O'Reilly on the Commoditization of Software 285
Iorek writes "International Data Group/Sverige has a great interview with Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly & Associates Inc. From predictions of eBay's purchase of Oracle to discussions of the failings of open source licenses, O'Reilly's certainly not reserved. I couldn't help but be reminded of the rise of this site and slashcode."
O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Later in the artical he comments on Debian, and how the creator and his company Progeny dont view linux as a product, but "a set of commodity software components he can put together for different purposes."
What he's getting at is that if the OSS community wanted to push forward, you need an idea and then use linux as the tools for that idea, suhc as automated backup, or something snazy like amazon (where it is a tool, and not the product). Trying to market it as a free desktop platform (in which case linux is the product) just wont cut it. I've done projects for my university, and its worked before, and it will work again.
Disclaimer: Do I beleive that linux cant be a product? No, I'm just saying that *ONE OF* (and not limited to) the best ways is to use it as a tool, not a product.
Open Source and Government Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Like open source software, public research labs publish the data they found, such as mouse or yeast genome, into the public domain (Humor me, I know that Open Source is not public domain, but it's darn close in terms of availability and cost). In addition, when a lab creates a new genomic library, they are supposed to make it available to anyone who asks. Sounds a lot like Open Source.
However, privately funded research usually do not have such policy, and use patents, trade secrets, and Copyrights to protect the IP. This has some effect in slowly down advancement in science in many ways. Such research also lead to imporant, and profitable advances for the companies involved.
But, due to limited public funding, not all worthwhile projects are funded in a timely fashion. A grant request to the NIH may take years before approved. A private company, seizing an oppertunity, may choose to invest and jump start a new field of research.
It seems that both models can co exist, and maybe it's time to have a publicly funded, or even an industry funded, organization, the supports Open Source development. The group should focus on open standards, common tools and platforms, and anything else someone can make a good case for. Something that will advance our knowledge, and make life easier. Something that we all cooperate on, rather than having blackmails or mighty pissing contests.
Maybe we should begin to treat Computer Science like Science, and really advance it methodically, rather than "My code is faster than your code..."
to a hammer, everything is a nail (Score:5, Insightful)
But it seems to me that he's looking at service industries, and calling them software companies. In order to do that, he has to change the definition of a software company, and as a result he's able to announce this as a shift in the software industry.
My problem with what he says is mostly aesthetic. It's that same old silicon valley rich guy entrepeneur guru bs.
He's making a lot of points that most people know -- web applications are more exciting, in many respects, than desktop applications now. Web applications are being built out of commodity pieces. The data in eBay and the customer good will is worth more than the code. All of those are good points, if not exactly earth shaking.
But the way he's stiched them together is mostly a semantic trick, and he's out there like he's been given stone tablets on some moutaintop.
It's not evil or anything, just a little icky.
Microsoft understood this long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux vs Windows was never the proper battle, it was always a battle over what you DO with these things, and how you do them more effieciently than the other guy. Lots of companies NEED something like Exchange, so they by an Active Directory and Windows by default, and so on and so on.
O'Reilly is dead on right. All this shit is just commodity for the applications built upon it that actually generate income. Superiority of one platform over another is a moot point. No one decides to buy a book at Amazon because of Linux, instead of Barnes and Noble because they run on IIS, so get over it.
Windows against Linux is now like Goodyear versus Michelin. Who gives a shit? Only tire makers, not CAR makers. So, it is time to focus on building shit that rides on these things, instead of so much focus on the things themselves. No side has an advantage right now, but that could change overnight. Suppose Microsoft buys Amazon, or EBay buys Oracle? Same players, whole new battle, and all this crap over which OS is better doesnt mean a thing.
What if Microsoft buys Macromedia; takes Flash and does interesting remoting stuff with Web Services tied only to .NET? What is the competing solution from IBM going to look like?
I've got no answers, but I agree with O'Reilly that things are going to get very interesting over the next few years, and things are never going to be the same.
Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What he's saying is correct, but it's not exactly earthshattering in anyway. Amazon puts together some services that rock. They patent them. And then they sell the service to others. That just seems logical.
How that ties into driving Open Source I'm not sure. If they're only devleoping proprietary things (services) on top of an open source backbone, they're not really driving Open Source devlopment. Just because I compile my program with gcc or use a perl script doesn't mean I'm driving open source development in anyway. They're just using it as the foundation to build on.
Open Source is by definition controlled by anyone who wants it to be. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like he's just stating the obvious and it has little to do with Open Source.
Economic drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
What's going to happen on the home level is what's already happened to the hardware market. Everyone is looking for the lowest price. When the PC first came out, a lot of people were concerned about the brand/reputation, et al., and were willing to pay a premium for an AT&T, IBM, or other high-line product. That's where the software market is right now. The high-end hardware makers got slaughtered by price. And now the high-end software market is about to get slaughtered. Microsoft (and lots of others) are going to have to compete against the software equivalent of incredibly cheap clone hardware... and they are going to lose.
Yes, But... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm happy for the change, so we can get over these stupid platform wars, and focus on things that actually do something besides send bits back and forth. Now we get to focus more on the value of those bits, and I think that is a good thing.
I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon and all the others are free to build and deploy using the same tools everyone else uses, and playing by the same rules. They are not to blame for being successful enough that their data being manipulated by those tools is more valuable than someone elses. Or for having the money and foresight to employ programmers to use those tools to create new tools for the company's own personal use.
There's nothing to "fix" here because nothing is broken. Should you have to license hammers from Black & Decker because you build houses for a living?
Re:O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple used FreeBSD as the platform on which to build the Mac OS X. However O'Reilly is right on in this case. Besides the modifications to the core kernal / toolset the Open Source community doesn't get much back.
It's not so much a case of them not distributing, but they don't distribute anything that was originally open source other than the core OS. Aqua, Quartz, Carbon, the Classic Environment and all the great apps (iTunes, Safari, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, etc, etc) are all proprietary.
So Apple gets the core of their OS devleoped for them by Open Source community. I'm not saying they don't give back, but they do get quite a bit out of the deal. And get to sell their software (&hardware) to boot.
In the end I guess Open Source is just a two edge sword.
Hm, socialist potsmoking hippy or corporate drone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I appreciate your use of bold. (Score:1, Insightful)
O'Reilly is WRONG about the license thing (Score:3, Insightful)
It was no oversight at all. It was design. Seems liked he's been believing OpenSource as described by its opponents, like it's communism or something, as opposed to what it is. Those are successes, not failures!
Actually, I'm a little surprised -- I mean where is that on the 5 stages of understanding the GPL? ("OH its NOT communism, it
Plenty of companies have been screwed by not getting the source, and getting straight-jacketed into dealing w/ only 1 company.. not just individuals. I see that as the point of opensource, take away the power to abuse that the software industry has, but not to be anti-industry in general. More of a return to the pleasant past, before PC's tookover.
Re:Open Source and Government Research (Score:2, Insightful)
We have that, and they call themselves "International Business Machines." As I understand it, they sell so-called "business solutions" based on Linux, and they bankroll some of the kernel developers. In fact, from what I can tell, it's fairly common (sort of) to see companies who use Linux in some way and fund people to develop it for them (Hans Reiser is probably the best example of this). I would say that those kinds of people are living the dream, so to speak
There's also the OSDL, where Torvalds now works. I don't know much about them, though; sounds sort of like a company who pays people to develop linux and then makes money doing... something?
Re:O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:1, Insightful)
to expand on one point you made (Score:5, Insightful)
(agree with everything you said, btw)
As a long time hardcore technical guy, and let me back that up by saying I'm a unix nut, I've been using linux heavily for 10 years now, solaris before that, and I get right into the guts.. I like assembly, circuit boards, and whatnot. I like a command prompt and I don't like microsoft.... anyway....
as a hardcore technical guy, open source liker, and a recent convert to OS-X... the comment about a gui got me thinking.
I like open source. I like open everything. I don't like being told what to do with my computer. Yet, I LOVE OSX, and I recognize that the one strength MacOS really has is that apple controls the desktop. It's not that you can't skin it,
So.. we want an open source gui. Here's the thing... the only reason the mac has the "world class gui" feel to it is BECAUSE of a certain lack of openness.. we're talking about a benevolent dictator here. Apple developers know what to expect on the desktop, know how the mac user expects it to behave... and that's the main attraction. If you don't want that, you might as well go use linux.
Yes, we can do stuff in linux that OSX can't do. Yes, open is good, no argument here...I'm just tossing out the thought that, when it comes to providing a rock solid user experience, for a general purpose computer... a lack of choice is sometimes what's needed.. to get people thinking and doing the same thing.
You can sit someone down and show them windows -vs- mac.. and invariably, the mac people get more done, and are more comfortable with their gui.. and it's not because one is more customizable, or more flexible.. in fact it's the opposite.
that image is true for some (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's another great example of commoditizatio (Score:5, Insightful)
The FreeBSD folks get some benefit as well. Besides having another big company using their code, testing it (and supplying patches) they kind of avoid the tug of war that part of Linux is going through - the whole "is it for geeks or the masses?" The coders who are good at one tend not to be as good in the other. So the FreeBSD coders can concentrate on the lower level bits, and have the Apple folks worry about getting the real fancy GUI on top of it.
Re:Disturbing trend... (Score:3, Insightful)
That was my first thought as well - will someone like me who wants to be the 'Chef' will be reduced to a person selling rice by the ton ?
However, I realized that the 'coders' workplace will be one of two:
1. Traditional software companies: until ASPs really catch on, although people will use more open-source software (like the google/yahoo/amazon exmples), the software that will sell more will still be taht traditional software making companies (like Microsoft). The fact that everybody is using air, doesn't mean that the the guys making the air ballons for divers doesn't exist - in fact, you could say they own 99% of the air market.
But, in case that ASPs do catch on -
2. The ASP companies will need us coders, and for us it doesn't really matter if we are coding for Windows or for a browser. And as for the creating-products-from-existing-components argument - we do it all the time...
Re:O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, according to the Tim philosophy of Open Source, Apple is the equivalent of Compaq. It's taking commodity software and "improving" it with proprietary additions. This works great (it worked great for Compaq), but eventually the paradigm shift will occur, and people are going to say "why am I paying proprietary prices for what should be commodity goods?"
Re:Yes, But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing left to innovate in software? We've been at this for, let me see, about thirty years now, and you think we've done all that can be done? That sounds like saying we've seen the end of history. I'd say we'll be seeing a whole lot of different ways to build software, and fifty years from now, people won't even notice that's what they are doing. Just look at them using spreadsheets today.
Re:to a hammer, everything is a nail (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're right on. In the buzz that Mr. O'Reilly is caught up in, it's easy to forget that that vast majority of computer users spend their days in MS Office, MS Outlook/Exchange, and XYZ customized core business application used by their workplace -- NOT Amazon and Ebay. Ordinary boring business applications are where the Open Source movement has enormous room to grow and conquer. While the core software 'stack' (OS,GUI,etc.) may be commoditized by this point, the rest isn't.
It is not uncommon for a medium sized business to spend literally millions USD on software licenses. Part of that is the M$ tax (OS, Servers, Office) and the other part is custom software that only runs on M$ platforms (accounting, ERP/CRM, etc.) Then, tack on all the support / training services needed to keep said software working. If anyone thinks there's no room for Open Source on the business desktop, they're pretty blind to reality. The issue is more how to coordinate developer-consultants such that they can collectively meet needs of their clients. (ie. free software / non-free services & customization)
But is there a market for an alternative? I challenge anyone who doesn't believe so to investigate what ordinary businesses are currently paying out for their IT needs -- both software licenses and services related.
Bad economy or not, there is always a market for better product at a better price. We don't need more eBay's and Amazon's; we need more Open Source entrepreneurs.
Re:Disturbing trend... (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the late 80's/early 90's there was a real buzz about software that would write software. It came in many different forms - Oracle had SSADM software that would generate applications once you put the system design as high level description, various IBM mainframe systems that would generate CICS systems from bolt-together components (very like O'Reilly dicusses in fact) - there was even a PC system called 'the last one' which was supposed to generate any application you needed from a high-level description. All of them had the common theme that you were going to need no, or many fewer, coders.
That didn't happen.
The flaw in the argument is assuming the whole world is predicatable and regular enough that solutions can be build from a set of predefined blocks. In practice this never happens because
1. All business and business processes are *always* much more messy than this
2. There's always something else to be done - any business system is a compromise between what can be built and what the customer would like. As filling the basics becomes easier the idiosyncratic tweaks that you need special code for become larger.
3. Technology changes drive systems requirements. 'The Last One' was so named because it was the last softwre system you were ever supposed to purchase because it then generate systems to do all you needed. Problem was 'the last one' ran on DOS.
In the future we may spend more time assembling systems from OpenSource commodity chunks, but because the world is messy those chuncks will never fit exactly as required or cover all the requiments needed for each unique business. In fact I expect they'll be more work rather than less.
Re:Open Source and Government Research (Score:2, Insightful)
Computer scientists are to programmers what physicists are to engineers (though, admittedly, there are far more individuals who do both CS and progamming than there are physicists who are also engineers).
Re:Tim O is right (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree as well. The market for applications running on mainframes is drying up.
Your attempt to extend this point further is rather absurd.
Re:Tim O is right (Score:3, Insightful)
Espcially when 'knows better' includes understanding what proprietary file fiormats that change on the whim of the software seller mean to data "owners".
Re:The "Integration" Buzzword (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference isn't always clear. I use these factors...
Integrations are much lighter weight than applications.
Integrations are very specific to a particular environment, whereas an application is more generally useful.
Integrations tend to use higher level languages, frequently interpretted. They rarely use C.
Code that triggers an application to generate a TPS report, then opens the TPS coversheet template in a wordprocessor, then bundles the whole thing and uses the email app to ship it off is an integration.
There are plenty of the places where the line is very ambiguous. The most important fact is that the center of gravity in the programming world is moving away from commercial software producers and writing big generally useful apps to customizers working directly for the users building small narrowly focused solutions.
That is a profound change. Imagine, if you would, that groups of volunteers around the world collaborated to design and build a car - then gave the cars away free. Instead of going to your local car dealership, you instead visit your local OpenCar.org Users Group, where they hand you the keys no questions asked. The auto manufacturing business would be in big trouble, but some of the assembly line workers might find new work doing custom configurations - new paint jobs, engine enhancement, installing moon roofs, etc.
That is what is going on now. For a long time, OSs and applications were written by larger and larger organizations. Like physical commodities, mass production was used to spread the capital and R&D cost over a larger and larger market. OSS changed that, however, because it effectively made the those costs zero. The industrial production model is no longer valid. IT is changing back to a craft production model with local producers and local consumers meeting face-to-face. The economics of that model work again because the producers aren't being asked to write new applications requiring tens of thousands of hours, but to customize an existing application, at a cost of tens of hours.
Apple's Licensing Irrelevant To Consumers (Score:4, Insightful)
O'Reilly noted that keying a license to distribution rights and obligations loses impact when the application is something like Amazon ot Yahoo, i.e. an app that won't be distributed. That applies, too, to millions of consumers of open source code who will never modify or distribute any code.
The GPL and other open source licenses assume that code consumers are also code producers, i.e., developers. That is no longer the case.
Re:Tim O is right (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the application market is dead. It's just that a software company can't make money recreating applications with decades-old functionality. The spreadsheet is solved. Move along. People will still pay for software -- just not the same software over and over.
Re:O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:O'Reilly is right about the license thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
They also are bound to notice notice that the latest version of Windows costs a lot of money.
The latter may be true for GNU/Linux as well, in some cases but the former makes it irrelevant.
Granted, this is only a very small part of the way the GPL works, but it's a start. The hard part is convincing people about the rest of them as well. The FSF has been trying to do that for a long time now.
not very good at building easy-to-use software (Score:3, Insightful)
Tim touches on something here that I have noticed too. Open source does not have a reputation for being easy to use. But why is that so? Some projects are very user friendly but in general the profit motive works against Open Source here. Consulting, Support, and Customization is the main business model in the Open Source world, but if a software is extremely easy for the end users to set up then there is less of a reason for consultants to be brought in.