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The author states: "There’s very little time spent developing operating systems and basic utilities anymore" This could be a good thing, or it could be a bad t
by wes-exp 13y ago
The author states:
"There’s very little time spent developing operating systems and basic utilities anymore"
This could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing - depends on your perspective. Maybe people "spending time" on these things would help advance the state of the art.
Case study #1: PC hardware was commoditized under the Microsoft/Wintel model which made hardware "open" in the sense of interoperability. On the bright side, hardware was cheap. However, the dark side of this is that hardware makers couldn't really profit and invest into R&D. So for a long time we got heavy, ugly, clunky, beige boxes that gulped electricity.
Case study #2: The web was a happening place of innovation when Netscape earned a profit. Microsoft felt threatened and promptly destroyed Netscape by releasing Internet Explorer gratis and bundling it with Windows. The web plunged into a dark ages period from which we are still recovering.
Is it a good thing that operating systems and utilities are being commoditized by open source? If your only concern is price, then yes. If your concern is also for innovation and advancing the state of the art, I'm not so sure. Sometimes, exactly what you need is a company that profits handsomely selling proprietary products, in order to push an industry forward.
Commoditizing things and making them cheap (so no one works on them anymore) is a double-edged sword that is not necessarily good. So maybe it's your civic duty to pay for proprietary stuff, build proprietary stuff, and not to give away your labor.
- scribu 13y agoCase study #2 doesn't hold water. The web didn't plunge into the dark ages because people gave away their labor or because they didn't buy proprietary stuff. It was because Microsoft stopped developing IE after it had reached market dominance. And what brought the web back out of the dark ages? An open source browser (Firefox).
- wes-exp 13y agoSorry for the lack of clarity. Case #2 is only meant to illustrate that commoditization has harmful effects of innovation. Microsoft, for a time, commoditized the browser market, which harmed web innovation. I don't think that's in dispute. My overall argument is thus: A. Commoditization is not necessarily good. It often harms innovation (supported by case study #1 and #2) B. Open source is a kind of commoditization C. A and B together implies that open source is not necessarily good. By the way, I would argue that it wasn't open source that enabled Firefox to save the web. It was the fact that Google was making lots of profit on web search ads, and used that money to fund Firefox's development. The fact that Firefox was open source, is incidental.
- minor_nitwit 13y agoFirefox had to become successful before Google's payments would make a difference. Google didn't front Mozilla the money to develop a browser.
- wes-exp 13y agoYou're right, Mozilla didn't initially depend on Google. It depended on Netscape, which created Mozilla. I think it's hard to argue that Firefox's ultimate rise to prominence wasn't directly related to funding provided by Google, though.