02.21
I have to say that I consider myself to be a scientist, if not in the traditional beakers-and-chemicals sense then in the more philosophical sense. I believe in the scientific method.
I don’t really get the rising anti-science movement these days. I think it is generally a result of a failing education system (caused through a lack of respect by the parents and pupils rather than the school themselves failings) but you more and more hear science being referred to as something optional. Even people who you would otherwise think of as smart seem to think mysticism and ‘healing crystals’ and other such nonsense can co-exist with science, missing the fundamental point – If there was any tangible proof you could cure people with crystals it would be science. Since no proof exists it isn’t science. And since no proof exists how on earth does anyone know that they work? Even if you prove me wrong and manage to prove in the healing power of crystals then you have just brought them under the umbrella of ‘science’ and your whole point is moot.
There is a popular saying (coined by Marcello Truzzi) which is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Basically if you claim you can cure cancer with crystals, can read minds, have a perpetual motion machine or any other large, game-changing, claim then you better be able to back it up with some pretty hefty evidence. Every now and then someone will trot out some perpetual motion machine which they claim ‘works’, but mysteriously never works on the night, or only works under limited, unverifiable conditions. I always call bullshit and the reason for this (and the original quote) is the burden of proof is on the person making such claims. I claim I can fly, why is it up to you to disprove this?
So apparently commercial software is obsolete. FOSS is the way of the future. The old barter model – I give you x in exchange for y – is dead, to be replaced by a model of free distribution and sharing. An industry that accounts for trillions of pounds and millions of jobs globally is on the verge of being wiped out and replaced by a community sharing model.
The old system of selling software for money is obsolete. Instead the new system is to not only give that software away but to give away the source, plus complete distribution rights. You can in fact make more money by giving away software and selling support than you can ever make selling said software.
The capitalist system of competition to drive down costs and to create the best product through competition is dead, instead teams of people working in their spare time (for free) will create software that caters for the end-users needs much more completely and capably than groups of people who’s livelihoods depend on keeping such users happy.
There are some pretty extraordinary claims above, yet the presented evidence of Linux (which nobody uses), Sun Microsystems (which just failed), Microsoft and Apple (kings of closed and doing well) with the only real evidence of success being Ubuntu (funded by a multi-millionaire) and Red Hat (who’s yearly turnover is probably less than Microsoft’s annual stationary budget) do not point to the claims being true.
Where’s the ‘extraordinary evidence’ required to back up such claims? Where’s the normal evidence? How can anyone make such claims and expect to be taken seriously by sensible people?
Believe this rubbish, sure, but don’t pretend it’s any more real or believable than healing crystals, homeopathy or ‘faith healing’, because it isn’t. I just looked in my crystal ball and saw that in ten years time FOSS will be just as unpopular then as it is now.
I’m not sure I agree with this.
Software is a fundamentally different good than, say, cars. There’s a cost to designing cars, and there’s also a cost to make each car and get it to the consumer. There’s a cost to design software, but the cost to make copies and distribute them is negligible. Same goes for recordings of music, digital copies of books, etc. People continue to sell them as if they’re tangible goods, but they’re not, and it’s only with the help of government and copyright law that they oblige people to buy them as if they were.
I don’t think open source itself is fundamentally flawed; it’s just different. The “give away software for free and sell support” model doesn’t make much sense to me, and Linux is clearly a failure. Mozilla, on the other hand, uses a “give away software for free and make money from advertisers” model, which seems to be working pretty well for them. Their software is also of much higher quality, and they have a strong focus on usability and a smooth experience (polar opposite of Linux). This is probably because they have a pressure to please their users, so that it’s worthwhile for advertisers to give them money, similar to the pressure commercial software companies have to please their users to get money directly from them.
Charging for support, on the other hand, provides a perverse pressure to create MORE bugs, so that you have more things to fix. Doesn’t make sense.
There’s also the basement hackers working on small projects where it’s “give away the software for free and hope for donations”, which works well for some people and not well for others. (And of course the true altruists, who write really small fry stuff and give it away because it’s too simple to charge for, we already have real jobs, and don’t really give a shit.)
So I think it’s not so much an open source vs commercial problem, but a hobbyist hacker vs employed hacker problem.
All the really annoying shit about Linux is never going to be fixed, since there’s no incentive for the people that know how to write code to fix it. They couldn’t care less if the clipboard is emptied when you close a program, so instead of fixing it, they work on writing Yet Another _____ from scratch in their favorite language, because that’s what’s fun for them. So, after all these years, we still don’t have a working copy and paste.
If you can think of an incentive for developers to fix tedious bugs that they otherwise wouldn’t care about (money? sex? anime DVDs?) and a fair system to judge who actually fixed it and how much of the reward they get (not the honor system or one of these half-assed bounty websites), I bet Linux would have a chance of being relevant.
“not the honor system or one of these half-assed bounty websites”
The thing is, to actually pay a developer to fix a non-trivial problem is basically the same as employing him for the short term. Its much easier to get payed that way by simply working on a proprietary project. Do you think many people are going to donate to a bounty fund of say 40,000 USD to get a feature that would require 6 man months when so many have already drunk the kool-aid for free is better and are used to having a fully free suit of software.
I do not doubt that it is possible, on occasion, to monetise the foss model, what I am challenging is the notion that commercial software is obsolete. While each copy has zero cost the first copy has an astronomically high cost that must be paid for somehow.
I am challenging the notion that foss is a replacement model for commercial – I don’t doubt it can be used profitably, but its viability is seriously limited.
15 years ago people used to pay for web browsers (Netscape didn’t start out free, it’s only until IE become a force in the market that Netscape became free). 20 years ago people used to pay for TCP/IP stacks on Windows (until Microsoft killed this market with Winsock). Microsoft has done more to kill the idea of paying for software then FOSS can ever hope to.
Actually, I would say the success of FOSS is because of Microsoft, not despite them. If Microsoft didn’t commoditize a lot software industries, they wouldn’t feel the to turn to open source in order to compete *somehow* with the software giant. Bringing back Netscape for example, it went from sharware, to freeware, to open source after Microsoft raped them with Internet Explorer. Firefox is based on Netscape’s source code.
If IE didn’t exist, would any of this ever happen? Probably not.
Another example is Novell, Novell was basically killed as a proprietary software company by none other then Microsoft. They moved to become a Linux company as their NetWare software product was being raped by Windows 2000 Active Directory.
There USED to be a vibrant and large software development industry, and programmers easily super high salaries. That was BEFORE Microsoft was a monopoly. It all went down hill from there.
The reason nobody believes in this “science” is because it has become a tool of the liberal media who believe they have some kind of monopoly on intelligence. If the “science” is political why believe it?
@
I think when you look how FOSS is funded, it’s a bit like the aristocrat sponsorship model. Which is how a very large amount of the world’s science research is funded. I mean, look at Linux kernel. No one pays for using it, but it’s still quite well funded. This is because Linux kernel developers have sponsorships. Eg: IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Google, NSA, Novell, Oracle and many others. This is no different then how many scientists are funded (through governmental or corporate sponsorship).
There’s a term for this, Piestar: “blind faith”. FOSS advocates have faith in their source model taking over completely, which smacks of Marx’s dialectical materialism and the belief that Communism would take over completely too. The common theme in both these logical fallacies is that both are assumed to work right from the outset without any proof whatsoever. When you point this out to an advocate, they’ll likely cite an exception such as Firefox while ignoring the literally thousands of other FOSS projects which are either stillborn, unremarkable or unusable.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the general concept of FOSS, and use quite a few FOSS apps myself. Like you, my criticism is not with the concept itself but the beliefs of its advocates and how they are perpetuated. To these people, FOSS is not merely just a “neat idea” but superior both in terms of morality and quality. FOSS is assumed to be better by default and thus negates any objectivity.
Slightly off-topic: yeah, belief in crystals and other new-age stuff annoys me too. My personal pet peeve are horoscopes, though.
It always sort of irks me when people say that software is somehow priceless because it can be duplicated for free. In material costs, this is true, but the cost of software isn’t in the materials, its in time.
Even if you consider material goods, much of the markup on a car goes to paying for the research and development, not the $500 in steel that goes into it. If Honda only built a single Civic, it would cost over a billion dollars with the exact same materials. That’s the cost of R&D you’re paying for. They get the price down by amortizing that cost across millions of vehicles sold.
There USED to be a vibrant and large software development industry, and programmers easily super high salaries. That was BEFORE Microsoft was a monopoly. It all went down hill from there.
This is bullshit. Novell could have dominated Microsoft, but they didn’t make the right decisions. WordPerfect languished in their success and that gave Word time to overtake it. Quark Express also languished, releasing new versions you had to pay dearly for without any new features or noticeable improvements, until Adobe decided to make InDesign and now it dominates the layout industry. Apple saw a niche to make an easier to use MP3 player and an easier to use smartphone.
Claiming Microsoft is a monopoly in any of the industries it dominates is silly since it isn’t, nor did it even have dominance to begin with. Their competitors just got lazy.
Lastly, I like your claims about a “golden age”. The reason salaries are down is because the number of developers went up and technology has improved, making what once took a guy with a degree, possible for a kid in his bedroom.
“Sun Microsystems (which just failed)” I don’t see how being bought by Orcale spell failure for the company. Can you kindly elaborate this for me?
“Sun Microsystems (which just failed)” I don’t see how being bought by ‘Orcale’ spell failure for the company. Can you kindly elaborate this for me?
Gee I dunno, one would think the being bought part would be enough but seemingly that concept is a little hard to grasp.
Maybe a metaphor will help, say you find a poor sick dear in the woods, being hungry, you decide to eat it. Does the animal dieing and going into your stomach somehow make him a success?
“Sun Microsystems (which just failed)” I don’t see how being bought by Orcale spell failure for the company. Can you kindly elaborate this for me?
Its not so much that Sun is being bought, its that Sun is being bought for relatively cheap that makes it a failure. They’re not being bought because they’re an upstart with vital technology that the big boys want, instead, they’re being bought because they just dropped to clearance pricing levels.
If Honda only built a single Civic, it would cost over a billion dollars with the exact same materials.
Some 15 years ago or so it was revealed that manufacturing a processor cost $1 or something and there was much murmuring about the audacity of charging us 250x-500x markup. Of course, the complainers ignored the hundreds of millions of R&D dollars (now billions) required to design a new CPU and create the manufacturing equipment to build it. They only see the last dollar spent whether it’s music, software, or processors. Some people just don’t understand the concept of amortization.
I think when you look how FOSS is funded
Too bad not enough of it is funded to make a general statement, which is really the crux of FOSS’ problem. Even with all the loons, if there were good money in this they’d be marginalized. Problem is, I am just as likely–perhaps even more so–to receive funding merely getting lucky by developing some closed source tool that provides a function valuable to a large audience. Anyone really interested in seeing the code to extend it is going to license it or buy it outright.
…nor did [Microsoft] even have dominance to begin with
This one’s my pet peeve: people assume Microsoft was birthed with a monopoly. They retroactively pretend DOS had 100% of the market, instantly, upon its release, and there was never a prayer for anybody. Meanwhile the rest of us saw the missteps of Apple, Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack. Settling with WP 5.1 for half a decade was fucking painful; people were begging for something like Word to come around. Novell Netware was ludicrously expensive and insisted on using this crazy IPX/SPX thing even when it was clear TCP/IP was the future.
Quark Express also languished, releasing new versions you had to pay dearly for without any new features or noticeable improvements
The worst part of Quark wasn’t even the tons of money for no improvements, it was the plugin ecosystem that built around the lack of improvements. Stacking them all in the right order was like a Jenga puzzle, and one never could completely get rid of the crashes.
There USED to be a vibrant and large software development industry, and programmers easily super high salaries
And here we see the typical guild mentality. You guys want your turf to be like the electricians’, with all sorts of over reactionary laws protecting your income and forcing recruitment from within to control supply. Artificially high salaries for work that is skilled yet not terribly hard to find is not a good thing for society and will eventually kill your product. In the US at least, see the automobile and railroad industries. The latter was definitely destroyed by guild mentality (unions) and the former arguably will be.
Kerberos’ post reminds me of James Randi’s bounty, on which he will pay $1,000,000 US to anyone who can demonstrate any supernatural phenomena whatsoever in a controlled setting. Naturally, no one’s claimed it, and all they need to do is repeatedly demonstrate the very ability they claim to have high confidence in. The best part is, being a professional stage magician, Randi himself is a flimflam man and knows all about the confidence tricks and distraction techniques. He’s not limited to psychics; somewhat recently he moved onto the ludicrously corrupt “audiophile” industry where the paid-off press uses pseudoscience to bamboozle naive marks with cash to blow.
What people don’t realize is, without science, we’d have to take everybody at face value and/or use our limited anecdotal experience to guide us through decisions. We’d all be vulnerable to charlatans peddling magic tonic water and “magnetic copper” bracelets that influence others’ thoughts. The unfortunate thing is science doesn’t tell us what we want to know, it tells the truth. Not to say there’s zero corruption or groupthink within the actual scientific community–just look at the deplorable state of the US Food & Drug Administration for that–but the actual scientific method, when followed correctly, is sound. Dealing with the emotional impact of the results is outside the scientific realm, however.
“people assume Microsoft was birthed with a monopoly. They retroactively pretend DOS had 100% of the market, instantly, upon its release, and there was never a prayer for anybody.”
Quoted for absolute, rock-solid, motherfucking truth.
Microsoft have a dominant position because we, the computer and operating-system buying public, GAVE IT TO THEM. It can’t even be said that it’s just the ordinary public buying whatever was put in front of them in the computer; Microsoft’s dominant position was handed over by people who knew computers, and knew what they were buying. The alternatives were found wanting for whatever reason, and people CHOSE Microsoft.
James Randi – the Epic Beard Man of sceptics.
“recently he moved onto the ludicrously corrupt “audiophile” industry where the paid-off press uses pseudoscience to bamboozle naive marks with cash to blow”
The $500 CAT6 cable being a notable example.
“40,000 USD to get a feature that would require 6 man months”
Is that a realistic work/cost estimate?
Has anyone ever used something like http://www.getacoder.com/ to have open source software written? I can’t see their coding quality being any worse than bedroom hobbyists.
I’d definitely contribute money to projects if I knew the money was going to be used wisely, and that I benefit from it, even if other people didn’t pay.
“I think when you look how FOSS is funded, it’s a bit like the aristocrat sponsorship model. Which is how a very large amount of the world’s science research is funded.”
How much research is funded by the corporate world vs the government?
“It always sort of irks me when people say that software is somehow priceless because it can be duplicated for free.”
Did someone say that?
Has anyone noticed how bad debian is? I installed it and it sucks. You can read about it on my blog and comment.
@Thomas B
NO WAI!! LYNUX IS THA PERFEKT LULZ!!11! U PAYD M$ SH1LL!
Now seriously, whatcha talking bout fool?
Aptitude kicks ass, just install synaptic from aptitude if it bothers you so much (I had to use aptitude to fix a borked OpenSUSE install due to the absolute fail that is Yast).
Now I don’t use debian, but you used LXDE, did you expect a proper desktop environment like KDE or Gnome?
“Aptitude, which really sucks because it doesn’t automatically install dependencies to packages”
Huh… yes it does o_O, at least on Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.
“There aren’t any good applications preinstalled either”
You downloaded LXDE, you’re an idiot.
*sigh*
Guys like ThomasB are among the worst of the Linux crowd. “Look at me! See? I can say Linux sucks too! See? Linux sucks! Aren’t I objective and gracious?!”
No, you’re not. Get over yourself. You’re just distro-bashing (a typical Linux user pasttime) and presented it to us as “objective criticism of Linux”. We’re not fooled.
Then Kerberos is the same way because he does that to windows.
Guys, that post above wasn’t me. More people being fags. Sorry.
He lies. I am the real Thomas B.
<_<
and Kommenter, I also tried GNOME with Debian a while back, so be quiet.
@Thomas B.
Do note that as far as I’m concerned, debian is a piece of shit.
I was defending aptitude since it kicks ass.
I don’t know what planet you’re on but aptitude sucks.
oh and I have a new entry on my blog talking about oracle buying sun.
Seriously, you need to quit. This is bullshit, stop using mah name.
@Thomas B.
You should thank the guy, he’s spreading awareness to your blog.
(A friendly reminder: “Don’t feed the troll”)
I am not a troll. I am the real Thomas B. Muhahaha.
I see little Thomas has turned into quite the winbred. The illegal monopoly has successfully strong-armed him into switching his loyalty away from linux.
We had to put him on a money IV while showing flashing pictures of Steve Ballmer and Gates mixed in with Jesus. Every request for kool-aid was met with electric shocks, every mention of the word brown resulted in a savage beating.
We showed him multiple examples of linux working like shit, we’re talking worse than windows 3.1 here (windows 3.1 had working sound).
Nothing worked!
In the end we just gave him a copy of windows 7 for free. Took about 5 minutes to take effect. An astounding success.
Btw… We’ll be seeing you soon Adam, real soon…
Lol, epic.
But obviously not true. Adam, you must be blind or dumb, and I’m sure it’s the latter because if you were blind, chances are we would have never come across your trolling. You’re too dumb to realize that Linux is “teh pwnage”, but the community behind it is “n00b”. Hopefully I’ve put that into vocabulary you know.
Have you guys figured out that anyone could use the name “Adam King” on this blog yet? Or are you all seriously that fucking stupid?
You’re all Adam King
“Or are you all seriously that fucking stupid?”
As stupid as one idiot pretending to be multiple idiots pretending to be one idiot?