Ethics of Software Ownership

[kerowo]

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Google search says : Results 1 - 100 of about 154,000,000 for MySQL

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So .Net is almost 6 times better than java because it gets results of 1.4 billion to java's paltry 257 million? That's a pretty silly way to measure market share.

[GoodCallYouWin]

I'm not so sure, when the topic of discussion is internet technology, a web search is probably a decent measure. ".net" of course would be a biased search term, just as if we compared dot com to the steel industry, because com and net are the suffixes to hundreds of millions or billions of websites.

[kerowo]

I don't know. I don't know that mind share always translates to market share or that results is synonymous with popularity or market share. A google for cobol doesn't come back with many hits relative to java or .net yet if there are more lines of production code in either of those languages than cobol it hasn't been that way for long.

[KipBond]

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I think a closed shop that follows a rigorous process is going to be more productive than a loose association of developers who aren't following such a process.

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1) Closed shops don't always follow a rigorous process.
2) Open source development sometimes does.
3) This has nothing to do with the process being "open source" or "closed source".

[KipBond]

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"MySQL - O RLY? You're saying MySQL is enterprise ready? "

lol? MySQL is used world wide and it's basically the best database solution... combined with php this powers the interwebz...

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Meh. None of the telcom companies I've worked for or the insurance company I've worked for use it. All the googling I've done shows "other" RDMS had 10% market share in 2005 and about the same in 2006. Compared 44% for Oracle, 21% for IBM and 18% for Microsoft.

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http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/

You will have to keep in mind that most studies measure market share by $$ spent on the product. This obviously skews the results as relates to free, open source applications.

[CrayZee]

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I've been a developer for 10 years or so in corporate America and there is very little math involved in any of the software I've written or supported and what math there was was figured out by someone else before the specs got to me. That's not to say there isn't math in any software or that high level comp sci isn't math heavy, just that what most day to day developers are doing isn't very math.


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Yeah, I should have said logical-mathematical instead. If you are writing a physics engine in a video game, that's more math intensive. If you are writing a user interface, then that's more closely related to psychology.

So yeah, you can partition things out. But I guess my point is that most ideas can be reversed engineered and that people should be allowed to do so. Some patents are absolutely absurd (e.g., Amazon's 1-Click "technology").

Even Bill Gates said in the 80's (?) that software patents are dangerous and that "obvious ideas" would be patented. But now you don't hear him saying that because the patent system works to his favor. While expanding the techno-portfolio with things like console game platforms, Microsoft is currently, and largely, in the software protection racket.

Microsoft realizes that it's futile to only protect in the long term because of attempts to open up a little bit w/ things like Silverlight; or they are attempting lock-in for a web platform.

Anyway, like I said, I don't think proprietary closed-source software is inherently wrong, but patents are. I haven't thought about this for too long, but software patents are likely anti-competitive and hurts consumers and small fry, independent dev teams.

My view of the utility of open source is like the "food pyramid." The most generic needs can, and likely will be, met at the bottom by open source. The higher you go up the pyramid, the more niche. This is where service and support come to play to meet particular business needs. So while off-the-shelf software will always be around, much of software is, or will, become more service oriented.

[KipBond]

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My view of the utility of open source is like the "food pyramid." The most generic needs can, and likely will be, met at the bottom by open source. The higher you go up the pyramid, the more niche. This is where service and support come to play to meet particular business needs. So while off-the-shelf software will always be around, much of software is, or will, become more service oriented.

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You may be including this already, but just to specify directly: software customization plays a big part of this, too. Companies pay open source developers to customize the product, or add features that they need. This is good, because the paying company gets to control the direction the product is taken (even if just for the short-term), and everyone else gets to benefit from those changes, too.

The only people who don't like this are the companies who are in the business of maximizing the revenue earned while giving as little innovative software development as possible (e.g. Microsoft). Ironically, while being massively inefficient, they still manage to earn a killing -- 6 years, billions of dollars, thousands of programmers => Vista? Unbelievable. Yet they will still pay for it in no time due to their OEM racket. Can you imagine what Linux developers could have accomplished with those resources?

[m_the0ry]

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much of software is, or will, become more service oriented.

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Is it really only at the top of the food pyramid that this is the case? Red Hat supplies a distribution of linux that is based on open source and an equivalent distribution can be installed for free in minutes. Red Hat is a private corporation, it has been in business for decades, and it sells its software at retail outlets across the globe. This is because the operating system - like all operating systems and most software in general - require some degree of support or supply some service (i.e., regular online updates). Red Hat has proven this to be an effective revenue source for software business models.

[CrayZee]

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much of software is, or will, become more service oriented.

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Is it really only at the top of the food pyramid that this is the case? Red Hat supplies a distribution of linux that is based on open source and an equivalent distribution can be installed for free in minutes. Red Hat is a private corporation, it has been in business for decades, and it sells its software at retail outlets across the globe. This is because the operating system - like all operating systems and most software in general - require some degree of support or supply some service (i.e., regular online updates). Red Hat has proven this to be an effective revenue source for software business models.

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Perhaps the food pyramid analogy is bad. Service and support can certainly exist at all levels and software projects are always a moving target. The analogy probably works better for business customers wanting custom development and support. Consumers have little control over the direction of open source projects; maybe only in aggregate but certainly not individually.

Another common pattern in technology is that business needs are met first, then consumer. I'm unsure what the Red Hat model is for revenue at the consumer level, but it seems a lot easier to make more money w/ business in mind. Once you have a good business install base, then consumers are more willing to move over it seems...or the business-funded needs satisfy some of the consumer needs.