#58:
Samizdat was a remnant artifact, a relic of what was once common enough it was just how things were. Like weeds in a vacant lot. Bears in the zoo.
It stands out as minor and exceptional because we’ve been so thoroughly nobbled by wanna-be hivelings and their drones. We all get born under these giant insectile pseudo-human aggregates which have almost immortal physical lifespans and powers way beyond individual human capacities. Our Distributed Masters and their support teams. But they aren’t human, which will be their eventual undoing.
For aesthetic reasons, Tracy W – because aesthetics are the ultimate morality. Reason falls away, beauty remains.
Stallman’s quixote-opposition to that hive-predation is what in my book recommends him for canonization.

There is some truth in what you say, in particular some some application topics are underserved or require specialist inputs, eg tax software.

They will not generally accommodate specific client needs, or needs of a community foreign to them (in a professional sense).

A thought experiment: enter a feature request to some active OSS project and the same request to the corporate competing product. See who accomodates you first.

There is a way to get what you want with OSS: send in a patch.

I don’t want to sound rude, but it’s obvious from your first paragraph that you don’t have a lot of experience with open-source based software systems. FYI, I make the better part of my living building and selling custom software systems and services to small to medium sized companies, and I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now.

abb1 @57

I’m currently re-engineering a legacy accounting system system for a company that provides customized accounting services for hedge fund managers. Previously, I worked on a web system for a realty company, an email monitoring product for a startup, a transaction processing system for an e-commerce value-added network …

For many companies, computer systems are not just for generic HR, CMS and accounting functions, they also implement the core business the way an assembly line does for an auto manufacturer. These systems are highly specialized and typically represent a significant part of the company’s capital investment.

They will not generally accommodate specific client needs, or needs of a community foreign to them (in a professional sense).

That leaves plenty of opportunity for commercial ventures, based on OSS or not.

Whenever any software product (including OSS) becomes “too big”, its development stagnates, as it becomes ever more challenging to make changes, add new features in a coherent manner, and indeed maintain or obtain an oversight and understanding of the whole system. Even when it’s not about features, the same goes for implementing more efficient or otherwise better algorithms.

Of course, I’m not talking about stable base utilities that have a well-understood and limited feature set.

Eventually this will express itself in an untenable learning curve and punitive overhead when doing any work on the product, as well as likely the product becoming sluggish and lagging in new features.

This opens up opportunities for competing products that start from a clean slate.

In any area, when somebody thinks they have invented a better mousetrap, they usually don’t hack an existing product that is centered around the old mousetrap technology, and where perhaps the non-core (non-mousetrap) parts, e.g. the user interface, are not particularly great.

Even in OSS you have many competing implementations in various areas, each with distinct advantages, and differing feature sets, targeting different interests. And even in OSS, new products share little code from those they replace, so I don’t see code reuse as a major tradeoff component.

Now combine this with the fact that a new product development need not be OSS.

1) GNU/Linux has in the space of 15 years from being a kitchen table project destroyed the commercial Unix market and derailed Microsofts plans for servers. That this would happen was obvious, at least to me, in 1995 when I was urging my then database company employer to port their product to GNU/Linux. The big advantages OSS has over commercial software is that it does not have a marketing and sales organization and does not have layers of product and development managers. So if something would be useful, or even just fun, there is no-one to tell you NO, don’t work on that, it’s not in the project plan. No-one to tell the customer that feature z is only available at extra cost. No reason for developers to make the program deliberately incompatible with other systems. No pressure to ship defective products to make this quarters goals or protect the stock price.

The real reason GNU/Linux took over the OS market, except for desktops, and is taking over the embedded market, and that Apache took over the web server market is they are simply better. More reliable, faster, more adaptable than the commercial equivalents.

OSS changes the IT ecosystem. I support myself by doing consulting, mainly with Postgresql, an open source database. Most of my clients could not exist or succeed without open source.

One, a quite successful startup operates several dozen hefty database instances, tens of terabytes, the Oracle licensing would be several million dollars, plus half a million per year for “maintainance”. Instead they pay nothing for Postgresql licensing and for about half of my time consulting to advise, tune and troubleshoot. They also use Linux. There is no way they could have started or succeeded if they were using all commercial software.

Google would be simply unthinkable without OSS. The whole architecture depends on compute nodes costing as near to nothing as possible and on being customizable to make large scale clustering practical and economically feasable. Just installing NT-server-edition on a few hundred thousand systems and keeping them patched s, never mind actually paying for the licenses, would be impossible. If NT or commercial Unix was all that was available there would be no Google.

3) Richard Stallman is literally a saint. It may take a while for him to be canonized, but it would be justified.

4) Amateur does not mean unskilled. It means done for love. Most people do better work when they are interested in it or if they are talented that way. OSS thus tends to have better developers than commercial software, who are better motivated and a have sufficient time to do the job right.

5) Amateur production is not exclusive to software. Contrary to the Imaginary Property industry bs, there would still be music even if it didn’t all get paid for. There have been “garage bands” for longer than there have been garages. Artists, writers, and poets are also largely not in it for the money. Indeed, the example of samizdat shows that not only do you not have to pay them, you can’t even shut them up.

6) The internet enables large scale collaborative amateur production. Linus Torvalds wrote the start of Linux, but relied on the GNU compilers and utilities (largely created by Richard Stallman) to have a functioning system. But it would have remained a curiosity without the thousands of other contributors. As it is, Linux and some other OSS projects are faster and more effective at software development than any commercial organization. Windows Vista, years late and arguably inferior to the earlier XP is only the most obvious example.

QV 53, what kind of custom software? Give me an example. I was thinking about applications like firewalls, monitoring systems, web servers, office/document management systems, proxies, load-balancers, VOIP, instant messaging, etc. – that kind of stuff. This is (as I understand) where you typically face a choice between commercial and open source. Is there really any in-house development (beyond trivial customizations) of this kind of stuff anymore?

This is irrelevant. Your assertion was that “There haven’t always been priesthoods of greed.” You have not provided any evidence to support this assertion.

None either for the additional assertion I’m making that the Neanderthals laughed and sang, extrapolated from their grave sites. Anybody who took that much care for their dead also sang. People who sing, laugh. Are laughing and singing Neanderthals in your conception of pre-history?

Before we get onto laughing and singing Neanderthals, are we agreed that there is in fact no evidence to support the idea that we believe that “there was a time, the majority of our actual history in fact, when people learned rapidly from each other, unimpeded by syndicates of privilege.”?

Sorry to be so pedantic about this, but your basic response to any doubts I express appears to be to produce a gush of more ideas. This is not conducive to the learning process. I want to get things settled about the state of evidence behind your earlier claims before we move on to your later claims.

Possibly you believe that currently we are not so overrun with humanoid parasites and parasitic organisations that we can barely move. If so, hang on, watch closely.

So you believe that we were always so overrun with humanoid parasites and parasitic organisations that we can barely move?

As far as I can see at least in “supporting” departments, internal (or contracted out custom) development budgets are matched to staff cuts in the job descriptions that are automated away.

Website/database development/operation vs. phone reps, automated resume mills vs. human recruiters, “employee/manager self service” vs. clerical staff, etc. Where I work (mid-size corporation) the secretarial and recruiting staff has been cut down to the bone, to the point where only VPs and up have a secretary.

What I meant was a company developing a proprietary product for sale to others, competing with other products (including OSS) out there.

From the proprietary developer’s perspective, their own product is (1) under their control, (2) they know it—unlike some “organically” grown and complex OSS product on which generations of ambitionados have laid their hands, and (3) they start without the baggage and possibly with a better technical approach.

From the (power user) customer’s perspective, you have a choice between an OSS product with a maintenance contract and a proprietary product with a maintenance contract. What you think works best for you depends on the vendor’s salesmanship, and in cases some technical merit aspects of the product relative to your needs.

You need to get out of whatever pigeon hole you’re stuck in. There’s as much if not more custom system and application software being developed today as ever.

In fact, the availability of free systems software like Linux, Apache, Java and PHP means that a greater percentage of a company’s software budget is available for custom development. Free software is actually creating more opportunities for professional software developers, not fewer.

But does it ever happen anymore? I don’t think so, unless it’s some simple and very much company-specific application. Nobody develops any in-house software these days…

Besides the possibility that Clovis point knappers could in fact have been part of a closed group, guilds, priesthoods, and trade secrets aren’t the only mechanisms that slow innovation. Anthropologist George Foster, the developer of the theory of Limited Good, found that a potter’s innovation in the small Mexican town where he did much of his research was not taken up by others of the trade nearly as quickly as Foster expected. When a few eventually began to use it, his questioning seemed to reveal that such “early adopters” had spent decades convincing themselves that they had come up with the idea independently—only in that way did they feel comfortable using it.

As a matter of fact, it could be argued that the community had developed the equivalent of a patent system, in which an innovater would have a reasonable time in which to benefit from their invention free from competition, before it was taken up by the larger society. You could even argue that it is an open-source, socially-based, patent system.

Worse is the phenomenon that many of us who have spent much time in third-world societies have witnessed—an automatic suspicion of innovation, and uneasiness or outright fright in the face of change.

At least from a technical perspective, there is a barrier to entry into working on an established complex (OSS) product, and/or tracking other people’s external changes and coordinating with them.

Having your own product that you know and control, and that has everything that you want to offer to the particular market you want to address, may be preferrable.

And who’s to say existing OSS stuff represents the top of the line in terms of technology? There are always new approaches of addressing old and new problems which may be better along some dimension, not necessarily speed of execution.