Ayanami Rei's Journal: My Bizzare Idea about Open vs. Propietary Systems

Bear with me for a second.

There's nothing wrong with closed source systems, propietary technologies, etc, per se. The point is that it does the job well, and for the right price (whether cash, time, effort, flexibility, lockin, etc.) Lots of propietary technologies suck in this respect, while others are downright pleasant even for the hardcore technologist and tinkerer (IE. Solaris, which is why I used the Sun icon).

Here's my thinking.
An ideal situation is as follows:
The Company designed closes systems. These systems are particular powerful and useful, but standards oriented and malleable, so they have few drawbacks except for closed nature.
The OSS community develops software to interact with said system and gets help from the Company. The OSS brings value to the system, and Company helps make the OSS more useful.

At some point a particularly smart person involved in the OSS project "closes the loop" and figures out how to duplicate most of the functionality in the closed system by examining the interfaces, reading research papers, and just by being clever.

At this point, the Company now has competition: a free product that does the same thing as their product and interacts with the OSS that end-users might already also have. One of three things might happen:

1) Company changes the interfaces for all new releases to isolate the OSS system and client software.

2) Company litigates for IP violation

3) *** Company determines that it no longer has a competitve edge in designing the system as it has become widespread knowledge through other channels (the same ones they looked at during development), and decided to innovate or find a new angle ***

It is the choice for option 3 that helps move technology along at a pace that can keep up with our increasing demands. I think OSS helps to prevent the industry from stagnating by revealing the "common knowledge" in systems, and helps companies to discover where competetive niches truely lie.

Companies that choose options 1 or 2 should be viewed negatively. They are the ones that you don't tolerate. I don't think Sun has ever opted for choices 1 or 2, and I think they "get it", which is why they abide and even help the Linux community, etc.

Not such a bizarre idea...

[MonTemplar]

I think that your mention of `common knowledge` is right on the money. The proliferation of Open Source projects in various areas (eg. browsers, e-mail, messaging, collaboration) allows for comparisons of different takes on solving the same problems, to see what works best. This is something that the commercial software doesn't support nearly as well - closed-source development means that competing products have to either reverse-engineer (compatible, but possibly illegally) to reinvent from scratch (time-c

proprietary

[Phroggy]

The problem with proprietary software is, what happens if the open source community DOESN'T duplicate it, and then the company decides to stop offering it for some reason (e.g. going out of business)? If your company has made a significant investment in using the proprietary software, and you suddenly lose support, you're in trouble. If the software in question requires some kind of service or maintenance that can no longer be performed (e.g. the software connects to the developer's servers to verify a li