Reading Linux

Open source is a good thing and all but has anyone ever worried about what it could possibly do to the world of programmers and their trade?
I mean has anybody ever worried about whether or not it could do bad things to the industry? It could easily be abusedby everyone and industrial programming as we know it could become obsolete. Which is what I am currently going to school for. Now in all of my worry I do see good things happening for the GPL as well but it could seriously change the industry and put many out of the job and I PLAN on working in that feild. Any comments on why it would or would not happen would be appreciated.

I should be ashamed of myself.

My .02:
I'm currently working as a programmer. Altho I believe that OSS takes away some market share from some software companies, I'm not worried about losing my job. That's because the company I work for makes highly customized software, for tasks where there simply is no OSS. While some software people might lose their job to OSS, I don't believe in the MS horror stories of the whole software industry collapsing. The industry will merely change from mainstream programming to custom solutions or support for OSS.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

The industry will merely change from mainstream programming to custom solutions or support for OSS.

Yep! Exactly my opinion, too! And exactly the same as what I'm trying to do: I'm using Open Source-based programs to create very customized solutions for Websites, eg. by taking WordPress and turning it into a nearly full-blown CMS, partially adding static pages - internally, to myself, I call it WordPress CMS. I already re-worked a full page based on it - excluding the shop system, which is based entirely on my own planning and sources, but very easy to customize - which you can find at: http://www.candies-boutique.de

The next one I'm creating this way is the all-new website of a small metal festival in Munich, called Metal Meridian-Festival, which will be up in the next 1-2 days. The current version (and also the new, as soon as I get it online) can be found at: http://www.metal-meridian.de

cu, w0lf.

Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign for a diseased mind!

Several of my freinds theorize that in five years all system software will be open source.
I believe this and I am sort of still worried. I would hate to be useless after my college training. But I guess I can be an open source programmer and do the GPL thing, but I would also like to live a comfortable life and afford that qaud opteron, refrigerated cased, 80 gigabyte 10k rpm raid 5, everything about is overkill rig....

I should be ashamed of myself.

This post was edited by Aynjell on Jun 23, 2004.

But I guess I can be an open source programmer and do the GPL thing

Well, OSS hasnt killed Unix, but made it RISE like hell .. and btw: there is not only the Gnu Public License, there are LOTS OF licenses out there, several including things like "available only for NON-commercial use@ etc., thus enabling you to use your product still in a commercial way whilst opening it to the folks who just want to set it up at home or a university, which is the number one problem with closed source software: you have to pay for every- and anything! And you're not even allowed to change or finetune it!

I'm not developing this thought further, because I think my dear fellow NAOis are going to know by themselves in which direction this does go ;) Think for yourself, folks! ;)

cu, w0lf.

Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign for a diseased mind!

Development houses that produce software for which usable open source alternatives are becoming available are bound to take some heavy hits. However, most money in the software development business is not being made with packaged boxes (Microsoft products aside) but custom or specialized solutions - correct me if I'm wrong.

For numerous reason I don't believe open source software is ever going to pose a threat to that kind of business. Actually it has become possible to offer such solutions at a much more competitive by building on top of free open source infrastructure.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Well thank you guys. That was just a worry on my mind. So if nobody thinks it will hurt commercial software design than I will eliminate it from my mind it was just a fear.

Thanks you guys.

Anyway I was reading a book that is fundamental in one of my classes, or more so skimming through, and they quoted the original author of the GPL in an article about software piracy.
Now, I am not saying that he doesn't commit piracy or that he does(I believe that he doesn't) however, the fact that the school book referenced him like that kind of irritated me.

I guess I am not the expert nor do I claim to be but the simple fact remains, from my experiences open source is a damn good thing and the fact that they would put him in a negative light like that kind of made me think back to arguments about bad doctrine the the school place.

has anyone seen Inherit the Wind!?!

I should be ashamed of myself.

I recommend that whatever job U eventually take, U take because U love doing it, not because it has the potential to make buckets of money. If that's what U want, import illegal substances into the U.S.; we have major appetites here for them, so the market is probably the world's largest, and best of all, U don't have to worry about paying taxes.

OK, let's get serious and take a look at the world of closed-source; I've been writing code in it for almost thirty years, so I know a little bit about the process.

Typically, a manager near the top will decide what the product is going to be. He then goes to his subordinates, who are also managers (for the most part), and works out a few of the top-level details with them. In the tech world, the prez and his subordinate managers are often tech guys, so they aren't dummies or newbies, and they carefully consider all the options. They haven't actually been down in the trenches for quite a few years, however, so if they have any smarts, they just outline the new product and leave the details to those who are in closer touch with the state of the art.

Next, the Plan travels further down the feeding chain for fleshing out. At this point, a lot of detail is undecided, and politics comes into play as various managers and organizations jockey for advantage. In any organization with more than one person, politics is an inevitable part of business. It's just part of being human; it can't be avoided, because parasitics are part of _any_ real-world process, including human organizations. In any case, the decisions that are now made are not directed by just one individual, and many times do not have the benefit of the customer or end user in mind. This is the first place where major errors can be introduced into the process.

At some point, the folks who write the code are finally turned loose to write the code. Most real-world projects are large enough that in order to maintain a viable schedule, the project has to be divided up into modules and farmed out to teams. In other words, only a few of the grunts will have the 'big picture.' If the organization is effective, a product specification will have been at least partly written at this point, with the details to be finalized by the grunts. Coding begins, and changes are made to both code and specification (but far more often to the former than the latter if it's done right) until the alpha, then beta tests are run.

At every point in the cycle, there are careful checks of the code against the specifications, and everybody involved will give input...

... But this is the ideal. What if somebody has a grudge against his boss and puts in a backdoor? What if he's the best coder and is able to BS his co-workers into not checking an important segment too closely? Or what if somebody is running behind and has an unreasonable boss, and decides to put in some code he wrote while working for another employer? He wrote it, it looks like his code to his fellow workers (because it is), but it belongs to another company, nobody there knows it's purloined code, and since THERE WILL BE NO OUTSIDE REVIEW, it will most likely never be found.

Of course, everybody knows that this sort of thing Never Happens. Trust Us when we tell U that Our Code is Most Excellent. Of course.

As for myself, I like open source. There is money to be made in it, both from a coding standpoint and a service standpoint (just ask Red Hat, Suse (Novell), and IBM). Best of all from a professional programming standpoint, the code is out there in front of God and Everybody, and if any of it is stolen, I would be an idiot to put it into public view. There's quite an incentive to keep it honest, and I'm sure that's the way most programmers would like to see it.

Finally, an awful lot of programmers write code for love of coding (I certainly do). Just write the shell of a piece of code and put it out on the web, and I guarantee U'll get not just opinions on how to improve it, U'll actually get the patches to make it better. Best of all from society's viewpoint, if an idiot project maintainer starts to ruin a project by taking it in the wrong direction, anybody else in the world can use his own copy of the code and start another project that goes in the right direction. Conversely, if an idiot manager in a closed-source organization takes the product in the wrong direction, the programmers reporting to him have no choice but to implement the changes, regardless of what they may believe or want (ever hear of 'employment at will?').

Another analogy is locks on house doors: They are there more to keep honest people, not crooks, out of the house. If the door is unlocked and open, a good guy might be tempted to go in and steal, when he wouldn't even consider breaking the lock if it wasn't open; the bad guy is going to go in through the door, the window, the wall, or whatever else he can if he wants what's inside badly enough. Open source is done in the light of day, in front of everybody, and with the co-operation of many. Closed source is done behind closed doors, with the good folks at the top saying, "Trust Us; we're honest and we're the best ... because We Say So." Give me open source any day.

Some areas of software are unlikely to become OSS, and OSS creates as more jobs than it destroys, so you're probably fine. Games for example, are highly unlikely to move to OSS. Their engines anyway -- the unreal tournament games are OSS to the extent that all of the unrealscript code is available for anyone to read -- just the code for the virtual machine itself is not.

I think this because singleplayer games have no plausible service model. For multiplayer you can pay for online play, ladder access, etc. But a standalone singleplayer game doesn't have any possible tie ins. You have to get the money when they get the game.

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think."

This post was edited by Tetrazome on Sep 03, 2004.

Games for example, are highly unlikely to move to OSS.

Personally, I would take the other route: OSS is a great model for games. This is for one simple reason: you can release the source code for the game under an open-source license, but that doesn't mean you have to give the art / levels / characters / etc. away for free.

This has occurred with numerous (albeit older) games, such as Quake 2 (correct me if I'm wrong). Now that no one is buying the game, the company has released the source code for the game. They only released the source code; you must still have the game itself to obtain the data files needed to play it. In some ways, this has opened new doors for the game, as it can now be ported to modern hardware, modernized, etc.

Now, that doesn't mean that all games should be released open-sourced. But I think that gaming provides a unique opportunity for open-source software that other software genres do not have, because games are not just selling the code for the engine -- they are also selling graphics, art, characters, levels, and other data needed to use the engine. This data can be licensed to the user for a price, while the source code can be open-sourced.

I'll see your two cents, and raise you a dollar... :)

Open source is better, because :
-> you can earn cash on tech support for your product
-> open source projects are very often updated = lots of work for programmers.
-> you can be amazed how many people can donate to your project out of their good will. if your project is good enough.
-> you get in touch with the customer instead of stupid PR companies :d

OSS is a great model for games. This is for one simple reason: you can release the source code for the game under an open-source license, but that doesn't mean you have to give the art / levels / characters / etc. away for free.

so the game actually is not fully OSS.

actually OSS is not really good model for a game. it's not fun to see a game slowly gain quality and lose bugs. people expect some decent functionality at the very start from trying a game. it's supposed to entertain, right?

"Life is a queue. You come in, hang around for a bit, get some service, then depart."

-> you can be amazed how many people can donate to your project out of their good will. if your project is good enough.

The definition of 'good' is purely speculative. You can have a good project and there could be a whole group of people that don't think it has any importance at all. I'd bet that there are few people getting real donations that have more modest size projects. Now I'm sure the top 10 projects on sourceforge are getting plenty of donations.

This post was edited by majic on May 24, 2005.

so the game actually is not fully OSS.

This is not my understanding of "Open Source." Open Source refers to the program source code, not to the data files that are (in the case of games) required to run the software. After all, many consider older games (like Quake, Quake 2) to have been open-sourced by their original designers (under the GPL, no less), but they do not include the data files for the game. You must obtain those yourself, presumably by having a copy of the original game. And I'd bet that id still holds copyrights on their data files (e.g., maps, models, etc.), and wouldn't take kindly to someone putting them out on the Internet for free.

actually OSS is not really good model for a game. it's not fun to see a game slowly gain quality and lose bugs. people expect some decent functionality at the very start from trying a game. it's supposed to entertain, right?

I can see your point in this regard. However, I was thinking more along the lines of a game development company working in standard fashion, except they release the code when (or sometime after) they release the game. Most game companies would not release their code to the public before the game is complete, I wouldn't think. They aren't trying to get additional programmers or help from the community; they are trying to develop a game and sell it. I just think it might be beneficial to the community if they would release the source code at some point, as id did with Quake / Quake 2. Doing so breathed new life into the games, and id had nothing to lose by releasing the source code.

Aside: OSS should not really be regarded as a way to obtain cheap or large amounts of labor. I "administrate" an OSS game project myself. The administration part is easy, because I am the only one working on the project. I am releasing it open-source (LGPL), not because I want people to work for me for free, but because I am using the project to learn different aspects of game development. For me, it's a learning project. Thus, it's not something I'm developing to sell (at least not at this point). Thus, since I'm not planning on selling it, I figure there's no reason for me NOT to release the source code.

[Shameless advertising: That said, if anybody's interested in working on the project, let me know. :)]

-> open source projects are very often updated = lots of work for programmers

Two words: Mine's not... ;)

Seriously, though, open source projects are often done in developers' spare time. Thus, if they have more important things (e.g., school, work, family, etc.), they don't always have time to work on their projects and release updates. Other things take priority, as they well should. For me, it's school. I just recently updated my project website and source code; it had been two months since my last update. I just had to take care of my schoolwork and other things that came up in my personal life. Granted, large projects (e.g., Crystal Space, Apache, etc.) that have numerous developers working simultaneously will likely be quite actively developed. However, I would think that it's rare, especially for smaller projects, to have frequent updates.

-> you can earn cash on tech support for your product

My response: Maybe. That certainly works, and many companies (esp. Linux distro companies, like Red Hat, Novell, etc.) make money that way. That philosophy works when the intended audience / customer is corporations that don't want to hire IT staff and such to make sure their servers are working.

However, I still do not see how such a business plan works for the individual, Joe Customer. With rare exceptions, I do not see how many of them are going to be interested in purchasing tech support for their software. If the software doesn't work, then they'll try something else (and likely post bad reviews to websites about the software they used to use). Most cases, unless it's something mission-critical to them (which is rare for the individual), they wouldn't usually buy tech support for the product, simply because they don't need it and won't use it very often, if at all. I certainly wouldn't. I use the Dr. Google method of tech support... ;)

-> you can be amazed how many people can donate to your project out of their good will. if your project is good enough.

This can be true. I agree with majic, how do you define a "good project"? And I can assure you that there are numerous "good" projects out there that do their jobs and such, but aren't as well-known as a Samba or Apache, so they don't get many donators.

Furthermore, I don't see how you can particularly make a business plan based on donations. If you're planning on using OSS for your livelyhood, you have to be able to roughly predict how much money you're going to make from your software. Relying solely on donations makes that difficult, IMO - you might get a lot of donations from people the month your project gets labeled Sourceforge Project of the Month, and bupkis the rest of the year. Difficult way to make a living, let alone run a business.

A primary difficulty with donation-based funding lies in the answer to a question. The question I pose to you, Mr. Yoshi (and anyone else who's made it this far into the post), is if you were running a software company, which would you rather have: 1000 corporations buying a copy of your software for $1000 apiece, or 100,000 individuals buying a copy of your software for $10 apiece? And, the obligatory "why?" :)

Now after this, you and others may think that I am anti-OSS. I assure you I am not, but I don't consider OSS the end-all, be-all in software development, licensing, and promotion / selling, either. Like most things, it has areas where it really shines (e.g., as many said a while back, making custom solutions for customers based on open-source software), and it has its shortcomings in other areas. But companies are figuring out how to make it work to their advantage, even to where they are profiting. And more power to them, I say, as well as to those of you who are managing your own small OSS projects. You never know whether yours could become the next Samba or Apache.

I'll see your two cents, and raise you a dollar... :)

I can see your point in this regard. However, I was thinking more along the lines of a game development company working in standard fashion, except they release the code when (or sometime after) they release the game. Most game companies would not release their code to the public before the game is complete, I wouldn't think. They aren't trying to get additional programmers or help from the community; they are trying to develop a game and sell it. I just think it might be beneficial to the community if they would release the source code at some point, as id did with Quake / Quake 2. Doing so breathed new life into the games, and id had nothing to lose by releasing the source code.

yeah i agree with that model.

Aside: OSS should not really be regarded as a way to obtain cheap or large amounts of labor.

well that's what netscape thought in the 90's :] go OSS to have more developers and save the freedom of standards.

-> open source projects are very often updated = lots of work for programmers

Two words: Mine's not... ;)

i thought of comparison described in Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Commercial product is developed by small group of programmers, they have a set of goals to achieve, they work for a long time before they release something. and time between releases is relatively long. (like with cathedrals, right?)
Open Source is rapidly developed, releases can happen even daily, and feedback is usually very good.

A primary difficulty with donation-based funding lies in the answer to a question. The question I pose to you, Mr. Yoshi (and anyone else who's made it this far into the post), is if you were running a software company, which would you rather have: 1000 corporations buying a copy of your software for $1000 apiece, or 100,000 individuals buying a copy of your software for $10 apiece? And, the obligatory "why?" :)

mr.yoshi :]
if i would sell software i would rather go for individuals. big companies cannot be trusted, you know. they might steal your code and stuff. and then sue you to death.

it also depends on what i would sell. if it was some enterprise software i would propably have no choice but to sell it to comapnies. i think trolltech has a nice solution to this problem (developers of Qt library, e.g. opera browser uses it) - they give source code to people who make OSS projects, and they sell licenses to companies that develop commercial products. i guess that's what i would do. make money and promote open source at the same time. if i had such a useful product like trolltech does :]

"Life is a queue. You come in, hang around for a bit, get some service, then depart."