The Failed Economics of Our Software Commons 205
An anonymous reader writes: Most software developers are intimately familiar with having to waste time implementing something they probably shouldn't need to implement, or spending countless hours making their code work with bad (but required) software. Developer Paul Chiusano says this is because the economic model we use for building software just doesn't work. He writes, "What's the problem? In software, everyone is solving similar problems, and software makes it trivial to share solutions to these problems (unlike physical goods), in the form of common libraries, tools, etc. This ease of sharing means it makes perfect sense for actors to cooperate on the development of solutions to common problems. ... Obviously, it would be crazy to staff such critical projects largely with a handful of unpaid volunteers working in their spare time. Er, right?? Yet that is what projects like OpenSSL do. A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development. This problem of freeriders is something that has plagued open source software for a very long time." Chiusano has some suggestions on how we can improve the way we allocate resources to software development.
Marketshare (Score:2)
Freeriders are giving you the marketshare. Having a loss leader is not an uncommon business practice, nor is it untenable.
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So long as you have other products to sell. If your only product is the loss leader, you are screwed.
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In this case the loss leader may just be a payment on other projects.
When Elon Musk develops his Tesla thing that I do not own, does this change things for me, does it make me poorer or wealthier? Well, it's making the economy more productive, it's making the overall economy wealthier because of this new product that people want and a generally wealthier economy allows people to pursue their hobbies and in the case of free software developers the hobbies are developing free software (excuse me for that), s
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Pre-Reagan America had a government that didn't charge for national parks, but James G. Watt changed that [nps.gov].
Government should provide for the General Welfare. It can and should create money to do so. The Fed has proven it can create money at will, and the stock market has reached record heights. Use that power of money creation to empower individuals instead of corporations, in the form of a Basic Income, say. Then people can work on open source, wikipedia, and challenges if they choose, instead of entering t
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The stock market reaching record highs in the face of a bigger money supply is called inflation. That's a Bad Thing(TM).
It doesn't increase our productive capacity, but instead it's a form of theft from people who have savings (people who fund large capital projects), to the benefit of people who receive the money: typically banks, the government, the politically well-connected (in that order).
How about nobody steals from anyone?
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How about the Fed give money to individuals instead of corporations? Or just use fiscal policy, funded by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers.
Inflation is psychological. Deal with it through indexation of everything (savings accounts, transfer payments, everything) as Israel does, successfully.
Re:Marketshare (Score:4)
How about the Fed give money to individuals instead of corporations?
"Steal from the right people" is still worse than "don't steal".
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Never watched Robin Hood, huh?
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"Steal from the right people" is still worse than "don't steal".
Propaganda.
Stealing is the unlawful taking of someone else's property. There, I even highlighted the important word for you. There are many good reasons for lawfully taking someone's property or rather: Small parts of it. Unless you're a hard-core anarchist, you have to solve the problem of how to keep the government (small or big) working at all, and sooner or later your solution will be taxes, even if you call it by a different name.
The major disagreement between political factions is how much to tax, who
Re:Marketshare (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh so basically you've bounded the debate?
Show me a single argument that's not from either an anarchist or an idiot that explains how to run a country with zero taxation (ignore the tiny minority of countries that can run entirely on oil exports or such, we're talking the general case).
Regardless, you have to explain what "lawful" means.
No, I don't. That word is in the dictionary and its definition is in no way disputed.
I don't care [...] Because morally,
So you're asking me to explain "lawful" only to say that it actually doesn't matter?
Other than 400 years ago, we did it with swords and gallows and dungeons and now we've made it a bit cleaner.
You need to get your head out of your ass and into a history book. The rule of law is at least 2000 years old and while governments have always had the option of force, its actual use is comparatively rare. Especially compared to mob rule. Today, 100 or 1000 years ago - you can clearly see that when the government breaks down, violence and crimes increase dramatically.
Morally, the difference between a "noble" passing a law that he can rape your wife on the first night of your marriage and then take your money for the rest of your life, is exactly the same as changing the US constitution to allow the state to tax in like manner.
Firstly, you really need to study history. While ius primae noctis makes for a great legend, historians today are not convinced it ever actually existed, and even if it did there are no confirmed cases of it ever being actually used.
Secondly, you should explain whether you are ok with the general principle of a society or not. In this context, "society" means that a group of people can make rules for themselves and enforce them. The details (nobility, democracy, segregation of powers, etc.) are unimportant as long as you make a covert argument that basically calls anything except pure anarchy immoral. So please come out of hiding behind phrases and state your position clearly. Do you think that people should be able to form societies and enforce their rules on each other or not?
With a MORAL argument
Humans are social animals by nature.
A society can only function if it can enforce its rules.
Laws are basically moral rules written down.
Therefore, I don't see a principal difference between legal and moral arguments.
The difference is that everyone thinks they understand moral, but few people understand law. And yes, not all laws are codified ethics, that's true. Many are of administrative nature, for example.
Is there no room in this world for morals?
Morals differ, even from person to person. That's why a society needs a common set of values.
anyone who found you could just steal, rape, kill at will?
Look around you. What's happening in Syria and Iraq? What's happening in parts of Africa? Yes, my idealistic friend, this is exactly what happens when government breaks down and societies fail. Sure, it is morally wrong, but it happens.
So in fantasy lalaland, where everyone is perfectly moral and also shares the same morals, you don't need governments, taxation and all this shit. In the real world, where real humans with all their mistakes live, you do.
I won't ask you to describe how a world based purely on morals and without government "interference" would work. Greater minds have failed at that task.
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The FED does not give money to corporations, they primarily interface with the government and banks. It also does not give money, it LENDS money to them. The trick employed here, is that in accounting terms money is added to the active and passive side equally and thus it balances out. Of course this is just smoke and mirrors, since under normal circumstances you actually need to have money to lend it to someone else, but that is not the case at the FED. In addition they get interest on the lending.
Generall
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The levels of inflation the last 20 years are not a bad thing, unless you mean they're too low. Effectively it's practically nothing, prices have been stable for decades. People who have savings invest it -- in the stock market and banks -- so they're the ones benefiting.
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Shhh. Don't start pointing out facts, they are frowned upon in these parts.
I am no economist, but as a geek ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a little toddler I already developed signs of geekiness. As I grew older, my geekiness ballooned so much so that I could not, even if I want to, deny that in this life, I am a geek
Now that I am old, as an old geek, I still think that what we geek do, what we truly enjoy doing, often goes counter to the outside rule
That is why, when that guy is telling me (and other geeks) that we live by a "failed economic commons", hey, I am not surprised
If we geeks are to live by a "successful economic commons" many of the geeky things that we do, and many of the geeky creations that we have created, would not exist
The gist of the whole thing is this --- economy, whether it be "failed" or "successful" --- is in eye of the beholder
One can say that the economy of a certain country/region is good --- but good for whom? For the general populace, or for the 0.1%?
That is why, we geek don't give a flying fuck about the economy. We do what we do because we enjoy what we do. That is all
If they (and when I say "they" I mean those who look down on the geeks) don't like it, they can go jump into the sea
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Re:I am no economist, but as a geek ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe - just maybe - the economy of free software is based on a different type of currency than what the Fed prints.
Not everything in this Universe is based on Dollars, Pounds, and Euros.
Heck, the Universe itself is a non-profit organization.
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Unless you're advocating a new form of Creationism that I'm not familiar with, the universe wasn't built from human labor. Software, on the other hand, is -- and that's why it costs money to make.
Free software isn't free to make. There's a reason it's free as in libre but not necessarily free as in gratis.
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Evidently you don't actually know how much a writer of documentation gets paid. Hint: It's not nearly as much as what a programmer with commensurate experience gets.
That being said, I write because I like to, and because I've found ways to get paid enough doing it to keep a roof over my head and coffee beans for my grinder.
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Look at just the last few years of Linux at all the guts being just ripped out rather than building on what was there, Pulse, KDE 4, Gnome 3, unity, systemd, why do you think every time it looks like Linux is gonna become mature and stable that some major subsystem gets ripped out and goes back to square 1?
You hit the nail right on the head. It seems the Great New Thing in Linux is something for which there is no evident need, and often is undesirable in many ways, yet the desktop - even with a straight default install - is glitchy and rough in ways Windows (as much as I detest it) is not. The polish just does not go where it is needed. Who wants to detail someone else's car?
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You are conflating Linux with the desktop environments that it supports. Don't do that. It just demonstrates how ignorant you are, and is rather annoying.
Linux is not built like Windows. A Linux distro consists of its Linux kernel and one or more desktop environments supported by the kernel. I am currently running the Ubuntu Studio version using the XFCE desktop with elements from Gnome and KDE blended in. It works pretty well: several years now without any system crashes, has handled several full distro u
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The guys at Netflix, for example, have a workload that involves sending 1MB chunks of data as fast as they can over the network. When they started, I think they could saturat
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Re:I am no economist, but as a geek ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, he is wrong, but your feeling about the economy do not matter one way or another, it operates outside of your sentiment, a failing economy would not allow you to be a developer.
Imagine if the economy was such that for you to be able to do all the 'geeky' stuff you do, you'd literally have to starve yourself to death and/or use up 99% of your normal sleeping time. I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving.
The economy as is allows people to spend their time however they feel like, some forego entertainment and leisure to work on their favourite pet projects. It's like telling a stamp collector that his hobby is a failed idea economically... he'd just laugh at the guy.
You do what you have to do to survive in the economy, so you do care, you are just not necessarily aware of it, but everything you do in life is based on the health / state of the economy.
Re:I am no economist, but as a geek ... (Score:4, Interesting)
"I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving."
But hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than we do [primitivism.com]:
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and they had computers and electric power and the Internet I presume?
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There weren't seven billion of them. The real challenge isn't working hard enough to survive as one of 200,000 hunter/gatherers in a stable population, it's in making it through the stabilizing process.
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I guess that you are talking national averages, but about 1/3 of my wage covers all my basic living costs so about 13hr/week of labour. I think the national average here would be about 1/2, or about 20hr/week. Did hunter/gatherers really have it that easy?
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Don't make the statement if you're not prepared to address rebuttals. You don't get to cherry-pick your facts and pretend that other facts don't exist.
BTW, you said previously,
Imagine if the economy was such that for you to be able to do all the 'geeky' stuff you do, you'd literally have to starve yourself to death and/or use up 99% of your normal sleeping time.
That sounds very much like how I had to live for several years whilst getting started in my present career.
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Your comments are a total non-sequitor. The myth that bushmen have a lot of free time is balanced against the fact that bushment live in what we would call poverty. They also live in their own filth and despoil their village untilt he point that it's uninhabitable and then they move on.
Being a bushman comes with some really severe tradeoffs.
> you'd literally have to starve yourself to death and/or use up 99% of your normal sleeping time.
If you think you've ever had to live like this, you are probably jus
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He uses OpenSSL as an example, and that companies should be devoting funds to this to help make it "perfect" to prevent the next Heartbleed attack. This ignores that there are already alternatives to OpenSSL. So, who should get the funding? OpenSSL or one of the alternatives?
This is like governments trying to pick economic "winners" and giving them all sorts of moola. Doesn't work.
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Don't look up loss leader, read up on the tragedy of the commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
If something is free, people will not contribute sufficiently to the resources. Which is the writer's main grip.
There are ways to get around this. You can charge for it, which runs against open source. Yes, one can make money by charging for support. However, while you might charge for support that does not mean you would contribute back to the open source project – so we still have a suboptimal solution
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Stake YOUR livelyhood on it and i would take you more seriously, i.e. you first.
There needs to be a licence that obligates those who profit from software to contribute whilst still allowing colaborative development and still free for personal use.
Corporate freeloaders sponging off the hard work of volunteers is just crazy,.
Freedom 0 (free to use for any purpose) is much to blame, it abandons any sense of ethics, and even demands the freedom to make society less free.
Re:Marketshare (Score:5, Interesting)
wait, WHAT? A group of people releases some code without asking for any money and then if people start using the code then they will come for money later? I am with the OpenBSD team on this, not with you! What you are suggesting is actually immoral and probably cannot be legally enforced. Once you release your code under a license that allows people to use it (at least that version of it, which you released), you can't now come after those people's money!
You know you don't have to develop anything at all, you don't have to develop anything for free and you don't have to develop anything and then give it away, but if you do, don't cry if people start using it!
Now, I already mentioned that in free software community code became money long time ago, that's the point I am trying to make - code is money and we exchange it for free seemingly, but actually we are making a payment with our code to other people who also create code that we can use.
Code is money and the labour that is used to create this wealth is not taxed or regulated by government, we do it on our own around all government regulations and around taxes and that is what built a vibrant economy, which the guy in TFA doesn't understand.
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Once you release your code under a license that allows people to use it (at least that version of it, which you released), you can't now come after those people's money!
You can allow people to use it under certain conditions, its not unusual.
And you dont have to agree with me about such a licence, people code for different reasons. It doesnt harm you if people release software under licences you dont like. (assuming your not "forced" to use it)
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No, it doesn't hurt me when people release anything under any license they like, the market share of that code will be negligible, there are many licenses like it (free excluding commercial use) but it doesn't hurt anybody. Many projects have corporate contributors, I believe the point of writing code is to have it used, not for it to sit somewhere idly so I would not write under such a license. I much prefer the BSD license myself to any other non-free version (including the GPL).
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There needs to be a licence that obligates those who profit from software to contribute whilst still allowing colaborative development and still free for personal use.
Such licenses have existed for a long time. They typically specify something along the lines of "free for non-commercial use" (which tends to imply "you have to buy a license to use the code in a commercial application").
The company I work for contributes to open source / free (little 'f') software, but only when the licenses are liberal in nature (e.g., BSD). The GPL is off limits.
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There is a certain corundum you need to solve. If you sell your software from the beginning, there is a real chance that nobody will ever buy it. If you open source it it may become a huge hit, but you get not money out of it. Assuming that successful open source projects would also be stellar successes when closed source is nonsense.
Also equating that rich corporations are "ripping you off" since they would have payed you good sums, is also nonsense. If no open source alternative was available and they rea
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I thought /. justified music piracy because the marginal cost was zero and people who really cared about music would do it anyway.
What is the equivalent of music concerts as a revenue source for coders?
Article doesn't address they "why" (Score:3)
If we want to address this issue, we need a complete overhaul of our IP laws.
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What aspect of current IP law do you believe creates this situation (i.e. the ease of free-riding on open source), and how should they be reformed?
This looks like a classic tragedy of the commons problem, in which case assigning ownership (i.e. eliminating the free-as-in-beer aspects of FOSS) is the relevant solution.
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It's not the tragedy of the commons because people using FOSS don't detract from it or create costs for the developers. In fact, more people using the software tends to help the developers because it increases the chances that on of those users will feel like contributing.
TFA seems to think that unpaid hobbyists developing software isn't a good idea either, but even the supposedly "bad" example of OpenSSL actually demonstrates the opposite. Would commercial software be any better? Doubtful. When security fl
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You're absolutely right, it's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a free rider problem. Brain failure last night. Still raises the question, what changes to our IP laws would fix that? In both tragedy of the commons and free rider problems, assigning excludable ownership fixes the problem, but would likely create others...
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Anyone who uses the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" should have to first pass a test showing they know the history of the enclosure acts before they throw that phrase around.
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What would you suggest? Stronger? Weaker? What?
Personally, I would advocate for a system which had a shorter time period and exposed more of the standards and source code.
Re:Article doesn't address they "why" (Score:4, Interesting)
If we want to address this issue, we need a complete overhaul of our IP laws.
Er, no.
The 'why' has little to do with IP law and a lot to do with group dynamics, especially herd behaviour. Take this statement, for example:
The problem with the 'snowdrift' here, to abuse the metaphor, has nothing to do with IP law, and nothing to do with lack of innovation. It has everything to do with the size of the drift. You don't have any choice but to wait for someone else to come along to help shovel. But the author is trying to say, If everyone doesn't shovel, nobody gets out. And that's not always true.
A quick reminder: When HTML first came out, the very first thing virtually every proprietary software vendor of note did was publish their own website design tool. And each of those tools used proprietary extensions and/or unique behaviour in an attempt to corner the market on web development, and therefore on the web itself.
But the 'snowdrift' in this case was all the other companies. Because no single one of them was capable of establishing and holding overwhelming dominance, the 'drift' was doomed to remain more manageable by groups than by any single entity. (Microsoft came closest to achieving dominance, but ultimately their failure was such that they have in fact been weakened by the effort.)
Say what you like about the W3C, and draw what conclusions you will from the recent schism-and-reunification with WHATWG. The plain fact is that stodgy, not-too-volatile standards actually work in everybody's favour. To be clear: they provide the greatest benefit to the group, not to the enfant terrible programmer who thinks he knows better than multiple generations of his predecessors.
Yes, FOSS projects face institutional weaknesses, including a lack of funding. Especially on funding for R&D. But funded projects face significant weaknesses as well. Just look at the Node.JS / io.js fork, all because Joyent went overboard in its egalitarian zeal. Consider also that recent widely publicised bugs, despite the alarm they've caused, haven't really done much to affect the relative level of quality in funded vs proprietary vs unfunded code bases. They all have gaping holes, but the extent of their suckage seems to be dependent on factors other than funding. If not, Microsoft would be the ne plus ultra of software.
Weighed in the balance, therefore, FOSS's existential problems are real, and significant, but they're not as significant as those faced by all the other methods we've tried. So to those who have a better idea about how to balance community benefits and obligations, I can only reply as the Empress famously did when revolutionaries carried her bodily from the palace: 'I wish them well.'
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To be honest it seems to me that the author hasn;t a clue what the real problem is.
He wants people to develop libraries that solve a problem... and then says that his cause is developing something new.
Our problem is that the established, mature libraries do not get enough use, there are too many people who think that they need to write a new thing to replace them.,.. and so we have lots of software that doesn't work well because its all reinvented wheels.
I'm sure if he did come up with a new HTML/CSS system
Other considerations ... (Score:2)
The real problem in many cases is that there are too many options, too many different libraries, and too much code that does pretty much the same thing in slightly different ways. How can you standardize when there are so many different "standards" to choose from?
This is actually a good thing, because it avoids a monoculture.
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I'm blowing mod points on this page for the first time ever to reply to you because you're projecting layperson search behavior onto programmers with no apparent justification.
To many "coders" are just "google cut-n-paste" already.
f a code class search engine with good dependency mapping anddocumentation existed
If "good documentation" existed, you could already find the code via google. One of the big problems of software is that documentation, like maintenance, is not seen as much "fun" as developing the new shiny.
And now, with apologies to MasterCard, "for the rest, there's Stack Overflow."
All goes according to plan (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't want free riders, don't make free software.
You get to choose your license. You don't get to complain that people are following it.
Misses the obvious, likely for dishonest reasons (Score:2)
Since it misses what could be discovered within a few minutes of inquiring into the subject I think the post is designed either to push an agenda or to start an argument.
No, it's not crazy (Score:3)
The people who do this have a number of reasons. Some do it open source software garners job offers. Some do it because they or the businesses they work for need free software to exist, and it's a self perpetuating loop - the more free software there is the more people contribute to it, so the more they have to chose from. For some it's like attending church - it feels right. For some it's a nice social group to be in. None of these reasons means they or the system they contribute to are crazy.
As for the free loaders - without legions of these "free loaders" free software would not exist. Few would bother to put the effort into Linux, or X, or Debian if there weren't legions of users out there to test it, and give feedback, find bugs, suggest improvements. They are a necessary part of the system. A system that for all its faults, works as least as well as any other commercial way of developing software if you go by deployments.
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A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development.
Obviously, that can't be talking about people that submit bug reports and suggestions.
GPL (Score:2)
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How about you use the GNU General Public License? It has strong copyleft, which prevents people from distributing closed-source software that uses your library.
It may also result in less contributors / contributions. The company I work for contributes to open source, but only to open source with liberal licenses (e.g., BSD). The GPL is strictly off limits.
Legacy Support (Score:2)
Part of the problem is a lack of support by OS makers for legacy software. We've solved a huge number of problems, many times, but those tools are destroyed when the OS makers fail to support legacy software so we keep reinventing the wheel, badly.
It's not just about collaboration or economics (Score:3)
Don't confuse the issue by pretending it's all about collaboration and economics of software. It doesn't make sense to try to shoehorn my software idea into an existing framework exclusively due to price and availability. Just because there's a square peg available for free doesn't mean that it'll fit a round problem, even if a square solution may take longer.
I predominately work in computational analysis and have spent a significant portion of my career trying to figure out physical problems (first in video games and now in engineering analysis), particularly in the finite element/CFD domain. That makes OpenFOAM is a classic example for me -- it's the benchmark for open source CFD analysis. But I'm still employed at an engineering firm developing our own numerical analysis tools.
OpenFOAM is quite good at a very small subset of what it claims to do, but it doesn't do *everything* well. Unfortunately, the framework is sufficiently mature at this point that trying to fork it and address those flaws would be a colossal undertaking. This means that for many toolsets, starting from the ground up is simply a more attractive alternative. Could we reuse a few elements deep in the integrators? Maybe, but those would come with their own baggage.
Chiusano has some suggestions (Score:2)
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Who's this Johnny-come-lately Chiusano guy? What happened to Bennett Haselton?
Please be careful .. when you say Bennett's name three times in a row, one of his articles magically appears on the front page.
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The real solution is really much simpler. (Score:4, Interesting)
Large companies need to stop spending boat loads of money on buying overpriced, re-released commercial operating system and productivity software that changes absolutely nothing useful about business functionality and spend maybe say, 10% of the money from what that budget would have been on donating to or contributing to software projects that the infrastructure's critical functionality relies upon.
Seriously. The money would go further and the software would last longer and everyone would get a lot more actual work done. Every time you buy a new version of Windows its like you're paying to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
And don't fucking reply to me saying shit like "durrr, but OpenSSL got hacked and doesn't deserve to have had more money." Maybe that's true, but probably not. Even if it were true, above, I said donating or contributing, as in - spend your own company resources auditing the software if you don't trust it. If you find enough vulnerabilities to distrust the people who make it, then FORK IT OR PAY SOMEONE TO DO SO. The bottom line is, economically even in a worst-case scenario its still cheaper than every single company rolling their own from scratch, or every single company buying the same software over and over again made (perhaps not any more securely or competently) by some completely unaccountable, inauditable closed-source company.
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Problem: when companies buy off the shelf, they get something NOW. As soon as they spend the money, they get a product. If they invest, they get a product... when? Next week? Next month? Next year? This is why most places don't develop, they just buy and stack. It costs more most of the time, but you always get SOMETHING.
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Did you actually bother to read what you responded to?
He said... wait for it... absolutely NOTHING... about open-sourcing your closed software.
And plenty of businesses make perfectly good money creating and maintaining Open Source software. I think I'm qualified to make this statement, since I work for one of them. In fact, it's one of the top half from this list of the world's 10 largest vendors of software [wikipedia.org]. And they don't pay me in play money, either.
Your fixation is not my fixation. (Score:2)
A Sense of Community (Score:2)
Not everything boils down to rational economics. People do lots of things voluntarily, without expectation of immediate financial gain.
The other issue with infrastructure type software (viz. OpenSSL) is that once created, they only occasionally require modification. It isn't a full time job. It'd be better managed by some interested custodians in their spare time (or rather; in time they choose to allocate to the pursuit); than for the software to be owned and managed by some organisation which assigns squ
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Score:2)
When money is involved, the question that comes to mind is "who should be in charge?"
There's a surprisingly consistent answer to this question.
I hear it a lot, from a lot of different people and that answer is "I should".
Snowdrift describes a way to raise funds.
It might even be more effective at raising funds.
But I see nothing that promotes spending those funds wisely.
Cause: Computers are Stupid (Score:3)
The real problem is that software is bunches of little idiot savants glued together. They do their known role well but ONLY their known role. They are not flexible and have no common sense to adapt to new situations. They have to have an exacting or pre-known environment.
When we try to make software more flexible, it becomes unpredictable, often backfiring. Often it's better to keep it narrow and crash rather than have it "guess" and do something wrong because you may end up with a million wrong results before you catch it.
I remember a story about military battle simulation software being built in the early days of OOP. An Australian company wanted a customized version for Australia, so they asked the vendor to add Kangaroos to the simulation.
Rather than code up a Kangaroo from scratch, which would take a while, the developers made the Kangaroo class inherit from the already built "Human" class. It all worked fine until a group of simulated Kangaroo's were spooked by explosions and whipped out weapons and started fighting back. The "Human" class was tuned for military simulations, not general animals because that wasn't the vendor's original goal.
The story may be an urban myth, but it illustrates some of the pitfalls of "reuse". Unless you have full knowledge of what you are reusing, you may end up reusing unexpected and inappropriate sub-features.
It's probably an undeniable rule of the universe that you have to balance predictability against flexibility. No free lunch, at least not until "true" AI comes along such that software won't make stupid guesses anymore; but then we'd all be obsolete.
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It all worked fine until a group of simulated Kangaroo's were spooked by explosions and whipped out weapons and started fighting back.
That was rather silly, only Dropbears do that.
Summary, or tl;dr (Score:5, Informative)
1) A new non-profit [snowdrift.coop] is trying to make it easy to fund open-source software, with a new donation method. You can donate, but your donation doesn't go through until ten (or X) other people donate the same amount.
2) This will increase funding for open source projects because:
* Companies don't want to fund open source if someone else will do it.
* It will be cheaper TCO for companies to fund open source projects they use. For example, if OpenSSL had been given more money, they would have fewer bugs (probably by rewriting everything in Erlang; really, that's what he said).
That is literally it. In all 2000 words he wrote, I cannot find another single point that supports his main thesis, that the new non-profit will increase funding for open source-projects. He however did spend a lot of words explaining that popular open source projects should get more money from the companies that use them, so that's something.
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Nice summary, much clearer than the original.
There seems to be a basic mismatch between the "problem" and the "solution". Most of the lead-in talks about corporate financing, and companies free-loading without paying for development. Well, in that world the funding distribution is from Extremistan (i.e it is probably a power-law distribution). So most of the money is held in pledges that unmatched by ten peers. The matching model only makes sense in Mediocrastan (i.e the roughly a uniform distribution) wher
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If a company selects open source code, it's already fills the company's needs. Paying money won't get them anything more at that point.
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I really don't think there is any way to get most companies to pay for the open source software they use other than a bigger stick. Making it a legal requirement.
That won't work either; they'll just chose a proprietary solution if they have to pay anyway, because then when something goes wrong they can throw up their hands and make excuses. Then the CEO runs the company into the ground, but not before jumping off and floating safely to land with his golden parachute... Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's why GPL is necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
While people yell it's too offensive and impossible to get success at business (an very common opinion I've heard so many times), it at least makes the game much fair via requesting you pay for your freedom. For other licenses I think they work "well" is only because they welcome people to pillage their work as the article reveals, so sorry I don't feel sorry for those projects adopted such licenses and claim they're more friendly toward business.
Freeriders? (Score:2)
It would seem that if your business has an interest in the direction that something like OpesnSSL is going, then said business will provide developers to work on it. While there are always going to be freeriders, they don't cost you any more to the develop the software than if there were not. On the other hand, if you owned the software instead of relying on the community to do the brunt of the development work for you, then you would be in a position to sell it to the supposed freeloaders. Of course, your
Thoughtstuff is a nonlinear space (Score:3)
What "Problem?" F/OSS works. (Score:2)
After working on a Windows system at my job, using my Linux computer is like a breath of fresh air.
Where is the problem? F/OSS has been around for decades.
The article sounds like somebody pissing and moaning about the foss model.
He doesn't get it (Score:3)
I work on my pet project (http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]) because it's a fun challenge I set myself many years ago. Whether others use it is irrelevant. Whether I ever make money off it is irrelevant. There is only one thing that matters to me:
That's it. Beginning and end of story. I work on it for fun.
failed or just different economics? (Score:3)
The benefits of open source softwares and freeware are incomprehensible those brainwash that greed is good or even that only through greed can come good. The open source projects have created enabling technologies such as httpd, TCP/IP, html, mosaic, etc. Without those technologies the economic booms circling the globe would probably be impossible. It created a feedback loops which into the private sector which then creates jobs and technologies which then help open source projects.
Calling those effects a failure is just silly.
What is the complaint? (Score:2)
The guys that argue that everything should be free are now complaining that they aren't getting paid? That is how I interpret this. And it is hilarious.
Disagree (Score:2)
The large companies I have worked for tend to PURCHASE supported free software from Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle (even if it's a clone of Red Hat), IBM, etc. Indirectly this means that they end up paying for the development of free software since these open source companies all PAY their employees many of whom write code that gets licensed under the GPL and contributed as open source. All you need to do to verify this it look at the contributions to the kernel or many of the key Linux subsystems to see the bulk
personal FOSS economies (Score:2)
I open source as many parts of my paid projects as i can so that I'm not forced to reinvent the same wheel i made through a previous employer.
This makes me more productive perceptually since i bring value from my previous positions. Others could as well, but aren't as versed with my creations as i am.
So why do my current employers give to my next? It's a perk choosing them nothing.
not so free (Score:2)
he vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development
For a lot of software, this simply isn't true. The millions of installs that don't pay a developer to work on the code still provide test environments, installed base to make the product popular and various other advantages. Very few of the highly successful Free Software projects would be where they are today if only people who contribute to their development had been allowed to use them.
moron alert (Score:2)
Um, no, it hasn't. Software distribution is essentially costless at this point and as such freeriders don't plague anybody.
Quick and terrible analogy. I live in a really wealthy area and people around my neighborhood buy fireworks at the 4th of July that put some large cities to shame. I don't personally waste my money on fireworks, but I don't need to. On the 4th it sound like a war zone down here and I c
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"Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers),"
How, out of curiosity, will this miracle be achieved? What magic wand will the Fed wave in order to create these resources from midair?
Now, there's a pretty decent argument for a basic income (from economists across the political spectrum, including Friedman, not generally known as a soft-headed liberal), but the money would have to be transferred from elsewhere in the economy via taxes.
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I always wonder why they limit their magic wand to a "basic" income. Why not instead pay everyone a billion dollars a year? I mean, if there's no downside to the Fed creating all this money, why be cheap?
Creating more dollars without creating more goods and services improves nothing - why do people have a hard time with that idea?
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Any many people are materially worse off because of it.
The point of the currency manipulation was to make it less obvious.
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Make it unconditional basic income. And opt-in, no one has to take it. Government and private businesses can hold challenges to stimulate individuals to innovate, but government doesn't require you to do anything.
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Where exactly does this money come from? If the government simply prints it, congrats, you've just massively devalued the dollar through inflation. Anyone who works would have their income skyrocket because of this (in dollar amounts, not in purchasing power), and the net result would be that little would change in terms of real purchasing power. If you actually taxed the folks who worked to siphon money over to those that didn't, the increased taxes would reduce the incentive to work and improve one's e
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If you actually taxed the folks who worked to siphon money over to those that didn't, the increased taxes would reduce the incentive to work and improve one's economic outlook, and cause a significant drain on the economy.
Finland has a basic income. It has not destroyed their economy.
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A good point, but it's too early to say if it's sustainable, or what the longer-term results will be. We've seen a lot of very generous social-welfare programs enacted in European countries, and many of them have since had to roll back some of those programs once their economies dried up - usually resulting in massive protests and strikes over "austerity measures", or the collapse of economies of countries with politicians too cowardly to propose such measures.
Granted, I think one advantage a basic income
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The private sector understands the alchemy of money creation, and creates at least an order of magnitude more money than governments do. The BIS reports [bis.org] that $76 trillion in OTC derivatives were created out of thin air by private entitites in 2013 alone. There is plenty of room for government to create the money for a basic income.
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But that 76 trillion doesn't create inflation, just like bailing out the 'creators' when those OTC derivatives fail doesn't. Only demand side fiat money creation causes inflation, not supply side fiat money creation. Deficits to expand the military don't cause inflation, just deficits to fund health care. /endsnark
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I've been a beta tester for decades, I dont get money. but I do get to shape the game, Hell one of my reports and recommended changes ended up in the game.
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Actually everyone uses my rule, It's a key part of fire damage.
Sad, that people like you cant grasp the ruleset well enough so you just fudge it. Sad.