Has open source won--or has it lost?
Assessing the open-source scorecard is complicated. A complete "state of open source" would fill many pages. But here are a few things that have struck me over the past year or two.
Large swaths of open source have become mainstream--to the point of invisibility. Jay Lyman summed this up well in the context of the last LinuxWorld. We've also seen large vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, generally de-emphasizing Linux and open source as businesses in their own right.
Just to be clear, invisible is absolutely not the same thing as irrelevant. However, some open-source fans who feel the need to ally themselves with a highly visible movement taking on "the enemy" find this shift troubling. (See, for example, "Mike's" comment to the aforementioned blog post.)
Pure-play open source as a standalone business has largely proven to be marginal. There are many successful companies that leverage open source in various ways. But it's the cross-selling of other things--systems, proprietary software, and services, in the case of system vendors, or advertising, in the case of Google--that brings in most of the revenue.
Basic pay-for-support models tend to have low conversion rates and haven't mostly been big moneymakers. (Essentially a form of "FREE 3," to use Chris Anderson's terminology.) I discussed this point earlier in "Does Open Source Have More Value Within a Larger Vendor?"
The Linux desktop remains a niche. There was a time when the desktop looked to be the next great frontier for Linux. That hasn't happened. Ironically, Apple Macs, which are arguably even less open than Windows PC, have been the big desktop winners over the past few years--not Linux.
The record for open source more broadly on the desktop is mixed. The Firefox Web browser has been the poster child for open-source client success. But other projects, such as OpenOffice.org, have been better at pressuring proprietary software vendors on various fronts (standards, pricing) than at emerging as big winners in their own right. And, today, the action has moved far more toward mobile clients (where Linux is starting to have some degree of uptake) and in software running "in the network" than in the traditional "fat desktop" client operating system.
Which brings us to the next point. There's a tension between cloud computing and open source. I cover that tension in much more detail in "The Cloud vs. Open Source" but essentially, most of the open-source licenses that were written to require that modifications and enhancements to open-source software be contributed back to the commons don't apply when software is distributed only in the form of network services, rather than directly in the form of the software bits themselves.
More broadly, as the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman has been lately complaining, the very idea of the cloud can be seen as conflicting with "Software Freedom" principles, to which open source was a means and not an end.
Yet for all those points that are either in the debit column or that some would place there, it's hard for me to see how open source could be considered as anything other than a great success. As a model for how software is developed and how people collaborate, open source has utterly transformed IT.
Even when open source hasn't displaced proprietary alternatives, it's helped make things like open beta testing and trial versions commonplace--ubiquitous, even. When was the last time you, as a consumer, bought a software program without giving it a spin first? For me, it's been a long time. Yet buy-before-try used to be the norm.
That open source has fully inserted itself into the mainstream as a result strikes me as a feature, not a bug.
Gordon Haff is a Principal IT Advisor with Illuminata, Inc. and has over 20 years of IT industry experience. He blogs about what's happening with enterprise servers and datacenters, "Yotta-scale" computing, and related software and device trends as part of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure.
Macs are nice, if your Grandma and Grandpa, or a kid in elementary school... Or in general if you just don't want to do any serious computer work or gaming. Most people that i know have a mac cause they want to surf the web, and listen to itunes without any serious problems and UNIX core can provide that security (not to mention the low market share in the PC world, yes it IS a factor). I have nothing truly against their hardware (save the iphone), i just hate the company for turning people into sheep that get mad whenever someone says something bad about them.
Truth time, Macs are no more "Revolutionary" than any home built PC, and not everyone likes them.
I happen to work for Apple, and the motto at my building is not "it just works" i'll tell you that much. my mac has crashed more times than my PC since i have worked there this year than my 4 year old XP laptop.
DRM is a whole separate topic...
@ the author: Yep - Open Source has achieved its goals admirably - to introduce open and free (as in speech) software into the world as a norm... a far cry from the days when most commercial software was locked-down tight, and anyone who dared plumb its inner depths were considered criminals, no?
The desktop is a commodity nowadays. Once I had belted out the battle cry of "Linux on the desktop!", but honestly, desktops are no longer the end-all and be-all of tech, and focusing on just the desktop is begging for irrelevancy. Linux instead managed to forge its power in all the exciting areas (pop open a VMWare ESX console sometime... look familiar? :) ) In the server room, Linux has separated the Men from the Boys - if you don't know (and can prove your skills in) Linux, you've cut yourself off from a lot of very well-paying jobs. You can no longer be considered a well-rounded sysadmin unless you have the skills in Linux as well as Cisco IOS... anyone can be a Windows admin.
FOSS as a standalone business model requires intelligence and creativity - something not all corps are able or willing to do. OTOH, they don't need to and still have Open Source as its heart and soul - especially outside of tech.
...and that's the biggest beauty of it all. :)
/P
"Server rooms like yours are becoming more and more isolated in the real world. "
Google, the NYSE, and Intel all say that you're full of it. Shall I continue?
"The last time I saw a company using a linux server was years ago."
Go check Monster, Dice, or any large jobs board... they all say you're full of it.
"Had linux not been open source, I would suggest to you it would have made a much bigger impact today."
You mean like AIX or HP-UX did? *snicker*
;)
/P
Yes, Mac OS uses a bit of open source unix parts in key areas of its core. But it does so using clever license allowances that contributes precious little back to those projects. Mac OS is not an open source system by any stretch of the imagination.
iPods are an integral part of the Mac system, so yes, they count. You can't play Windows Media on an iPod, because Apple won't allow it. MS licenses it's codecs and DRM to anyone who wants them. Many competitive MP3 players can play WM media, but not media from the iTunes store, because Apple won't allow it.
The iPhone is another great example, and of course, it's a platform in it's own right. Only one phone model, only Apple manufactured. No licensing to other manufs. Every app for the iPhone is vetted and approved by Apple. Then add in their notoriously restrictive SDK. If you want to put Windows Mobile on your phone, or make an app for a Windows Mobile phone, you just do it. And, of course, that's what Android is all about. Apple, once again, most closed and restrictive by far, far and away.
MS is not open as in open source. But it's open as in it will license it's tech to all comers. This is the biggest difference it's always had with Apple, and thus is probably the biggest reason that MS, even with consistently inferior technology, has always had the lion's share of the market.
it's true that if your offering is software as a service, then you may not be required to give your changes back under the current iterations of the GPL, but on the flipside, computing clouds and virtualization practically make Free as in Freedom licensing a requirement since using multiple instances on demand (ala amazon EC2) or running multiple snapshots to provide redundancy or in a disaster recovery scenario will violate most closed source per cpu licensing agreements.
google wouldn't be able to afford it's 400,000 or more servers if it had to pay licensing on each one. nor could most webhosts or web2.0 providers. linux on the desktop isn't that big of a deal, but the gains that firefox has made really says something about open source software.
Idealism is a nice thing, I suppose, but at the end of the day, most people will prioritize functionality above idealism. Where OSS grants functionality and cost advantages, it wins. Where it doesn't, idealism may be a decider, but likely there will be functional concerns which trump idealistic ones. That's not a pugilistic statement; it's just an acknowledgement of reality. We build computing systems to get work done; not to feed our egos.
Nonsense.
Shareware pioneered the try-before-buy model. The "open source" movement claimed they invented it.
I used to visits "Stroud's Consumate Winsock Apps" site every day to see which new software was available to try.
If you want the history of Open Source, you have to crawl back far, far further than autumn of 1991 (when Linux was first released).
While you cannot play .wma files on an iPod, you conversely cannot play iPod audio files on a Zune - so that's a wash. (and claiming that a device cannot play someone else's proprietary file is kinda stupid anyway).
By the way - licensing abilities does not mean "open" by any stretch of the imagination. Quite the opposite, in fact.
/P
Jay Lyman's column linked near the top ("mainstream to the point of invisibility") does underscore one major benchmark that all Open Source projects should aspire to - the ability to remove "free/Open Source" from its list of features, and still be able to compete with proprietary offerings. Some open source projects have succeeded in this quite well: Eclipse, Firefox (though, for the latter they pretty much had to - they were already competing with free). Arguably, I'd say many (if not most, especially in the case of Firefox) of the users of these two products really don't care much about how open the codebase is - they just want the product to work.
Many Open Source products that are considered successes can't get past this - you mention the most famous one - OpenOffice. I would argue that The Gimp would easily fall into this latter category as well. The main selling point for these two products is still the license, not the product itself.
I argue as far as to say that the Cloud may be the one place where Open Source software can really start to grow - for much of the same reason that it is showing promise on mobile devices. The actual technology is hidden from users who couldn't be bothered to learn or understand it. For most users, they will see a familiar interface, and be able to get their work done - doesn't matter if it's Open Source or proprietary. If it doesn't work as they expect, they abandon it, and the techies that DO understand the technology actually have an incentive to make it work the way the "dumb" end user wants or needs it to.
You've mentioned Stallman as complaining (doesn't he always) about people not contributing back changes to the community of software that the cloud will run on - he ignores the advantage to those actually doing the legwork: Open Source software can be used with proprietary modifications for services that will benefit the customers of those services, and those making the modifications can actually enjoy a competitive advantage. There wouldn't be any competitive advantage if these modifications had to be published, and without this competitive advantage, there wouldn't be any real benefit to investing time and money on some innovations (again I allude to Google's search technology).
However, meaningful growth of open source in the cloud effectively depends on contributions back to the commons. Even if it were true that Open Source in a 2008 Snapshot was widely adopted in the cloud (and then taken private) that wouldn't be much of an advance of open source IMO. The counter-argument of open source as development model is that it's to everyone's advantage to contribute many enhancements/fixes (though perhaps not all) back to the commons--especially for pieces outside of core competitive areas.
Google's search technology is really the only thing making Google any money, and should this technology ever wind up in the hands of Google's competitors, their business would be destroyed.
I am NOT a Windows fan.
In what way? Linux dominates the server room. The only reason Open Source itself got any traction in the business world is due to Linux. FreeBSD was Open Source before Linux even existed - yet nobody began stumbling over themselves to embrace Open Source in the business world until Linux showed up.
Can't see how much more relevant an operating system can get with regards to Open Source, you know?
Go to any Linux help forum and you'll see command line jargon on about your second post. Apparently the GUI configuration tools aren't that effective. Even Windows should do this. Just have one good configuration program that can read XML files that are presented by each program. The XML files can describe to the configuration program what options can be set for that program and what their expected values are. Does every program really need its own options dialog box? They all do the same friggin thing! This also means you can have prewritten code to read and set program options. This would just simply save programmers time instead of having to rewrite this code for every single program. The Linux people just can't get together to make this happen though.
Another one is you need a completely different application package for each distro. Seriously, how hard is it to cram some binaries in a zip file with an XML file that describes what each file is? If a package has a shared library I'm pretty confident it'll go in the shared library folder. Sounds crazy doesn't it? However, the Linux people just can't make this work. Everyone does it their own way so this becomes something very complicated when it shouldn't be.
Also, watch a newbie try to use apt-get when their computer isn't connected to the net. People are used to downloading a single file via the web or torrent and double clicking. Then saving it to a CD or flash drive to install on another machine.
You see Windows has the Win32 API, GDI, Winsock, or DirectX. Windows has a platform. With Linux this isn't the case. The package manager has to look inside of the package and figure out what else you have to download to make that package work. It might already be on the system. It might not. Who knows?
Linux also loves to put things all over the system. Share libraries in the shared folder, binaries in the bin folder. Every app is split into like ten folders. Yet, all your program config files are crammed into the home folder? You couldn't make one more folder for the purpose of organization?
These complaints have been made before, but the Linux supporters will just argue with you, and then wonder why nobody uses Linux on the desktop. They say well, Linux is the da bomb on the server! Awesome, I don't need to run a server. I need to install a program that was written for a completely different distro onto a computer with no net access that's made by a company that doesn't have their app in this distro's repo. Also, I don't want to spend all day tracking down dependencies. Then I need to configure it graphically. Can you make that easier? Cause I can do that on Windows. And this is from someone that loves Linux.
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by MiamiWebDesigner
October 30, 2008 9:11 AM PDT
- Cloud Computing and Corporate Culpability
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Bruce Arnold, Miami Web Designer
http://WebDesignMiami.PervasivePersuasion.com