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Long Live Closed-Source Software?
Journal written by EvilRyry (1025309) and posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 30, 2007 02:36 PM
from the i-am-something-of-a-fan-of-closed-source-games dept.
from the i-am-something-of-a-fan-of-closed-source-games dept.
EvilRyry writes "In an article for Discover Magazine, Jaron Lanier writes about his belief that open source produces nothing interesting because of a hide-bound mentality. 'Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.'"
Related Stories
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IT: Security of Open vs. Closed Source Software 366 comments
morhoj writes "Cambridge University researcher Ross Anderson just released a paper concluding that open source and closed source software are equally secure. Can't find a copy of the paper online yet, but I thought this would make for an interesting morning conversation. You may not agree with him, but anyone who's on the BugTraq List can tell you that open source software isn't as bug free as we would all like to think." I found Anderson's paper, so read it for yourself. There are some other interesting papers being presented at the conference as well.
[+]
Linux: The Future of Closed Source Software and Linux 566 comments
slashy writes "What is the future of closed source software and Linux? OSWeekly.com delves into the subject and emerges with a possible answer. Quote: "I have been struggling with one major problem lately with the Linux operating system and that problem is the amazing lack of new and exciting software. It's frustrating because by the time said software does finally make its way down to the Linux user, the Windows crowd has been using it for nearly a year or longer.
Perhaps some of this is because there does not appear to be a clear, simple to follow outline cooperative for companies to design for the open source operating system. Arguably this is because of the perceived need to keep things "open," however, I feel it's time for Linux to grow up and find some kind of common ground with the closed source community. I am a firm believer that both parties could learn a lot from each other; unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon."
[+]
IT: Security — Open Vs. Closed 101 comments
AlexGr points out an article in ACM Queue, "Open vs. Closed," in which Richard Ford prods at all the unknowns and grey areas in the question: is the open source or the closed source model more secure? While Ford notes that "there is no better way to start an argument among a group of developers than proclaiming Operating System A to be 'more secure' than Operating System B," he goes on to provide a nuanced and intelligent discussion on the subject, which includes guidelines as to where the use of "security through obscurity" may be appropriate.
[+]
Linux: Closed Source On Linux and BSD? 526 comments
An anonymous reader writes "I want to start (very small) software/hardware business. The code in question will be closed source. I won't modify or use any GPL code or any 3rd-party sources. It will be my own handwritten C/C++ code from start to finish. I am planning to sell embedded-like boxes with an OS (Linux or BSD) and this code. I am more familiar with Linux but I am scared a little bit of Linux licensing, and also of Linux fanboy-ism: I personally got a 'go to hell with your @#$ closed code' slur on Slashdot. I am not a GPL guru and not a software freedom fighter. I just want to do my job and make a living." Read on for this reader's five particular questions.
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As a creative open source developer... (Score:3, Insightful)
One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
UNIX.
The original versions shipped with source code. It was only when AT&T tried to make money on it that the source code closed down, and then guess what happened? dozens of incompatible versions became the norm.
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Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because trying to lead open-source developers is like herding cats. Unless you're holding their can of food, they won't go where you want. And if you can't make all of them focus on the single project you want accomplished, you don't get anything done without a huge mass of so many people that everyone can do what they please and you'll still have enough people going your way. But the only way to get that size a mass of volunteers is to work on a "sure thing" project with an established design that moves towards a goal everyone can already see -- to copy an established product.
For example, wasn't the OpenMoko team supposed to have released a user-ready package of hardware and software by now?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's because trying to lead open-source developers is like herding cats. Unless you're holding their can of food, they won't go where you want. And if you can't make all of them focus on the single project you want accomplished, you don't get anything done without a huge mass of so many people that everyone can do what they please and you'll still have enough people going your way.
This is precisely why there are companies who gladly hold the food by paying salaries to developers of open source software, so you can lead them where you want them to go. IBM, Redhat, Sun, etc. all make an excellent living guiding open source software where their business needs it to go. Open source software greatly lowers the barrier to entry into the market which, imho, increases innovation in how business is done. I mean seriuosly, I don't see closed source software making amazing technical breakth
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
I would actually hand the prize for OSS development to Ubuntu Linux made by Canonical. They got around the "good, cheap, fast: choose two" dichotomy by using philanthropic funds, and the result is a system that manages to almost not betray its decades-old foundations. DISCLAIMER: I am an OS X user, though I can fully understand how Apple obviously takes the path of "good and fast" by throwing "cheap" out the window.
I'd say we've reached the point where people problems hold as back more than actual technological problems. If OpenMoko got their shit together (I really wanted one, so now I love to use them as an example of a failed project.), we could all be running mobile phones with multi-touch interfaces, cheap service plans, WiFi internet access, and best of all, software at least open enough to let us program the device. Such a device would, if sold cheaply enough, put established mobile phone and the less savvy mobile video gaming companies out of business, and we have the technology to produce it. It's just the people causing problems.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand now. Throughout this discussion, I just thought you were an idiot. Now I see that you're a fanboy.
There are so many truly innovative open-source projects I couldn't name them all, but most just don't get much support because
Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
At the same time, we haven't seen any really innovative ground-up OS's be developed lately because the market can't support them. What ever happened to AmigaOS anyway (the original version, not the new attempted reincarnation)? Hence we are stuck with largely incrimental developments from three old operating systems: CP/M (-
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there's some merit to the idea. Many open source projects don't have a concept of a deve
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Particularly with the last two examples, sometimes a dual GPL/Proprietary license helps things. The GPL is viral, so if you're selling a library, you can sell it to people that want to sell things
Parent
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
wheel
There are certain ideas that are hard to improve upon beyond minor cosmetic and detail changes. There are a lot of things one can do to improve wheels -- materials, suspension, etc -- but changing the fundamental shape isn't one of them.
(And yes, one can invent radically new concepts for transportation -- e.g. wings -- but they don't solve the fundamental problems that wheels solve.)
Unix/linux, word processors, spreadsheets, etc solve certain fundamental problems. You want radically different software, look in radically different problem areas (as some other posters have noted).
There are certain shapes of non-round rollers that work fine, and even lumpy wheels work, but after continued use they'll both wear themselves to a circular wheel shape. Twenty years ago Henry Spencer's sig said "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly", and Microsoft (among others) has been proving him right.
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Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
You just made the authors point for him, bravo.
To say that UNIX is a "wheel" is garbage. UNIX (and Windows, which is based on similar concepts) is a moth eaten dirty piece of cloth. It's got giant problems. Look at malware for one. Look at how many jokes revolve around software crashes of some sort, for another.
Before claiming that UNIX is like a wheel, go read up on modern operating system research. Seeing as you have a low opinion of Microsoft, might as well start there - try reading Singularity: Rethinking the software stack [microsoft.com] from Microsoft Research. They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection. There are no traditional processes, or syscalls. Instead the basic unit of software is a "Software Isolated Process" or SIP that is statically verified and compiled to machine code at install time. SIPs cannot be arbitrarily modified after installation. The whole thing is a single address space microkernel, except without the performance problems that scuppered previous microkernel attempts (because there are no context switches). A new security model based on verifiable type systems, state-machine based messaging and pre-declared intents allow for the construction of systems that are far more resistant to malware and unstable 3rd party extensions than today.
And they only just got started.
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Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
These are certainly problems that Windows has, but I don't see the relevance to modern unix-like operating systems. A modern alloy wheel with radial tires isn't the same as an old wooden chariot wheel, but they're both round; that's the essential "wheelness". Microsoft still hasn't figured out that an array of spokes works better if connected to a rim, they're too busy trying to figure out what color spokes work best.
As for the work you describe, it bears about as much relation to real-world operating systems as anti-gravity research does to wheels. Yeah, sounds wonderful, it'd be nice if it worked, but there are some fundamental reasons why it won't.
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Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
It would also be easier if software authors got a grip and stopped creating huge and unwieldy dependency trees for every little feature they add. Do we really need to ship a shared library for libquxblortsnort when it's all of 10k and used by exactly three projects in the known universe? Perhaps the author should just include the library with their source and link it statically.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
a) The creation of something novel
b) The exploitation of something new
The area that Open Source shines in is B. Now, it may be that you can achieve greater speed of deliverable in the A part by getting a bunch of antisocial bastards together to work hard on something so they can use it as leverage on the rest of us. But, at the end of the day, that leverage reduces the value of that creation.
If I invent something new, but you're not allowed to use it, there's n
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To be honest, the only piece of innovation that's really given me a "Wow!" moment in Open Source is the Mylyn project from Eclipse.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Going from "is my work really outdated?" to "How can I keep my work from becoming outdated?" and implicitly assumes that the work _is_ outdated. Wasting time considering how to deal with inane questions from clueless intellectual artiste is just stupid.
Would you ask your plumber how to improve network design just because some guy thinks the Internet is a series of tubes?
Sure, it's important to have constructive criticisms and developers certainly should be open to such, but it's just as important t
bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Having used all of the above, what's especially innovative about any of them?
Okay, I'll bite back. I can't speak to Hibernate or Spring, but I will speak to Eclipse.
Eclipse is a fully mature, OSGi-compliant tools platform that just happens to be, in its default form, a self-hosted Java IDE. However, Eclipse itself can be transmogrified [eclipse.org] into anything you want it to be, including application servers, games, smart clients, and software that helps run both the Dutch railway and NASA's Mars rovers. That seems pretty innovative to me.
Sure, right, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I'm keenly aware I'm preaching to the choir. This article is the most flame-baiting piece I've seen on the front page in a long, long time. I have to admit, it'll be good for driving traffic, and unfortunately the author is probably going to make a bunch of money on it. He won't get my clicks, though... I flatly refuse to read TFA.
Re:Sure, right, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody knows there's not a shred of original code or thought on such sites as SourceForge.
And what is the innovative code?
And let's just completely write off sites like Open Source Alternatives, because they've never listed any software that showed promise or included innovative new features.
And again, WHAT IS IT? Sure, there is a LOT of code out there. But show me the OSS software out there that screams, "Wow! That's unbelievably clever!" And sure, there's some *popular* OSS software, but as I pointed out in another post, popular does not mean innovative.
So far, I haven't seen any posts with a long list of examples of OSS innovation. Just screaming that there "just has" to be a lot of innovation... look at all the lines of code!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not good enough? Okay, let's put things in a different light: open applications tend to lower boundaries to broad adoption, and tend to follow open standards. Commercial software firms do not have a vested interest in maintaining open standards for development, as this inhibits their ab
Re:Sure, right, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, you only list a handful. Only two of them are actual desktop productivity software, and only one is widely used. The rest are back-end stuff, and a protocol. The bittorent applications that people actualy use are often closed-source. I'm not sure by what definition bittorrent itself is an "application."
Firefox is the only one that is widely seen by end users. Poen Office is not widely used. Or perhaps your fingers are too tired to type out the names of the FOSS applications that are used as much as Microsoft Office, iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat by the average user?
Parent
Re:Sure, right, yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
The question is not whether there's open source software, but whether it is creative or original.
KDE was designed as a copy of Windows. If you use Windows, you've used KDE and vice versa. I hated it from the start; I want something that's at least an attempt to provide a fresh experience.
OpenOffice is a blatant copy of one of the previous versions of Microsoft Office. It is distinguished only by the fact that it's free, on the good side, and that it's unoriginal and drab as Office 97 was. Whenever I've tried it, I feel like I'm back in 1997.
Consider Pages and Numbers, made by Apple. They are both bursting with original ideas, design innovation and creativity. I use them all the time and prefer them to both the Microsoft versions and Openoffice.
FireFox is a special case, since it was started as commercially funded development. Still, tabbed browsing, which I've always associated with it, was actually introduced by Opera, which is a commercial product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser#Tabbed_browsing [wikipedia.org]
MySQL has innovated, but it seems to be a largely proprietary product developed by a fairly small team - i.e. open source in name, but closed in development. The have a hybrid model where they license special versions and provide pay support. Alas, I have to ignore PG SQL since I have no experience on it.
Certainly nobody is going to argue that Apache configuration files are particularly user-friendly in this point and click age.
On the other hand, take Apple. The dock, coming from NeXT, was new and different compared to its forebears. Apple then put a lot of effort into reworking it to become more "Apple-like". KDE and Enlightenment, on the other hand, both have obvious copies of the Start menu.
The iPhone has an interface almost completely unlike any other phone, and of course it came from a commercial team determined to produce the world's best design. They were not trying to copy a HTC phone; they blazed their own path, in such a dramatic fashion that my jaw dropped when I first saw it, and now, despite its high cost, it's on my desk right now.
In conclusion, innovative software does seem to come from private companies. People who develop open source software are people who had a need for something they could not afford, and created a copy of their own. At the time Linux was developed, a SCO license cost $1,000! That kind of enterprise is something to be proud of, especially when done successfully. But when it comes to developing interesting and original products, the open source world is way behind.
There's nothing wrong with open source; I use a lot of it, and enjoy the fact that I can compete in the world without having to pay $10,000 for a Unix operating system and SQL database. But that doesn't mean it's interesting or innovative.
It would be nice if it was.
D
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The Author is a Fucktard (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth?
What, the same closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop that built a complete, adored operating system around BSD?
Re:The Author is a Fucktard (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA: "So Richard hatched a plan. [...] He would instigate a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, program: the Unix operating system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could control software culture. Eventually a kid named Linus Torvalds followed in Richard's footsteps and did something related [...]. His effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded open-software movement."
I have a lot of questions about this quote: What is dull about Unix? Is the author so ignorant that he really believe Linus was following in Stallman's footsteps, rather than challenging Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX microkernel design? There are some pretty fundamental differences between the philosophies of Stallman and Torvalds in regards to FOSS, the GPL, etc. For example, the Hurd kernel is (or will be) a microkernel, and Linus is keeping Linux under the GPL v2. Almost all modern operating systems are modeled after Unix... GNU/Linux, OS X, AIX, HP UX, MINIX, etc. Why reinvent the wheel?
The author has a lot to his credit; he's a very influential person, coined the term "virtual reality", and has taught at several Ivy League colleges. However, this article makes unsound claims and smells of anger and dejection. It's not worth sending him an email or flaming him, as he encouraged in the article. Let him vent. He's allowed to find FOSS boring. Software like Blender, Firefox, MythTV and Python will hold my attention for a very long time.
The article seems to be lacking in insight. For example, here's a quote attributed to him (from wikipedia.org):
"If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."
This is analogous to our belief that books have something to say, which devalues the people who wrote them and make us into idiots. There's nothing dehumanizing about reading what others have written. It's simply a form of communication.
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NIH syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's not what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
He's not saying that Open Source isn't great. He's just come back from a conference of researchers, and is saying that from a research perspective (which is not necessarily production), innovation and creativity doesn't tend to come through in open source projects, even if
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please don't lump the FSF in with "open source" (Score:3, Insightful)
New for news sake! (Score:5, Insightful)
Such remarks basically insult practitioners for a lack of imagination without giving any substantiation. "Who know how much better it could be" is an impotent whine [whinge]. The commentator reveals themselves.
Re:New for news sake! (Score:5, Insightful)
He's just come back from a research conference, and his point is with how new ideas get developed in a research environment. Right or wrong, he's not saying that open source isn't great, more stable, or a good choice for businesses and individual users who want something stable, reliable and useful. What he has said is that from his own observations, OSS is not a great model for fostering creativity and encouraging people to innovate and try radical new ways of doing things.
I'm not sure I fully agree with his view as he's stated because there are certainly some innovative ideas out there that have benefited a lot from OSS. He does have some merit with his arguments, though. Many of the popular OSS apps tend to be the ones that re-engineer ideas from closed source products.
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As if closed source isn't the same? (Score:5, Insightful)
OS creation isn't that interesting to most people, because once you know enough about it, you realize that while the Unix paradigm may not be perfect, getting to a current Unix's level of capability and stability would take decades.
What came before (Score:5, Interesting)
The Roman alphabet is far from ideal when it comes to reading and writing English, but we use it anyway. The spelling of many words in English is far from phonetic, but we continue to spell them that way just the same. The benefits of moving to a different set of symbols or a different spelling of some words are vastly outweighed by the costs involved.
This is what is known as a path dependency. The grass may be greener on the other side, but the price to be paid for moving there is profoundly prohibitive.
The same is true when it comes to computer science.
A reinvented wheel may be better than what it replaces, but the cost of its development does not justify the effort, assuming you can get anyone to adopt it.
It is easy to be creative when you don't have customers. When you don't have people who have come to use a particular product, or work within a particular paradigm, change is easy. Without these other people clogging up the way, it is easy to jump to a new way of doing things.
If no one used the Roman alphabet, finding a new one would be a snap! If the spelling of words wasn't standardized then implementing new phonetic spellings for things like "knight" would be easy.
Needless to say, this isn't going to happen.
He has a very small point... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is some very innovative open source stuff out there that has nothing to do with Linux. Including a few next-gen operating systems.
In fact, I think that the fact that open source programmers have gotten so much out of Linux that a 70s platform is *still viable and thriving* in 2007 says quite a bit about them - and the opposite of what the article was saying.
There are some legitimate criticisms of open source - this isn't one of them.
Someone remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
His name pops up every six months on Edge or
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, in craftsmanship old tools and techniques are often best. when I add to my century-old house, I pre
Jaron Lanier==Vanilla Ice (Score:3, Interesting)
Stupid phrasing (Score:3, Informative)
Clearly not acquainted with history (Score:5, Insightful)
Every piece of significant Internet technology designed, developed and deployed over the past 25-30 years has been open-source. Offhand, I could list everything related to Usenet and NNTP, Apache, perl, gopher, python, PGP, BIND, Firefox, archie, AFS, NFS, X, LDAP, MIME, majordomo and mailman, ruby, RCS, CVS, subversion, BSD Unix, Linux, sendmail, postfix, courier, exim, P2P and associated tools, IRC, a bunch of ASF projects, etc., etc., etc. These are the building blocks of what most people perceive as the contemporary Internet -- and I'd say that creating that has involved some serious innovation.
The biggest obstacle to innovation isn't open-source: it's software patents and the associated legal thicket that's being constructed to strangle innovation and thereby preserve the profits of the incumbents. I note with interest the the overwhelming majority of those engaging in this anti-innovation practice are vendors of closed-source software -- who are thereby admitting that they can't compete on merit, and so have to resort to unethical legal maneuvers to quash their competition. Oh, and the occasional open-source-is-bad propaganda piece.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Java, ASP/ASP.NET, C#, Flash, Exchange/Outlook, Adobe Reader, IE, Netscape, Google Search, Akamai caching, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc., etc., etc...
Don't confuse the blinders for the edge of the universe.
Yeah, /. and Digg sure bore the shit out me... (Score:3, Insightful)
As it so happens, I am producing a distributed film with FOSS [archive.org] called the Digital Tipping Point, and our community would never have been able to create all these great BASH scripts [digitaltippingpoint.com] to automate the process of capturing, compressing, and uploading the video to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection without the freedom of FOSS. Oh, and coincidentally, neither the Internet or the Internet Archive would exist without FOSS.
This guy clearly does not know what he is talking about.
It's true enough about Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of how good OSS is, CSS will live on (Score:3, Insightful)
Closed source software is very important to how people use computers, even if they tend to use OSS. For example, if, say, Windows XP or Mac OS X were fully open source, would you really choose Linux over them?
In a nutshell, the point I'm trying to make is that closed source software can be very good. True, that can't be said of certain products [microsoft.com], but Windows XP wasn't all that bad, Office 2007 (ignoring OOXML) is excellent, and since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple have always made a brilliant example of how to create good software; I'm typing this on Mac OS X Tiger now and it's excellent. True, its kernel is open-source, as are the GNU tools, and several of the APIs, but the rest of it is closed, and I truly don't mind using it.
While it's good to have something for free, it will take something enormous to get open-source on almost every machine in the way, say, Windows is. For example, a real innovation that makes open-source software dead simple to set up, and different to anything before it. Because - let's face it - Linux is a jargon minefield for the inexperienced user, and while Vista is no better, XP and Mac OS X are dead simple - two editions, that's it.
That said, I do have a problem with fierce monopolisation of software using closed-source, which makes Vista my case in point. So my case briefly is that I don't mind using closed-source software if it's good enough and reasonably priced. If it's open-source, that's the icing on the cake.
He does have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Lanier invented gloves-and-goggles virtual reality. I tried his original VR system back in the 1980s (novel concept, terrible lag), and met him back then. Lanier tries too hard to be cool, but he has done real work.
He does have a point about the Unix/Linux/open source ecosystem. Face it, Linux is pretty much like Unix, which dates from the 1970s. The Berkeley stuff from the 1980s (notably BIND and Sendmail) is still in use, buried under layers of cruft and still breaking. C programs are still crashing all the time. C++ didn't help much. X-Windows, which was never very good, has survived all its successors.
I never dreamed when I started using UNIX in 1978 that thirty years later it would still be a major system. I thought the future of operating systems would be more like Multics, with rings of protection, on cheaper hardware. Or like Tandem, a transaction processing system where the mean time between system failures was measured in decades. Or like UCLA Locus, where distributed processing really worked. But no. It's just minor variations on UNIX, forever.
That's what Lanier is pointing out. We have roughly the same problems at the bottom we had thirty years ago.
For the uninitiated (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking it's because while the basic concept of the Linux kernel is, well, the same kind of thing Linus put together all those years ago, based roughly on UNIX and all that, but he's wrong because the kernel code would have been completely replaced by now?
How different is the latest kernel from those that have gone before?
How does it compare to Windows, which has completely changed kernels (DOS to NT) through it's lifespan, adding 386 instruction support etc etc? Surely Linux has adapted to newer x86 hardware capabilities as they've become available?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then the fact that most software is still written in C/C++ should cause a tear or two.
The Unix way of doing things is extremely powerful. It's not the only way, but I haven't seen too many alternatives.
I too am dismayed at the efforts of
Re:Apache (Score:5, Informative)
curl -i 'http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/' | head -2
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