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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 08:09 AM EST |
Tell people that, and then they understand it better.
Wayne
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| Authored by: mcinsand on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 10:04 AM EST |
The GPL represents a completely different investment philosophy from the
traditional commercial enterprise. Conventionally, a company will purchase
software from a vendor, where that vendor has either written or repackaged
closed-source code. This vendor offers something exclusively; the vendor is the
only one with the package, that vendor's reputation is invested in the package
being a good one, and the customer gets a negotiated license... along with some
headaches, no doubt, involving DRM and installation keys. If the software is
tailored or written specifically for the customer, there is then exclusivity.
The GPL carries a different set of cost/benefit calculations, however. What has
many companies up in arms is the loss of exclusivity… should they decide to
distribute the software. Any code changes must be released for free access as a
condition of legitimate GPL’d software distribution. That is the cost, as well
as the benefit. The company in question is not the only distributor losing
exclusivity; any other company that makes changes to the code also has to
publish those changes.
For the big projects, such as the kernel, OO/LibreOffice, etc., could any of the
proprietary vendors actually afford the pool of programmers available for open
source projects? Especially for one of these major efforts, any company using
those products is effectively tapping into a community much larger than they
could ever access with a software vendor operating under traditional models.
The benefits of more programmers and more companies involved is often cited, but
still understated. Programming is really all about a metaphorical ‘scratching
of the itch,’ and everyone does not have the same itches. The more parties
involved in shaking down a figurative backscratcher, the better it will be.
As for what the newspick article calls ‘religion,’ there is a very practical
benefit to the philosophy of a license that keeps open software open. Closed
software comes with tools to keep the software closed; license keys, phoning
home for authentication, backdoors for disabling, etc. Those cost in terms of
programming hours, security, and reliability (one more ‘feature’ to trigger a
crash just contributes to a crash’s likelihood). Those programming hours do not
go into GPL software; the focus is far, far more on just making a good
application. There are other costs to the old-school models, and Windows is the
posterboy to demonstrate how traditional software businesses drive software
engineers to make stupid choices… at least from the standpoint of reliability
and security. MS could not compete with DR-DOS on the OS side and companies
like GeoWorks for the desktop, so, rather than focusing on making better
software, OS and desktop were kludged together for Windows 95. Those smaller
companies then had a much higher investment bar to even hope to compete. MS ran
several companies out of business along the way by tying their own versions of
applications into Windows, and the browser is yet another example. The bigger
the wad got, though, the easier it became for a cracker to take ownership of the
system by finding a weakness in what should have been a separate module.
Probably the best analogy for what browser integration did to security is what
happened to William Wallace at the end of ‘[redacted].’ Look, a user can do
much to sacrifice security and reliability, no matter what operating system is
on a computer. However, software architecture choices that go with traditional
commercial offerings work directly against goals of having a computer that the
user can trust. Ditching the outdated model also means ditching the motivations
behind megalithic architectures, DRM, etc.
The ‘religion’ aspect mentioned in the article is mainly a FUD tool from the
proprietary side, as I see it. Playing that card is a way to demean the GPL
community as being centered on something besides the simple matter of software
that works. The open principles of the GPL do have very strong philosophical
resonances with many. For most of us, though, the GPL simply gives us what is
best from a practical standpoint, so that we can have a robust, trustworthy
computer.
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