Sumamael

I kinda liked Halo's history debates, so I will try to copy his idea (only steal from the best) and start some debates regarding business and economy.

Let's start with something that most people can relate to. The stuff below is something that I have written for myself in preparation for a university exam. Let's discuss it, feel free to point out any issues you might disagree with.


Why open source will change the business world? Let me preface this that by open source changing the world I mean the open source model, characterized by the free exchange of information and global non-profit cooperation, and not just its current representation of linux geekdom.

In the current business world, more specifically international trade and the world of multinational enterprises (MNEs), information is king. The most precious assets a multinational enterprise possesses are its KBAs (Knowledge Based Assets).

KBAs encompass a wide range of things, from technology patents to management know-how, from marketing data to competition monitoring.


In the past decade we have witnessed the rise of a new kind of enterprise, the e-MNE. From Google to Ebay, a new breed of enterprises sprung out of nothing to conduct business taking advantage of the latest thing, the cyberspace. Their business is information and technology now is merely means to an end and not the goal itself.


This is what we call the “information age”.


The western civilization’s business evolution in the past century progressed from the production model through service model to the information model.

The reason for this is perhaps that global competition forced the west to seek new markets in order to gain comparative advantage to the rest of the world or to sustain growth.


Since these days the rest of the world is able to produce the same goods and services cheaper (or at least at the same price) the last bastion of western business’ comparative advantage is information or in other words, the above mentioned knowledge based assets.


This is when the inherited flaw of the information based business model comes into play. It is based on the vehicle we call Internet in order to function. A medium which while serves both the conventional multinational enterprises in their quest for information vital for global competition and e-MNEs to conduct business, it also allows the free flow of information for everyone (who is connected) on the planet.

The open source movement exploits the very nature of the Internet, information is shared with the rest of the world instantaneously. One could also point out that P2P music and movie piracy is also one of the side effects of the same issue.

It is easy to see why some information based enterprises are so hell-bent to protect their assets and try to force some sort of regulation on the very thing that that they exploit every day, the free flow of information.

What will be the next step of evolution of the western business world to stay competitive when the rest of the world catches up knowledge wise due to this free flow of information? What will be the new model?

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Sanchek

I think the open source issue is already abating a bit. In the end, if everything were open source, the entire sector would crumble on itself. If all guys working on Mozilla didn't have day jobs, we'd never have seen it developed in the first place. They'd have been too busy working at Starbucks to pay rent.

The rabid open source advocates are like e-hippies. It won't last.

Palimax Sceleris

From a busines perspective, Open Source isn't attractive without SUPPORT.

We use a number of products that rely on open STANDARDS, but open SOURCE isn't a concern of ours.

Similarly, most open source products for the desktop still aren't ready for primetime. Check back in a few years. There are, however, countless tools for engineers where the open source product is BETTER than the commercial alternative, but, the impact on business for security analysts using Nessus isn't exactly making Cisco go broke.

Rybit

Google has a deal with the Mozilla organization. Without the funding of Google, Mozilla would never be able to continue producing a browser like Firefox with the budget they were on before Google got involved. A corporation like Red Hat needs to support open-source software for it to be used in a commercial environment; no company would risk putting their assets and their business on the line without having someone to blame. Open-source software is free, and is generally do-it-yourself technology. You'll find a lot of teens and tweens and college students using it for the "hacker" appeal.

Companies like Red Hat and Novell bring open-source technology to the masses. Without Red Hat, Linux would never gain as much popularity as it has right now. Don't get me wrong: I like having free software. But the elitist attitude of some developers and unwillingness to fix bugs urgently (think FreeBSD) annoy me very much. Open-source software isn't as "open" as you think; there are usually closed circles who make decisions for the overall direction of a project.

Another concern of many companies is the stability and longevity of a project. More often than not, an open-source project dies when the lead developers bail out. This happened to me when I was using some obscure XML libraries for a project. After the third version, the developers abandoned the project, and I had to rewrite the entire project to use another set of libraries.

Firefox is nice, and so is Apache and the Linux kernel, but without the funding and support by commercial organizations, open-source would be nowhere near where it is today. IBM and HP support Apache (check their contributions page), and the Linux kernel is supported by Novell and so forth.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Linux is actually more expensive to maintain than Windows. I'm almost convinced the developers of free software have purposely made setting up a Linux environment very difficult: job security. The requirements for hiring qualified people to administrate a Linux or BSD environment are very high, and so are their salaries. But Windows, on the other hand--any monkey can be trained to do common day-to-day tasks.

I use Gentoo and other free software on this server because I have the time and experience to run a Linux environment. But one of my employees have had a difficult time trying to do anything Linux, which is why I'm a Microsoft shop at work (Active Directory's ease of management, etc). But I do agree with one of the posters who say it's important to have an open standard, not so much open-source technology. Hell, a few open-source projects don't even have a standard. Look at BitTorrent for example. Every single damn implementation of BitTorrent has some quirks and differences.

Open-source, however, has changed the world. It's beautiful that you can find every component you need online (for free) to build a system to launch nuclear missiles. Open-source has forced Microsoft to compete. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about any licenses other than the GPL and its derivatives. But these open-source projects are only sustainable if they have a company vouching for its reliability, a company who will also be actively involved with bettering the software for general use.

I don't see Microsoft or open-source as necessarily better, but merely as competition. It's Microsoft versus every other organization (companies who support open-source) that competes with Microsoft (such as HP, Novell, Google, and so forth).

Maniacles

Open source uses the gift economy model, but fails to suffer the free rider problem due to the negligible incremental cost of replication.

Malse

I personally find it comical anyone would ever pay for software they didn't get the source to, particularly on a large scale, and that has nothing to do with free redistribution rights at all. I also think it's extremely funny that people are constantly trying to retrofit Industrial business models onto computer software and acting like it's an intrinsic property of software developement itself.

As long as there have been computers, there have been people giving away the tools to use them, just as long there as there have been gardnerers there has been an Old Farmer's Alamanac (or it's oral equivalent). The only reason anyone ever thought to make money off it had to do with redistribution costs that prohibited anyone from participating in the supply end of it. Thanks to networks, the redistribution costs of anything have so rapidly approached 0 that it seems any sort of classic publishing is doomed to extinction as people collectively realize that.

The current linux hype will likely eventually pass. But open source software goes far deeper than that, and is a fundamental tenet of the culture of computer science. Nearly every major new idea in computer science has first been made available in open source implementations, largely from academic institutions. The internet simply would not exist in its current form if people had tried to lock down TCP/IP into a sellable commodity. Hell, I'm still waiting for commercial systems to implement the transparent distributed computing model that was freely available in Sprite in like 1992 (I can see the ads for MS Distributed Blue Screen in 2015, trumpeting process migration technology from 1989). Can you imagine if CERN had tried to SELL http?


That's funny, I've always thought the exact same, but about the Windows and Oracle and SAP and Track type systems. But that really has nothing to do with the source to them being available or redistributable, and more to do with the intended audience. Unix software authors tend to know and like Unix, and write tools that fit their view of utility, which is going to be at odds with people that refuse to learn about it. On the other hand, many closed systems are so intentionally obscure and non-sensical so that you are locked into expensive support contracts. The Oracle DBA phenomenon sort of speaks for itself there.

All of the consideration for abandoned open source software apply about ten times worse to closed software as well. When HP bought Compaq who bought Digital, we had absolutely no choice but to start on a painful, moronic series of required ports and upgrades in which we have lost millions of dollars and have in many cases been left with systems less functional than what we were upgrading from. Had our primary operating platform been FreeBSD instead of Digital Tru64 (the people that named Ultrix hadn't been buried deep enough), we could have simply migrated off their platform forever. What's funny is that Microsoft has gradually done this to its own customers over and over again with (and this is only a single example) pointless Office remixes that have no functional benefit over prior versions but used incompatible file formats. I personally never needed a spreadsheet program more advanced that the absolutely archaic Lotus123 dinosaur my parents purchased for their PC-XT in the dark ages, but the only possible way to run that now would be on an open-source emulator.

It seems disingenous to use something you got for free as an example of why you can't depend on an entire software culture when the same has been true of more companies than stars in the sky. I'm sure a lot of people were real happy with their Novell systems in the late 90s too :> My employer uses some FORTRAN libraries older than the half the posters here that are absolutely unavailable from any other vendor and if that company decides it's no longer in their interest to sell it, we're in a pretty pickle.

Hell, the "legacy" meme that's been going around since the 90s is a great example. Here you have commercial vendors trying to drill into management consciousness that any system older than about 5 years is dangerously unsupportable and needs to be totally replaced by a new, untested, system that will probably require man-years of time to get working as well as the current one. And by that time, it'll probably be "legacy" too.

Palimax Sceleris

As opposed to open systems so obscure and non-sensical with NO support, because the people who wrote it eventually moved out of their parent's basement?

Oracle might cost an arm and a leg, and it might take some well-compensated DBAs to keep it running, but when mess hits the fan, there's a guy sitting at a phone at Oracle who is RESPONSIBLE for providing us support -- not a webpage with part-time developers, but a company waiting with an army of support. Expensive, but worth it.

For me, my little team webserver runs Apache on SUSE. For our enterprise, they're IIS on Windows.

Rybit

The timing of this post is interesting. Cisco's firewall source code was stolen by some Swedish teenager (who's currently being held and questioned). I don't see how Cisco's executives should be so worried about their source code, seeing that there are open-source implementations of firewalls. If it's really worth the price difference, then the leak of the source code should not cost their customers their estimated "billions of dollars of damages."

I like Apache more than IIS, and that's because Apache is tested and has been around much longer. Microsoft's biggest bane is that they try to stuff all kinds of neat features with IIS and Internet Explorer (and often is the case that they'll deviate from the standard). Apache has several full-time developers funded largely by corporations and personal contributions.

I have to disagree with you, Max, for enterprise software. I think Apache software is definitely enterprise-quality. Look at Tomcat, for example. J2EE is what many companies are using, and I see a lot more Apache Tomcat/JBoss implementations than I do with IIS .NET, BEA WebLogic, Macromedia JRun, or IBM WebSphere in the enterprise (especially with banks and insurance companies). And there are people who provide support contracts for Apache and Tomcat, such as Covalent (many Apache developers work for this company). Apache has a few offices in the U.S, and they are widely sponsored by many corporations (notably IBM). They have a board and a very good development structure. (50% of Fortune 500 companies run Apache HTTP/Tomcat; 70% of Fortune 100 run Apache HTTP/Tomcat.)

The truth is that open-source projects that have suceeded have gradually transformed into commercial products: Red Hat, Linux kernel, Apache, Tomcat, and so forth. Google runs on hundreds of Red Hat systems. The Linux kernel group has its own funding from corporations who have benefited from open-source software. Firefox is getting sponsorship from Google (and it is widely speculated that there will be a GBrowser). When an open-source software has companies who vouch for its development, offer support contracts for it, then that's a sign of sucess.

But man, MySQL is fscking annoying. I would choose DB2 or Oracle (yes, I know 10-40k) or even Microsoft SQL Server any day over MySQL, for the fact that there are so many things it doesn't support (they didn't add Unicode support and subqueries until the last version).

Palimax Sceleris

I think you misunderstand me. I don't think that Apache isn't enterprise worthy. I'm only suggesting that it makes for a nice platform for my simple needs (PHP support, and easy implementation of a MySQL backend), where a Microsoft solution would be overkill. I'm not getting a SQL licence for my team's message board

That said, IIS *is* enterprise worthy as well, and it's what our enterprise uses. [And it's where I diverge from them...]

Rybit

Hehe, Microsoft must be responding to antitrust sanctions. Never would I imagine that they release the source code to Windows or their other products under the auspices of the "Shared Source Initiative." Or they could just be responding to the growing pressures of open-source competition. Here's the link.