Mundie Speech @ OSCON - Blogged In Real Time 141

I couldn't agree more. It was the chance to "learn by seeing how other people were doing" that drew me to Linux (and other Free projects) in the first place. I've learned more in the last five years or so than I could ever have learned using closed source software.

One of the great benefits of open source is that when I have a problem with a program, instead of wasting my time clicking around on menus and reading useless, cryptic error codes, I can dig into the code and find the problem. With Open Source, problem solving becomes a learning experience, not just time wasted clicking around trying to coerce crappy code into working and learning nothing useful even if I happen to stumble onto a solutoin.

I think what frightens Microsoft and their peers is that a generally superior development model has emerged that can reduce development costs and produce code that can help increase efficiency and cut costs for end users. Eventually this development model will result in a market shift away from closed source software that will make the clash over the business model concepts moot.

It is in a for-profit organisation's interest to create Open Source software

That depends on the organization. It would probably not be in Microsoft's immediate interest to release Office 2000 as open source software, because Microsoft depends on monopoly revenues to survive.

On the other hand, it is clearly in Red Hat's interest to continue to contribute to the development of the Linux kernel, because anything that improves Linux as a platform is likely to increase Red Hat's consulting revenue. (Red Hat's chief competition isn't other Linux consulting firms anyway -- it's Microsoft and its servitor firms.)

It is in a for-profit organisation's interest to use Open Source software

Frequently, yes. IS/IT is a cost center, and anything that can minimize its cost to a business is in that business's interest. Insofar as open-source software can do so -- for instance, by avoiding lock-in and monopoly-priced license and service fees; guaranteeing platform stability; and increasing reliability -- it is in a business's interest to use it.

Closed-source software frequently invites the manufacturer to attempt to lock in customers and impose monopoly pricing. In many cases, closed-source vendors alter the platform out from under their customers' feet in order to spur upgrade revenues. (Take Microsoft Office, for instance.) These costs can be avoided with open-source software.

There are certainly particular business needs for which there does not (yet) exist open source software. There are also businesses with such large investments in closed software that it would not (at the moment) be in their interest to migrate.

It is not in a for-profit organisation's interest to create Open Source software, but it is in the public interest

Certainly there exist cases where particular for-profit organizations have offered closed software for which public, collaborative efforts have created open alternatives. However, if the claim being made is that for-profit organizations should be required to create open-source software so as to serve the public interest, I disagree. This would be an infringement upon their property rights.

It is not in anyone's interest to create Open Source software

I doubt anyone would assert that to begin with ....

*Very* well said. This is an excellent addressment of this issue. Frater, you should develop this into a full length essay, as it places the issue in its proper context. Failure of businesses is perpendicular to the issue of free software success.

Craig Mundie responded to maybe two out of dozens of messages posted on that round table. I posted a series of questions in response to Microsoft's specific complaint about the GPL in the University context, and got zero response. It really did seem as though Microsoft was participating because they wanted to iterate their message of the week, and not because they were actually interested in participating in debate about their message.

There were plenty of points made by people with "marquee names" in the discussion that were never acknowledged, let alone substantively responded to by Craig. Part of that is certainly due to the large number of posts the moderators accepted, but I don't think much of anyone was very satisfied with the level of engagement that the Microsoft folks carried out in that discussion.

Is money the only measure of value or success?

It seems to me that GNU/Linux is a success regardless of any company's profit margin. After all millions of people use it and the number grows year after year. Is the ability of the user to explore and alter the software not of value?

What do you value?

It is true open source has not generated any big software companies. Open source probably won't on its own. However open source has been sucessfull for companies that use open source as a support for their key products. The best example I can think of is Internet service providers. I know of atleast one local ISP that uses open source extensively to support their primary bussiness of selling Internet access and hosting services. In return they have contributed source. I suspect that many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, would not exist if it weren't for open source software. Open source has been very sucessfull for them.

I think he would define "culture" as any group of people with common beliefs and viewpoints.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

No. My only comment is that their level of attention to this has changed dramatically recently. And it is not merely dismissive.

Have you?

In general, I was impressed by the number of MS people at this event. They seem to be listening.

It's expected that people would behave like adults during a roundtable, which everybody did except for Bruce. Why respond to someone acting childishly? It only encourages them. Bruce made it very clear why he doesn't have many friends, and it's only natural that he'd be ignored when behaving that way. Like I said, that's why they even made the Troll and Flamebait moderations here at Slashdot, where childish behavior is practically the norm.

Cheers,

No offense, but I didn't see the name "Jon Abbey" anywhere in the listing of RoundTable participants. Why would you have expected anything more than zero response from anybody?

Cheers,

Bruce does have some good points that should be heard and debated, but I don't blame anybody who declined to respond to his childish baiting. I mentioned the mocking way he kept repeating Mundie's name over and over, but he also devoted one post (called something like, "I thought this was a debate, Craig.") to going off on Mundie for not taking the bait.

Cheers,

when you are the dominent culture, you often don't understand or even see the passive power you posess; only those who are not part of the dominent group can see that.

Microsoft's passive power isn't significant compared to the active effort they expend in keeping dominant. The encrypted code in Windows 3 that detected DRDOS and displayed an error message, didn't just write itself. The lawyer who wrote threats when people leaked information about the non-standard stuff in their Kerberos implementation, wasn't being passive.

Attacking others isn't something that Microsoft does passively; they go out of their way for it, sometimes even at the expense of short-term profit. It's a strategic policy.

I think that we need to acknowledge that for-profit corporations will do whatever they can, within the law, to advance their own interests, and it is the responsibility of government to protect the public interest.

Simply put, the natural tropism of corporations towards more money is bolstered (in an unnatural way) by a legal obligation to do so, with heavy penalties for doing anything else.

I think that this has trapped many corporations in 'local minima' that they are unable to break out of, such as screwing their customers for every dime they can, when a longer term strategy would be to cultivate their customer base and keep them happy.
--

I used to have one of these many, many, many years ago. I have the graphic they used to make the shirt someplace, if that's any help. Should be able to get one made (or print one yourself) from that.

...until you can't find a job that puts food on the table. Which is, I think, the real issue. The GPL is a "scorched earth" policy.... Yes, it has the potential to hurt Microsoft, but also to destroy ALL programmers' livelihoods and markets. We should be careful about trying to win a war with nuclear weapons.

It's my code, and if I don't want you making money off of my labor, that is 100% my perogative.

The BSD License is fair because it recognizes this fundamental arithmetic. The GPL is not, because it throws a needless impediment in programmers' way -- forcing them to waste their time re-coding the wheel. If you attempt to prevent your colleagues from using code which has no market value, you are being spiteful -- as can be seen from the tone of your message above. To paraphrase Brian Reid, programmers should stand on one another's shoulders -- not one another's feet.

Brent Glass loathes the GPL.

I've noticed, of late, that some people who are outraged that I've questioned the GPL -- the "Holy Writ," as it were -- have mischaracterized my views.

Let's set things straight here: I do not "loathe" the GPL. I do point out that the GPL is detrimental to developers' livelhoods (as Richard Stallman himself says; see The GNU Manifesto); that it was born out of irrational spite and mailice against commercial programmers and commercial software companies; that it hurts standardization by driving a wedge between commercial and non-commercial software developers; and that it threatens consumer choice by eliminating diversity. I have provided ample evidence for these effects in my many postings and articles. I believe that it is important for the open source community to recognize that the GPL is not a valid open source license, because it discriminates against a group of people (commercial developers) and against a field of endeavor (the production of commercial software. It should, instead, adopt truly free licenses such as the Apache License. Microsoft is by no means honorable, but it is actually correct on this point.

You write:

Once my code is released under the GPL, it can never be taken away.

The difference is that, under the GPL, the code bears a "poison pill" that specifically hurts commercial developers. This discrimination is, as Stallman himself says, "the principle and the purpose."

"it will be possible to make a round-trip query/response using Hailstorm services without 'phoning home' to Microsoft servers." -- Gillmor describing Stutz

What exactly does this mean for me, the common Linux user?

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6690267.html? tag=mn_hd [cnet.com]

hehe :)
--

Of course they are listening. First rule of warfare is to "know thy enemy".

There is a big difference between listening with an open mind and intelligence gathering. I don't know which one they are doing. Do you?

I cannot imagine a world in whiich MSFT or the BSA would lobby to overturn the DMCA. Can you?

No, but I can imagine a world in which Microsoft or the BSA would choose not to help defend the DMCA (thought directly legal or PR means) in the face of a judicial or legislative challenge. Convincing them to stay on the sidelines would be an important step toward reversing or overturning the DMCA. It's always useful to have fewer giant corporations opposing you. :)

--

We should be concentrating on doing what we do best - writing good code and sharing it with each other.

Yes, the coders should continue down their most excellent path. But not everyone in this community is a coder. /me raises hand

We made it this far by concentrating on that - writing good software.

Yes. Will that carry you? The best code out there needs marketing, whether it's word of mouth or something else. The best coders are rarely the best marketers. Leave that to your users.

We did not get this far by targetting a company and attempting to beat it with a free alternative.

You wouldn't know it from all the anti-MSFT FUD as well as looking at the varions WM's around the community...

We should not be targetting Microsoft and attempting to beat them.

Why the heck not? They're the big giant. If you can fell them, you can go kick the butts of the rest of the Phillistines.

They will out manuever us.

MSFT can outmuscle you. They cannot outmaneuver you.

We should drop all this bickering with MS and go back to doing something that Microsoft can't beat us at: writing good code.

I hope that the coders do just that. I hope that they haven't gotten bogged down in the external fights. The community has to find its external leaders and let them take the fight to the public and to Microsoft. You'll notice that MSFT never uses coders to present their side--they use polished people like Craig Mundie who have a good idea of what their position is and how to express it clearly. Why should the community be any different?

Because this community isn't out to make a ton of money and rule the world. This community is out to make software that works so amazingly well the gods will notice.

Who says they haven't already? I'd rather the people take notice.

If you want to beat up Microsoft, be my guest. Just don't tie yourself so closely to us code writers that you take us down with you should you loose.

I don't plan on loosing [sic], really. And it's not so much beating them. Microsoft makes a really great straw man, and hey, that's what excites the public. I'm not really into beating straw men per se, but you can start to focus the debate on relative merits at that point.

Again, I repeat. I'm not here writting code to beat Microsoft. I'm here to make this f*&king computer do my bidding. Don't tell me to change my licensing practices, or my direction (beat Microsoft at all costs) just becuase you think Microsoft needs to be beaten. I didn't make my code GPL so you could fight a battle with it. I made it GPL so you could use your computer efficiently, to help advance humanity, to some day get the human race to the stars.

Personally, I'll never ask you to change your licensing ideas just to "beat Microsoft". Microsoft is very clear in its sourcing and licensing policy, and I want to contrast the community's policy with that. Those who will examine the contrast carefully will likely take the community's side. Then once they do that, and they see the excellent code being created by the community, Microsoft will be marginalized and have to go back to writing good code to have market share.

If you stop coding with the GPL [or the BSD, but I prefer the GPL myself], I'll kick your ass. =P

Ah, then my question thrown back at you is twofold: Has no closed source software companies ever gone out of business? If so, then closed source is not a savior of business.

Second, is it only opensource startups that die? Or is it not that MOST startups die regardless of whether they are software-related, open or closed source related?

The answer to both questions is obvious - that one cannot extrapolate from the bad doo-doo that happened last year in regards to linux-related startups to mean that the opensource model is unsupportable in business. RedHat is doing quite well now, improving all the time and the kernel, so to speak, of their business is opensource-based, though they do add-on extras that bring in the money. In any case, it is not an automatic that opensource=bad business/dead business.

The above is not correct, and in fact, no one has been able to cite an example of a profitable open source software company. Cygnus was privately held and so it's hard to figure out if it was proftable or not, but it was definitely not "greatly profitable." However, it's easy to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on its $20M in annual revenues [cnet.com] and 180 employees [redherring.com] at the time of its acquisition. The cost of maintaining 180 employees in a technology company in the SF Bay Area is more than $18M annually, and there are other costs of doing business, so if the company was profitable at all, it was just squeaking through. (And $20M in annual revenues after ten years of existence is no one's idea of "greatly profitable.")

Red Hat has yet to turn a profit, though it keeps promising one real soon now.

Mandrake is losing money. According to its financial disclosure [mandrakesoft.com], as translated by BabelFish [altavista.com]:

Since its creation in November 1998 the company recorded losses. The cumulated amount of the overdrawn turnover of the group accounts between September 30, 1999 and 31 March 2001 amounted to 13,7 MEuros is approximately three times the amount of the turnover over the period. In spite of a strong progression envisaged of its turnover, MANDRAKESOFT considers a benefit only at the end of the exercise closed at June 30 2003;

That is, it doesn't expect to become profitable for two years.

IBM is sinking a billion dollars into open source this year. That doesn't mean it will realize any profit from this investment. It certainly hasn't earned it back yet, and whether it ever will is purely speculative.

CollabNet is privately held, so it's hard to say how much money it's made back on that $35M investment. [collab.net] It's announced a few deals [collab.net], but refuses to comment on their size: "It's our first true enterprise development network..." It's a significant deal for CollabNet, so much so that Mills refused to comment on the size of the contract or even whether it's the company's biggest win so far. (CollabNet is still privately held.) Mills did say that there are other deals now in the pilot stage with the potential to be as big as this one. I think it's a safe bet that the company is not yet profitable.

Many consultancy companies have done well. In fact, the consultancy companies do what can't be done in the Microsoft world - they can be profitable, equal players.

Consultancies are homesteading businesses, not software companies. As already pointed out, consultancies only scale linearly, not exponentially. In any case, they aren't doing so well either. I'm not going to mention the name of one company we're partnered with, but they make a great open source product, but they're in dire straits and they're going to have to start charging for it. I imagine there are probably a few small-business open source consultancies which are bringing in six-figure salaries for their principals, but that's not enough to sustain development efforts, and it's not enough to go public.

Tim

I didn't say that. I said it "has almost universally failed, and nowhere succeeded." So far, nothing in this thread has provided any valid counterexamples to that observation.

there are plenty of us that don't give a ding darn whether the "business model" is "valid" or not. Richard Stallman sure as hell doesn't care.

This is the first of several comments like this in the thread, so I'm responding to this one.

Business model is exactly the difference between free software and open source. You're quite right that RMS doesn't care about profit potential. He is opposed to the idea of making money by writing software. This quixotic viewpoint defines the free software movement. For a while, it largely gave way to the open source movement, which held that it was possible to make money by developing software and giving it away with source code for free. Now it's turning out that this concept doesn't work, which is why I wrote: "Hasn't the idea that open source generates major profit potential been pretty well refuted?" I'm not arguing here against the free software concept, only the open source concept.

Tim

(I'll assume you meant services businesses, since companies like Eazel, Mandrake, Red Hat, and so on are not consultancies per se.)

That's fine as far as it goes, but small consultancies don't have the financial resources to support the development of significant original software. If consulting were to become the dominant software business model, it would create stagnation in the software industry. Let's face it, people want to use Word, not TeX, and Photoshop, not GIMP. A consultancy or a computer science department is never going to develop Word or Photoshop. That takes serious revenues and investment, not linear service fees or spare-time development.

Second, you mostly seem to be obsessed with being "greatly profitable" rather than making enough to live on.

I was responding directly to claims about Cygnus, Red Hat, and other companies being, and I quote, "greatly profitable." In fact, they are not profitable at all, much less "greatly." I often see the same claim about open source profits made by open source advocates. The post I responded to here was modded up to 5, which is ridiculous for a set of demonstrably false statements.

I'm sorry if you or the moderators don't care to be informed of an uncomfortable truth, but I think it's important to correct persistent misinformation. Debate should revolve around facts, not propaganda.

Tim

Oh man - I'm gonna stop posting on Slashdot if we have to write bibliographies now.

You're not reading what you quoted:

He said that we basically don't see economic reality and we don't know about business, and while we have good points we should abandon most of our philosophical ideas.

He says that Mundie suggest we don't understand business and that we give up our philosophical ideas.

Putting aside the truth or falsity of the claim, WTF does business have to do with our philosophical ideas?

MS just can't comprehend anyone having a philosophy that does not maximize profit.

Whattayagonna do with people like that?

Club them with a shoe and throw them out of the lifeboat.

• An IPO
• Multi-billions in and out every year
• International recognition
• A house with every nerd device ever to hit the planet (the Gate's estate)

Satisfaction that I am making a positive world change

Verification that I wasn't doing stuff solely to promote myself while hurting others.

The ability to for me and my employees to live. I don't need to be a billionare to feel validated and I have no intention of ever getting myself in the position where I will feel the only way to protect myself is to screw others. This is where MS is right now.

I'm not sold on this being the case with MS and its detractors, but it could help me understand how a normal human with some degree of common decency might work for a company that seems to specialize in injustice.