Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market 686
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.'"
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.
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.
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:5, Funny)
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Because those videos are still on youtube [youtube.com] for me.
Geoip is fun. Who cares are human rights when you can safely hide things for some, and hide that you have hidden them for others. Now excuse me while I'm going to search for my tin-foil hat.
Re:bringing down companies that create wealth (Score:4, Funny)
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.
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.
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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".
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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.
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Interesting)
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But FOSS frees up capital to create wealth in other ways. The market for software is a drain on the economy (when looked at globally), and its destruction would be a plus (just as if people were freely repairing your windows). Saying that companies must spend money on software to help the economy is the broken window fallacy, and something I would expect from a communist (or at least one whom was trained by them in economics).
I am tag
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".
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.
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:4, Interesting)
Alas, I made the mistake of picking a few expensive examples. I should have used things like "a fountain pen" or "a pair of hiking boots". Wealth is THINGS. It's not money. "Creating wealth" is MAKING THINGS. Whatever you make - software, music, steel, bricks. All of them are wealth. Selling something is NOT creating wealth, though.
Yes, not everything is of value to everyone. If I'm starving on a mountaintop in Canada, a Hybrid Prius will do me little good, if any. Unless its upholstery is edible. But a bag of wheat will mean quite a lot. But, all in all, wealth is about THINGS.
Income, on the other hand, is about IOU's. Which can be redeemed for things, but which aren't things in themselves. Note that high income doesn't imply high wealth, though the two are closely tied in a "normal" economy. In a place like Zimbabwe, the two are almost completely disjoint - all the income in the world can't buy non-existant maize, gasoline, anasthetics, etc.
And if all the factories that make things stop doing so, all the income in the world won't stop everyone from becoming neo-neolithic savages.
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wha? Yeah, because Adobe and Microsoft haven't created any wealth at all. Please. Microsoft's (I really hate them, but they're a convenient example here) products make many within the company wealthy. Many who purchase [or pirate] their products use them to make themselves wealthy. The same can be said about pretty much any other large closed-source software company you can think of. Even the founder
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That doesn't prove that Microsoft creates wealth. Drug dealers products make many in their supply chain wealthy. Protection rackets make the mobsters running them wealthy. Casinos make plenty of people wealthy, most of them casino owners. None of them create wealth, they just harvest it -- same as tax collectors.
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:4, Insightful)
In the [non-software-related] examples you gave, wealth is simply shifted from the consumer to the producer. In my [completely software-related] argument, the selling of the product creates wealth for the company. The company expands and creates jobs, providing wealth for new employees. The purchasers of the product use the product to generate wealth for themselves. In all of these cases, the tax (income and sales where applicable) revenue enables the expansion of infrastructure and education - thus generating even more... wealth.
Did I really need to go into that level of depth? Pretty simple stuff.
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It proves no such thing. A skilled blackjack player can use casinos to make himself wealthy; that still doesn't mean that the casino created the wealth, nor even that the blackjack player did.
Users of free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, Cinepaint (aka Film Gimp) can and do use those products to make themselves wealthy. In this
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I believe the parent poster was referring to the fact that I make a good salary supporting Microsoft installations, along with Oracle software, Sonicwall, and the thousands of other programs are out there. Furthermore, our business couldn't make as much money as it does if we went the all paper route. The automation that the software tools give us save us a ton of both time and money allowing us to grow faster which is illustrated by the fact that our workforce has doubled now in three years. I would defini
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.
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This doesn't mean that proprietary software necessarily creates wealth. If you can do the exact same job with free software as with software that you've spent thousands on, you've wasted money. Instead of creating
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Hey, people and companies make good money selling bottled air. There's always a value-add, though. Dive stores sell compressed, filtered air to scuba divers, and 3000-psi compressors don't come c
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.
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.
I disagree... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I do agree that software companies generate wealth.
I mean, you used BeOS as an example. That's a bad example because BeOS was never a terribly _valuable_ product. Sure, there was a large investment made, but very little value produced. This is not endemic to the software industry, it's endemic to Be. Supporting this theory that a large investment produced little value is the fact that THE COMPANY WENT UNDER!
With software, the user-base is equally as va
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:4, Informative)
"Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production." (from the (reasonable) Wikipedia defintion [wikipedia.org]) Nothing in this definition mentions the government. FOSS really is quite communistic in that everyone owns the means of production and the product. Up the irons!
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Because "communist" used to be the insult that "terrorist" is now. Metcalfe use to throw that insult around in his columns whenever open software of any kind was the topic. Open software is really just a subset of the sharing of information that got our science to the point where it is today.
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Funny)
Don't come at us with your Harry Potter speak...
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.
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Not that my Spanish is perfect, but he doesn't want higher barriers of entry to programmers. He seems to be saying that free software exists simply to destroy business opportunities that would otherwise serve to be making money and providing for-pay jobs. (An interesting but unrelated thought: if open-source contributors are mostly professional programmers, what happens when the market for for-profit software dies?)
I think he misses the flip side of this, though: although no programmers got paid for the
Re:News Flash: bitter ex communist hates communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actually he's half right (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you can't think of someone more...qualified?
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It's almost impossible to find a large software company with multiple products that doesn't have some open source offerings, however, even if their main products are primarily closed source. Some examples are Apple [apple.com], Microsoft [microsoft.com] [also see Codeplex], Adobe [adobe.com] and Oracle [oracle.com].
Probably the best example I can think of for closed source is game companies like EA, Vivendi (Blizzard), etc. Carmack and Id are the exception, not the rul
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To give an example, community maintenance of GCC has greatly helped development on embedded platforms. Even the most esoteric piece of kit can have a compiler ported to it, thus saving a great deal of time and energy when developing a new embedded platform
Re:Actually he's half right (Score:4, Interesting)
What does a company like IBM care who develops whatever open source products it markets (and we all know it has, for many years, given a good many utilities away for nothing, even before Linux was a dream in Torvald's twisted, geekish mind)? What it needs is software solutions and hardware solutions (preferaby coupled) so that it can collect support fees.
What Open Source isn't going to do is to keep a specifically software-writing house going. But I don't see a lack of proprietary software out there, so this guy sounds like a complete idiot. "Look, I'm the guy that made Tetris, and open source is BAAAAAD!"
Fucking moron.
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Wait a second, I don't know jack about programming, IT, computer science, or economics... but I know video games, and he's not just a one-hit wonder. He also designed Pandora's Box and Hexic HD.
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:4, Funny)
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
And another obligatory.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory, sorry. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory, sorry. (Score:4, Funny)
You must be new here.
(oh, come on, you *knew* that was coming)
What do you expect... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What do you expect... (Score:5, Funny)
Chair throwing, and dancing like a monkey. You?
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Waaaaah (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not really accurate, is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
Re:That's not really accurate, is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm certainly not one of those hardcore FOSS types that believes proprietary closed-source software is evil. But just as much as there may be competition (ie LAMP vs. Windows/.NET/IIS), there's a lot of crossover as well.
The lack of polish is a good point. Ubuntu's close, but laptop hardware in particular is a real problem point, and reduces its utility a great deal. Still, it does work on most desktops, and it's a pretty polished product that in some ways I find a good deal more usable than Vista, which is a closed-source product gone nuts.
FOSS not competitive ? (Score:3, Interesting)
All you see is the desktop, but the desktop is the exception. You mentioned Linux being competitive on the server market, yes, and what about Linux on appliances: wireless access points, NAS, network printers, network cameras, mobile phones, etc ? Linux devices probably outnumber Windows devices by
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.
Re:Before everyone jumps on him (Score:4, Insightful)
FOSS rarely hurts commercial software companies who still sell valuable software. That's because we geeks generally prefer to get rich rather than give away our work for free. Once a software niche has matured, and when there's no remaining opportunities to make money, you generally see the rise of FOSS. Tetris is a good example of a game so simple that any good hacker could crank out a clone. It was worth a bit in it's time, but not now.
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?
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True, the Soviet government screwed him over, too, but only after Andromeda had sold the rights (which they didn't own) to Spectrum HoloByte (who got rich selling it in America).
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.
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Reads it again...
Awwwwwwwwwww.............
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Funny, I thought it was photosynthesis and plants. Now, if you meant hot air ...
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.
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
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I am an anaerobic life form, you insensitive clod!
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's destroying the software market, what's taking it so damned long?
-mcgrew
(journal is too violent to link, don't want to give the tetris guy any ideas. Let alone "Chairman Steve")
Re:Everybody's got a right to be wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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OSS is supposed to be about innovation and new ideas
Huh? Says who? I've never heard that before. OSS isn't "supposed" to be about anything other than exactly what each contributor wants it to be. The only thing it's "about" is allowing everyone to share the product, whatever that might be, but it most certainly does not have to be original, nor is there any compulsion/pressure to that effect. Heck, that would require an authority of some sort, of which there is none operating specifically for open source.
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.
What you see isn't all there is (Score:3, Interesting)
GIMP and OpenOffice are perfect examples.
I don't know which proprietary Linux paint program GIMP replaced.
OpenOffice is an even worse example, it was a non-free program (StarOffice) until it was "liberated" by Sun in order to spite a corporate enemy. If anything, StarOffice is an example of the duplication going on in the non-free world.
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.
The keyword is "I see" because it just tells about the path you have gone. Some of us have traveled a different path, and seen more. The Internet and the Web started from "open source methodologies". The comm
Russian to English Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta admit, the man has a point... not much of one, but he has it.
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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.
"that's tough on you" (Score:3, Insightful)
From the GNU Manifesto:
I'm reminded of this quote every time I see hospitals, schools, etc. deal with deployments of expensive (usually Oracle-based) database software. There are hundreds of very similar organizations around the country that could get together and commission a world-c
FOSS could never have popularized computing (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do you mean exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why, exactly? At the worst it would mean a return to a world in which corporations had to design their own applications from scratch, and in which expert programmers moved from job to job and moved the skills around. Before long big corporations in different but related business areas would get together and say, OK guys,
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!
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Look at IBM for Bob's sake!
Yes, they sell software and hardware, and make money off it.
But their primary business model is based on SERVICES.
Also, if you're into uber-high-end CRM, Oracle is NOT a minority ANYTHING. They're nearly the ONLY thing.
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.
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.
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That's not how it works (Score:3, Insightful)
What this guy is bitching about is not being able to make money off the low-hanging fruit. If it can be done by individuals or small groups working in their spare time, then there will be one or more FOSS packages to do the job. There are any number of areas where FOSS is unlikely to make inroads by the very nature of the problem space, but writing software in those areas is a bit more challenging than implementing falling blocks on an 8-bit CPU, a task so simple that I've taught schoolchildren how to do it in BASIC on vintage Apple IIs. Aside from random luck, I'm afraid the road to prosperity involves lots of hard work, and there's no way around that.
"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)
LoL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless, if companies cannot cope with change, their end is all we can hope for, that's a free market, if we were to protect companies from competition that would be death to our free market and wealth.
I think competition is what keeps the market alive, then he doesn't sound too much like a capitalist to me. Seriously, this guy has created one of my favorite games and all, but this paragraph is quite ridiculous. Has free software ever killed a company? Is free software all about copying stuff? Is free software anti-business? (Let's forget all those companies, even MS making money out of these things...) Does free software prevent innovation (I could say 'firefox' and prove the opposite is true) . Really, this paragraph is so lame, perhaps he thought no one was going to find out he was saying these ridiculous things because it was a Spanish interview, that's about the only explanation for this piece of non-sense.Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, the FOSS games are better and more innovative than the commercial game (see Hextris [hextris.com]). The reason this happened is the same reason that you could never make money on the original Battlezone [wikipedia.org] anymore. Because BZFlag [wikipedia.org] is so much better.
Do the authors of BZFlag deserve to be blamed for this? Probably not. Is it Atari's fault for not constantly updating their game? Maybe. Should the author be making money off of an idea he had 20 years ago? Probably not. It's like Pong or Breakout. Both were firsts, both started a genre that continues today, but they have seen their day.
Wouldn't it make more sense for this guy to start a company that makes puzzle games?
He's just saying that because... (Score:3, Informative)