toddevan

Delicious reading

I read several articles today that were absolutely captivating. They were also all very long. In fact, i did a word count on the three articles i found and they totaled 10,876 words. I then totaled another article i found about form and computation and that article was only 5,603 words. However trying to be the avid learner and academic that my parents tell me i am, i read all 10,876 words of the three interesting articles. these are the articles i read


The first article i read was actually an interview with Tim O'Reilly. Basically good ol' Timmy is really pro open source software. The premise of his little symposium was to tell all the rich and powerful guys what the ten most common misunderstandings about open source software is and then smash them to smithereens. Well Timmy I think you are on to something here. BUT, i am not convinced. I will tell you what i am convinced of after reading this article. I think that open source is something that can be every bit as reliable as closed source software. I did not know that the internet was so heavily supported by open source applications. I also did not know that large corporations relied on open source applications like Perl. I am now looking at open source products in a new light, i thought they were all things like Linux and Red Hat and that their main function was to make life difficult for Microsoft. I was wrong.

However when we get deeper into the presentation, things start becoming a little more gray. Basically to my understanding one of the biggest fears of using open source software is that: you wont be able to make money, and people will steal your stuff to make a profit themselves. In terms of the money issue, what Tim says in a nut shell is "Its like the internet, you will make money off things that use the internet." The only problem is that he is basically asking you to take a leap of faith, we arn't sure what the next ebay will be that uses the fruits of open source and we don't even know if there will be anything like that. Tim said "It is harder to predict the future than it is to make it." So there you have it, who knows if releasing all your code will bring your company profits, but hey it might! Also according to Tim we will be able to rely on college kids and programing gurus indefinitely. He says "The key contributors to most open source projects today are a mix of university researchers, developers internal to companies who use that particular open source package in their work, independent consultants who profit from the increased visibility their participation brings them, and developers sponsored by companies who have identified a clear revenue stream associated with that project." I mean, if a developer is gaining revenue from a project, why would they let other companies have access to that project? Obviously open source is amazing and could be something as big as the internet, but Linux has been around for over two decades.

Personally, I'm with my pal Tim. But i don't think that all the bourgeoisie execs and ceos will be quite as thrilled as my pal is. You see, I get the impression that since Tim is such a big player in the stock market he hopes that he will be able to pull a "Google" (stock wise) in the upheaval. But, thats probably just cynical. I wont pretend to know a much about open source or business so take my conclusions with a grain of salt. I will just re-iterate that this article has made me think about open source software completely differently and i am now wiser. Sweet.

The next article i read was Democratizing Software, also about open source. The Democratization of software is a fancy name of switching to open source. My comrade Dave is very interested in open source software. OK, well this guy Brent Jesiek is writing what looks like a thesis paper, or just a plain old paper. He is taking a close look at how technology and software effect us in terms of social freedoms, commercial interests, and other heavy issues. Let me say, after reading both of these articles i feel like i know a lot more about open source. But its still confusing.

So Brent talks about a lot of different things in his article. He and others like Feenberg have thought about the impact of technology on us on a completely different level than i am used to. So to break it down, when you have closed source software bad things happen. For example, software and hardware are obviously heavily reliant on one another. This one time intel put a tracker on their processors and there was a big hoopla. People said their right to privacy was being infringed and it was a mess. This probably happened because they (intel) knew what kind of software was for sure going to be running through their processor. Also, closed source software generally leads to non open ended, non scalable, non flexible, worse quality programs than those of open source programs. Why?!?! Well, you see there is this thing called the "Hacker ethic" and a part of the hacker ethic is the hacker way of thinking. This states that they like the ability to expand and improve the program they are working. This is opposite from programs that are closed source, like MS Word, which are characterized as "stable." Cool, thats cool, but what if this whole open source just proliferates a "closed source" style community again!!!??? well according to Brent, "its worth the risk" in not so many words. PLUS! we will have a ton of cool new toys. But seriously, according to Brent even if we do revert to our old ways we will still be better off than before so hey why not. Although Brent had compelling and hart felt evidence in support of this valient effort i still dont think that it is feasable. The only way America or the world will move to open source is if china or someone else does it and then they look like they are getting such a positive result that we or the world will be left behind. It also seems like this open source movement is putting a lot of faith into the hope the people will take time to make awsome programs for their own enjoyment.

Alright, time to wrap up this little foray. The last article is a devils advocate to the first two. Maybe thats not even the best way to describe it, more like the negative side of the equation. The first two articles were heavily promoting open source, but if it is really so great why does it need promoting? Well, not everything is as great as it seems. Creating programs in open source almost always happens from separate locations, and working remotely is much more difficult than working in isolated team. Also, the people writing the programs are generally the extremely computer savvy, so a lot of the cool features they add might be lost to the average joe. Finally, source code is extremely complicated so the number of people who can actually do something with an open source is limited. So the debate continues. Is open source the way to go?



After reading all three of these articles i have come to some conclusions. Open source is like the final frontier of the programing world, no one knows whats out there and everyone is afraid that if they go they will get lost and like it or not never be able to return. I believe that major companies will be very hesitant to open their source code to the community. However if something big happens, like some guy gets rich from his garage making some program that is open sourced. Well, if something like that happens i think we might see changes. Never the less, open source programs are something to be looking at.

posted by toddevan @ 6:49 PM Comments: 0