The bitter-sweet taste of open source
From an essay of Paul Graham: (Original essay here)
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That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser.
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.
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I'm a professional programmer, eventhough I use open source to do ocassional jobs and I certainly enjoy the work in the open source community, I do tend to agree with Joel Spolsky on an interview he offered on the radio about the different types of software licenses and software economy in general. Open Source take us, professional programmers, to the edge. Here's the original interview in mp3
Here's a good thread on Open Source vs Commercial
The point is, Open Source value comes from Darwinian selection and thousands of volunteers all over the world, who are willing to do things for free, who are, some of them amateurs, that want to try how far they can go and who offer their code for free. The only thing Commercial software might have in its defense is Support and sometimes you get good quality support on open source forums.
How can software companies survive open source? I frankly don't know.
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That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser.
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.
...
I'm a professional programmer, eventhough I use open source to do ocassional jobs and I certainly enjoy the work in the open source community, I do tend to agree with Joel Spolsky on an interview he offered on the radio about the different types of software licenses and software economy in general. Open Source take us, professional programmers, to the edge. Here's the original interview in mp3
Here's a good thread on Open Source vs Commercial
The point is, Open Source value comes from Darwinian selection and thousands of volunteers all over the world, who are willing to do things for free, who are, some of them amateurs, that want to try how far they can go and who offer their code for free. The only thing Commercial software might have in its defense is Support and sometimes you get good quality support on open source forums.
How can software companies survive open source? I frankly don't know.
posted by Lizet Pena de Sola at
12:16 AM
5 Comments:
Linux/Unix and the OpenSource movement will soon rule the world give it 5 years or so.
While most of the support for OpenSource software comes from forums and listservs responses are often pretty fast, personally I think thats a lot better than the windows software phone support with long hold times.
The only thing about linux is a lot of software packages have a lot of dependancies and can be difficult to install.
Personally I like SuSE linux for my Work and Home computer and RedHat Enterprise for servers.
"...the OpenSource movement will soon rule the world give it 5 years or so."
Not quite, programmers need to eat, you know, we can't be the modern world poets, drinking pops and coding for free.
While I see a great advantage in publishing the code, I believe that when you release your code under the GPL license and give the freedom to change it, most of the time you're also taking no responsibility for what you coded and skip the support part completely. It's a take it or leave it.
From the top of my head I can compare WinMerge (Open Source tool) with Araxis Merge (Commercial Tool) and Araxis Merge is fairly superior. The same happens with FabForce DB Designer (Open Source) and Embarcadero Studios (Commercial), they are both used to design/generate databases. The difference there is night and day.
My point is, we can't go all to "donate your sleeping hours here" type of projects.
There has to be some sort of profit after all. So how to get profit from Open Source and keep the quality of software at the same time?
From the top of my head I can compare linux (open source) its really stable with very few bugs and has lots of feature and a great command line interface, compared to windows (commercial) its buggy, crashes often and is hard to get good support for, oh and its expensive, especially if you have many servers.
Kidding, a lot of software for windows is better and a lot of open source software tries to mimic the windows version. There are still many softwares for linux that are commercial and people are also needing custom software for windows and linux. Any other good thing about open source is you can customize and existing piece of software for your specific needs. As long are there are computers there will always be a need for programmers no matter how much open source software is available.
I'm not a Linux user. I frankly haven't compared both server OSs myself or ever had my hands into Linux more than for typing a few basic shell commands.
Here are some white papers on Linux vs Windows comparison:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/analyses/yankeetcoupdate.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/analyses/comparable.mspx
Both papers were released this year.
Any comments on that?
This thread was moved to Linux vs Windows war.
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