Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market

alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity. When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority,' and also criticized Stallman's ideas as 'belonging to the past' where there were no software 'business possibilities.'"

bringing down companies that create wealth

Complains the author of one of the biggest productivity destroyers in computing history.

Re:bringing down companies that create wealth

Tetris was originally designed as a training tool for late Soviet-era transport interests. The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.

This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.

News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism

Details at eleven.

Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism

Oddly, I see FOSS as an extreme example of capitalism. Reductio ad absurdum with a twist.

In a given market with profits, more competitors will enter until profits are driven down to the point the cost of entering just isn't worth it. With software, this set point is a bit lower than many industries, because less capital is needed for production. FOSS lowers it further by reducing the barriers to entry (you get to reuse older code). Some people derive a non-financial benefit (and sometimes financial) that exceeds the cost of contributing, so there is a negative cost (a benefit). It's still worth it to them to enter the market no matter what. So even assuming no profit, you get plenty of competitors.

The capitalist version of superconductivity. Against the rules except in unique circumstances.

What this guy misses are controlled markets with barriers to entry.

Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism

Not only that, but his complaint about software companies generating wealth is mostly bogus as well. They are able to generate income, but that is much different than wealth. When a software company goes under, typically the code is sold of at rock bottom price and then forgotten about. Look at BeOS as an example. Open source generates true standing wealth.

Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism

Yeah, I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL, and free market competition can be pushed to the max. I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software? Does the government provide an income to the limited few software suppliers allowed? Do you get your software license coupons each month and have to stand in line to get software? Does it eliminate value judgments and class? (No, actually, it's highly competitive and the best software "wins".) Does it preclude everyone from ever selling their programming labour? I'm just missing the connection, I guess. FOSS 'creates' wealth for everyone, in the direct form of the benefits you get from using the software, and in the indirect form of lowering the cost of production of other products (e.g. a retailer using Linux as PoS can offer cheaper products).

Re:Actually he's half right

You use Steve Jobs as the extreme for closed source software?

Are you sure you can't think of someone more...qualified?

What do you expect...

from a Microsoft employee?

Re:What do you expect...

from a Microsoft employee?

Chair throwing, and dancing like a monkey. You?

Before everyone jumps on him

This is a guy who got screwed out of a lot of money because the state took his hard work without giving him a dime. I am not surprised that he finds the idea of people giving away their hard work for no money to be repulsive (even if it's voluntary).

Of course the irony is that he is from a country where piracy is (and has been) running crazy rampant.

Re:Before everyone jumps on him

Having unique life experiences and thus unique perspective is great... but is in no way an excuse for having a skewed world-view.

His assertion that Free software doesn't contribute economically is way off base. The university culture of spreading information and freeing knowledge is not a bygone rebellious idea: it is sound principle that is gaining more and more traction as people become more interconnected. Rather than stifling business opportunities, this free distribution of knowledge has been a core enabler of technological and economic progress in the western world.

Besides, the core ethos of Free software is about user choice and promulgation of ideas. It is the antithesis of the central-control that co-opted his hard work for its own gain.

Re:Before everyone jumps on him

I was talking more along the lines of how throughout history, every time some new way of communication allows us (meaning anyone not in power) to communicate amongst each other more efficiently, it is seen as the downfall of civilization.

Hell, even the printing press was initially thought of as a horrible thing for humanity. Where would we be had our leaders been successful in stopping it's spread?

He's Just Bitter

Because he was employed by the Soviet government,
Pajitnov did not receive royalties. Pajitnov, together with
Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991
and founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.

Translation:

"I didn't get diddly-poop from my program until I started selling it for money,
and obviously the entire world should work that way!"

Everybody's got a right to be wrong.

Free air is destroying the market for oxygen bars!

Any market that is so easily undermined was due for an adjustment anyway.

Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong.

Free air is destroying the market for oxygen bars!

I am a representative from the AIAA (Air Industry Association of America). As a firm believer in the rights of plants and blue-green algae to earn money through their photosynthesis, I find it irresponsible and criminal that animals across the world use oxygen without paying the creators royalties. Therefore, I have decided that I am going to sue everyone on Earth. Not just humans, mind you. All of you bears and tigers and piranhas will have to pony up too! Gwahahaha! GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA AAAGGHHHAGHH GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong.

Peace is ruining the market for war profiteering!

Russian to English Translation:

"All you 'free software' freak who made clones of my game and called them different things, or made it multiplayer and then didn't charge anything so there's no royalties to be paid to me, are assholes! Charge for your rip-offs of my game so that I can get money from you!"

Gotta admit, the man has a point... not much of one, but he has it.

It's called "Creative Destruction"

When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction" [wikipedia.org], a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at.

In this case, if you can't make a better product than something that is already available to the whole world for free, you're not doing anything productive. Either make better software, or quit whining that people won't pay you for what you do make.

How is being a minority relevant?

When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority

Yes, so..? Is that supposed to be a "problem" here?

Obviously, Red Hat's and Oracle's (and a number of others not mentioned) business models works, otherwise they would have been abandoned in favor of the more traditional ones. And whether they work is what matters here, not how many have or haven't dared trying something new!

He has a point...

I was discussing with a client today about whether to use a service oriented architecture on a Redhat server supported by an Oracle database, but he was much more keen on using a vertical block model with a rotational function that maximized resources by removing redundant full rows, and had pretty colours and a catchy tune.

Wrong model

He is starting from the wrong position. He seems to think that software has to be written by companies for sale to customers. He thinks that increasing profit comes from making lots more sales.

Wrong. Increasing profit can also come from reduction in costs.

90% of software is written within organisations and never sees light of day outside of the organisations that create it. This is in spite of many organisations sharing some common problems/needs, even if much is specific/unique to them. Most of these organisations are not in the business of selling programs, they run factories, trains, banks, ...

What Open Source does is to liberate a little of this 90%, the bits which other organisations might find useful and can easily adopt into their IT systems. The companies that release it get: feedback, bug fixes and enhacements. The guys who receive/use the software send their patches back because doing so is less (long term) work than putting the patches into each new release that comes out.

This is how Open Source works. It does not depend on software houses to sell to users, the profit does not come from software sales, it comes from cost reduction by those who use the software.

Yes, there are those who make a living from support, from the big guys like Red Hat to the small ones like myself; but the greatest profit from Open Source is the cost reduction in the users.

Re:I just don't understand...

Actually I can answer it simply: it makes my job as a programmer easier. I'm one of the vast majority of programmers who do not work for a company writing software for others. I write software for internal use at my company. We aren't going to sell it. We aren't going to give it away. It's never going to leave the confines of the company. And F/OSS gives me easy options. I need an HTTP library? Grab Curl. I need a SOAP library? Grab gSOAP. SSL? Grab OpenSSL. Printing? CUPS. XML/XSLT parsing/processing? Xerces and Xalan. And having gotten that utility software out of the way, I can proceed on to the business-specific stuff that my company really wants me to be working on.

Yes, we could buy commercial libraries for all those things. But those commercial libraries come with hefty costs for things we aren't going to use, have license restrictions attached like how many copies we can have installed that have to be managed, and have very poor support when it comes to bug-fixes and support for exotic hardware/OS platforms. F/OSS simply gives us far fewer headaches and costs us fewer dollars to use. When we need it somewhere, we just install another copy and we're good to go. All we have to watch out for is redistribution of our software outside the company, and that's easy since it's not supposed to happen.

Yes, F/OSS is very bad for programmers who make their living selling software commercially to others to use. But that's like saying that the advent of the automobile was very bad for the people who made horse-drawn wagons, carriages and such, and the people who bred and sold horses to pull them: it pretty much meant the end of most of their business. But those people were a small minority compared to the number of people who merely used wagons and carriages, and now trucks and automobiles, to move cargo and people around.

Re:I just don't understand...

Hah. They were saying that back when I was in high school, 30 years ago. It doesn't seem to have happened yet.

The main reason it hasn't is that all the people predicting it focus entirely on the process of writing code. That's the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what code you want to write. That involves hard questions like "What constitutes valid data?" and "What's the proper response when we see this sort of error?". I spend more time cajoling users into thinking about what they want there than actually writing the code to do it. I won't believe programming as a profession is extinct until I start to see users thinking about those things before asking for something to be done.

Re:Meh.

If I want to use a tool, and am willing to make one myself so that I can use it, and then I put that tool out for everyone to use, what exactly is the problem with that? Should I be forced to buy the expensive tool from the big tool company, even though I have the skill to make it myself? Should I be forced to charge for my tool when I don't feel any need to do so?

If I like tetris, and make a tetris variant of my own to see if I can do it, am I then forbidden from showing it to anyone?

No one owes Microsoft, Macromedia, and Adobe a living. If their products are superiour, then they'll do well enough. If not, then they deserve to go out of business. End of story.

And it's not just about "free". If it were only about free, then no one would have bothered writing an alternative to the existing commercial stuff; we'd have just pirated it. The amount of work needed to crush security on any copy-protected media is trivial compared to the amount of work required to create an alternative.

Re:Obligatory, sorry.

This joke is never obligatory! Will you people finally let it go?

I for one welcome our humorless overlords.

Farewell sweet, sweet karma