Hi Ceki!
Long mail follows.
Ceki Gülcü wrote:
> Pier,
>
> I am not sure that Allaire is entirely insane. He says:
>
> Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer ...
> I can't imagine something that could be worse than
> this for the software business and the
> intellectual-property business.
>
> It takes a huge amount of effort to build reliable general purpose software. In open
>source we give it away for nothing. Users rush to OSS because they get something
>valuable for free. If I could eat for free at the Greek restaurant around the corner,
>I'd eat there 7 times a week even tough it is smoky and I happen to prefer Turkish
>cuisine. :-) Unfortunately, the restaurant owner does not see things the same way.
Nobody is saying that software should be "free" in that sense -- essentially what is
called "gratis" in Spanish. It should be "free" as in "freedom".
The situation as it stands now might perhaps be explained with another foodstuff
example. You can go to the local restaurant and ask to have your food served without
salt -- you may want your steak raw, or burnt. Perhaps you don't want dressing with it.
And then you can go to Macdonald's and get one of those nice little packages where
they have put it all together for you. Now imagine they didn't allow you to take out
the onion -- and the package explicitly disallowed you to look inside the bread. It
would be very convenient for them, since they might package all kinds of stuff without
your knowing. But I sure want to know what I'm eating, and that's why I don't like
going to fast-food joints.
You may even eat at home -- it's cheaper, but you get to DoItYourself. Nobody will
propose that home cooking should be forbidden for restaurants to thrive, and yet that
is exactly what Allaire says.
The basic difference is, food ingredients cost money, software ingredients do not.
Microsoft hacks a program once, and then sell the product a zillion times. This
economy of scale is unprecedented, except perhaps in the intellectual property
business. Microsoft earns a disproportionate amount of money with it.
> What is the economic model behind OSS? I am not 100% sure OSS can scale to become a
>really big industry. No one in the OSS business is making money except perhaps Tim
>O'Reilly. Btw, his company keeps 90% of the revenue. The author gets 10%. I repeat:
>90% for the paper, 10% for IP. So much for IP.
There's a rock-solid economic model in hardware. You don't go to the computer shop and
say: I want an open-source Pentium III with an open-source 17" monitor. I haven't yet
heard an OSS proponent ask for free iron to run Linux.
There's an economic model in services. You don't get Linux installed for free --
either you DIY or contract with a company.
And there's an economic model for companies that get involved in open source. Apple,
Sun, IBM -- the biggies are slowly getting it. Even the most draconian of OSS
licenses, GPL, is accepted and built upon by them. Why? just because they earn more
money with it.
> OSS seems so successful because few individuals can make a huge difference. Linus is
>doing OSS because some bigger company thinks it's good publicity. Many OSS authors
>have a patron behind them much like scholars and artists did a few centuries ago.
>
> However, I dread the day when OSS becomes so successful as to kill (not just weaken)
>software businesses such as Microsoft. What's the point of developing software if
>chances for getting any revenue are slim? This is all rhetorical of course. In
>today's world, you land a 100'000$ job if you can spell Java. This situation of
>plenty might not last for ever, especially if all the world's software needs were to
>be fulfilled by OSS. Beware of what you wish for as you might just get it. Just my 2
>counter cents.
The question is, there's a huge demand for software this days. But most people are
reinventing the wheel at each company; we don't build upon other folks' work.
The real problem in the software industry is that more than 1/2 of all projects are
cancelled -- they fail. And most projects that are eventually completed are over
budget and buggy as hell. This is what is giving us developers a bad image, and in the
long term is very harmful for the industry as a whole.
If all of us had good frameworks and utilities to build upon, we'd do more work -- and
of better quality. Most of the software in the world is done for banks and the
military, and most of the rest is for vertical markets. The small remainder is what
would be most benefited by OSS.
(I can post hard data to back up my assertments, if you don't believe them.)
Microsoft is not threatened because OSS software is gratis; Microsoft is threatened
because they have a monopoly upon systems software for Intel machines. All the "evil"
empire stands on a very antiamerican base, and that is what Linux threatens. But I
don't see the likes of Adobe, IBM and Blizzard Entertainment troubled in the least by
the existence of OSS alternatives -- they sell excellent products to folks that really
need them.
> ps: Oh, coming back to MS, I think it's very "unamerican" to label competition
>"unamerican" but the bigger the lie is...
You're so very right. They might as well label OSS developers "witches" and start the
bonfires...
Un saludo,
Alex.
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