Open Source In the Datacenter: It Was Never About Innovation 100
An anonymous reader writes "The secret to open source innovation, and the reason for its triumphal success, has nothing to do with the desire to innovate. It's because of the four freedoms and the level playing field (and agility) that was the end result. It's like Douglas Adams' definition of flying: you don't try to fly, you throw yourself at the ground and miss. This article explains why it was never about innovation — it was always about freedom. Quoting: 'When the forces of economics put constant downward price pressure on software, developers look for other ways to derive income. Given the choice between simply submitting to economic forces and releasing no-cost software in proprietary form, developers found open source models to be a much better deal. Some of us didn't necessarily like the mechanics of those models, which included dual licensing and using copyleft as a means of collecting ransom, but it was a model in which developers could thrive.'"
Most Software Is Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
90% of everything is crap, but at least with open source you can find out why instead of waiting for the developers who can't reproduce your problem.
GNU GPL FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
When I write code for personal reasons, I always release it under the Affero GPL v3+ [gnu.org].
It saves me the time and effort of attempting to monetize or control every little snippet of code that I write just for fun or just to learn something.
It also ensures that nobody can commercially exploit the code without A) paying me for a non-GPL license, or B) contributing back to the community.
As a side effect, it makes a great way to show off my coding skills to potential employers.
They can look me up on GitHub and evaluate my code and skills, but they still have to pay to play.
I'm not a libre software zealot. I don't believe that everyone is under a moral obligation to release their source code.
However, I do find the Affero GPL effective at protecting my non-commercial interests and providing an assist on my commercial interests.
That is why I use the license, and encourage other software developers to do the same.
Why FOSS? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I don't get - if there is a downward pressure on prices on developers, how does adapting an Open Source model help them? It's not like they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code.
Also, the 'four freedoms' have never been about making better software, as RMS never tires of pointing out (and it shows). They've been an end in itself. If you write a software - no matter how bad, but simply put it under a A/L/GPL license, RMS would be pleased. Your software respects the 'freedom' of your neighbors, who you must help, as per Freedom 2.
But I doubt that the desire to put Open Source in the datacenter had anything to do with any 'freedom'. It was about putting better software out there. Since the existing datacenter hardware was tied to the support contracts that a Microsoft or Sun/Oracle or HP would provide, moving to FOSS meant that any datacenter that adapted it would determine its own support timelines, since the open source meant that they could hire their own developers to maintain it beyond upstream support, and also, the upstream projects had no strong reason to EOL a version, unlike commercial entities.
The innovation part - this part is not completely true about FOSS, since there ain't millions of programmers interested in the project, and so the software usually doesn't get examined except by its developers, and maybe some very interested customers. Where FOSS helps is that if a customer has esoteric hardware, the software can usually be ported to it to exact the maximum life out of the system, as well as provide a uniform software platform for heterogenous computing environments.
Re:Innovation rarely exists. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, the problem is the misdefinition of the word "innovation".
An innovation is something new. Something revolutionary that changes everything.
The transistor was an innovation. Rounded corners and ultra-thin device form factors are not.
In the world of free software, tools, apps, and other software constructions don't overtly aspire for this goal. They just want to get X task completed. Most tools and products start as ugly assed hacks, thrown together with haste.
The magical alchemy of free software, is that if somebody else expends the energy making that ugly hack, and shares it for free, others can snag up that hack, look under the hood, and either use it as-is, or use the energy they would have used to create their own ugly hack to beautify and refine the hack they just found, and make it better for servicing the unique twists of that person's requirements when doing that task. This could be anything from adding new features, to fixing dirty code work and inefficiencies in the logic. Des not matter. The effect is the same.
Over time, the dirty hack becomes something the original author never envisioned, but increasingly more innovative, as more people look at it, and add clever improvements. It does not come into the world to change anything, just to do a job.
It is an organic, evolutionary process. Something "barely fit" for the function undergoes selective pressure, and unrestricted replication, and intelligently guided evolution. The latter part is why it reaches "innovative" local maxima solutions to problems quickly.
Trying to upset the applecart, just to upset the apple cart and change the world is a monumentally difficult task to "just do". FOSS does this effortlessly, one clever hack at a time. The payment the innovators receive in return, is better employment of their time (for the few minutes or hours of time they invest each, they all get demonstrably better software than they could have produced from scratch in that period of time, and if they improve the software and release under the license terms, then the time they spent adds value to the next person in the chain. It isn't about monetary compensation; it's about time use.)
Proprietary software tries to leverage the time and energy of a small group of talented people, to prduce a product of greater sophistication than an individual software hack can produce in a sensible amount of time, and extort money out of them for the service of providing an already made package that should suit thier needs. (Should). This is done to get a slightly higher amount of monetary valuation of "time" from the customer, and offer a "bargain" in time expenditure vs value to the customer.
(The software company pays their employees a certain financial compensation per hour worked, which is summed to help arrive at a production cost figure for the product. The proprietary vendor then amortizes that cost over an estimated userbase, and arrives at an MSRP, and from there a transaction for the finished product can be conducted. The msrp is higher than the amortized cost per unit, the price of the product for the customer is considerably lower than the valuated figure for the time it would have taken them to mae the product themselves. Both walk away with value.)
With foss, this methodology is disrupted; there is no money seeking middle man. The value added by each small successive evolutionary step improves the software. They get the benefit of many times this investment, the longer the product stays in active development. Linux Kernel alone constitutes millions of man hours of coding time. If you spend 1 hour making a small improvement to current trunk, and have it accepted, you still have over 1,000,000:1 value return on the time. The next person gets 1,000,001:1 return. Etc.
This feedback allows foss to grow and evolve radically faster than proprietary software could ever hope to achieve, especially as the development life of the product increases. Proprietary software has recurring costs in deveopment. FOSS has recurring returns.
FOSS is a true innovation in software development.
Thin screens and gestures pale in comparison.
Re:Everyone wants something for free (Score:5, Interesting)