Novell asserts that the future of software development will not be found in the open-source or proprietary models, but in one that combines the best of both worlds–or “both source” as the company calls it.
Novell sees a ‘both-source’ future
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Methinks they are sprinkling a few grains of rat-poison on their delicious open-source friendship meal they have prepared thus far. They think you can still eat the meal because it contains just a bit of rat-poison.
But freedom is not something you do a little bit of.
Live Free or Die
http://www.opengroup.org/publications/graphics/n910cov.jpg
Seriously, it seems everyone wants to become famous for some wierd name they assign to some concept. There was Closed Source, then Free Software, then Open Source, then Shared Source, now Both Source.
That’s great news. So there’s Red Hat which focuses solely on Open Source at its core (With 3rd Party Proprietary partners such as Oracle), and then there’s Suse of whom will put proprietary “modules” or “other things” inside Suse to make an in road to the markets where Open Source is weak. Nice to see some competition and smart thinking for once.
I have been saying both communities need to coexist for some time now, the problem is the willingness to cooperate and not necessarily from the corp. users. Many people in the Linux community want it one way, their way, and they are too stubborn to compromise. I guess we will see how this works out.
Up until now, Stallman’s reason for distancing himself from the Open-source movement seemed irrational.
It makes perfect sense now.
That’s great news. So there’s Red Hat which focuses solely on Open Source at its core (With 3rd Party Proprietary partners such as Oracle), and then there’s Suse of whom will put proprietary “modules” or “other things” inside Suse to make an in road to the markets where Open Source is weak. Nice to see some competition and smart thinking for once.
There is no userland software that FOSS can’t duplicate and even improve on, given enough time.
Proprietary software can get things moving quickly, but frankly I don’t see the need for it.
When YaST was proprietary, it was only a matter of time before it just plain wasn’t the best installer/configurator out there.
I agree with you that Novell with find this a hard sale, but not for the same reason as you think.
Many people in the Linux community want it one way, their way
Are you surprised by this? Free Software is an ideology not just another community. Freedom, like Truth, is exclusive. You can’t expect someone who has decided to stick to the truth to accept a situation that is 95% true and 5% false as being Truth.
A business that is based on both-source may succeed in the short-run, until some guy in soviet russia scratches the itch. Then everybody and their dog will start donating their code to Linux, in order to appear to look like a good open-source citizen.
The weakest link is in the confusion over “open-source” and “Free software”. Try to think of both-source or any other bladibla name in the context of “Free software” and you see that it fails.
Programmers need money for food and housing. And the world needs source code to push business and science further into the future.
A business that is based on both-source may succeed in the short-run, until some guy in soviet russia scratches the itch. Then everybody and their dog will start donating their code to Linux, in order to appear to look like a good open-source citizen.
That’s why CVS commit permissions aren’t granted to the world. As it is, many patches are turned down for various reasons. There is no reason that this policy will change in the future. As long as the leadership in charge continues to scrutinize changes, then our purposed Russian may scritch his itch all day long. The rest of us will not be infected.
My point has nothing to do with CVS comit permissions. I’m talking about closed-source software that was carefully garded a few years ago when Freesoftware was not a threat, being donated today.
It’s more like proprietary companies seeing their demise and trying to make friends while they are alive by donating the code to open-source, in order to gain favor.
The trend will continue. The truely “Free software” companies will prosper, and those who donate just enough to appear open-source will have a hard time maintaining the façade.
Are you surprised by this? Free Software is an ideology not just another community. Freedom, like Truth, is exclusive. You can’t expect someone who has decided to stick to the truth to accept a situation that is 95% true and 5% false as being Truth.
Research always has a certain percentage of uncertainty. Statistical research traditionally sets a 5% error lever. Meaning, with a certainty of 95%, they can state that a certain assumption is wrong. On these assumptions, our whole scientific knowledge is based.
Judges do the same. They also accept a certain error level when convicting criminals. Only, they choose a far smaller error level.
In other words, nothing is certain.
Please, when you say stuff like this, please know what you are talking about.
Meaning, with a certainty of 95%, they can state that a certain assumption is wrong. Or right, of course.
“We are a company that owns a large closed source base and now we have bought some open source related smaller companies, we’ll open the code of some of our products and we’ll still distribute other products as closed source, because we think we will profit the most this way”
Novell gets it and the Stallman koolaid drinkers will be dismissed for the wackos that they are.
In other words, nothing is certain.
Actually, death and taxes are pretty much a sure thing. 😉
“The industry needs the profits from proprietary software to help fund open-source developments…”
Absurd! Consulting services firms and end-user organizations (government, high-tech, academia, individuals, etc. ) are providing much more funding and code than proprietary software companies (with certain rare exceptions).
It was matter of time for Novell to come up with this cock-eyed statement. Novell is not interested in good citizenship in the FOSS community. They are interested in one thing – and one thing alone: relevance. Time and again, they have been unable to compete in areas where they’ve dominated. In the end, they’ve repeatedly had their asses handed to them by Microsoft and Sun. So now they will drag SuSE and Ximian resources down the Provo toilet with them as they begin their regular decent to irrelevance.
In the meantime, here’s a few questions for Novell: why isn’t Netware open source? what isn’t eDirectory open source? can we see both sources?
Naah, there is a 5% uncertainty that you might not die. 😉 In logic, I learnt facts were 100% true and that a premise, which is the building block of a logical conclusion, is either true or false, no inbetween.
Statistics on the other hand are deeply rooted in probalities with margins for error. That’s why 20 econometricians(sp?) will interpret a poll in 20 different ways. In brief, statistics are a tool or instrument of quantitative analysis. They should never be regarded as facts or representative of the truth.
Hah, my philosophy and statistic classes paid off after all.
Many people in the Linux community want it one way, their way, and they are too stubborn to compromise.
As were the proprietary commercial organizations before Linux came along. Now that there is some real competition from all this GNU software they’re playing a new (or is it GNU) game. They’ve changed their tune and now they want to be nice and work together. But why?
Is it because they were always concerned about the quality of their products and value they were giving their customers?
Or is it because they are concerned about their pocket book and how much profit they will be able to make when competing with free software that is available, for free?
Where were they when Linux had trouble getting hardware and driver support? Where were they when customers were being forced to pay monopolistic prices and register every piece of software they use and ….
Let’s face it, we’ve been giving proprietary organizations our time and money for products that barely meet our minimum requirements. One would think those organizations would have a vested interest in keeping their customers happy. But we all know their interests lie in making the most money for the least amount of work/cost possible.
Well now they have some new competition. Free software costs nothing!
Compete with that, bitch.
Until we finally agree that we’re doing this for people, not for profits, this fight can go on as long as it has to. The end goal is to make our free markets more consumer and customer friendly. Its unfortunate, for us, that the commercial software industry didn’t pursue such a righteous goal from the start. What will it take to make them acknowledge the value of sharing IP? Their demise? That is one option, and I think they finally get the picture. But do they really ‘get it’? Only time will tell.
Free software costs nothing!
Compete with that, bitch.
In the end, everybody in the software industry loses if we keep attacking each other. The only beneficiaries of our infighting are businesses that have nothing to do with selling software (eg HomeDepot, TimeWarner, Sears, Fedex, Gucci, etc)
So chill out dude. You ain’t proving anything by “taking on” the establishment because you’re still going to be under the thumb of “Man” and you’re still going to bend over and pay you $18 for CDs and $10 for movies and $50 for Brittany Spears in Concert and $3.50 for Sarbuck’s lattes
Corporations (and their copyrights) can theoretically live forever, and they sure aren’t expected to pay any significant amount of tax, at least in the USA.
“Novell gets it and the Stallman koolaid drinkers will be dismissed for the wackos that they are”
You have it almost right….. Novell gets it, and they are going to absolutely without question TAKE whatever it is they want. Novell couldn’t careless who Stallman is much less support anything he thinks.
Lemme see, msft distributes all proprietary, so msft predicts the future will be all proprietary.
Redhat distributes all open, so redhat predicts the future will be all open.
Novell distributes both open and proprietary, so . . . what do you suppose novell would predict?
“Both-source” sounds just so lame!!
Let’s face it, we’ve been giving proprietary organizations our time and money for products that barely meet our minimum requirements. One would think those organizations would have a vested interest in keeping their customers happy. But we all know their interests lie in making the most money for the least amount of work/cost possible.
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And what is wrong with this? It may not be compatible with FOSS ethos, but that doesn’t make it morally reprehensible.
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Until we finally agree that we’re doing this for people, not for profits, this fight can go on as long as it has to. The end goal is to make our free markets more consumer and customer friendly. Its unfortunate, for us, that the commercial software industry didn’t pursue such a righteous goal from the start.
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Why should we agree? Ultimate freedom is not about free software, but about you pursuing what you want, and me pursuing what I want (within agreed upon legal standards, of course). If I am a corporation producing software X, and an alternative is available that is equal in all ways, from a company that is more “customer friendly”, I would expect my customers to flock to them in droves. In a highly competitive open market, being customer friendly would be quite adaptive for a corporation.
Not @hmmm, but @anonymous, regarding corporate taxes in the USA. They are substantial, just take a look at the IRS corporate tax code sometime. Furthermore, you are unlikely to see a very large corporation suddenly embrace OSS and subside solely on service-based profits, because they risk being placed in the highest tax bracket as a service corp.
While we all may differ in opinion on the reasons behind Novell’s “both source” stance, it is a smart move for them to put chips on both sides of the fence.
In logic, I learnt facts were 100% true and that a premise, which is the building block of a logical conclusion, is either true or false, no inbetween.
A logical proposition is a statment of set membership. If a set could be exactly defined a statement of membership of a set can be either 100% true or 100% untrue.
Rules of life however demands that exact communication is impossible which means that any defined set will have somewhat fuzzy edges.
Thus a proposition can be mostly true. Or true enough. Ultimately a premise will be true/false enough for the demands of it’s particular inference, which may or may not be suitable for further inference.
I remember reading about something interesting in this department four years ago:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynamo-1.html
Something called Dynamo by HP. It emulates a cpu, and optimizes the code at runtime. Apperantly they managed to make some code run faster than native in emulated mode.
Why should we agree? Ultimate freedom is not about free software, but about you pursuing what you want, and me pursuing what I want (within agreed upon legal standards, of course).
We don’t have to agree on the details of freedom. But then we get what we have here. A place where we say you’re free to do what you want, but you can’t grow certain plants, you can’t cross the road in certain spots, you can’t say certain things, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Yet we still call it freedom. But I disagree with your definition of freedom or that this is really freedom at all.
Freedom of software is a bit different. Perhaps we wouldn’t need access to the source code if we could purchase a quality product that didn’t have bugs, didn’t have security problems and offered us fixes for any bug or security problems we find in the product. Then we could pay for features. And pay for the next release that contains more features. And the next, and so on.
But look what we have here. Is Win XP bug free? What about 2000? Certainly they must have fixed all the bugs in 2000 by now. And 98? If they haven’t they must be working diligently on it and will offer us a free patch any day now, right? Look at the Apple model, it offers bug and security fixes and new features in updates that cost like $100 each. But when we purchase these products shouldn’t we have the expectation that they are feature complete and bug free?
But until we can get those guarantees I like to be a very vocal proponent of the unique advantages GNU software offers. Such as access to the source code, ability to get those bug and security fixes for free on a timely basis, as well as all the free feature enhancements anyone could ask for, or code…
Programmer’s should be poor, they should make as much as McDonald’s workers because everyone should know how to program a computer.
Supply and demand says that when there is a sufficient supply of programmers to meet any commercial demand in this lovely system of economics it might be difficult to find work and our wages could be far less that we had hoped. It happened to other industries. What makes you think it won’t happen to software development?
And what value does your souce code have? How much would the source to Windows 3.1 sell for today? And if you rewrite it line for line could you sell it for more? Writing source code is like writing poetry or a book. Some books are priceless because the words are arranged in a very precise way, but most are not worth the paper they are printed on. In time most of our source code will be worth nothing. But unless it has been open sourced all that labor, all that IP, all those algorithms will be lost.
Would it have been intelligent for our artists and musicians to make their art for profit and burn the originals? What value can we place on an original Georgia O’Keeffe? How valuable was she to our society? How much money would we be willing to give her to paint again?
Or would we expect her to paint for 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year, for a salery of like $40k because that’s all an artist is worth… if she doesn’t like it she can always go work for McDonalds, right?
People are worth more than we pay them. And the IP some people create is priceless. So I think we should try to fix our system to offer these people a better quality of life. That’s all.
Hell, were already in a “Both Source” world.
If a proprietary app that is mission critical decided to write a version for the an open platform thats seems like a winning solution to me.
Not to mention the programmers still get to eat-.
-Nx