 |
 |
 |
|
Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
Larry says a lot of good things. I think his speech was a bit over the top but I can forgive him since he's primarily stumping to raise money to actually fight this stuff where it matters - in Washington. We can sit in our offices and write software forever and call ourselves freedom fighters but if the government prevents us from sharing then it doesn't matter. We must reform the government directly. I believe that is Lessig's point. I also agree with this point: "Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed." I write software for a living but I don't write products. I do enterprise softwaree - I'm an itinerant software architect basically. I buy components from venders and stitch them together and automate business processes. Its software engineering in the collossal. Selecting components is incredibly risky. Apart from looking at the software, I have to look at the financial health of the company that sells it. If the company vanishes tomorrow, what happens to the value of my purchase? We are all familiar with bit-rot. Every new OS release breaks some software. You can't say, well just stick with the old version because network effects eventually pull you forward. This is the strategy MS has been using for years to force either OS upgrads or App upgrades. I don't think I have to explain it - we've all been victims of it. It is for this reason that I prefer open source components over proprietary every single time. Because there is no safety in commercial components - they can vanish at any time. OTOH, if the source code is available - then I feel secure that I can keep the system runnning by taking on the maintenance of the component. If the component is really good, then a community will arise to take this over and we can share the cost of keeping our systems running. In fact this is exactly why there is an opensource movement at all. Because almost every single developer that contributes to opensource has been screwed by the loss of some important copyrighted software. Some important chunk of work we've done that uses or builds on the hidden software was made worthless instantly. So I'll agree with Lessig that software source code should be required to be opened. In practice, it turns out that this isn't the big vulnerability that the software vendors claim. Any sizeable chunk of work requires a great investment of resources to understand and very few people are motivated to undertake that. Most of us have bigger fish to fry. Incidentally, Apple's OS code is (mostly) open for inspection via the darwin project. Solaris has been opened as well. We aren't seeing a lot of "ripping off" of that stuff because it would cost a lot to do it, the license forbids it anyhow, and there's plenty of other more interesting work to do. Its also interesting to note that what's not open is being cloned via the GnuStep project. So you can open your source code and still maintain control of your property. Besides, it would be easier to tell if you were being ripped off (plagarised) because you'd be able to spot inclusions of your code into other systems because they'd be open too. Plagarism is still prosecutable, right? There are responses to this message:
|
