Long Live Closed-Source Software? 676
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.'"
As a creative open source developer... (Score:3, Insightful)
bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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: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.
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.
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.
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 it is only the 1 in 10 closed source projects that actually have something new. You've just claimed that you don't care about innovation and creativity for the production software you use in your business, but would rather have something stable. I don't follow why you have a problem with his opinion -- there's no relation.
It's true enough about Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, they're almost 1/4 as impressive as the commercial Smalltalk and Lisp environments we had in 1987.
Any argument relying on Java (which Alan Kay called "the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS") is going to fall kind of flat. Indeed, the fact that the new generation thinks that their Java tools are so cool is part of the problem.
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?
Re:As a creative open source developer... (Score:2, Insightful)
So when someone says "Your work is outdated", you should ask "is my work really outdated?". You can then follow up with questions like "How can I keep my work from becoming outdated?", and "how can I bring my work up to date?".
As a community, open-source developers should welcome criticism - it presents a great chance to improve, it improves the dialog about the overall quality of the software, and it gives non-programmers a way to help. This criticism may be baseless and wrong, but that's no excuse to ignore it!
Re:bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
The ability of someone to take GPL code, even expensive purchased software, and give it to anyone, anywhere, for free, hurts development in many cases.
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.
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!
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.
Re:Clearly not acquainted with history (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.
Re:Missing the design point? (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 the Linux community to clone Windows. Right down to the icons. Ugh! Let's innovate, people!
...laura
Re:Someone remind me (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, in craftsmanship old tools and techniques are often best. when I add to my century-old house, I prefer to use updated versions of century-old construction patterns and techniques, not just for continuity, but because they result in better construction than the way houses - even the more "innovative" ones - are slapped together now. And it's the same way with *nix. Updated versions of decades-old tools and design patterns build something not only more compatible, but in many dimensions actually better, than some freshly-invented blue-sky bag of tricks. The geodesic dome was brilliant and novel, yet obviously in retrospect not the way to go. The jury's still out on the VR stuff Jaron's fame is based on - which was something quite beyond the illustrated multi-player versions of Adventure that's all that's seen real success to date.
Still, Jaron wants art from software, whereas most here, like me, appreciate it more as a craft - closer to fine carpentry than abstract painting.
Re:Sure, right, yeah... (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 ability to control the use (and profit from) their products. If it weren't for open source software supporting open standards, I assure you we would have far fewer options in computing than we have now.
The simple fact that a college student can install any Linux distro he/she likes and start writing software is a great way to encourage research into computing. The compiler he's using may not be "original, groundbreaking software" but the end result just might be.
Re:NIH syndrome (Score:3, Insightful)
The fundamental weakness of FOSS is essentially its immunity to commercial considerations. Obviously, this is also one of its greatest strengths. Developers can venture into new territory without having to worry about marketability -- presuming they have day jobs -- but on the other hand, they can also pursue rigid personal development ideologies that have no interest to anyone but a small group of equally fanatical and close-minded enthusiasts. (See the nitwit above who refused to even read the original article, lest Jaron Lanier make a penny from the pageview.) Moreoever, FOSS developers are often unconcerned with the wishes of their users. That's certainly true of much commercial software, but user satisfaction is an inescapable force in the marketplace, whereas it has little to no effect on many FOSS developers.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that a career vaporware evangelist like Jaron Lanier is probably not the best messenger for this particular message, I think it's fair to say that much of the FOSS community has been preoccupied with cloning or competing with existing software packages, and a relative minority are concerned with the sort of pure research and experimentation Lanier is talking about. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you view the main function of FOSS as providing inexpensive and unencumbered alternatives to commercial software, and it may even be unavoidable with the maturation of personal computer technology, but if you were present for the explosion of creativity in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, it's hard to deny that he has a valid point, even if it is stated in an overly inflammatory way. Most of what we have been seeing for the last decade or so has been the iterative evolution of existing technologies and not revolutionary new developments, no matter how often the latest minor permutation of last decade's news is trumpeted as the Next Big Thing.
You can elect to get pissed about the message if you want, but it would probably be more constructive to recognize the situation for what it is, and if it bothers you -- and it certainly need not -- then spend some time thinking about the unexplored spaces in the field and start exploring them.
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.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
What part of, "That is because it is statically linked," did you fail to understand? Static linking of binaries is bad:
There is a reason the distributions dynamically link applications, and it's not just so as to be obtuse and obstructive to users.
Re:As a creative open source developer... (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a reason for all of this, of course. Companies like IBM poured untold billions into R&D, particularly during the 1960s when computer power began to make research into various kinds of operating systems, file systems, memory systems, math processor systems, CPU types and the like became possible. Other than perhaps quantum computing, I suspect that there's an IBM, Cray or DEC simulation, prototype or conceptualization for damn near every kind of kernel we find today.
And what's so innovative about OSX or Windows anyways? Pretty much all the work done on GUIs over the last two decades has been refinement. I don't consider eye candy to be innovation.
The word innovation gets tossed around so very much, and yet I don't think most of the people that use it even no what innovation means. Xerox was a GUI innovator, because they pretty much invented the concept. IBM was an innovator, because they funded a goodly portion of the research that makes up what is considered computer science nowadays.
Windows, Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, ad nauseum and etcetera are applied technologies, pure and simple. Linux's kernel is modeled on an old technology, but then again so is OSX's and Windows, because those old technologies are a) really not all that old (what the fuck is thirty or forty years in reality) and b) they worked very very well.
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.
Who's not acquainted with history? (Score:1, Insightful)
How many of those are open-source knock-offs of a superior commercial system? How many of those only became open-source once their creators had milked everything they could out of it as a closed-source product, and then released it so it would live on?
PGP was originally "free for noncommercial use only". Ruby (I'm a Ruby programmer) is basically the new Smalltalk. Subversion is just CVS without too many of the more blatant flaws, which in turn is just RCS plus
Some of those, like Perl, are open-source and have always been. But for some reason that doesn't seem like a great argument in favor of open-source.
From a different point of view, look at what Xerox PARC created: laser printing, ethernet, the modern GUI (including the mouse, icons, windows, and color computer-generated bitmap graphics), and object-oriented programming, to name a few.
Sure, if you're running 4 mail servers and 2 mailing list programs and 3 version control systems on your Linux-and-BSD box, then it looks like open-source is everywhere. But if you're using a mouse to click in a window on a bitmap display to use a program written in an object-oriented language and will later print it out on a laser printer, it looks like you're using a modern Alto, which was incredibly innovative, and not developed as an open-source project at all.
Open-source has a rich history and is responsible for a lot. But so does closed-source. It's just as foolish to ignore one as the other.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Note that. Where's the innovation in open-source? In projects like Perl and Python where a single benevolent dictator wrote an initial working model and then released it into the wild to attract contributors (though with Perl you would never realize it wasn't designed by a committee). But since those were one-man efforts, they two had to build off of previous work, and so you can't run Perl or Python on most non-*nix systems.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
I run active perl on several XP machines without problems. I get a command line interface, so I can type perl one liners or I can run perl programs that end in
Mac OS?
I honestly don't know.
However, I am lead to believe that you can. http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/perl.html [apple.com]
What other group of systems comprises "Most non-*nix systems"?
NB: I know that MacOS can be considered a *nix system, but I couldn't think of another operating system for comparison.
Re:Please don't lump the FSF in with "open source" (Score:3, 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.
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.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there's some merit to the idea. Many open source projects don't have a concept of a development cycle. They do awful things like mixing security patches and new features (rather than having a separate security branch that can be tracked.) The products are often constantly evolving and changing functionality, even in minor releases. It's really quite a mess.
If the projects were more thought out, planned from the beginning with target features for the specific release, and with security fixes released for that milestone without having to add new (and potentially buggy) features, I think that the world of FOSS would be a much better place.
Where do they get these people? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is he also upset that other than cosmetics as new materials become available, bridge design hasn't changed much since the Romans? Is he upset that thousands of years later, the wheel is still round? Wonder if he's noticed we're almost all still stuck on the x86 archecture that's, what, a quarter century old or so?
I see the Wiki says he's a "pioneer" in "virtual reality". Oh, yeah, that's a hot field.
(not)
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?
Re:As a creative open source developer... (Score:2, Insightful)
The phrasing here is nearly flamebait. I don't particularly care, but it shows your bias. Linux is a solid kernel that performs its job well.
Operating systems are just scaffolding. Once they've reached a certain level of flexibility, there's no point in changing their external programmatic interfaces, since at that point they can ALREADY RUN ANY CRAZY EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTATION ENVIRONMENT YOU WANT. Squeak? KDE? Dr. Scheme? Gnome? Haskell? Cocoa? They're all just ways to tell your computer what to do. Their internals might be tied to the Unix model, but their external interface (the one you see) certainly does not have to be. Some of them were borne from academic research, including Squeak, Lisp, and Haskell.
OS X is a Unix, and it's innovative. Why? Because NeXT came up with an interesting programming environment and sold it to Apple. OS X would have been just as innovative using the NT kernel. It isn't the kernel's job to make a computer awesome.
Linux is essentially irrelevant to the topic of open source innovation. Indeed, it is a red herring.
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.
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
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (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
It's just a lot easier to build a new OS that can leverage 30 years worth of programs, so people try to make sure the GNU set will run on them. Even Apple took a bunch of open source tools as the base of their operating system.
By the way, Apple didn't innovate with the iPhone. That kind of shit has been in Japan and Taiwan for a couple of years now. Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't make it new.
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 (-> DOS, Windows95-ME), UNIX (Linux, AIX, etc), and VMS (Windows NT, XP, Vista). To be fair there have been attempts at innovation in the systems world (HURD, BOB, etc) but they haven't been successful for market and/or organizational reasons despite bringing really creative ideas into the field (sometimes, for example re: BOB, that creativity really should have been bridled-- but hey, Malinda the project manager came out ahead).
As for FOSS development-- it works as does closed source development by attacking real world problems. My job as a leader in the LedgerSMB project isn't to hold a can of food, but to get other users to do that so that there is more work to go around. I then get to help people coordinate and structure their contributions so they can get it in.
From a creative invention perspective, the *vast* majority of software, closed or open, brings little new to the table-- software engineering in any environment is usually a matter of paying attention to the details and trying to solve well understood problems a little better than anyone else. However there are exceptions. I would suggest that Asterisk and Bayonne as telephony application servers are innovative in the sense that they provide an open framework for telephony application development. I would suggest that PostgreSQL is innovative in a large number of ways, but then it was originally designed to be a research platform.
Being able to make useful new inventions is a rare trait. I don't believe that FOSS will kill that off. Instead I think that it just changes the economic rules of the game.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
There's another advantage to being orignal too - Dos and Windows ran for ages on hardware that wasn't really up to running Unix - e.g. 8086 and 80286s with no MMU, horrible graphics facilities and only a few megabytes of RAM. You'd be hard pressed to run X Windows and a Unix like kernel on that but Microsoft stuff was designed to only run on it, totally ignoring high end workstations. Which is another lock in producing situation - once people started to use Windows and bought Windows only applications, it was hard for them to move to Unix later.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been unable to find any anti-GPL agitators who were actually prevented from selling their own work.
All the ones I've found want to sell *other people's work* and keep the money for themselves.
And they complain that the GPL prevents them from doing that.
</world's smallest violin>
It's real simple: either the fraction of GPL code in this putative product that the GPL is supposedly denying to the world is significant, or it isn't.
If it's a significant part, then they're thieves.
If it's not a significant part, then they're just lazy whiners.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I'm saying that radical ideas almost always fail in the marketplace. There's a business rule which says something like "Never be the first to market with a new concept. Let that company fail and use what you learn from them to succeed in the market." The market generally accepts what is tried and true. That's true for software. It's true for movies. It's true for music. And
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
I can answer part of that. Price and availability of multitouch devices. One can code all one likes but if the hardware to play with isn't easily available then it is kinda pointless. Most small touchscreens you can get in the states (that don't come from some shady website in broken english) are single touch only.
Re:One word rebuttel to TFA (failed) (Score:2, Insightful)
Java. MySQL. Qt.
None of them are innovative and Java wasn't developed in an open source context. Java is a poorly designed rehash of Pascal, MySQL is just another relational database, Qt is just a kit for building GUIs that have been around (though incrementally enhanced) since the seventies.
Back to the drawing board. Surely there's at least one white crow—some ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in open source? I can't think of one, and no one here seems to be able to either, but that doesn't mean none exist.
Re:bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)