Trouble With Open Source?

George Russell writes "Stephen J Marshall, writing in the BCS online magazine, provides a cogent argument detailing the ills of Open Source Software for the software industry - namely, the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership of OSS developed under the current Intellectual Property laws. Do these issues concern you?"

They concern me, but apply equally to proprietary

[Ed Avis]

So... is most shrinkwrap proprietary software noted for its conceptual integrity or innovation?

'Professionalism' is rather a loaded word, see Phil G.'s notes [greenspun.com] on it.

Re:Intellectual Property

[Skreems]

You're completely right. In fact, not only SHOULD they be able to, they ARE able to. The employee contract for most businesses states that employee code written in free time belongs to the employing company ONLY if it derives significantly from the work the employee is doing for pay. That means that while someone working on the Vista kernel wouldn't legally be allowed to contribute code to the Linux kernel, they're more than welcome to work on Firefox, for example, or GIMP, or basically any other product that doesn't parallel kernel programming.

Before I get flamed, let me point out that I realize there's also usually a clause that states you can't compete with the employing companies products in your outside work, so Firefox would be out of bounds for a MS employee. The point remains, though.

Cogent? Hardly.

[btobin]

I got this far: However, when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer. This is just flat wrong, at least in the US. Who owns what is governed by the contract you sign with your employer, and most employers write that contract in such a way that code you write on your own time, for projects unrelated to your job, belongs to you. They do this because, as a general rule, the broader the rights they try to assert, the less enforceable the contract becomes.

Re:Of course they concern me

[mgkimsal2]

I've had the same issues with open source projects *AND* even closed source products that were a 'business'. I was at a company which spent 5 figures on a time tracking system which was supposed to 'integrate' with MS Project. *After* purchasing, we found it didn't do what we were told it did. Caveat emptor, etc. but what do you do? It had 'documentation', a 'support' number with people answering the phones, all the requisites of what people consider necessary for a 'business', but the product was broken for our needs. We were *lied* to, flat out, but had no recourse short of legal action. Should we have pursued that? Possibly, but that is more money and time pursuing something which has an unsure outcome.

Yes, there are more bad/unprofessional OSS projects out there than good, but it seems to be an equal problem for software in general, not something which only affects OSS.

Re:Intellectual Property

[UncleFluffy]

I found the whole IP thing completely ridiculous.

From my memory of waving the legislation he mentions (Patents Act 1977) in front of an employer during contract negotiation time, it's not only ridiculous, it's wrong. As far as I can remember, the employer only owns the rights if the IP: (a) is produced on the employer's time, or (b) is produced using the employer's equipments, or (c) relates to the employer's business activities. If none of these are true, UK law says that the ownership of the IP is the employee's.

(Though it's seven years since I left the UK - UK-based folks should double check this yourselves).

Why does the BCS care?

[geoff lane]

The BCS is The British Computer Society. For a fee and proof that you spent years toiling in a Cobol foundary, you can become a member of the BCS.

The problem is, almost nobody involved in computing does join as the BCS has been irrelevant for many years.

Now all these upstart home programmers have the gall to create products with the quality of Linux and Apache.

In short, the BCS is a club for people who want to talk about programming rather than actually crank code.

Re:Not really

[Arker]

You want to make money coding?

So what you do is customise software. This is probably where MOST coders make their money, and always has been. The availability of standardised Free Software packages to build on has only expanded this market.

Re:Hmm, professionalism, you say?

[GauteL]

I'm sorry, but most computer code is NOT research. It is more akin to engineering and not all engineering projects are something which is open and peer reviewed.

Open source is just open engineering projects. Not all of these actually do get proper peer review, although sometimes they do.

Besides almost all researchers does things to keep people from catching up to them by reading their papers.

If you routinely read lots of research papers you will find that it is not straightforward to follow their work. The needed information might be there, but there are probably massive amounts of intermediate steps you will have to take to redo their work. Thus there is normally quite a bit of "reverse-engineering" involved in following other people's research.

It is probably akin to releasing specs for hardware, but not providing an open source driver.

And finally, plenty of research is not open, but a trade secret. Just because it hasn't been published does not mean it is worthless. Things might actually WORK even if it isn't published you know.

Re:Innovation

[Chemicalscum]

OpenOffice is better than MS Office insomuch that it stores its documents in an open standard format rather than a closed proprietary binary format. This has consequences for those concerned with long term storage of documents. Will you be able to open that document in ten or twenty years time.

This is the reason why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering converting to OpenOffice.

Re:Innovation

[grayrest]

I can't see how...Mozilla is any better than Microsoft Internet Explorer in any way other than its license

Tabs
Typeahead Find
Bookmark Keywords (possible in IE with tweakui)
Javascript Errors point to the correct line of code
Javascript Debugger
Document Inspector
CSS2 selectors
CSS3 color model
  support
pseudo-classes on every element
PNG Alpha Channel Support
(alpha grade) SVG support
MathML support
(alpha grade) XForms support
User CSS
Centralized Extension Database
XML-driven UI (XUL, predates XAML by years)
Easy Extension authoring
Web Developer Extension
Greasemonkey Extension
Gestures Extensions
Download Statusbar Extension
Javascript Shell Bookmarklet
Edit Styles Bookmarklet
View selection/generated source

Yeah, I don't understand why people would choose mozilla over IE. Must be for granola-eating, sandals-wearing hippie reasons.

What your employer owns depends on your contract..

[borgheron]

The author of the article drastically simplifies the "Intellectual Property" section of his article.

So long as you are careful about terms and conditions you can rest assured that nothing is wrong. A good book to read to tell you all about this kind of problem is called "Who Owns What Is In Your Head" by Stanley H. Lieberstein.

The author of the article at the BCS is spreading FUD.

GJC

Terrible Article

[dajobi]

Mr Marshall strings together a series of misconceptions and misinformation that looks like the arguments of any generic IT manager who has heard of open source but doesn't really know all that much about it. He makes absolutely no attempt to back up his claims with any form of evidence or example. A good portion of the article can be debunked by inspection, the rest goes up in flames when held against The Cathedral and the Bazaar [catb.org], Homesteading the Noosphere [catb.org] and The Magic Cauldron [catb.org], (which I'm sure most Slashdotters have read) all of which were written after years of experience and study of hacker culture, rather than just a glance at the surface of "the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor."

In short this is nothing more than an opinion piece, definitely not news.

Re:Intellectual Property

[Haeleth]

Pretty much, yes.

Incidentally, I just scanned through the other legislation he mentions (the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988), and what it says is this:

(1) The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it, subject to the following provisions.

(2) Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or a film, is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.

This is the only mention in the entire act of any concept of works belonging to an employer, except for a couple of references to this section. I am having serious difficulties figuring out how "in the course of his employment" is supposed to imply "irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours".

As for the Patents Act 1977, what it says is this:

(1) Notwithstanding anything in any rule of law, an invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken to belong to his employer for the purposes of this Act and all other purposes if -
(a) it was made in the course of the normal duties of the employee or in the course of duties falling outside his normal duties, but specifically assigned to him, and the circumstances in either case were such that an invention might reasonably be expected to result from the carrying out of his duties; or
(b) the invention was made in the course of the duties of the employee and, at the time of making the invention, because of the nature of his duties and the particular responsibilities arising from the nature of his duties he had a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's undertaking.

(2) Any other invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken for those purposes to belong to the employee.

Now, if anything you invent belongs to your employer, what exactly is the point of (2) there?

Disclaimer: IANAL. It's quite possible that these laws are written in an evil dialect of English in which "belongs to the employee" means "belongs to the employer". Consult a real lawyer if you care.

Re:Hrmph.

[bitingduck]

Not all OSS is high quality, far from it. And last but not least, not all of it is maintained on a decently regular basis.

I'm a relative newcomer to OSS, but I think that neither of these statements is a real problem with OSS.

first: Not all OSS is high quality.

That's certainly true, but not all closed source software is high quality either. A lot of fairly specialized stuff that's closed source is junk, too. (actually some pretty major stuff is junk, too, but I'll use a relatively specialized example) A friend of mine has had to wrestle a lot with electrophysiology software (to drive data acq hardware and analyze data) and a lot of the proprietary stuff is expensive and kludgy, and often you can't tell if the calculations it claims to be doing are grounded in reality. There are some open source alternatives, and although they may not have some of the features you want from the closed stuff, you can add the ones you need and know how they actually do the work . In science that you're publishing it's critical to know that the software isn't doing something wrong behind your back. OSS makes it easier to check and fix problems with the data acq and analysis software.

I've also had problems with closed source data acq software environments that force upgrades too frequently, and in such a way that if you want to make minor changes to something, or run it on a slightly later OS, you have to upgrade the whole thing (sometimes taking a lot of time and money), rather than be able to just upgrade the pieces of it that you want to use.

As for stuff that's not maintained: That's also a problem in the closed source world, and it's worse. If you have closed source legacy software that gets dropped you're SOL if you ever need to change anything (like maybe buy a new machine to run it on, because the old one died, but the program only runs under windows 3.1). You basically have to replace the whole thing.

For open source stuff that's not maintained it just goes dormant. I recently decided to start playing around with a subset of the open directory (dmoz.org), and rather than try to roll all my own software, spent a fair amount of time looking for stuff that I could start from. There are a fair number of closed source packages for manipulating the data, and a few open source ones, too. Possibly the best one I found was an open source perl module that hadn't been maintained in about 4 years (Catalog at Senga.org). It installed easily and pretty much ran out of the box (despite being designed for a much earlier version of mySQL). There were some things that needed fixing (e.g. compliance with the current dmoz acknowledgement statement) and it was relatively easy to do myself. I also can customize it to do whatever I need much more easily than trying to wrestle APIs on someone elses closed source package, and put the updated version back up for others to use and expand on.