Hal Vaughan wrote:
I think eventually we'll see more open source than closed source, but
over the past 25 years or so, it seems the innovations have been made
in closed source, then emulated in open source. There are advantages
to different business models.
The first IBM mainframes back in the 1960s arrived with free open source
software and a license that said you could not redistribute the software
or move it to a different brand of computer. Lots of people contributed
improvements to the software because they did not see programming as
producing valuable intellectual property. Software can be free, open,
and collaborative but still restricted.
The American government eventually sued IBM over some anti trust issue.
IBM dropped their hardware prices and started charging for the open
source software. The total bill was the same. Lots of people demanded
better software out of the box because they were now paying for the
software. Most people stopped contributing and started thinking about
how they could develop their ideas as separate add on products they
could sell. Neither the BSD or GPL licence stop you selling add on products.
IBM eventually stopped distributing the software in source code because
so many people made changes without contributing the changes back to the
developers. Those changes made support too expensive and IBM removed
the source code to prevent all those little tweaks. Source code can
create problems. Open source can lead to sloppy code development if you
expect other people to detect and fix all the problems for you.
Unix arrived with an open source model and promptly exploded into more
variations than there were computers. Linux had to go through the hassle
of stopping the base system exploding into a million versions and is now
trying to unify the main variations. The Apache model of a stable base
and lots of plug in modules is the best approach. The plug in modules do
not have to be free.
I like open source software because I can see what it is doing and
ensure the software is secure. Australia has data privacy laws that
cannot be met by closed source software. The software has to be open but
does not have to be free.
You can use an application for months before you find a major problem,
which is too late to recover your data if the data is locked in a
proprietary data store. I look for software that uses a free open
database I can access with other tools if the application fails. The
application does not have to be free but I must be able to keep the data
and access the data if I stop using the application.
You could sell me an expensive application if you used MySQL or
PostgreSQL to store the data and provide a way to control, log, and
audit everything that your application puts on or accepts off the network.
I like the software model where people offer free open products for
beginners and amateurs then offer a commercial version for professionals
who use the product to make money. MySQL has a free version that I use
to develop most projects and a commercial cluster version I recommend
for large corporate projects.
One of the examples mentioned in an earlier post was a client server
application. If I was looking at that application, I would demand the
client be open so I can see exactly what data is sent to the server and
I would demand a daily backup of my data from the server in an open form
where I can access the data without proprietary tools, a form suitable
for into to alternative software.
Free access to my data is more important than free software. MYOB costs
a trivial amount of money but I threw it out because they refused to
switch to an open database or provide an open SQL interface. I would
have paid ten times the cost of MYOB for a good open alternative.
Peter Moulding
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