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UnprofessionalUnprofessionalPosted Jan 26, 2003 7:33 UTC (Sun) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: Commentary: The way of Linux (News.com) The report was disappointingly unprofessional in several respects. Its dig about "the open-source socialist fringe" demonstrates a characteristic confusion: the term "open source" was invented specifically to help participants to distance themselves from the Free Software movement, so by definition there can be no such thing as an "open-source socialist fringe". Nonetheless, the report would better have observed that even the putatively fringiest socialists' code works demonstrably better than convict-monopolists' output, and let the reader draw his own conclusions. The dismissive treatment of desktop use of Free operating systems as a "gaffe" that wouldn't "make sense", is similarly unprofessional. If the writers think no Free Software is ready for desktop use, they neither support the claim, nor offer any estimate of how long it will be before any will be ready. The many successful desktop deployments to date, and the unexplainable paucity of failures, would surely mystify the authors if they considered the matter. The authors pretend that only "open-source" software produces additional "costs--like documentation, support and commercial add-ons", which "swell a company's IT budget". What do they suppose swells the IT budgets of companies dependent on proprietary software? Similarly, they recommend staffing a technology center with "skeptics -- not gurus". Since a guru is, by definition, the most competent available individual, "skeptics" must be those less competent. They beg the question, skeptical of what? Might skepticism about the wisdom of depending on the goodwill of a criminal monopolist qualify? The blanket advice, "companies ... should treat open source like commercial software: Hands off the code," betrays a deep failure to understand the success of Free Software to date. Decisions about participation in Free Software projects belong at the lowest levels of the company, where the costs and benefits to each project may be evaluated directly, without reference to ideology. If a particular group has the needed skills on hand, and would benefit from engaging with others to improve their tools, what does it matter how sophisticated the rest of the company is about building software? (Better advice for a CIO would be, "Hands off: encourage line managers to make reasoned choices," but advice like that is too generally useful, somehow, to put into a report.) The tacit advice to ignore the second most widely-deployed Linux distribution, Debian, is simply irresponsible. Support for Debian installations is as readily obtained as for most distributions they do recommend, and Debian has unquestionably better future prospects than most. The Debian project's continued success must so mystify the authors that they dasn't mention it at all. The report's final predictions -- Microsoft freeing its "language runtime" (thus making its OS, somehow, magically scalable from embedded systems to mainframes), and million-dollar "Ellison Prizes" for people who no longer write code somehow generating an outpouring of innovation, smack of feverish fantasy. Where did we get the Free Software we have? That's where to look for it in the future. Many of Free Software's key components came out of (socialistic?) direct government grants to solve specific problems. Some arose from the "socialist fringe" the report disparages. Most were developed to meet specific needs by people hired to satisfy those needs, and then found uses (and development support) worldwide. Many of those people were hired by, or on behalf of, governments. Is that socialistic? The code works. The report's flaws come from the same place as in most research firms' reports: sponsorship. Who paid Forrester to have this report written? It looks stitched together from scraps of position papers from IBM and an embedded-system vendor. The authors clearly do not understand the field they pretend to analyze. Instead, they have constructed a fantasy world in which they can echo the wishes of their sponsors. We should not allow the apparently-positive remarks to mislead us about the merits of the report or its publisher.
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