Agile Ajax » Another Brain Fart on Why Open Source is Bad

Another Brain Fart on Why Open Source is Bad

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, December 31, 2007 @ 12:32 pm

Every so often, someone scrawls a manifesto about why closed source is good and open source is bad. Usually the parties involved are technical ignoramuses (like in this Economist article) or industry hatchet men. But Jaron Lanier should know better. He isn't a hatchet man and is far from a technical ignoramus, yet he engages in the same sort of sloppy thinking that characterizes those other brain-stain graffiti artists.

His article for Discover Magazine, entitled Long Live Closed-Source Software!, is a case study in bad examples in the service of a simple argument. His argument goes as follows:

Open Source == Linux
Linux is a derivative if qualitatively better version of the closed-source UNIX.
Therefore the open source movement can only produce derivative works, and nothing as breathtakingly revolutionary as the iPhone.

He goes on to speculate about some of the causes for this failing, likening closed source to cell walls that help organisms differentiate and speciate. Open source, by contrast, is like the primordial goo.

Since Jaron is a more serious idiot than the usual idiot, I think his article requires a refutation.

Open Source != Linux -- I have a personal memory of the early days of the Internet and the Web, but a good history can be found here.
The Internet and Web were suckled on the teat of open source. So put
the World Wide Web in the open source column. In closed source's
column, you can put the ultra-sucky Hypercard.

Jaron's
own article is spiced with unintentional references to revolutionary
Open Source ideas, particularly when he refers to the conference that
prompted this article as "wikilike." Though Ward Cunningham, the original author of Hypercard, based the original WikiWikiWeb
on that Apple turd, the open source wiki soon surpassed it's ancestor,
becoming a central tool in both extreme programming and open source
projects.
Quality in not to be sneezed at -- quality, or
evolutionary change in software, is a very valuable thing indeed,
especially where support costs are concerned. I've worked in the belly
of the beast. I know the crap that goes into most closed source
software. For every Apple that obsesses about the quality of the
iPhone, there are a thousand companies producing crap software. Open
Source in fact, by in some cases pioneering and in others evangelizing
the principles of Agile Software Development, has done more to improve
the quality of software development than all the universities and
corporate professional development programs put together.

Like
most Apple products, the iPhone is not revolutionary -- the
technologies and devices have all been there before -- rather, it is a
step up in the quality of the user experience. User Experience is
something that open source software, by and large, does not do well.
Why is that? For the same reason there are not very many open source
dental practice management packages: there are so few dentists who also
develop Java software. There are a ton of IDE's, however. Usually the
open source software gets such a bad start, though, that it's User
Experience Design deficit is enormous and hard to mitigate. Open
Source, by and large, has not attracted UXD resources to its projects.
There are some social reasons for this -- UXD is seen as being a soft
"design" activity most often engaged in by fat corporate projects --
but hopefully that perception is changing.
Open Source
creates more than just derivative works -- we've already touched on the
many sweet things that Open Source has delivered. Let me add a few
more: Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Spring, GWT. I could go on, and most
of my near endless list of software are developer tools, frameworks and
libraries. That's where the true ferment of the Open Source movement
lies. Hey, Open Source can even make working in a closed-source .NET
world quite tolerable, with the many ports of open source Java
frameworks. If you want a slick consumer product like the iPhone, then
the closest that the Open Source community has to offer is probably
Firefox. Any argument that Firefox is derivative of IE has to be
laughed out of the room (see here).

A
less soft-headed analysis of the interaction between open and closed
source would focus on the market forces that drive each one and their
overlap. For closed source, the driver is the profit motive. For open
source, the driver is recognition, just like in academia. In between,
there is an overlap, where companies either sell their services or an
advanced, closed source version on top of their open source one.

I
can buy that the open source force undercuts the closed source profit
motive, but I don't think it's quite that simple. Before I hurt myself
and demonstrate the limits of my knowledge (my mother's praise aside, I
only worked for a Nobel Laureate Economist, I didn't actually win the
prize), I'll refer you to two excellent papers on the subject: Society and open source -- Why open source software is better for society than proprietary closed source software, and Economics of Open Source Software.

OK, I feel better now.

Technorati Tags: open source, economics

Topics: Editorial, Open Source

agile ajax

Comments: 9 so far

Right, Firefox is a derivative of Netscape Navigator.

I think his point stands. Open-source is great at building developer goodies, good at building software for systems administrators, and sucky at building software for non-technical users.

Comment by Sammy, Tuesday, January 1, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
On your list of really cool and innovative FOSS samples, you forgot to mention us ( http://ajaxwidgets.com ) but that was probably just a glitch

Thomas

Comment by Thomas Hansen, Tuesday, January 1, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
Hypercard was created by Bill Atkinson, not Ward Cunningham and it was hardly “sucky”. It was the first authoring environment of its kind and came into popularity well before the web. I’m guessing you missed the initial rush of HyperCard lest you would understand the impact it had. Whether or not it was open or closed source has little bearing on its worth as a software product. The fact that it was FREE was ground breaking for that time on a commercial OS/Platform. You need to understand that at this time, “open source” was strictly in the realm of academia, almost no commercial interests even considered it, so the both of you are kind of wrong.

Also, if you had done some basic research you would know that Cunningham built his WikiWikiWeb in 1994 BASED on IDEAS he had implemented in HyperCard in the late 80’s. Sounds like a real turd to me - the fact that he could prototype an idea like that well ahead of the mainstream web.

I’m not sure who is coming across as the biggest idiot or “technical ignoramus” here, him or you.

Comment by Jon Gilkison, Tuesday, January 1, 2008 @ 7:17 pm
Has he been to Linuxdevices.com? Embedded Linux?
And why do people *increasingly* choose RedHat and SLES over UNIXes?
Java?
Transmeta/Crusoe? virtualization?
And talking of good-looking design, do a Youtube search for Beryl, Compiz and Metisse. No really, right now.
See that spinning cube? It’s “opensource/Linux”.
You’re free to draw your own conclusions.

Comment by James Wachitt, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 5:29 am
Without open source, Ajax wouldn’t exist, we’d have some weird JScript.NET ActiveX hybrid that work with IE6.5. Without open source software would be so bloated with slick graphics and ridiculous swap file hits that it’d seem like the first time you loaded up Windows 3.1 again.

I don’t think you can argue one way or the other that open/closed source is the best and thats all that should exist. It’s a very mutually beneficial relationship (think Firefox and Android).

Comment by T.J., Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 8:37 am
Funny considering that 20 seconds of work shows that DiscoverMagazine.com runs on open source software:
Plone
Zope
Squid

Comment by Paul Davis, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 10:27 am
Might as well add linux considering the http response header:
Zope 2.9.6-final (python 2.4.0, linux2; ZServer/1.1 Plone/2.5.2)

Then again, it’s possible they are running windows/iis and faking the response headers (i doubt it)

Comment by Paul Davis, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 10:43 am
I really don’t understand the open source business model. Explain to me realistically how I’m supposed to get paid if all the software is free? I’ve seen statements that all the money can be made on support and documentation and such but won’t some programmer just look at the code and create a patch or just suggest a workaround and post it on the web? I like having money and being able to pay bills but open source’s busineess model seems to conflict with these goals.

Comment by o.s., Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
Oh and Sammy you’re spot on about the second biggest weaknesses of open source software. Open source software seems to be designed to be as user-hostile as humanly possible.

Comment by o.s., Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 12:23 pm