L
>So anyone who provides software that is not OSS is not contributing to
>the common good? I realize you have a major issue with corporations
>making money by creating and selling software, but you can't really
>believe the hogwash you are spouting. There is nothing unethical, or
>immoral about doing so. There are some legal issues involved, but most
>of these legal issues are secondary.
I don't think Curt was saying this exactly, but defending the motives of OSS practitioners against the accusations of being motivated entirely by envy and hate of Microsoft.
However MS hate and envy is certainly deep rooted in the OSS community - remember the comparison between Bill Gates and Bin Laden? No-one not blinded by irrational belief could possibly go as far as to believe that.
I'm going to put my tin hat on and defend Microsoft's contribution to the "common good". I genuinely believe that their contribution to the industry has been a very large net positive. They were responsible in the first place for a version of Basic that did a great deal to democratize computing - many of my generation cut their teeth using some version of Microsoft Basic. Then with DOS, and later Windows, they produced a common and coherent target platform which greatly simplified applications software development to a point where shrink wrapped software was not only possible, but the norm (anyone who ever tried to target one or more of the various competing Unix standards in the 1980s will vouch for just what a pig of a job it was). And with the Office suite and their programming tools - cf Visual Basic - they produced affordable application software of excellent quality, certainly in comparison to any competitor at any given time.
So the net result was a highly usable, coherent platform (which I can target for support tools for our embedded products knowing it will work just about the same anywhere), and some very excellent software. Frankly this is a good thing full stop. I still run DOS programs I bought in 1983 on a machine that could not even have been conceived then.
I do think now that MS's main problem is that they are the first company in history to have completely saturated their target market with a product that is good enough that you never need to upgrade. This is at the root of what I suspect is a misguided licensing and upgrade strategy, since they are scrabbling to preserve income streams from products with no intrinsic obselesence (software doesn't rust or wear out), and expand into other areas (CE, XBox and phones) they can't really deal with. Fundamentally, there are only 4 ways to expand: sell more of the same to the same customers (who now have what they need, hence the need for forced upgrades), Sell to new customers (but there are hardly any available), sell new stuff to old customers (but there is no obvious mass market app for anyone with Office and a web browser), or sell new stuff to new customers (very tough). Without expansion, companies wither and die, but MS is in a very very difficult situation indeed because of its very success, and it's not surprising they are coming up with bizarre attempts to solve their problems. I rather think that the company has reached its zenith.
This may create an opportunity for OSS and other software development models, but apart from Linux I'm struggling to think of a piece of OSS software I would willingly use - Openoffice is extremely flakey, GCC is poor in comparison with (say) IAR Cross compilers and not close to VS in terms of usability; CVS is simply dreadful.
On the other hand, there are some highly dubious aspects to the creation of a culture of free software. As I say, most is poorly executed, and hides quality problems behind a "well, it's not finished yet and hey, you can join us and fix it yourself" attitude. This is chimeric, because the number of people in the user base with the skills actually to dive in and fix complex systems is vanishingly small. In point of fact, the benefit of being able theoretically able to cure problems is heavily outweighed by the practical likelihood of actually having problems!
However there are some philosophical problems I have too. I've had a PC at home for about 5 years, in which time I've bought precisely 7 software packages (a screensaver and 6 kids games). Everything else I've used is freely (and legally) downloaded or provided as freeware. Now I am a software engineer by profession, and I can see a problem here: we are creating a culture which actively devalues software to being a giveaway item (you can see this on the Automation list where people are constantly asking for free software to accomplish some high value task). This is ultimately not sustainable, as we are squeezing any value out of the act of producing software.
Now what OSS does is use the luxury of the free time available to highly educated and well paid people to dump (in the sense that components are dumped) software onto the 'market'. This actually *distorts* competition - companies who can afford to sell software at below cost to support hardware can live in an environment where everything is expected to be free or low cost, but smaller concerns are not able to economically finance support tools out of money gained for them, and innovation in other areas (I am thinking of embedded applications principally) is stifled.
Think of it this way. Is it ethical to go to a third world country with a truckload of free bread and distribute it free of charge to all comers? On the face of it this looks altrustic, but I'd say it is actually very misguided, since it would destroy the livelihood of local bakers and grain producers. Now I'm not comparing the problems of third world economies to my very privileged existence as a software engineer in the West, except to point out that even acts that on the face of it appear blameless need a little deeper consideration. Fundamentally, the risk is that we cut our own throats.
One last point, specifically relating to Automation. The one thing that users of Automation software have in common is that they make many times the capital cost of any piece of Automation equipment they buy from a vendor such as my company, and they make their money by selling the things they make to you and me. Why should there be a clamour for Free software, when there is no corresponding clamour for free food, free cars, free stuff in general? Why is software viewed as something so intrinsically different from any other product of the economy that it must be given away for nothing as a point of principle? I don't have an answer to this question - except that it may derive from the fact that it is easy to copy and has no obvious intrinsic value other than the medium transferred on - but it does intrigue me.
Cheers
Tim
>the common good? I realize you have a major issue with corporations
>making money by creating and selling software, but you can't really
>believe the hogwash you are spouting. There is nothing unethical, or
>immoral about doing so. There are some legal issues involved, but most
>of these legal issues are secondary.
I don't think Curt was saying this exactly, but defending the motives of OSS practitioners against the accusations of being motivated entirely by envy and hate of Microsoft.
However MS hate and envy is certainly deep rooted in the OSS community - remember the comparison between Bill Gates and Bin Laden? No-one not blinded by irrational belief could possibly go as far as to believe that.
I'm going to put my tin hat on and defend Microsoft's contribution to the "common good". I genuinely believe that their contribution to the industry has been a very large net positive. They were responsible in the first place for a version of Basic that did a great deal to democratize computing - many of my generation cut their teeth using some version of Microsoft Basic. Then with DOS, and later Windows, they produced a common and coherent target platform which greatly simplified applications software development to a point where shrink wrapped software was not only possible, but the norm (anyone who ever tried to target one or more of the various competing Unix standards in the 1980s will vouch for just what a pig of a job it was). And with the Office suite and their programming tools - cf Visual Basic - they produced affordable application software of excellent quality, certainly in comparison to any competitor at any given time.
So the net result was a highly usable, coherent platform (which I can target for support tools for our embedded products knowing it will work just about the same anywhere), and some very excellent software. Frankly this is a good thing full stop. I still run DOS programs I bought in 1983 on a machine that could not even have been conceived then.
I do think now that MS's main problem is that they are the first company in history to have completely saturated their target market with a product that is good enough that you never need to upgrade. This is at the root of what I suspect is a misguided licensing and upgrade strategy, since they are scrabbling to preserve income streams from products with no intrinsic obselesence (software doesn't rust or wear out), and expand into other areas (CE, XBox and phones) they can't really deal with. Fundamentally, there are only 4 ways to expand: sell more of the same to the same customers (who now have what they need, hence the need for forced upgrades), Sell to new customers (but there are hardly any available), sell new stuff to old customers (but there is no obvious mass market app for anyone with Office and a web browser), or sell new stuff to new customers (very tough). Without expansion, companies wither and die, but MS is in a very very difficult situation indeed because of its very success, and it's not surprising they are coming up with bizarre attempts to solve their problems. I rather think that the company has reached its zenith.
This may create an opportunity for OSS and other software development models, but apart from Linux I'm struggling to think of a piece of OSS software I would willingly use - Openoffice is extremely flakey, GCC is poor in comparison with (say) IAR Cross compilers and not close to VS in terms of usability; CVS is simply dreadful.
On the other hand, there are some highly dubious aspects to the creation of a culture of free software. As I say, most is poorly executed, and hides quality problems behind a "well, it's not finished yet and hey, you can join us and fix it yourself" attitude. This is chimeric, because the number of people in the user base with the skills actually to dive in and fix complex systems is vanishingly small. In point of fact, the benefit of being able theoretically able to cure problems is heavily outweighed by the practical likelihood of actually having problems!
However there are some philosophical problems I have too. I've had a PC at home for about 5 years, in which time I've bought precisely 7 software packages (a screensaver and 6 kids games). Everything else I've used is freely (and legally) downloaded or provided as freeware. Now I am a software engineer by profession, and I can see a problem here: we are creating a culture which actively devalues software to being a giveaway item (you can see this on the Automation list where people are constantly asking for free software to accomplish some high value task). This is ultimately not sustainable, as we are squeezing any value out of the act of producing software.
Now what OSS does is use the luxury of the free time available to highly educated and well paid people to dump (in the sense that components are dumped) software onto the 'market'. This actually *distorts* competition - companies who can afford to sell software at below cost to support hardware can live in an environment where everything is expected to be free or low cost, but smaller concerns are not able to economically finance support tools out of money gained for them, and innovation in other areas (I am thinking of embedded applications principally) is stifled.
Think of it this way. Is it ethical to go to a third world country with a truckload of free bread and distribute it free of charge to all comers? On the face of it this looks altrustic, but I'd say it is actually very misguided, since it would destroy the livelihood of local bakers and grain producers. Now I'm not comparing the problems of third world economies to my very privileged existence as a software engineer in the West, except to point out that even acts that on the face of it appear blameless need a little deeper consideration. Fundamentally, the risk is that we cut our own throats.
One last point, specifically relating to Automation. The one thing that users of Automation software have in common is that they make many times the capital cost of any piece of Automation equipment they buy from a vendor such as my company, and they make their money by selling the things they make to you and me. Why should there be a clamour for Free software, when there is no corresponding clamour for free food, free cars, free stuff in general? Why is software viewed as something so intrinsically different from any other product of the economy that it must be given away for nothing as a point of principle? I don't have an answer to this question - except that it may derive from the fact that it is easy to copy and has no obvious intrinsic value other than the medium transferred on - but it does intrigue me.
Cheers
Tim