proprietary guys (Score:3, Insightful)
Most new ideas in software are incremental improvements in processing. There is little real innovation, ever. All improvements in software are inevitable. Someone, somewhere will get peeved enough with the status-quo to change how something is done, and the state of software will creep forward. That is the nature of having conscious thought.
Money is not going to create an idea. Nor will the absence of money destroy an idea. A programmer with a software idea will pursue the idea regardless of most circumstance.
What McVoy is really pissed about is the fact that he isn't all that creative, and he's watching the scientific process shatter his perfect little delusion.
Writing software is physically cheap, and has only one natural scarcity: time. All physical resources for writing software come at essentially no cost by comparison, and that is one of the reasons that software as a revenue generating product is not naturally sustainable in the long term. McVoy must be ignoring this to sustain his perfect little delusion.
The services model is a naturally sustaining model in the absence of artificial constraints such as software patents. People are lazy, and they don't want to know how to use their software. However, they know they have to have that same software to make their (non-software) operations run. More than not are perfectly willing to pay other people to keep that software in order. That is the whole impetus for maintenance subscriptions.
Open Source, however, addresses the one big issue people have with subscriptions to proprietary software: control.
People don't want to have to maintain their own software (and hardware, for that matter), but they also hate the overbearing cruelty imposed upon them by proprietary vendors. Open Source gives customers the best of both worlds. Someone else takes care of the headaches, while the customer retains all the power in the form of the ability to switch service providers. This keeps vendors honest.
None of this is a replacement for keeping knowledgable staff on the payroll, but it's the next best thing.
Re:He's right (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, wait:
uptime
9:01am up 252 days, 11:23, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.03, 0.01
That's just silly. And here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but a LOT of the products you're describing -- eg., the browser -- existed in the OSS sphere before it did in the closed-source sphere. Let's list the "killer apps":
Spreadsheet
Word Processor
Database
E-mail
Browser
Of those five, only the spreadsheet and word processor got their starts as closed source. (Well, okay, the database is a tough one; see Ashton Tate v. Fox Software for details.) Regardless, there are damn few ideas for software these days that didn't exist ten years ago. In other words (and here's the whole point, so pay attention) MOST ALL SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF LICENSE, IS DERIVATIVE THESE DAYS. Or, in a nutshell, your argument is specious, ill-informed, and simply dumb.
HOWEVER: Larry might be right, but for the wrong reason. The ONLY thing that drives corporate (as opposed to individual) innovation, as far as I'm concerned, is competition. If competition goes away, innovation stops. See myriad Microsoft cases (eg., DOS 3.x vs. DR DOS, IE vs. Firefox, etc.).
Re:That's just silly. And here's why. (Score:3, Interesting)
The basic idea, perhaps, but not necessarily the design.
Version control with all the bells and whistles is a complex problem. Coming up with a good solution is difficult. Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
Re:but then companies like.... (Score:2)
What he said was not very thought out..
Re:I think it's true... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think it's true... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya know... he hasn't really said many things lately that deserve our respect. Does being a friend of Linus really demand all that much respect? This guy seems to have his head up his ass so why should I show him anything but contempt?
Re:I think it's true... (Score:3, Funny)
That would be a pretty stupid reason for giving someone respect. Innocence By Association is just as stupid as Guilt By Association.
Cool, good luck to him. I'd be interested to find out how being as big an asshole as his worst critics, and taking every opportunity to demean the work of other pr
Re:I think it's true... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, he should be treated with respect just because he's a friend of Linus? Regardless of the fact that he acted like a whining and annoying brat during the whole BK-debacle? His behavior was downright moronic, and he kept changing the license under wich BK was released. then he pulled the BK-license for OSDL, because one independent contractor of OSDL happened to Telnet in to the BK-server.
Linus and McVoy might be friends personally. But that does not mean that McVoy should earn respect because of his professional activities. Just because he's friends with Linus does not mean that he's a great guy. This whole debacle has shown that he is in fact a grade-A asshole.
He started to whine when others tried to "reverse-engineer" his precious BK. Well, too bad for him that reverse-engineering is allowed. Looking at his comments, it seems to me that he wanted BK to have similar protection a patent would give him. Of course he couldn't say that he supports software-patents, so he started bitching and moaning and being a real jerk hen people didn't like his constant license-changes and *shock and horror* tried to reverse-engineer BK.
Re:I think it's true... (Score:3, Insightful)
because alot of people felt that being at the mercy of McVoy was not a smart thing to do. By creating a free altnernative that could interoperate with BK, they would have eliminated that dependancy. And looking at McVoy's behavior in this case, they were 100% correct! Being at a Mercy of someone who can take your tools away from you at will, is NOT a smart thing to do! The one good thing M
Re:I think it's true... (Score:3, Insightful)
Less resources wasted reinventing the wheel, because you can re-use everyone else's software without paying them a dime.
The fact that software programmers only earn money with opensource by actually working (i.e. doing support or adding new features with contract work) mean software will move forward in stability and/or features instead of being milked to death by the creator company (Quark XPress anyone?)
Re:I can't disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
So what exactly was it that products like sendmail, bind, apache, etc where copying from the closed source world? It also seems that Internet Explorer starts to rip off features, which where introduced with open source browsers. (Safe for Opera, but it was Firefox' success which finally convinced MS of tabed browsing and the implementation has yet to be seen).
I'd wager that the internet would be a duller place, would it solely be reliant on such engineering gems lik IIS and Exchange (which came later in the first place).
Re:I can't disagree (Score:4, Informative)
Certainly not desktop [enlightenment.org] environments [gnome.org], servers [apache.org], remote shells [openssh.com], anonymizing [freenetproject.org] (or swarming [bittorrent.com]) networks [eff.org], or compilers [gnu.org].
Because all of those things are just replacements for commercial applications, and did nothing new.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
Please do. Because though he's not 100% right, I do think McVoy has a point, and the two projects you mention are not so overwhelming as to prove him completely wrong. For all our talk of innovation, very little open source software is innovative -- much of it exists to mimic some proprietary alternative. Even the linux kernel was created as a project to get a unix-like system on x86 hardware. Firefox, though built from the ashes of Netscape, was mainly driv
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
It's hard to predict the future... (Score:4, Insightful)
... but I'll give it a shot. I think that there is plenty of room in the world for both OSS and commercial software. FOSS will continue to develop free alternatives to commercial products. One of the things that drives people to create FOSS is the wish to have an alternative to commercial software. That is a good thing.
Commercial software has a niche, as well. Sometimes you need a pile of money to develop a new idea. In order to get that money, you usually have to promise some kind of return to investors. So you need to make profits. That's cool too. I don't mind paying money for things like games and innovative applications. I want software engineers to live comfortably since I'm married to one.
Down the road, I think we'll see that OSS will takeover the common applications. It will be used for the OS, obviously, basic productivity applications, software to run governments and schools, voting machines, security applications, all the kinds of applications where it makes little sense to duplicate effort and where budget constraints are tight. There will continue to be commercial applications that introduce new ideas, but eventually, those will also find their way into FOSS, as they should.
Attacks on either system are silly. Just as it makes sense to have competition in products, it also makes sense to have competition between ideas. You can't have a good democracy if everyone has to march in lockstep. We should all welcome new ideas that move us forward, regardless of where they come from.
Re:Well, let's have a look (Score:4, Informative)
Reality: the original PHP (PHP/FI) was developed in 1994, released in 1995; ASP was released in 1996. Sorry to shatter your precious illusions.
Re:Well, let's have a look (Score:5, Informative)
Whether you think its a "shoddy piece of work" or not, it clearly isn't a clone of a product released a year later.
Re:Well, let's have a look (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla comes from Netscape. IE came because of Netscape. They were both either clones or directly based on Mosaic. Which was made by academia (you know, NSF funding, which some people say isn't useful for anything).
Several things had plugins before Active X. Cubase has had plugins for yonks.
Microsoft Office started with Word and Excel. Word is a Wordperfect clone and Excel a Lotus 1-2-3 clone.
FTP was also file sharing before Napster. It just wasn't p2p. p2p apps predate Napster (e.g. the military
Re:Well, let's have a look (Score:4, Informative)
PHP came out before ASP too. You are not letting reality get in the way of anything, because Microsoft did not invent server side scripting first.
In any case, the first web browser was open source. The first web server was open source. The first TCP/IP stack was open source. The first SSH was open source. The first network transparent windowing system was open source. There is no closed-source equivalent of rsync.
McVoy is bullshitting I'm afraid.