New ESR paper: The Magic Cauldron

Thanks to webmaven for sending us 'The Magic Cauldron', the latest piece by ESR. The paper "anaylzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon." As always, very timely and interesting reading, considering the IPO announcements and more news of investment from folks "oustide" of the Linux world.

My own papers

I plan to write followups to both "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "The Magic Cauldron". I have a few ideas in mind for titles. Hopefully, these will be in the same spirit as the originals:

1. Knights of the Boardroom Table
2. Open Sorcery
3. A Code Jester in King Richard's Court
4. Slaying the Proprietary Dragon
5. Use the GPL or I'll Get Medieval on Your Arse

(All due respect to ESR, of course. I'm just having fun here.)

A vocal minority?

(A final note before the exposition: the discussion and advocacy of open-source development in this paper should not be construed as a case that closed-source development is intrinsically wrong, nor as a brief against intellectual-property rights in software, nor as an altruistic appeal to `share'. While these arguments are still beloved of a vocal minority in the open-source development community, experience since [CatB] has made it clear that they are unnecessary. An entirely sufficient case for open-source development rests on its engineering and economic outcomes -- better quality, higher reliability, lower costs, and increased choice.)

I want to see some statistics that prove that people who agree with Stallman are only a minority of members of the open source community. Without that, this looks like just another attempt by our friend Eric to minimize the very real concerns many of us have about the real freedom of our software. Yeah, all that other stuff is nice, too, but three out of four (quality, reliability, and choice) are quite possible with proprietary software too. All you need are developers who care about the product and the customers rather than just the stock options.

He missed an important point

> A key fact that the distinction between use and sale value allows us
> to notice is that only sale value is threatened by the shift from
> closed to open source; use value is not. Let's say you hire someone to
> write to order (say) a specialized accounting package for your
> business. That problem won't be solved any better if the sources are
> closed rather than open; the only rational reason you might want them
> to be closed is if you want to sell the package to other people.

This is not true. ESR misses a very important and commonly stated
reason: a company may believe that exclusive access to a piece of
proprietary software provides the company with a competitive
advantage. For example, a microprocessor-design company might embed
considerable experience and research in a computer program to improve
the quality of CPU designs. They might quite rationally believe that
if they gave that software away, their competitors would use it to
improve their own processors and take business away. H&R Block may
quite rationally believe that their tax software is enough better than
the competition that it garners them customers or increases the
efficiency of their preparers. BMW may quite rationally believe that
their engine-design software allows them to build better engines for
less money and sell more cars.

In many cases, this is delusional, but in other cases it is
undoubtedly quite justified.

It is odd that ESR missed this point, because I think it is the
fundamental reason behind the difference between the GPL and BSD-style
licenses. RMS realized that there is a large incentive for companies
to "take software proprietary", and went to great lengths to prevent
it in the GPL. If "taking software proprietary" were wholly
irrational, there would be little reason for going out of one's way to
prevent it.

ESR actually alludes to this, tangentially, later in the article:

> (One objection sometimes raised to open-sourcing hardware drivers is
> that it may reveal important things about how your hardware operates
> that competitors could copy, thus gaining an unfair competitive
> advantage. Back in the days of three- to five-year product cycles this
> was a valid argument. Today, the time your competitors' engineers
> would need to spend copying and understanding the copy is a
> substantial portion of the product cycle, time they are not spending
> innovating or differentiating their own product. Plagiarism is a trap
> you want your competitors to fall into.)

However, his rejection is rather specific to hardware drivers, and
rather flippant as well. The real reason it is rational to
open-source a hardware driver is that the expansion of the potential
market to Linux and BSD users more than makes up for the loss of
trade secrets.

Open Source Still Makes No Economic Sense

To me, anyways, after reading this latest piece. The notion of being reimbursed for your efforts (as Stallman and others insinuate) through software 'support' simply does not apply, especially as regards games. People bought Doom because they wanted to upgrade from the shareware 'teaser', not because they wanted software support--the people who make money in this case are those who wrote the help books; if id simply GPL'ed Doom in the first place, they'd have been out of business long ago. 12 year old kids aren't going to ask for help playing games, they will ask from their friends. The reason they released Doom was simply because it was obsolete at that point.

Raymond's argument instead infers that an evolutionary ecosystem would have built around the Doom code, a la Linux, to somehow make it better. This simply has not been the case--old code is dead code. Why in general would any gaming company want to GPL their source code?; games have a very short lifespan, and their success is based on the fact that they have something others cannot copy.

In the Linux world, you have (too) many versions of Tetris and Minesweeper, mostly as coding exercises, but nothing really unique or compelling--which I suspect is Open Source/GPL's real weakness: lack of originality. Linux can only follow Windows precedents; there is no economic incentive to carry out the research to do something truly innovative (emacs still thinks there's no mouse). The tech carrot pulling the industry these days is $$$, *not* 'making software that doesn't suck'; rather the inverse seems to be true, i.e. making sucky software guarantees $$$.

Scenario B: what if Bill Gates got hit on the head tomorrow with one of his many inhouse videocams, and decided to GPL Windows and Office? (Raymond should have brought up this at his talk); what possible advantages could there be? Netscape did it in hopes of making a new open standard and breaking the Microsoft stranglehold; as far as I can tell with Mozilla, they haven't succeeded. As for Windows, they own the standard OS as well as the desktop suite. What advantages could there possibly be for MS? So that MS can make money printing books instead? So that Corel could take and rebrand it Corel Office? So that IBM could finally have Windows back from Bill?

Someone please explain this 'logic' to me; though a lot of this appears as a troll, I am perfectly serious--I'd like a real, not some second rate sociological mythmaking about tribal 'gifts' and so forth.

Re:Open Source Still Makes No Economic Sense

You have some very deep and important points, but the sheer length and scope of your post militates against thoughtful replies. I'll try, but it won't be easy -- you cover too many topics.

First, support for gamers is provided primarily by new versions of their games, which is exactly what the kids paid money for. This is what ESR, and most people in the computer industry, define as 'support'. Tech support is an incidental, needed for certain specific things but in other cases capable of being provided by almost anyone.

Your definition of "earning money for support" is therefore wrong because you misunderstand the meaning of the word "support".

You later claim that ESR is wrong, and id actually released DOOM because "it was obsolete at that point." But what does "obsolete" mean? It still runs; software rot has yet to make it stop working. The problem was exactly what ESR had said: other companies had slowly made the unique value of DOOM into something non-unique. This is the true meaning of your word "obsolete," in this case. At any rate, my point is that you and ESR are both correct here: they released DOOM because it was not optimal to keep it.

And since then, people have improved the DOOM code. It's only a game, so there's no reason to spend a lot on it, but it's still reasonably popular, even considering that there's better tech out there.

As for your later protestations -- look around. Look at Aegis, LyX, TeX, Enlightenment, and so on. Open source is not in the least constrained for ideas, and never has been. Don't weaken your argument with such patent gibberish. It doesn't even make sense from a theoretical point of view -- you can't pay people to have good ideas.

Finally, you ask why MS should make Windows Open Source. Good question; it's not hard to come up with a list of business reasons for. It's also trivial to come up with a list of reasons against. In the final analysis, it's their decision, and having them choose one way or another contributes nothing to either of our arguments -- although if they chose open source it would be contributing a lot to Windows users.

Next, Mozilla. Mozilla has for the first time produced an entirely standard browser, and has set Netscape in the limelight. Sounds good to me.

Finally, your stuff (up to this point) is indeed serious and worthy. But the part about mythmaking -- what a cheapshot. Read the essay before you make your snide little comments.

-Billy

Chuckle :-)

I couldn't help but notice that ESR managed to write a 20 page essay on the future of software without mentioning a certain company from Redmond or a certain individual worth ~$90,000,000,000.00 even once :-)