10 ms·

Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software,

Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software, but the reverse seems to be true. The open source business is thriving.

throwawayjava 8y ago
> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples: 1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system. 2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s. 3. Videogames. 4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook). Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time... Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.
- kanox 8y ago
  Open source does well when companies build commercial products on top of it and then pay the developers.
- taeric 8y ago
  Having been using Mac os for a while at work, I can't say it is superior. More supported, but equally as broken as my expectations for any os. Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most. Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- confounded 8y ago
  > Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type. Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits. Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers. In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.
- mrob 8y ago
  How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    I second this, Office has become less and less usable over the years. They keep hiding features and menu items that I use and constantly move around what is not hidden. Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use. The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.
    - slavik81 8y ago
      Most of LibreOffice is pretty good, but Impress is awful. Last month I put together a presentation. I wanted three slides with a few bullet points and a handful of images, but I gave up on Impress after encountering multiple different show-stopping bugs. The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again. I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer
  - veddox 8y ago
    LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power). Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)
    - frostburg 8y ago
      How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  What did Mac OS build off of? Would that be possible without OSS? Same for the large web services. How far would any of those companies have gotten without open source? No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >Would that be possible without OSS? In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community. As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.
    - oautholaf 8y ago
      Mac OS came from Mach, an open source microkernel from CMU in the 80s. Although Objective-C was originally proprietary, NeXT implemented it on GCC and open sourced it. The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Absolutely. My point was that, absent open source alternatives, Mac OS [EDIT: OS X specifically] could have been created on top of a proprietary UNIX. The lack of open source Unix alternatives would likely not have had much of an impact on Mac OS and certainly Apple hasn't taken advantage of the open source development model for Mac OS.
      - SeanLuke 8y ago
        > Mac OS came from Mach I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS. Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
        8y ago
- veddox 8y ago
  I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes". Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)
- Lio 8y ago
  99+% of people’s time? I think you missed out web browsers. The majority of which are open source. Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.
  - fyi1183 8y ago
    The JavaScript that arrives at the browser is usually not source code in the way that licenses tend to define the term (which is the preferred form for modifying the program). It's usually at least minified. It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Looking at the source code of nonfree Javascript is not recommended. You could be sued if you happen to write something similar and can't claim anymore that you invented it independently ("white-room").
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    That's not really true - most JavaScript is minified and a lot is obfuscated. And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.
veddox 8y ago
> The open source business is thriving. Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  The majority of servers are open source, the majority of consumer devices are open source, all super computers are open source. How is open source not eating the world?
  - veddox 8y ago
    As long as MS Windows still has 89% market share on the desktop/laptop market [1], as long as Google still keeps core parts of Android under lock and key, and as long as all my friends still communicate with Facebook and WhatsApp, I think the claim that "the majority of consumer devices are open source" is a bit early. Look, guys, I'm not saying open-source isn't important! And I'm definitely not saying there aren't any great open-source programs out there! All I'm saying is: on the current market, most companies that produce software choose to distribute this software under a closed-source license. What's so hard to accept about this simple observation?! [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share
    - nine_k 8y ago
      Open source makes sense for widely used, preferably infrastructural things. Operating systems, various network servers, programming languages. Most companies' has a very limited audience and a very narrow purpose; it can't benefit from the network effect.
  - adventured 8y ago
    You just named 0.1% of the revenue of the tech industry. Closed: Google search. Windows. Office. Facebook. Cisco. Intel. Amazon AWS. Amazon retail. Most Adobe products. Most Oracle products. iOS and most of what Apple does. Salesforce. Workday. Most of what nVidia does. Most of what Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and pretty much every other chip maker does. Most of what Samsung does. The core software of: PayPal, Square, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, et al. The list keeps going. Most of what every major tech company does is closed off. The tools are largely open source. The actual pieces of the companies that generate revenue are not. They love open source, when it isn't about their revenue generation. Ask Facebook to show us all of their source code. Nearly the entire tech industry is built on massive, closed products. Google search by itself generates more operating income every year than every public open source company combined, by a factor of ten. Ask Google to show you all the source code to search.
jdietrich 8y ago
I think a more pertinent example is the Shanzhai culture in Chinese manufacturing, which is distinct from both the overtly open culture of Free software and the explicitly closed structure of intellectual property. You're unlikely to find a datasheet for the latest MediaTek chipset through Google or Baidu, but you won't get sued for sharing a copy with a friend. You can't buy sample quantities through a distributor and MediaTek won't talk to you unless you're a serious player, but it's not hard to buy a couple of chips or a few reels if you know the right person. Information isn't free, but it doesn't have a price tag either - it's exchanged as part of a reciprocal guanxi network. Much like the BBS warez scene, information gradually percolates from a core of well-connected peers to a wider network, creating a hierarchy of esteem and a duty of reciprocity that incentivises the continued flow of information. I share with you today, in the expectation that you will share with me tomorrow.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  In my limited understanding, guanxi has the taste of corruption, not openness. People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market which provides more liquidity and opportunity. Is that wrong?
  - barrkel 8y ago
    People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market This describes most markets that are not in fungible commodities.
  - forkLding 8y ago
    Guanxi is a broad term and can mean anything from networking (the business kind) to asking about job referrals from friends, you can google the investopedia definition to get a better idea. It can be seen negatively or positively based on the context as in like "he got his job through guanxi" aka he either networked hard (positive) or there was some kind of nespotism involved (negative).
    - citrablue 8y ago
luckydata 8y ago
Maybe the community, the "business" is doing quite poorly.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Not really similar. Copyright applies by default and releasing software is voluntary.

throwawayjava 8y ago

> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples: 1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system. 2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s. 3. Videogames. 4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook). Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time... Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.

kanox 8y ago
Open source does well when companies build commercial products on top of it and then pay the developers.
taeric 8y ago
Having been using Mac os for a while at work, I can't say it is superior. More supported, but equally as broken as my expectations for any os. Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most. Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
confounded 8y ago
> Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type. Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits. Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers. In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.
mrob 8y ago
How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.
- tyfon 8y ago
  I second this, Office has become less and less usable over the years. They keep hiding features and menu items that I use and constantly move around what is not hidden. Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use. The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.
  - slavik81 8y ago
    Most of LibreOffice is pretty good, but Impress is awful. Last month I put together a presentation. I wanted three slides with a few bullet points and a handful of images, but I gave up on Impress after encountering multiple different show-stopping bugs. The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again. I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer
- veddox 8y ago
  LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power). Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)
  - frostburg 8y ago
    How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).
TACIXAT 8y ago
What did Mac OS build off of? Would that be possible without OSS? Same for the large web services. How far would any of those companies have gotten without open source? No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >Would that be possible without OSS? In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community. As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.
  - oautholaf 8y ago
    Mac OS came from Mach, an open source microkernel from CMU in the 80s. Although Objective-C was originally proprietary, NeXT implemented it on GCC and open sourced it. The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Absolutely. My point was that, absent open source alternatives, Mac OS [EDIT: OS X specifically] could have been created on top of a proprietary UNIX. The lack of open source Unix alternatives would likely not have had much of an impact on Mac OS and certainly Apple hasn't taken advantage of the open source development model for Mac OS.
    - SeanLuke 8y ago
      > Mac OS came from Mach I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS. Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
      - 8y ago
veddox 8y ago
I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes". Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)
Lio 8y ago
99+% of people’s time? I think you missed out web browsers. The majority of which are open source. Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.
- fyi1183 8y ago
  The JavaScript that arrives at the browser is usually not source code in the way that licenses tend to define the term (which is the preferred form for modifying the program). It's usually at least minified. It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Looking at the source code of nonfree Javascript is not recommended. You could be sued if you happen to write something similar and can't claim anymore that you invented it independently ("white-room").
- IshKebab 8y ago
  That's not really true - most JavaScript is minified and a lot is obfuscated. And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.

veddox 8y ago

> The open source business is thriving. Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.

zeth___ 8y ago
The majority of servers are open source, the majority of consumer devices are open source, all super computers are open source. How is open source not eating the world?
- veddox 8y ago
  As long as MS Windows still has 89% market share on the desktop/laptop market [1], as long as Google still keeps core parts of Android under lock and key, and as long as all my friends still communicate with Facebook and WhatsApp, I think the claim that "the majority of consumer devices are open source" is a bit early. Look, guys, I'm not saying open-source isn't important! And I'm definitely not saying there aren't any great open-source programs out there! All I'm saying is: on the current market, most companies that produce software choose to distribute this software under a closed-source license. What's so hard to accept about this simple observation?! [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Open source makes sense for widely used, preferably infrastructural things. Operating systems, various network servers, programming languages. Most companies' has a very limited audience and a very narrow purpose; it can't benefit from the network effect.
- adventured 8y ago
  You just named 0.1% of the revenue of the tech industry. Closed: Google search. Windows. Office. Facebook. Cisco. Intel. Amazon AWS. Amazon retail. Most Adobe products. Most Oracle products. iOS and most of what Apple does. Salesforce. Workday. Most of what nVidia does. Most of what Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and pretty much every other chip maker does. Most of what Samsung does. The core software of: PayPal, Square, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, et al. The list keeps going. Most of what every major tech company does is closed off. The tools are largely open source. The actual pieces of the companies that generate revenue are not. They love open source, when it isn't about their revenue generation. Ask Facebook to show us all of their source code. Nearly the entire tech industry is built on massive, closed products. Google search by itself generates more operating income every year than every public open source company combined, by a factor of ten. Ask Google to show you all the source code to search.

jdietrich 8y ago

I think a more pertinent example is the Shanzhai culture in Chinese manufacturing, which is distinct from both the overtly open culture of Free software and the explicitly closed structure of intellectual property. You're unlikely to find a datasheet for the latest MediaTek chipset through Google or Baidu, but you won't get sued for sharing a copy with a friend. You can't buy sample quantities through a distributor and MediaTek won't talk to you unless you're a serious player, but it's not hard to buy a couple of chips or a few reels if you know the right person. Information isn't free, but it doesn't have a price tag either - it's exchanged as part of a reciprocal guanxi network. Much like the BBS warez scene, information gradually percolates from a core of well-connected peers to a wider network, creating a hierarchy of esteem and a duty of reciprocity that incentivises the continued flow of information. I share with you today, in the expectation that you will share with me tomorrow.

forapurpose 8y ago
In my limited understanding, guanxi has the taste of corruption, not openness. People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market which provides more liquidity and opportunity. Is that wrong?
- barrkel 8y ago
  People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market This describes most markets that are not in fungible commodities.
- forkLding 8y ago
  Guanxi is a broad term and can mean anything from networking (the business kind) to asking about job referrals from friends, you can google the investopedia definition to get a better idea. It can be seen negatively or positively based on the context as in like "he got his job through guanxi" aka he either networked hard (positive) or there was some kind of nespotism involved (negative).
  - citrablue 8y ago

luckydata 8y ago

Maybe the community, the "business" is doing quite poorly.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

Not really similar. Copyright applies by default and releasing software is voluntary.