What will happen to open source development after the commercial software, whose research and designs they simply steal and clone, goes under?
“Yeah, right. 'Contribute back to society.”’
I wasn’t specifically referring to OSS contributing to society,
as I was referring to software authors, in general, contributing
to society. Both sets of contributions do admittedly contribute
in different ways, which is part of the point. For my reaction to
Jeff’s Pirates/OSS users remark, I’ve been accused of getting
defensive and reading things into his comment that weren’t
there. Thank you for the demonstration that this can happen on
either side of the debate.
“Show me any OSS project that has provided as much contribution
back to society as MS and Bill Gates have with their charitable
contributions,”
I’m not saying those aren’t valuable, but there is a definite
commercial self-interest involved. The contributions started in
ernest around the time Microsoft came under its heavist fire from
government regulatory bodies. This is also about the time
Microsoft went from a non-entity on Capitol hill to a very active
supporter of the government lobby.
You can also see this in their windows licensing. They had very
little interest in serving the third world with their product,
until OLPC went after the market with open source software. This
now has Microsoft rushing to market with a version of Windows XP
targeting a platform that Gates once very vocally derided. “Get a
real computer”, if I remember correctly.
The work they’ve done is indeed enormous, but it is essential to
view it in its context.
"Let’s see… What’s the FSF’s record of charitable donations? "
I’m not sure I view the FSF as a donor, but rather an aggregator
of donations of time and effort made by individual developers.
"The problems with Open Source is that:
- most of it is crap."
I don’t think that’s limited to OSS. Most software, in general, is crap.
“- there’s no support.”
My experience that commercial support isn’t too snappy. I’ve
spent a fair amount of time working with vendors who can’t answer
questions on their software and aren’t able or willing to fix
issues in the time frame that’s useful. In the case of
deprecated softare, something like Visual BASIC 6, the situation
is worse. Not only is support unavailble, the product is
discontinued, leaving the only eventuality an expensive port (on
my dime) to another platform.
“Sure, report a bug. If you’re lucky, someone with the knowledge
and free time (because the OSS stuff is a sideline;”
Much is also commercially supported. You mentioned IBM, please
see their contributions to Eclipse, and LInux, among
others. There are also products and niches within spaces too
small to support commercial development. Given a choice between
a hobby developer and no software at all, I at least want the
choice of an OSS alternative.
"- too many are abandoned. "
See VB6 and Windows XP, among many others. Abandonment is not
unique to OSS. The ability to take on support after the original
authors abandon a project, is unique to OSS
“There are just too many negatives and not enough positives about
most OSS to depend on them.”
We see this differently. It’s not that I will only use OSS, but
rather that I’m not willing to write off all software that’s
licensed under OSS, a priori. Some of it is quite nice.
@Rick
"Closed source is a licensing scam, more or less unique to the world of software. Most other stuff you buy you actually own, and you are free to resell it, take it apart, change it, fix it, learn from it, whatever. I’ll pay for software, I won’t pay to get screwed (unless you’re a hooker).
Linking the desire for freedom with piracy is pretty typical for the utter contempt some software makers have for their users. Never thought you would be one of them."
Again, a lot of Pirates became OSS enthusiasts when they realised they could get what they wanted without breaking the law. THIS IS NOT A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE, this is what happened.
And it’s not as bad as the standard contempt shown for OSS enthusiasts to anyone who doesn’t want to spend time and energy attempting to fix their software, for the reward of, in many cases, being told they’re doing it wrong.
@michael
"Flatly, if you need a tool to build a regular expression, you are in the wrong job."
You are wasting time and doing a worse job for the purpose of ego-stroking. Well done sir.
Excellent. Although a lot of people out there (this includes me) would rather download a free, open-source program, there are definitely real reasons to buy payed software. For one thing, paid software almost always comes with support in one form or another.
I don’t pay for software because I can’t. I don’t have a credit card, I’m not willing to poke my dad every time I want some paid program, and free software (as in price, not as in the FSF fucked up and preached definition) works good enough.
And yes, sometimes I do pirate. But it’s like with music. I’ll stop pirating when they give me a decent way to get it legally (afaik there is only one online music store in Argentina, ubbi msica, and it sucks).
First they insult you. You criticize them. Then they insult you some more.
End conclusion: the guy don’t know how to write besides others things… Perhaps some of the posters should write the posts for him. 
I stopped reading after:
These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.
Yeah, I’d have to say that was badly-worded at best.
In fact, I argue the opposite is true. Proprietary software users engage in far more “piracy” (as defined by their vendors) than Free Software users do. A lot of it is even unintentional. But even malicious “pirates” are going to be using proprietary software. What use is the GPL to someone who ignores license restrictions anyway?
Really though, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who regularly uses computers and has never violated a license (even by accident). We are all former “pirates”. So I’d suggest that singling out one group of us to tar with “the P word” is just a really Bad Idea.
It would be fair to say that those folks who just can’t abide by restrictive software used to have no choice but break the law, and now they have a choice. I suspect (hope) that’s what he was trying to get at.
The Regex Coach (http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) works for me.
It works for me too! It’s a great tool.
I’ve read through a hundred plus comments, and am surprised that no one mentioned the legal aspect. The last corporation I worked for ABSOLUTELY FORBID open-source software for accountability reasons. They could not sue if something went wrong. I’ve talked with a few friends, and they tell the same story. So there is still a market for major companies to license software with a warranty in case you lose a few million using it.
A commercial program that is superior to a freeware alternative often has little chance of attracting users. Why? Well, because most users only need so many features. I took a quick look at the websites of Beyond Compare and for WinMerge. If I wanted a comparison tool, I’d probably go for WinMerge because it has the basic functionality I need. I don’t need 100 features when I’m just going to use 10.
This is why many people choose Deepburner over Nero Burning Rom and why some people still stay with Internet Explorer 6, rather than switching to IE7 or Firefox and even these alternatives are free, too! If it’s got what you need, why get something else?
I’m sure if someone made a Resharper-Free that implemented 10% of the features the commercial Resharper has, it’d be just as popular or even more-so than its costly counterpart. And that’s just 10%
@o.s. “The same can’t be said for Communism or Socialism though. Those governments have always actively worked to crush anyone who disagrees with them.”
I very much doubt you know what Socialism is if you’re saying things like that. So many people think “Commie == Socialist == BAD!!” without knowing what any of them are or how they are different from each other. Sigh.
Socialism does not crush those who disagree any more than any other way of running things.
Tim: “They could not sue if something went wrong”
Good luck suing a software vendor when something goes wrong. Maybe a large corp can leverage their buying power to get free licensing or compensation, but commercial software companies are notorious for their lack of liability. Its part of practically every licensing agreement in existence.
@Greg: Absolutely, and that was kind-of the point that I failed to make;
For example, by the time you search for it, find it, blog/talk/proselytize about it, you could have easily shelled out the $30 for a RegExBuddy or $40 for a BeyondCompare and save much time and effort.
I write software for a living, for my own business. Self-employed. An army of just 1. Believe me, nobody wants to spend money needlessly less than I do. It’s really coming directly out of my pocket, off of my bottom-line, food-on-my-table etc.
But I’ll drop $30 on Beyond Compare (or whatever) and move on to the next problem. If Scooter go under in the future (heaven forbid that they should) and I find myself suddenly needing a file compare program and also somehow my copy of BC has stopped working, then I’ll worry about the cost of finding and buying that program again there and then. Right now, I’m thinking about today, tomorrow and maybe the next 12 months. I’m not worrying about the potential long-term lock-in cost of buying a utility program, because that lock-in cost is not going to bite me in the next year or so; as a small businessman, that’s the only period of time I’m really focussing on. Who knows where I’ll be in 2 years time?
While I accept for many others this isn’t the case, for me it’s absolutely simple; I can hit Google, find the ‘popular solution’, make a relatively quick, semi-informed choice, buy the tool, do the job and move on to the next problem. It’s not even so much the time involved in finding the open-source alternatives, or asking people for recommendations - it’s the simple fact that the cost of these things is usually truly insignificant. If BC was a $300 purchase, then it would warrant some consideration. If it was a $3000 purchase, I’d naturally research it and look for ways to either justify the cost (or find alternatives). But at $30, it’s a buy, use move on thing.
To me, so much stuff changes in the real world on a day by day basis, that worrying about whether a utility tool vendor is going to be around in a couple of years time is just a waste of my time.
I understand why other people want the ability to get inside the source code, but am I ever really going to get inside that source code? Pretty damn unlikely. So having the source code is a comfort, but in reality that’s all it is - it’s very unlikely that I would take-up a chunk of source code (probably developed in a tool I’m not familiar with) and try to fix, or adapt something in the future. Probably better to simply swallow the cost and find another supplier/vendor.
Though, like I said, I appreciate that we get all sorts of developers here from all walks of life and from following the often heated comments above, clearly I’m in the minority!
PHP is the Visual Basic 6 of the UNIX world. It’s broken, kludged up garbage for lowest-common-denominator programmers. But it’s dirt-simple to start with, so it’s become ubiquitous garbage.
By the way, I pay for open source software all the time, but It’s because I tried the software and found it useful. Not all open source people are like that guy.
I saw here and there reasonings in the form “We pay to get beers, there is no free beers”. Hum, I think reality is a bit more complex… Some open-source hardware designs examples :
- High-quality servomotor : http://www.openservo.com
- 3d printers : http://fabathome.org
- Telescopes : most of the designs are available
Those open-source designs are made by people that needed it, and are already well paid enough to share those designs.
In the same way, it’s quite reasonable to think about free printings of beer production device, with variations to get Mexican or Belgian taste. Then you get real free beer… Of course you have to pay to build the beer production device, to get the ingredients, the electricity. It’s the same with free software : even you get them for free, you still have to learn to use them, to have a computer… They don’t kill the economy, they are not non-sense. Just an other way to do business, which tend to lower the individual profit, but raise the global profit, because of the knowledge sharing.
Regards,
Alex
I agree with most of the topic, but many things that I can argue with. the first is that “free” definitely does not mean “the same for all”. “free” means equal right to compete, to create fair competitive market
Yeah, I also suggest www.omfica.org
I found many answers to the discussed topic there. Now I see that it is possible to rise individual benefits, intangible to some extent, but benefits, from egalitarian point of view!!!
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
If you take your head out of your butt and read the sentence in context, you will notice it says “these people” referring to people who won’t pay for software no matter the cost, from the sentence less than a line away. He isn’t stating OSS enthusiast == pirate. Some of you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills or perhaps you just like trolling.
For every OSS advocate who won’t use a commercial product, there are still two Windows developers who won’t use Linux or anything that smacks of it because it’s “a toy.”
At one development job I had another programmer essentially wrote his own string processing library from scratch in C because he didn’t trust regular expressions (since they were associated in his mind with Unix, Berkeley, free software, etc.—all lumped together as “noncommercial” and therefore crap).
“A commercial program that is superior to a freeware alternative often has little chance of attracting users. Why? Well, because most users only need so many features. I took a quick look at the websites of Beyond Compare and for WinMerge. If I wanted a comparison tool, I’d probably go for WinMerge because it has the basic functionality I need. I don’t need 100 features when I’m just going to use 10.”
But a lot of people need to be able to access that functionality easily and clearly, and that’s where a lot of OS software falls apart. Which is ironic, because it’s exponentially easier to make less functionality easily accessible.
That said, that is an OSS strength. “Less functionality, but it’s the stuff you ACTUALLY use.”