From kragen@dnaco.net Tue Aug 11 09:09:01 1998 Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 09:08:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen Reply-To: Kragen To: "Nathlich, James R. (JNAT)" cc: rebecalist@bossanova.com Subject: Re: Internet as change, and Open Source Software In-Reply-To: <5779E24720E5D11180E500805F6FF7E0ABEE6E@con-msx2.backup.chevron.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1179 Status: O X-Status: On Mon, 10 Aug 1998, Nathlich, James R. (JNAT) wrote: > >The power base is already information. In fact, it has been since at > >east the time Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. To win a war, you need > >only two things: > >- to know everything about the enemy; > >- to be completely unknown to the enemy. > > *sigh*.. You and Larry Ellison. Ok.. I have a reasonable amount of > respect for Tzu, the 5 rings, the Creed of Sparta, and, um, the Vulcan > Big Book of War. Given all that, I still find the statement above to be > a tautology. You find it a "needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word"? > >Capital is almost irrelevant, except insofar as it helps these two aims > >-- and it does. > > For Kings and Matriarchs... ok. The rest of us have to eat. If what you need is to eat, then war power is certainly one way to get what you need. War power is determined primarily by information, and has been for quite a while. > >> Ah, the open source software... official Buzzword of August. > > August...1970. If you just now heard of free/open source > software, there's no > > wonder you are skeptical. > [J.] 1970? Hmm.. if you run punch cards through a mimeograph > machine, then send 'em to 50 different people via Pony Express, you > could probably run the Moon Launch. However... However, some of us had Internet email in 1970, and were working on open-source software. Others of us were in research labs with time-sharing machines where we could exchange open-source software via local email and simple copying. And yes, you can run punched cards through a card duplicator and copy open-source software that way, too. :) Most of us were not in any of these situations at the time, and your dubiousness is therefore forgivable. > [J.] Which answers your above question. I'll try again, since > I was too general before. Will freeware/shareware/open code ever be > more than just a base from which capitalish entrepreneurs make a start > from? 'Twould appear, that in order to get to the masses, that a > business entity of some sort has to take a freeware/shareware product, > market it and distribute it en masse. There are several wildly popular pieces of open-source software that definitely got to the masses before having a business entity market them and distribute them en masse. BIND, Apache, sendmail, the GIMP, fvwm, Enlightenment, gcc, emacs, and Perl all fall in this category. Of course, any time a piece of software becomes popular, people will find ways to make a living (and even get rich) from it. Open-source software is no exception. This can be confusing -- as software starts to become wildly popular, people (often the original authors) start making money off of it. It's not surprising that people accustomed to the proprietary-software market think that the commercial enterprises getting involved are the cause of the popularity of the software. (There are *also* cases of open-source software *actually* being brought to the public by business entities. Linux and GhostScript are two examples, and more show up every day.) > [J.] Absolutely. It's been around since 1970, et al. So why > is it that This Quarter it chooses to make it's media blitz? PcWeek, > Wired, Some Wacky Web Woman Named Rebeca, ZDNet, InfoWeek, PC, Byte, et > al have as of late (say for the last 3 months) been all-of-a-sudden > talking about OSS, And "percentage of Linux users out there" And > interviewing Torvald, And of course asking the big question... "Is this > a (gasp) Threat To Microsoft?". > Anyway, I think it's a valid phenomenon that's been overhyped to > make news. Bashing Microsoft and Intel sells, these days. Bashing Microsoft is part of it. Another thing is that Linux's fairly-consistent exponential growth has reached the public eye now; Linux is at about the stage the Internet had reached in 1993, with about 10-20 million users. Of course, this brings lots of attention to open-source software -- there's an entire OS out there now, and it's got to the point where it's interesting to everyone, not just techies. By the way, the Internet was growing more slowly than Linux; it had been consistently doubling every 1.5 years or so, I think, while Linux usership had been consistently doubling every year since 1993 or so. (It had experienced an earlier period of rapid inflationary growth from 1992 to 1993.) The media blitz started in January or February, though, and stories about Linux or open-source software had been appearing about one per month in computer journals for the previous year or two. The media blitz really kicked off in March, when Netscape announced it was going to open-source Mozilla. > [J.] I'd counter with the following: OSS is nearly always more > feature rich than proprietary stuff, but it's almost always harder to > install and use. Generalization, but would you agree or disagree? Open-source software is nearly always written to run on Unix, by people who spend most of their time in Unix. Software written by Unix-heads is almost always harder to use than software written by DOS or Mac people, and often harder than software written by Win32 people. Open-source Unix software is usually not as hard to use as proprietary Unix software. Some open-source Unix software is *much* easier than proprietary Unix software. Usability is certainly related to the amount of effort invested in building the software, but it's more strongly related to the feelings of the developers toward usability. Unix people tend to think it's a fad, and their experience with Macs often prejudices them against usability. These things are changing. Go look at www.kde.org and www.gnome.org. Or try to install Red Hat or SuSE. So, to answer your question, I disagree. Kragen