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Question: Why don't we see this rate of invention in open source community? It is already (apart of it corporation-sponsored part) an artistic community, people

by rumcajz 11y ago

Question: Why don't we see this rate of invention in open source community? It is already (apart of it corporation-sponsored part) an artistic community, people work on stuff they like, there's no business pressure and so on.

pjmlp 11y ago
Because the majority of the open source community are either people building up their CVs or working on side projects. Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Also a reason (among many others) why the market didn't adopt their technologies.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  > Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    The researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things. A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto
    - rjsw 11y ago
      Building an Alto then required lots of money, you can prototype fairly complicated things now on a cheap FPGA.
      - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        Yes. Of course. But, to quote Wayne Gretzky: I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. You can build today's complicated things cheaply. But if you really want to achieve a quantum leap you need to think 10 years out. It is not cheap to build today the prototypes of things that will be desirable in 10 years. That is what Xerox PARC was doing. It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software. Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity. Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
        rjsw 11y ago
        I was sufficiently good at building stuff in FPGAs and writing the software to use it that I don't need to work anymore. I see the kind of decisions that I need to make now on what projects to work on as the same as those that would need to be made by creative people receiving basic income. People seem happy to donate to Kickstarter projects, the amounts needed would be smaller if the participants already had enough to live on.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        You are missing the point. What would be the Alto of today designed with hardware from 2030, not with a cheap FPGA from 2015?
        rjsw 11y ago
        I don't think I am missing the point. The Alto hardware was fairly simple, most stuff was done in software. What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Check this video running in another thread. This a known Alan Kay talk, he did it already a few times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price. You won't get there with basic income.
    - calibraxis 11y ago
      Basic Income can be a great stepping block to cultural improvements which include things like tech. It is true that some things need allocation of resources which Basic Income doesn’t directly address, but a society with Basic Income might be more reliably capable of getting it done.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        I agree with basic income for everyone. Just don't agree it is enough to innovate at Xerox PARC scale, as what is being discussed is funding, not salaries.
- hga 11y ago
  Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Eh, if they'd put Altos in serial production instead of small batches at a time adding up to 2,000 units it wouldn't have been vastly more expensive. There was nothing both exotic and wildly expensive about them compared to contemporary PDP-11s + a graphics console. The extras were a mouse, chord keyboard, network adapter, and more memory per person than normal for a PDP-11.
ossdev014 11y ago
Because of money. OSS is usually written as a hobby in the spare time of developers because doing it full time rarely pays the bills: http://www.zdnet.com/article/electricity-bill-threatens-survival-of-openbsd/# http://www.zdnet.com/article/electricity-bill-threatens-surv...!
mpweiher 11y ago
Lots of reason. OSS usually tries to duplicate something that's already there, or make small improvements. There's a lot more chance for a result that others will find impressive when doing something incremental, because you are building on all the stuff that's already there. In fact, academia is also the largely that way: do a small increment. Doing something that's true invention is far more difficult, and the results are far less impressive in the short to mid term. As an example, you probably won't find Objective-Smalltalk [1] very impressive, I would say that a good part of the reason for this is that it is really trying to invent something new. This is slow/difficult because you must eschew the easy/obvious answers. It is difficult to communicate for the same reasons: everything is subtly strange. [1] http://objective.st/ http://objective.st/
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  > OSS usually tries to duplicate something that's already there, or make small improvements. Rust? I'm sure there are many other counter examples too.
  - sparkie 11y ago
    Rust is hardly groundbreaking. It's a mix of imperative/functional styles that are well known, thrown in with pointer ownership which has been researched and toyed with in various forms for years before. It's a small improvement on C and C++. Making a practical implementation is praisworthy, but I'd say this hardly counts as an invention in open source, and it's particulaly unrepresentitive of the FOSS community anyway because it's backed by a big company with a big research pot. The kind of game changers Kay is talking about are not that easily approachable. You won't be able to take your existing knowledge of language X and suddenly see how they mostly apply to Y too. If that were the case then you've not really changed the paradigm, only given a glimpse of how it could look from the existing one. And the reason you don't see many of these kinds of innovations in the FOSS world (although they definitely exist), is because they don't gain traction. If something is clearly new and takes significant effort to learn, very few people are going to take the time to investigate it. Meanwhile, solutions which fit well into the existing paradigm are easily accessible by masses of developers, and they flourish. This is probably one of the main reasons that real invention is rare: people are after fame, and adoption rates aren't going to go up quickly if you challenge existing conventions.
mst 11y ago
Long term focused thought. I've been running a consultancy for ten years, my current research project that I believe will shortly become a product has been around over ten. We mostly make our money by open source users finding us. But that sort of invention is time consuming and hard; I'm only working on said project because shadow.cat is capable of letting me.
nabla9 11y ago
Open source/free software philosophy is solution oriented. Successful open source project serves immediate needs and revolves around implementation. If you have a problem, you write code that solves the problem and give it to others to use. Software should be at least minimally usable to be adopted. It should work with other software. Look at the software in Alan Kay's VPRI: http://www.vpri.org/ http://www.vpri.org/ They don't write software for you to use. They build software to use as platform to test ideas. If some of those ideas is good, someone may rewrite the whole thing to fit into current software infrastructure.
davelnewton 11y ago
What makes you think we don't? Most innovation is coming directly from the OS community: hardware, software, systems, etc.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Examples, please. Particularly software innovations.
vidarh 11y ago
Assuming that you're right that we're not (and I'm not convinced; a lot of amazing stuff is coming out of the open source community): Time. I'm working on a Ruby ahead-of-time compiler. I started in 2008. I slowed myself down a lot by all the blog articles I've written about it, but yet, at this point it's only now getting close to being able to compile itself. The reasons it's been so slow going, is that in those years, I've only put in the equivalent of a few months of fully time work on it - it's not my only project, and working on my side projects have to compete with spending time on my son and other leisure activities. It takes a lot more people to get the equivalent output of a lab of fulltime staff. Even more so because this slows down interaction and communication as well.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sparkie 11y ago
Inertia, Communication, Noise. The landscape is very different from what it was in 70s. They were working on a clean slate before half of the human population had computer terminals in front of them. Their battle was to get the terminal in front of people, but I'd argue that the biggest accelerator to adoption has been social media, not the way GUIs behave or programming languages function. The web is now the legacy software we're stuck with if we want any impact at this scale. Say for example, if you had a completely new idea for a general purpose operating system which simplified things greatly, but was unlike Unix, and it had no web browser. Now what? People aren't interested - they want their web browser.

by rumcajz 11y ago

pjmlp 11y ago

Because the majority of the open source community are either people building up their CVs or working on side projects. Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Also a reason (among many others) why the market didn't adopt their technologies.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
> Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  The researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things. A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto
  - rjsw 11y ago
    Building an Alto then required lots of money, you can prototype fairly complicated things now on a cheap FPGA.
    - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
      Yes. Of course. But, to quote Wayne Gretzky: I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. You can build today's complicated things cheaply. But if you really want to achieve a quantum leap you need to think 10 years out. It is not cheap to build today the prototypes of things that will be desirable in 10 years. That is what Xerox PARC was doing. It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software. Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity. Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
      - rjsw 11y ago
        I was sufficiently good at building stuff in FPGAs and writing the software to use it that I don't need to work anymore. I see the kind of decisions that I need to make now on what projects to work on as the same as those that would need to be made by creative people receiving basic income. People seem happy to donate to Kickstarter projects, the amounts needed would be smaller if the participants already had enough to live on.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      You are missing the point. What would be the Alto of today designed with hardware from 2030, not with a cheap FPGA from 2015?
      - rjsw 11y ago
        I don't think I am missing the point. The Alto hardware was fairly simple, most stuff was done in software. What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Check this video running in another thread. This a known Alan Kay talk, he did it already a few times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price. You won't get there with basic income.
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    Basic Income can be a great stepping block to cultural improvements which include things like tech. It is true that some things need allocation of resources which Basic Income doesn’t directly address, but a society with Basic Income might be more reliably capable of getting it done.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      I agree with basic income for everyone. Just don't agree it is enough to innovate at Xerox PARC scale, as what is being discussed is funding, not salaries.
hga 11y ago
Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Eh, if they'd put Altos in serial production instead of small batches at a time adding up to 2,000 units it wouldn't have been vastly more expensive. There was nothing both exotic and wildly expensive about them compared to contemporary PDP-11s + a graphics console. The extras were a mouse, chord keyboard, network adapter, and more memory per person than normal for a PDP-11.

ossdev014 11y ago

Because of money. OSS is usually written as a hobby in the spare time of developers because doing it full time rarely pays the bills: http://www.zdnet.com/article/electricity-bill-threatens-survival-of-openbsd/# http://www.zdnet.com/article/electricity-bill-threatens-surv...!

mpweiher 11y ago

Lots of reason. OSS usually tries to duplicate something that's already there, or make small improvements. There's a lot more chance for a result that others will find impressive when doing something incremental, because you are building on all the stuff that's already there. In fact, academia is also the largely that way: do a small increment. Doing something that's true invention is far more difficult, and the results are far less impressive in the short to mid term. As an example, you probably won't find Objective-Smalltalk [1] very impressive, I would say that a good part of the reason for this is that it is really trying to invent something new. This is slow/difficult because you must eschew the easy/obvious answers. It is difficult to communicate for the same reasons: everything is subtly strange. [1] http://objective.st/ http://objective.st/

Drdrdrq 11y ago
> OSS usually tries to duplicate something that's already there, or make small improvements. Rust? I'm sure there are many other counter examples too.
- sparkie 11y ago
  Rust is hardly groundbreaking. It's a mix of imperative/functional styles that are well known, thrown in with pointer ownership which has been researched and toyed with in various forms for years before. It's a small improvement on C and C++. Making a practical implementation is praisworthy, but I'd say this hardly counts as an invention in open source, and it's particulaly unrepresentitive of the FOSS community anyway because it's backed by a big company with a big research pot. The kind of game changers Kay is talking about are not that easily approachable. You won't be able to take your existing knowledge of language X and suddenly see how they mostly apply to Y too. If that were the case then you've not really changed the paradigm, only given a glimpse of how it could look from the existing one. And the reason you don't see many of these kinds of innovations in the FOSS world (although they definitely exist), is because they don't gain traction. If something is clearly new and takes significant effort to learn, very few people are going to take the time to investigate it. Meanwhile, solutions which fit well into the existing paradigm are easily accessible by masses of developers, and they flourish. This is probably one of the main reasons that real invention is rare: people are after fame, and adoption rates aren't going to go up quickly if you challenge existing conventions.

mst 11y ago

Long term focused thought. I've been running a consultancy for ten years, my current research project that I believe will shortly become a product has been around over ten. We mostly make our money by open source users finding us. But that sort of invention is time consuming and hard; I'm only working on said project because shadow.cat is capable of letting me.

nabla9 11y ago

Open source/free software philosophy is solution oriented. Successful open source project serves immediate needs and revolves around implementation. If you have a problem, you write code that solves the problem and give it to others to use. Software should be at least minimally usable to be adopted. It should work with other software. Look at the software in Alan Kay's VPRI: http://www.vpri.org/ http://www.vpri.org/ They don't write software for you to use. They build software to use as platform to test ideas. If some of those ideas is good, someone may rewrite the whole thing to fit into current software infrastructure.

davelnewton 11y ago

What makes you think we don't? Most innovation is coming directly from the OS community: hardware, software, systems, etc.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Examples, please. Particularly software innovations.

vidarh 11y ago

Assuming that you're right that we're not (and I'm not convinced; a lot of amazing stuff is coming out of the open source community): Time. I'm working on a Ruby ahead-of-time compiler. I started in 2008. I slowed myself down a lot by all the blog articles I've written about it, but yet, at this point it's only now getting close to being able to compile itself. The reasons it's been so slow going, is that in those years, I've only put in the equivalent of a few months of fully time work on it - it's not my only project, and working on my side projects have to compete with spending time on my son and other leisure activities. It takes a lot more people to get the equivalent output of a lab of fulltime staff. Even more so because this slows down interaction and communication as well.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sparkie 11y ago

Inertia, Communication, Noise. The landscape is very different from what it was in 70s. They were working on a clean slate before half of the human population had computer terminals in front of them. Their battle was to get the terminal in front of people, but I'd argue that the biggest accelerator to adoption has been social media, not the way GUIs behave or programming languages function. The web is now the legacy software we're stuck with if we want any impact at this scale. Say for example, if you had a completely new idea for a general purpose operating system which simplified things greatly, but was unlike Unix, and it had no web browser. Now what? People aren't interested - they want their web browser.