LWN writes about a InformationWeek interview to Linus Torvalds: "Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn't have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral. Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not 'evil' or 'immoral', it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade - it's just a superior way of working together and generating code."
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Member since:2006-04-21
The problem with your statement is that you're not seeing the big picture. You're focusing on the details. Call it manufacturing, authoring, producing, whatever...the end result is the same: A product is made. It doesn't matter how it's made.
On the contrary, it does. In an effort to get away from the tired analogies, I'll say "consider...books". If books were developed the same way as proprietary software, then not only would you have to learn how to read English to read English books, but you'd also have to learn (for example) Rowlingish to read Harry Potter, or (better example) Quenya, Sindarin or Westron to read Tolkien. It takes time to learn a language and to learn to read it (particularly if for some reason, the written and spoken languages are very different, as they are with English, French and Finnish). If you had to learn Quenya/Sindarin/Westron to read Tolkien, Rowlingish to read Harry Potter, and Dickensian to read Great Expectations, not only would few people read Tolkien/Rowling/Dickens, but also, not much other reading would get done by those who did take the trouble to read them.
In the real world, however, Tolkien for example specifically stated that he kept the amount of Quenya/Sindarin to a minimum, and rendered "Westron" into English, etc., in order to maximize his audience.
You can get both if you are willing to pay for it. A non-trivial peice of software is equally as complex as a manufacturing plant, and thus would take a comparable amount of time just to get brought up to speed on (i.e. you can't just dive in and start hacking away). But that's the problem, I think a lot of folks equate "open source" with free when that's not the case. Most professionals aren't going to start readily contributing to some software without getting paid to do so.
Completely agree. However, if you have in-house programmers, you don't necessarily need outside expertise to modify a product, and if you have a closed-source product which uses proprietary formats (which often seems to be the very motivation for closed-source) then if/when the company goes belly-up, you don't have a means of supporting the product. In such an environment basically the only two possible outcomes are that companies use a variety of different formats, which is inconvenient, or else that a given vendor effectively gains a monopoly, which reduces interoperability problems but also ensures that "the throat" that people would like to choke when things go wrong in effect "gets too thick" for any but the strongest to choke. In that sense open source, relying as it does on open protocols amongst other things, really is the David that goes up against the Goliath that few other combatants have a hope of defeating.
Member since:
2005-07-06
"The problem with this statement is you're confusing hardware with software."
The problem with your statement is that you're not seeing the big picture. You're focusing on the details. Call it manufacturing, authoring, producing, whatever...the end result is the same: A product is made. It doesn't matter how it's made.
"I can get better collaboration by allowing other people (outside of my company) to work with my software to improve it - I cannot work with other people (outside of my manufacturing plant) to work with my process of manufacturing easily."
You can get both if you are willing to pay for it. A non-trivial peice of software is equally as complex as a manufacturing plant, and thus would take a comparable amount of time just to get brought up to speed on (i.e. you can't just dive in and start hacking away). But that's the problem, I think a lot of folks equate "open source" with free when that's not the case. Most professionals aren't going to start readily contributing to some software without getting paid to do so.
There is one area of software where I think paying outside individuals to contribute is worthwhile is security stuff. Other than, "outside" collaboration is more costly/trouble than it's worth in the end.