Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses [LWN.net]

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 14:13 UTC (Thu) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048)
In reply to: Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses by bojan
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski

about hard working folks at Red Hat being parasites

A business model can be parasitic no matter how hard people work. Those are unrelated issues.

If is more efficient because there are no artificial IP barriers that would cause unnecessary duplication and profiteering. What Red Hat writes today, you can improve tomorrow.

That isn't an argument for hugely lower total R&D costs. You can argue that it's desirable to have that freedom to modify the code, or "to enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", etc. But at the end of the day, a given amount of development requires a given amount of total input. If from one vendor, it's tha vendor's R&D budget; if from multiple vendors, it's their collective R&D budget. But ultimately a programmer will be on someone's payroll, and that someone paying the programmer must make money somewhere. You just attribute the R&D budget of proprietary software companies to "largely unneces[s]ary duplication and profiteering". I can't see "duplication" being such a big issue, especially since commercial licensing deals can always be worked where they're more efficient than duplicate efforts; and "profiteering" happens with all business models.

I presume many people here program for a living and want to be sure that there's a lot of demand on the job market for software developers. I'd like to know your theory for how the realization of Red Hat's vision (them making $5B in exchange for destroying $50B others make) would be good for programmers seeking (or seeking to retain) a job. Should tens of thousands of developers currently developing proprietary software be laid off and enter the job market? If not, what's your theory for how they will all be better off if Red Hat does what its CEO says?

to post comments

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 22:04 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> I presume many people here program for a living and want to be sure that there's a lot of demand on the job market for software developers. I'd like to know your theory for how the realization of Red Hat's vision (them making $5B in exchange for destroying $50B others make) would be good for programmers seeking (or seeking to retain) a job. Should tens of thousands of developers currently developing proprietary software be laid off and enter the job market? If not, what's your theory for how they will all be better off if Red Hat does what its CEO says?

Look who's whining about job losses now. It's always the same thing - we can't change the economy because people will lose jobs - an argument used by monopolies worldwide. Well, yeah, that's how transformation generally works. A less efficient model is replaced by a more efficient one.

It is not about who's going to keep their jobs. It is about how much money the general public need to spend on a particular type of good.

So, the theory has nothing to do with programmers being better off. It has everything to do with general public being better off.

BTW, if Red Hat need to grow ten times (example) to get to $5B, that means that 10 times more _open_ _source_ programmers will get a job there. In terms of others, like myself, who get paid by _other_ companies (not strictly in the business of open source) to use and maintain this software, we'll continue being paid just fine. And we'll contribute back just fine (in my case, admittedly, not as much as I would like to, but somewhat). And you may also find that should more proprietary software be displaced by open source, more folks like myself will be around in these "other" companies, creating an even more powerful community. You are ignoring this effect entirely.

Your world view involves replacing one thing with another, without any change whatsoever occurring anywhere. This is not the nature of progress. Disruptive changes, like this one, change many different aspects of society and new equilibrium is then established. This is then shattered by a different model, when the weight of the next big change is sufficient to collapse the new, now old model. At which point, more whining will be heard about job losses and the like.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 22:24 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

> I can't see "duplication" being such a big issue, especially since commercial licensing deals can always be worked where they're more efficient than duplicate efforts;

Of course. I'm sure Oracle, IBM and SAP share most of their code. Give me a break.

> and "profiteering" happens with all business models.

Yeah, and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are not worth $80G combined. Where were you in the last two decades?

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Oct 1, 2010 4:02 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm sure Oracle, IBM and SAP share most of their code. Give me a break.

Sharing code across companies with a different focus only makes sense for larger pieces. Cross-licensing patents is another thing.

There are plenty of problems when trying to integrate open source code available under one license into code under another. GPLv2 isn't even compatible with GPLv3...

Yeah, and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are not worth $80G combined. Where were you in the last two decades?

Aggressive questions like the last one don't strengthen any of your arguments. Of course I'm aware of the money that's been made in that sector. That's part of capitalism, and as long as competition rules are enforced properly, wealth creation is a good thing. The biggest achievement of those entrepreneurs is not that they made themselves mega-multi-billionaires but that they made many of their employees (typically through stock options) millionaires over the years.

Red Hat has reached a market cap of $8 billion, so it has also had that effect, but the ratio between the value it created in terms of stock and the employment it created for the economy appears less favorable.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Oct 1, 2010 6:06 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

The difference in this "wealth creation", is that proprietary software does this by overcharging for their monopolies (i.e. what happened in the last two decades), while open source does it by charging for service and support. There is a lot less chance the second model will run away into profiteering, because competiotors have a much easier way of getting in.

Unfortunately for your theories, Red Hat are, as I said before, very good at what they do. So, they take the lion's share (for now).

I have no idea when was the last time you installed anything Red Hat made, but if you did, you would know that there is plenty of innovation there. So, although you are trying to present a situation in which they supposedly don't have the "core" of their product (whatever that's supposed to mean), I can assure you that their "core" is just fine and being rewritten daily. How do you think one gets from Linux From Scratch to Fedora, if not by innovating.

In the end, the main test is which model produces the same goods cheaper. You seem to think that we have to keep spending $50G instead of $5G, because someone may lose their job.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Nov 14, 2010 19:30 UTC (Sun) by promotion-account (guest, #70778) [Link]

And also remember that RedHat has engineers on most of the relevant FOSS layers. From the kernel, to the plumbing layer (NetworkManager, *kit packages, etc), to GCC, to X, to glibc, to GTK, to the foundational GNOME libraries (libxml2, etc), to the user-facing GNOME applications, to the RPM packagers themselves.

So they are not really 'taking away' anything. Our stack wouldn't be the way it is without RedHat.

And speaking of jobs, there are lots and lots of FOSS developers who are having projects that they love thanks to these developers original contributions. Where are they? They are allover the place in the usual silicon valley companies.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Oct 3, 2010 23:15 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Sounds like you haven't heard of the word "symbiosis", actually.

Cheers,
Wol