Open-Source Software Development: Doomed From the Start?

[Kirkaiya]

Originally Posted by paris

well i totally agree with Cringely. Am doing a project based on CMS and open source software and in my summary i will say extacly what Cringely said.

How can someone built the perfect product just by free help? lot of research is needed and a lot of resources which means a lot of money and alot of money do not exist in open source projects. Why do you think linux is far below Windows? just because if they could sell it they would have money to do more developement and reserch on it.

I am a programmer and i prefer to work and get paid, not work just for the joy of builting someting.

I think that people here are, in fact, misrepresenting what "Open Source" means. People often associate open-source with "free", but that is NOT part of the definition of Open Source.

Open Source means exactly what it says: the source code is open (that is, you can obtain the source code to the product, and thereby modify it yourself).

There are several different licensing schemes some people use to sell (for money - as in, GET PAID) for open-source software. Some of those licenses require end-users who make changes to the source-code that get commercially used to contribute that source-code back to the originator of the code. One common license is the GPL (GNU Public License).

However, there's nothing to stop somebody from selling you a piece of software, and they provide you with both the compiled (ie., executable) code plus the source-code, under a different licensing model.

So - my point is just that, Open Source does not nessarily mean free, and of course many open-source programmers get paid. On the other hand - some of the best coding I ever did was probably in 8-bit assembly for the 6502 chip in my Commodore 64, which I wrote part as part of a of a BBS system I created (which I ran for 2 years) - and I gave the software away to friends, who also ran BBS's on it.

I had never heard the word "open source", and back then, a lot of software was free anyway, and I *did* get phone-calls from friends using it who found errors, and fixing them was a lot more fun than doing my 10th grade homework, as I recall... Don't forget that a lot of software gets written by people with a love for solving problems and programming, it is not, in fact, all about the money.

So I think the author of that article is actually pretty wrong - there are many many sucessful open-source projects, and to assume the model is inherently flawed, when most of the web runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, Perl, sendMail, etc., is a bit of a flawed argument. Oh - I *have* to plug the awesome SpamAssassin - i have a free implementation called SAProxy, which filters 90% of my spam out)

[Kirkaiya]

Originally Posted by paris

well i totally agree with Cringely. Am doing a project based on CMS and open source software and in my summary i will say extacly what Cringely said.

How can someone built the perfect product just by free help? lot of research is needed and a lot of resources which means a lot of money and alot of money do not exist in open source projects. Why do you think linux is far below Windows? just because if they could sell it they would have money to do more developement and reserch on it.

I am a programmer and i prefer to work and get paid, not work just for the joy of builting someting.

I think that people here are, in fact, misrepresenting what "Open Source" means. People often associate open-source with "free", but that is NOT part of the definition of Open Source.

Open Source means exactly what it says: the source code is open (that is, you can obtain the source code to the product, and thereby modify it yourself).

There are several different licensing schemes some people use to sell (for money - as in, GET PAID) for open-source software. Some of those licenses require end-users who make changes to the source-code that get commercially used to contribute that source-code back to the originator of the code. One common license is the GPL (GNU Public License).

However, there's nothing to stop somebody from selling you a piece of software, and they provide you with both the compiled (ie., executable) code plus the source-code, under a different licensing model.

So - my point is just that, Open Source does not nessarily mean free, and of course many open-source programmers get paid. On the other hand - some of the best coding I ever did was probably in 8-bit assembly for the 6502 chip in my Commodore 64, which I wrote part as part of a of a BBS system I created (which I ran for 2 years) - and I gave the software away to friends, who also ran BBS's on it.

I had never heard the word "open source", and back then, a lot of software was free anyway, and I *did* get phone-calls from friends using it who found errors, and fixing them was a lot more fun than doing my 10th grade homework, as I recall... Don't forget that a lot of software gets written by people with a love for solving problems and programming, it is not, in fact, all about the money.

So I think the author of that article is actually pretty wrong - there are many many sucessful open-source projects, and to assume the model is inherently flawed, when most of the web runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, Perl, sendMail, etc., is a bit of a flawed argument. Oh - I *have* to plug the awesome SpamAssassin - i have a free implementation called SAProxy, which filters 90% of my spam out)

[Kirkaiya]

Originally Posted by trepine

<snip>
This is largely because IE locks up quite frequently, and destroys her shopping session (I know mozilla for win, but that kinda puts a crimp in the opensource dying thing so I will leave that alone).

Hey, now - I use Mozille 1.3 as my primary browser now, and have for some time (once you set it to load components during startup, there's no annoying lag time to start the browser anytime you launch it).

It's more stable than IE on my laptop, runnin Win2K, and I think is hardly indicative of a dying Open Source project - it's actually advanced quite a lot, and surpassed the heavily-monied Internet Explorer in terms of functionality, in many ways. I think people just had unrealistic expecations when it first went "open source", which led to rumors of it's demise, when, in fact, it's updated very frequently, and has NEVER infested my machine with a malicious worm (which IE has done)

Otherwise - I agree with you fine post!! :lol:

[Tienshiao]

OK.. the second part of his argument is the possibility of hijacking a project by some evil Microsoft backed group.

Now most (large) projects have maintainers who are manage the contributions and in some cases are the largest contributers. I don't think it is likely for somebody to submit new code that takes the project in an undesirable direction, and the maintainers accepting it.

Fine.. you payoff the maintainers. The other core developers of the group who disagree with the decision can fork the code (see the *BSDs). If the project heads in an undesirable direction, those that find it undesirable can fork the openly available code base.

[Coordinator]

The logic behind original author's argument could even seem compelling if only it didn't totally contradict hard facts on the ground. Open source projects are thriving, huge amount of work is being done, many projects have completely thrashed their closed source competition, and if anything the tide is rising.

Now, why this is happening is indeed hard to explain. But trying to explain real facts is more useful then inventing logical explanations for imaginary situations like "demise of open source software".

[BarryB]

Originally Posted by Coordinator

The logic behind original author's argument could even seem compelling if only it didn't totally contradict hard facts on the ground. Open source projects are thriving, huge amount of work is being done, many projects have completely thrashed their closed source competition, and if anything the tide is rising.

I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on the rising tide of open source software development.

But the validity of the article's hypothesis does not hinge on how many projects are ongoing or how many new ones are starting up. The validity hinges on whether open source projects are more likely to die than commerical ones. The situation looks something like this:

Is Open_source(dead)/(open_source(live) + open_source(dead)) > Commerical(dead)/(Commerical(live) + Commerical(dead))?

As was pointed out above, it's unlikely that this question will ever be answered due to the tendency of failed commerical projects to be buried.

Granted, I'm avoiding the whole question of what constitutes a "dead project." But I stand by my argument that the hypothesis of Cringly's article is not whether there thousands of live open source projects or more open source projects than commerical. His hypothesis has nothing to do with live open source projects or live commercial projects (except as part of a total number of projects). His hypothesis has to do with dead ones.