Slashdot Log In
Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 26, 2008 03:45 PM
from the sterile-absentia dept.
from the sterile-absentia dept.
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.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Funny)
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.
Parent
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Informative)
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.
Parent
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Funny)
I'd figure the easiest way to do that would be to get rid of all the L-, T- and S-shaped shipping containers.
Parent
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Funny)
You don't have to use euphemisms, we won't judge. Just say "my penis".
Parent
News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Funny)
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Artificial scarcity, which includes all intellectual property law, is about destroying wealth so you can force people to work like slaves and fight over the scraps.
It's reminiscent of the wealth burning parties of primitives, intended to prevent the accumulation of wealth so the people would have to keep making more in the service of the tribal leaders.
Basically, Alexey Pazhitnov Leonidovich doesn't value wealth, he values leverage over his fellow man, which he can only have if people are systematically kept in a state of deprivation.
It blows my mind how many people defend a system that keeps them impoverished, not because they don't understand what it's doing to them and their fellows, but because they think they're going to be the man on the top one of these days and they want to be the beneficiary of all those systematic imbalances.
Parent
Redistributing and creating wealth are different (Score:5, Insightful)
Making software creates wealth. Making source code creates wealth. Selling it is just redistribution of wealth.
If a bunch of people get together and produce a word-processor, an open source word-processor will always be around for people to improve, debug, learn from, while a closed source word processor will only be around while the company survives and sells it.
In both cases the "wealth" of a useful product is produced, but in one, the product and its useful constituents (source code, etc.) eventually disappear.
The reason we have copyright and patent law is to give people an incentive to produce public goods which, once produced, are best given away. One of the intrinsic problems with closed source software is that a big part of the thing which IP law is intended to generate and eventually give away for free is instead kept secret and lost.
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes a good argument for the notion that software generates wealth. I don't think you've established that we need Microsoft, or proprietary software from any vendor in order to have these benefits. You could make just as much money supporting free software. Granted, the ubiquity of Microsoft products means that your customer base is larger for MS kit, but that still doesn't make proprietary software a necessary part of the business model. And the office automation you describe can be done as well using free software solutions.
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
No. An automobile is wealth. An airplane is wealth. A book is wealth. Income is just an IOU based on your contribution to creating wealth.
"Creating wealth" is all about producing things of value. "Free" software is wealth if it has value. The fact that people use it demonstrates nicely that it has value. The fact that it costs nothing to use is irrelevant to its "value".
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually those are just things of _arbitrary_ value. If someone can't use it, it is worthless for _that_ person.
Wealth is the ability to _generate_ income.
If you own a house are you wealthy? That depends -- does it COST you to have it (thus it is a liability), or does it GENERATE revenue for you (thus it is an asset)?
Open Source is the perfect example of the new "monetary" system that humans are progressing towards. It is not about the "things" that will determine wealth (since in the future everyone's basic needs will be met), but about what you can do for others.
--
Money is in invention that represents time & skill.
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Funny)
Don't come at us with your Harry Potter speak...
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
The original author of the code has to *actively want* his code to be reused, design it modularly for reuse, and provide useful documentation to other programmers on how it can be reused. Anything else is a just an enormous hunk of code that substitutes cost in money with cost in time.
Parent
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Actually he's half right (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you can't think of someone more...qualified?
Parent
Obligatory, sorry. (Score:4, Funny)
In California, you play Tetris.
In Soviet Russia, Tetris play YOU!
(thank goodness for burnable Karma...)
Re:Obligatory, sorry. (Score:5, Funny)
This joke is never obligatory! Will you people finally let it go?
I for one welcome our humorless overlords.
Farewell sweet, sweet karma
Parent
What do you expect... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What do you expect... (Score:5, Funny)
Chair throwing, and dancing like a monkey. You?
Parent
Waaaaah (Score:4, Insightful)
Before everyone jumps on him (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Before everyone jumps on him (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
He's Just Bitter (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any market that is so easily undermined was due for an adjustment anyway.
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of effort you put into something is really irrelevant to what other people are willing to pay for it, because the amount of effort you put in no way affects what other people need.
Alexi is right, this sucks for people who want to write small programs and live off of the proceeds, because free software destroys the market for that. But it's nearly impossible to argue that free software is a detriment to society as a whole, because it drastically lowers the cost of doing other things with that software, thus creating wealth.
Parent
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
The spirit of Open Source is the belief that making the code available to anyone makes the product better, because anyone with a bit of inventiveness and some time can make the product better. Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic.
Your comment "...Sucks to be them..." strikes the core of the problem with open source. It's not supposed to be about screwing "The Man"...it's supposed to be about making better apps. Unfortunately, too many people see it your way.
Parent
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox and IE7 are another example of this. IE didn't have any significant improvements until Firefox came along, and now IE is being very actively improved upon. It took five years to go from IE6 to IE7, yet now IE8 is already being developed. However, in this scenario, the FOSS product was actually a major improvement over the existing non-FOSS product. Many want all software to be FOSS. I'm still not completely sold on that. I think everyone should have the choice and sometimes it takes a well payed developer to get the job done because its hard to find someone to volunteer their time for a rather uninteresting (yet necessary) application. Right now, I think the two complement eachother. FOSS creates competition in areas that otherwise would be dominated by monopolies. FOSS makes applications available that would otherwise be too expensive for a single person or a small business to afford. This is quite empowering. Think about it for a minute. Thanks Apache or MySQL the singular person with modest budget can implement an enterprise class web server or database. The playing field has just been leveled.
Parent
Russian to English Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta admit, the man has a point... not much of one, but he has it.
It's called "Creative Destruction" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
FOSS could never have popularized computing (Score:4, Insightful)
How is being a minority relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong model (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I just don't understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source is better for the world-at-large. Make no mistake about it. **The world-at-large is more productive for getting software for free.** They can spend the money they would have spent on software on other things.
But how could you think that this is better for *programmers*? I *always* ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"...Well, in the sarcastic wrods of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people _happy_".
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I'm not saying it doesn't make the economy-at-large more productive...clearly it benefits all the people with "business" and "creative" degrees, and since there are more of them than us, it clearly benefits the "larger group", so to speak. But how does it make *us* better off? I'm not so engrossed in matrerialism that I think how much I make is the only thing that matters...but I find the idea that my reward for being part of a highly successful OS project might be getting "recognized" and maybe if I'm lucky getting hired on as a code monkey for some "creative" people that used what I worked so hard on for free very distasteful.
I really tried to embrace the idea of the OS movement, but because no one could answer those questions I have come to regard it, at best, an idea for a perfect society (one where *everyone*, not just programmers, works for the common good) that is tragically ahead of its time and at worst a pox on the profession of programming.
Re:I just don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I just don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
"Free" Software must exist (Score:4, Insightful)
TOR, Freenet, could have never been created if it were not for open source. They serve a very important purpose.
All closed-source, proprietary encryption solutions are worthless, since the code has to be reviewed independently. Otherwise there *could* be back doors in it.
I can go on, about other situations in which open source is the only viable development strategy for a given technology, but that is all irrelevant really. This author can say it *should* not exist, but it has the *right* to exist. Anybody can write code and choose to give it freely to the world. Some that do are amateurs at best, and the code merely a shadow of the similar commercial offerings. Some that do it, are truly gifted, and it is a dire threat to the similar commercial offerings.
As for it creating competition with companies that create wealth and prosperity and obviously destroying that wealth and prosperity, that is a very weak argument. It just sounds a little bitter and petulant. IMO, that is like a businessman selling bottled water up and down a road for a few years in the desert at high prices. Something, or somebody else comes along and creates drinking fountains alongside the road for free. Or even just torrential rains. He just has to move on to something else. Not that much more complicated.
Point in fact, it won't destroy that wealth and prosperity anyways. Maybe what software companies should be doing is offering support packages on the software, and get their wealth and money that way.
ASCII graphics FT...W? (Score:5, Funny)