IP-WARS.NET || The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source

The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source

By ColonelZen, Section General Articles
Posted on Mon Sep 19th, 2005 at 18:00:42 EST

The web organ of the British Computer Society has ejaculated The Trouble with Open Source. This is a clear FUD piece but it is very well written - undoubtedly better than this rebuttal will be, but it is FUD after all and it's semantic assertions apart from it's literary polish are contrary, debatable and in most instances simply incorrect.

It's worst offenses come in it's bullet points of "some of the issues surrounding OSS that aren't normally aired in public" itself a prejudicial statement imputing first that the assertions that follow are unassailable truth and that there exists some clandestine attempt to silence discussion of the matter.

His first bullet point seems to assert that F/OSS is either mostly lawfully illegitimate or can't happen at all. His assertion of illegitimacy "However, when it comes to software professionals ... Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer." may or may not be true in the UK but it certainly is not a universal truth in the US. First obviously if you have a release from your employer it is not true, and secondly the rights of the employer to "intellectual property" generated by an employee not directly related to their job varies (very) widely in the US from state to state. This particular piece of FUD comes straight from ADTI - and I among many others have previously dealt with it, in my case in Brownian Commotion. Beyond the standard MS/ADTI FUD talking point he completely misses the fact that much F/OSS is now directly generated under auspices of the corporate world.

The next point Conceptual Integrity is a baldfaced attempt to confuse the less knowing reader between the nature of F/OSS as a whole and the nature of individual software projects within F/OSS. Yes F/OSS overall is very like a spontaneous bazaar of amorphous structure and little control or clear direction. But the individual projects under the F/OSS umbrella are not like that at all. Most smaller ones may be the work of a single individual and larger ones are usually organized under a single "benevolent dictator". In large projects there can be a hierarchy of lieutenants, or there may be elections to choose the overall leader. But projects do find the leadership they need - or they fall by the wayside to be supplanted by projects and teams doing a better job. Reading Mr. Marshall's paragraph on this, you'd think that large F/OSS projects are innately impossible, and that I could never be writing this on gedit, reading his article and posting mine on firefox to a web site running Scoop, served by Apache and running Linux. Nope, large F/OSS software projects can't happen because F/OSS cannot generate a clear vision or "Conceptual Integrity" for its projects.

The third bullet, that "The Open Source movement, with its hacker ethic, doesn't promote professionalism" is a little hard to take when most of us are professionals. But it also doesn't clearly define what Mr. Marshall means by "professionalism" either, and there is little else in the way of elaboration here than an attempt to raise fear by asserting that a lack of professionalism was somehow responsible for the economic calamity of the video games industry was "nearly destroyed" by "bedroom programmers". One imagines that Steve Balmer's worst fear is Linus in his pajamas! More seriously aside from pure emotional connotation this "point" must struggle mightily to avoid being a tautology - that software not written for pay - ergo under professional auspices - does not promote professionalism.

The final bullet points to the lack of a killer app from F/OSS to denigrate the level of innovation in it. Well, when was the last "killer app" at all? Well I know one... several actually: Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Or lets go back a bit: Sendmail and later The World Wide Web itself? Multiple desktops? Beowulf clusters? It's easy to claim a lack of innovation in F/OSS to people who only use Windows; by definition they aren't paying attention to what F/OSS is doing. Actually the one and only purpose of this paragraph is a subtle FUD in support of the SCO's long since debunked claims against Linux.

It's a pity these bullet points were so lame as the article actually began with quite the humorous note. It characterized the polarization as "communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind" versus "greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support." Somehow this doesn't quite jibe with IBM and HP working with F/OSS projects.

Actually the article is clearly aimed at the author's fear that F/OSS may contribute to the decline of a native software industry in the UK. His final horror is "the nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between. Where would our freedom of choice be then?"

What he fails to distinguish is that the economic drain imposed upon the commonwealth by the "taxation" by Microsoft of companies "locked into an endless cycle of product upgrades, which can be almost impossible to break free from" (Mr. Marshall's words) may in fact be a large part of why British companies (as with all companies around the world) do not have the wealth or incentive to invest in resident software talent and promote indigenous software companies. Free software gives you the freedom to use virtually all of your software support budget locally rather than export it to Redmond. But that would be your freedom of choice. Then.

--------------------
Copyright 2005 by Terrence W. Zellers. This article is available for publication under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license as published at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 editorial, 7 hidden)

Re: Assorted nicks (4.42 / 7) (#7)
by JCausey (jcausey@ip-wars.net) on Tue Sep 20th, 2005 at 23:06:21 EST
(User Info) http://www.ip-wars.net

Instead of posting any lengthy analysis (or a reply to Marshall), I'll just post 'em as I find 'em.

From the article, Marshall states (in the Professionalism bullet:

There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.

I had to go look this up and found a good wikipedia entry. There, they indicate the cause of the crash was a combination of three factors:

a weak economy, a profusion of poor quality games (particularly the Atari 2600 versions of Pac-Man and E.T.), and very aggressive marketing of inexpensive home computers, especially the Commodore 64

Later in the entry, there is a brief history of the production of low-quality games:

However, video game companies also played a role in the crash. For example, when Atari issued its widely panned E.T. game, it manufactured millions of units in anticipation of a major hit. Unfortunately, the game had been rushed to market, and its low quality yielded poor sales, leaving Atari with huge stocks of product unable to be sold. The game was literally put together in mere months and rushed out onto the market.
...
Unlike Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony in later decades, the hardware manufacturers lost the exclusive control of their platforms' supply of games. This led to a flood of lower-quality third party titles. Activision was co-founded by four Atari employees in 1979, who left the company because Atari did not allow credits to appear on the games and did not pay employees a royalty based on sales. Atari quickly sued to block sales of Activision's products, but lost the case in 1982. This court case legitimized third party development, and companies as ill-prepared as Quaker Oats rushed to open video game divisions,
...
Unlike Activision, they did not have top designers to create the games. Games such as Chuck Wagon and Kool Aid Man were less then stellar examples of games that companies would make in the hopes of selling their product and taking advantage of the video game boom.
...
The rush to market of so many substandard games by poorly prepared publishers in 1982 flooded the market. When stores went to return goods to these new publishers, the publishers had neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers' money. Many, like Games by Apollo and the ill-fated Quaker Oats games unit (US Games), quickly folded. Inside Mattel, one Intellivision sales executive explained the problem by saying, "Two years of products have been pushed into the channel in one year, and there's no way to re-balance the system."

Comparing this history (see the end of comment for other links to similar descriptions of the 1983 crash)) to what Marshall wrote, I do not see the parallels between the video game industry's "bedroom programmers" and OSS. This is mainly because I get the impression there were no bedroom programmers - only lots of really big companies trying to cash in on the latest craze, and doing a very poor job of it. Of course, as Zen points out, much of the development of at least major OSS applications now are being undertaken by large corporations (I think I've seen a figure of 80% of contributions annually?). For good or bad, it certainly appears to me the F/OSS model has moved from the "bedroom programmers" smack into the middle of corporate boardrooms.

In an interesting twist, imo, the wikipedia entry goes on to point out some of the steps companies took to battle substandard game development. This was mainly done through new uses of copyright law and forcing other developors to license the right to develop games for a particular platform. The leader in this (according to the wikipedia entry) was Nintendo. As is wryly noted, Nintendo's aggressive attempts to maintain control

has worked against them as their market share in the industry has dropped over the last decade.

Hmm, a company using intellectual property laws to try to shut out competition? Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there?

Some other sources regarding the 1983 video game crash the curious may want to check out:
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Video_games:_The_crash_of_1983
http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play3sta1.htm
http://www.buzzcut.com/filemgmt/visit.php?lid=3 (a Word document - I only viewed the Google translation)

I did some research on Mr. Marshall, but nothing that I can verify yet. I think he is the same Stephen Marshall employed by Calumet Electronics Corp., but the connection is tenous at best. He did mention the University of Glasgow in the BCS article and I also found a Stephen Marshall listed in a directory of University of Glasgow people that seems to confirm the Calumet connection.

I have not found anything tying Calumet and Microsoft together. Likewise, nothing has turned up yet between the BCS and Microsoft (though BCS does run their web site on IIS).

Next I'm going to look at his claims about the harm to the indigenous UK software industry by F/OSS. I have some materials here that I think will easily refute that, but I have to dig them out first.

Jeff

Re: Assorted nicks by JCausey, 09/22/2005 09:33:17 EST (3.83 / 6)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source (4.16 / 6) (#14)
by codswallet on Wed Sep 28th, 2005 at 00:25:32 EST
(User Info)

So, it would appear that the only people who are actually free to participate in OSS projects are self-employed or unemployed software professionals, students and enthusiastic amateurs. Anyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP. This does not square well with the altruistic image of OSS.

There are more "self-employed or unemployed software professionals, students and enthusiastic amateurs" these days than 9 to 5 employed programmers. There are also a fair number of retired and semi-retired programmers, members or related professions - physicists, engineers, chemists and mathematicians and former programmers now in management. Also much OSS comes from companies like IBM, so it's hardly "illegal activity", and many programmers insist, as I do, that they have an agreement in writing that all progammming not in the product area of the company is theirs. Most companies have no problem with this. They have no use for random pieces from a large FOSS project.

. Like any engineering design project, good software needs a designer (or software architect in the current industry jargon) with a clear design concept which must be adhered to rigorously otherwise the software becomes progressively messier as it is developed in a piecemeal manner. Fred Brooks, the computing pioneer and author of the defining publication in the software engineering field, The Mythical Man-Month, calls this 'conceptual integrity'. We only have to look at the history of the electronic computer to see that the greatest advances in technology have been made by brilliant, strong-willed individuals, usually supported by a small team of dedicated engineers - not community-based projects.

The oldest eristic argument trick in the book - the simple assertion of something false. Most people don't know enough software history to refute this.
Most large FOSS projects are modular collections of individually testable components. The history of large projects with "conceptual integrity" has been, on the whole, a disaster. As for small projects, why does the non-FOSS community have a monopoly on "brilliant, strong-willed individuals"? My experience is that there are more of them outside the corporate sector, beause they're too strong-willed to work in that environment, where they are considered loose cannons.

As for FOSS projects, Unix comes to mind. Even under AT&T a great deal of the utility software for UNIX was donated, and then there's Berkeley Unix. The Arpanet is another example. On the other hand ADA has all the conceptual integrity in the world, but even the government coudn't make people use it. The ISO protocols had lots of "conceptual integrity", but somehow we seem to have ended up with TCP/IP.

Innovation: The absence of design leadership in the OSS development process and a motivation for OSS developers to create free versions of their favourite proprietary software may also explain why there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application. Linux is an excellent example. Although it contains many powerful new tools and utilities, Linux is in essence a facsimile of Unix, a proprietary operating system first developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1969. Ironically, the legendary robustness of Linux actually owes more to the good design of Unix and its older relative, Multics, than it does the OSS development process.

This is also utter crap. Innovation has nothing to do with "Killer apps". Most of them are blindingly obvious and appeared as soon as the technology was available to support them. As for Linux, there's more innovation in it than in SCOX's version. But more important, it isn't the aim of Linux to be innovative. OS innovation, for example, occurs in small projects like L4. When it becomes established technology, it may end up in Linux. People don't like massive innovation in each new OS release, something that should surprise no one.

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source (3.15 / 13) (#1)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Sep 20th, 2005 at 05:57:13 EST

<<
From its humble origins in the 'hacker' culture of US computer science laboratories in the 1970s, open source software (OSS) has grown to become arguably the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor.
>>

Well, `hacker' is a loaded term for sure, but yeah, OSS had its roots in the 1970's. It was called UNIX at the time.

<<
At the heart of OSS is a wonderful idealistic notion that appeals to our caring, sharing side.
>>

At the heart of it, is that programmers like to program. Fsck off btch.

<<
The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support. Instead, there are communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind. Unsullied by the sordid world of commerce, the code that they produce is somehow purer and more ethical than proprietary software.
>>

God, you do like to babble on, don't you. The heart of it is programmers like to program. Did I mention Fsck off.

We LIKE what we do. We would do it even if we were not paid. You don't understand that concept do you? Starving artists? Aspiring actresses/actors waiting tables? Writers in dives? What the hell do you think a programmer is anyway?

<<
This utopian vision of technology is championed by high-profile pressure groups such as the Free Software Foundation and embraced by cyber-liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
>>

As opposed to a low pressure group such as Microsoft's marketing department. Blow me.

<<
However, OSS would not have become the powerful force that it is today without also having wider appeal.
<<

Damned, you finally got something right. How many sentences did it take you?

<<
However, OSS would not have become the powerful force that it is today without also having wider appeal.
>>

Blow me, I was never a hippy. Fsckhole.

<<
OSS also appeals to a deep-seated fear within many hard-nosed IT managers in organizations whose reliance on a particular software product may be critical to their business.
>>

No sht. So you want me to count the number of proprietary software companies we have important applications from that went belly up?

<<
Such organizations tend to have major concerns over the risk of inadequate or diminishing support for the product, either through product obsolescence or if the vendor goes bust.
>>

Um, Duh.

<<
They become locked into an endless cycle of product upgrades, which can be almost impossible to break free from.
>>

I did mention Duh, right?

<<
With OSS solutions, users have the comfort of a large developer community that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon and there is always the option of supporting the software in-house as the source code is freely accessible.
>>

Damned, you bought a clue!

<<
Despite the overt counterculture
>>

Great I am still a hippy. So what is your past writer boy?

<<
and anti-globalization agendas
>>

Stop the presses! OSS is against globalization! Film at eleven. God that was so clueless.

<<
displayed by certain sections of the open source movement,
>>

Some names would be helpful here you know. Oh wait, that would mean you know what a reporter does for a living...

<<
many governments are now also turning towards OSS in their quest for an information society for every citizen.
>>

Whatever the hell you meant by that.

<<
Many of the proponents of OSS seem to have been captivated by the idea of a free lunch
>>

Maybe perhaps, they have been captivated by the idea of understanding what their freaking computer is doing.

<<
and may have failed to consider the longer-term effect of OSS on our fragile software ecosystem.
>>

Oh great, software is now wetlands. Save the freaking spotted owl! What total blather.

<<
Let us examine some of the issues surrounding OSS that aren't normally aired in public:
>>

And on that note, I turn you over to Zen...

-Dio. Who is still probably potential recruit since I cannot figure out how signing on works on this site.

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by matesrates, 09/20/2005 11:28:05 EST (3.55 / 9)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by rex007can, 09/20/2005 12:07:52 EST (3.70 / 10)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by Sunny, 09/20/2005 12:46:25 EST (4.00 / 6)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by matesrates, 09/20/2005 15:41:59 EST (3.85 / 7)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by Sunny, 09/20/2005 18:08:39 EST (3.50 / 6)

Re: The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source by rex007can, 09/22/2005 10:47:11 EST (3.00 / 4)

Since when is Dio a troll? by Potential Recruit, 09/22/2005 18:04:01 EST (2.37 / 8)

Re: Since when is Dio a troll? by rex007can, 09/26/2005 11:30:48 EST (4.00 / 6)

Re: Since when is Dio a troll? by ColonelZen, 09/26/2005 15:04:35 EST (3.60 / 5)

Re: Since when is Dio a troll? by rex007can, 09/28/2005 08:43:22 EST (3.33 / 3)

Re: Since when is Dio a troll? by Potential Recruit, 09/27/2005 18:58:25 EST (3.50 / 4)

Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#23)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 11:31:41 EST

This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

The Trouble with The Trouble with Open Source | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 editorial, 7 hidden)

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