SAP Exec Disparages Open Source As IP Socialism 498
FlorianMueller writes "According to a VNUnet report, Shai Agassi, the president of the product and technology group at SAP, disparaged open source as 'more likely to break applications' than to deliver innovation. He also equated the open-source development model with 'Intellectual property [IP] socialism,' which he says 'is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society.' In Europe, it isn't a secret that SAP's management primarily views open source as a threat to its business, and that SAP is politically on Microsoft's side. SAP and Microsoft co-financed certain pro-patent lobbying activities in Europe, and recently co-founded the European Software Association, an entity that is expected to lobby for software patents and against open-source adoption by European governments."
Re:Why against open? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Open source is great for debugging, but it's crucial not to touch [the code]," said Agassi.
If it's "crucial" not to touch the code, what kind of a hous-of-cards are we dealing with here?
He got it all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
No, one of the worst things that can happen to our society is that it's turned into an IP-based society.
this is expected (Score:3, Interesting)
"IP Socialism", eh? Yet they use Apache. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:He got it all wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
I would guess that this refers to the nomadic tribes? If so, then this is only natural. Their belief comes not from a deep-seated understanding that land needs to be unownable but rather from puzzlement as to why anyone would want to "own" something that they need to be away from for 75% of the year. (And, indeed, might not come back to for several years in a row.)
Presumably, farming tribes (and sedentary tribes in general) would have a different view on this.
You could make a parable of the same for this day. You will find few pÃeople today who would "understand" why it would be useful to own land in the Alpha Centauri star system (and hence a general agreement to the Outer Space Treaty and such), but a few hundred years down the road, this may be prime development property.
Re:Does he know nothing about the technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
Absolutily.
Plus, their applications written in ABAP, their own language, are delivered in plain source code. Which may not be OSS by license, but still in the sense of the word.
And one word on the incredible amounts of $$$ they charge: Actually, neither Oracle nor Microsoft nor IBM are anywhere cheaper.
So far I thought Agassi knew more about technology... But he seems really anti-OSS anyway, now that I come to think about it. He also changed SAP's web-oriented UI-strategy to web + MM-Flash and integration into MS Office.
Re:Never works? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Never works? (Score:5, Interesting)
An irony in this is that the Ark. Dept. of Health serves something like 2,200 users with a Wang VS mainframe cluster that runs like a clock -- it keeps on ticking. The VS cluster has a repository of about 50,000 programs, some 38,000 of which are actually utilized by users of the system. A very small group of five or six programmers maintains the code and accommodates all legislative and regulatory changes, often in a tiny fraction of the time it takes for adaptations of newer software technologies, especially those provided by outside firms. Of course the State of Ark. wants to "get rid of the Wang" ASAP (or should that be "A sap?").
It's unclear how it would even be possible to spend money like $60 million creating VS clusters because the stuff just doesn't cost that much. A single VS to serve 500-1000 users can't cost more than low six figures, and new VS technology puts the largest, fastest VS into 3.5" of rack space using industry standard hardware in a Linux host.
Re:The same old FUD from a new party member (Score:1, Interesting)
I think you confuse socialism with totalitarianism.
Free software is about a community forming and providing the solutions to their own problems. You know, "By the people, of the people, and for the people".
...er... that's quite a socialist description.
What's more socialist, expecting all of your solutions from big brother named Bill, or developing them on your own?
...those sound like two situations completely orthogonal to socialism. The first option, however, is the most unlikely in a socialist system.
Eh? The heart of socialism is acting in the interest of the people. Jesus, you've really swallowed the US hysteria of the Socialist (== Communist) Bogeyman haven't you. I suppose you think that because the Nazis had "socialist" in their name, that they were socialist? Remember, east Germany called itself the German "Democratic Republic". Just because someone calls themself something, doesn't make it so ("compasionate conservatives", "moral majority").
I think you need to go and find out what socialism is. I'm not a socialist myself, but it annoys me to see such ignorant nonsense talked about it.
Re:Never works? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a typical false correlation. Quality is NOT inversely proportional to price, it's proportional to QA budget, which is (well, should be) proportional to total budget, which is proportional to the number of customers - and price is inversely proportional to the number of customers. Of course all of these "proportionalities" are rather vague.
Re:Never works? (Score:3, Interesting)
I first realized this when working with incredibly expensive bar code software - several thousands per seat. Horrible, horrible, horrible crappy GUI, clearly chopped together in a month or 2 using MFC. Buggy and crashy, barely functional in it's key features (automatic generation and sizing of bar codes for various label printers). I eventually got totally fed up with it and spent an afternoon writing wrapper scripts for GNU barcode and ghostview.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:3, Interesting)
ABAP (the now passe SAP programming language) was designed to be an 'open' language, but now that they failed in that the future is now all about Linux with Java! Woo!!
Of course, they also used to be the best of buddies with Oracle, and now they only recommend their new best friend, IBM. Of course, they don't recommend AIX... they recommend things like Solaris DB2. They recommend things like Linux DB2 production systems over AIX DB2 or Solaris Oracle.
I think they're nuts, and I'm exiting SAP support as quickly as possible. Their new stuff is broken, crazy, and will do nothing but make my job a LOT harder.
-WS