LWN: Comments on "Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)"

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

jeremiah — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 22:10:31 +0000

I've been struggling for a number of months on the OSS/CSS issue for my own code/company. I'd like to feed my family and maintain standard of living. At the same time I'm very interested in giving something back to the community which has enabled me to feed my family and myself for the past 15 years. Everytime I evaluate the situation the licensing that I come up with becomes less and less restrictive. To the point that I think and LGPL solution w/o copyright assignment is best and trying to build a support buisness around it. It's been a difficult process, and maybe it'll never really fly, but I have a day job with a company that will let me do my own thing while doing their thing. Going OSS will reduce my potential income, but It'll be a lot more fun, and maintainable if I can get a community around it, as opposed to hiring tech support staff, and raising capital. From what I've seen over the years it seems that if you make something useful that addresses a complicated problem, people are willing to pay you for your dedicated support, even if they can get it for free.

measure three times, mark twice, cut once

tialaramex — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:24:31 +0000

You're right up to a point. The results will not be so stark as I wrote.

In context bonuses don't do very much. If your developers aren't on the breadline, research shows that variations in pay ostensibly linked to their performance as a group or even as individuals don't make a real difference. Of course they appear happy at the moment you announce the bonus, just as they appear happy when the sun comes out, but they aren't factoring that bonus into their behaviour, nor are they unconsciously working harder to get the bonus.

So it's true - developers are not basic machines (the research says this does work if you ask people to pick apples, stick labels on boxes, or other mechanical work, things we could get basic machines to do, it stops working the moment you ask the employees to _think_)

But (and again this is because your employees are creative, not box packers) they will bend your useless metrics anyway. Not so much because they're driven to obtain the bonus, we've seen that they aren't. But just because bending metrics is apparently a natural human pass-time.

measure three times, mark twice, cut once

tialaramex — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 15:47:10 +0000

Yes, you're quite right. The place where I buy most of my weekly groceries is owned by its staff (under a scheme where you buy a stake over time). The place where I buy the odds-and-ends during the week is a co-operative, which means not only do the staff have part ownership, so do customers like me.

And these aren't tiny local outfits, they're household names in my country, this is a model that works every bit as much as Red Hat's model for running a Free Software business.

It's actually quite rare for the goals to just be "profit" although it's often portrayed that way in caricature, whether you're a first-time CEO or this is your tenth new business, you usually have an identifiable goal that's distinct from "make money". The backers are happy to write that into the paperwork for the business, on the understanding that you intend to make money while in pursuit of this other goal (e.g. create an affordable home computer, make heirloom grade furniture, show people insights into their family history...)

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

PO8 — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:58:56 +0000

Thanks for the clarification. I'll stand by my second paragraph, though. :-) What models?

measure three times, mark twice, cut once

ekj — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 07:52:24 +0000

Well, there's the policy of saying: What we want, is to have a profitable company, should we succeed - the employees will get x% of the profit.

Or just plain make the employees co-owners of the company, thus aligning their interests with those of the owners since they then ARE the owners.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

marcH — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:29:48 +0000

You just demonstrated what kind of mixed bag is this brand new "intellectual property" concept - a perfect fit for a fuzzy article.

Obligatory

marcH — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:22:25 +0000

David Wheeler's prolificacy makes me wonder if he is normal human being.

measure three times, mark twice, cut once

marcH — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:14:34 +0000

> Result: Nobody wants to fix their own bugs because there's no bonus for that. Everybody wants to see poor quality code from other people, because that means more bug fixes for them.

You are assuming that bonuses are the end of the story and that developers are basic machines reacting only to bonuses Law. In the real world you have a balance of other incentives, like for instance your boss breathing on your neck until your fix your bug (without getting any bonus), your colleagues hating your because you are such an PITA, etc. Please consider bonuses in a realistic context.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

endecotp — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:36:45 +0000

I think they probably equate "social benefit" and "economic activity", and both within Europe. But do you really think it will do Nokia any good to have to spend $x on Symbian when they could instead be using those people on their next platform, even when that work comes effectively at half price? I doubt it.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

nix — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:24:01 +0000

I do wonder what their definition of a cartel is. A code pool that anyone can join and anyone can contribute to and anyone can give away or sell and anyone can use as long as they impose the same conditions on the people they distribute to... yep, that seems almost entirely exactly what a cartel is not.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

njs — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:59:39 +0000

Are they even *trying* to deliver "the most social benefit per euro invested" there, though? Or are they trying to maximize within-Europe economic activity, possibly at the expense of outside-Europe activity? Because while I agree that improvements to Symbian are unlikely to produce any net social value (versus the opportunity cost of improvements in other platforms), but I can certainly see an argument that this will let Nokia steal some business from American and Chinese companies. It may not be so irrational as you think...

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

alsuren — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:17:32 +0000

Copyleft requires strong copyright law. This is what the article is talking about when it talks about IP rights. Even RMS understands this now (he was campaigning for reduced copyright terms for a long time until he did a talk to a bunch of lawyers and they ripped him to shreads).

Software patent law is a big mess that hurts the entire industry (not just open source). I'd be tempted to argue that the problem with software patent law is that it is weak (not strong and well-tested in court like copyright law is, not internationally recognised or backed up with international treaties like copyright law is, and not signposted clearly on the about page of every piece of software like copyright law is).

DRM and other measures only hurt the consumer. They don't hurt anyone in the industry (which is what this article is about).

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

Seegras — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 11:30:37 +0000

> The article is advocating balance and diversity in the economy.
> It also seems balanced and well written.

I'd not call "More encouragingly, there is some evidence that strong intellectual property rights and/or deregulated markets promote OSS." balanced. I call this an extreme mercantilistic, colonialist stance.

Because mentioning "deregulated markets" with "strong intellectual property rights" in one sentence does not mean "free markets" but "free markets and monopolies for us only".

Besides, while open source pretty much works best in free markets, the assumption that it would need "strong intellectual property rights" is totally bogus. Open source can very much work without any intellectual property rights, works probably best with some weak intellectual property rights, and is actually heavily impaired by a lot of those "strong intellectual property rights", namely patents and anti-circumvention provisions.

Obligatory

dgm — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:29:07 +0000

You made me learn a copule of new things. Thank you so much for this link!

Whose definition of Freedom?

gmatht — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:12:28 +0000

Well the argument wouldn't be so much that "freedom is bad" rather that freedom is the right for informed adults to choose what contracts to enter into. Or at least that would be the libertarian view of freedom, there are many views on freedom but very few people consider freedom to prohibit the use CSS software. As you say, the open source argument is up for public debate, but AFAICT the free software argument didn't make it that far. Not that is hasn't convinced some, but I wonder if we'd be better off without them most of them. We have plenty of frustrated users who feel they have to use your software because it is F/OSS even though they hate it, which shows through in their so called "bug reports". We also have developers who feel they have to fight evil CSS and thus have to throw their pearls before those ungrateful (and frustrated) freeloading users, which shows through in their response to even well written bug reports. It would seem better to lose a few battles in the short-term than end up with a frustrated and dysfunctional community.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

mti — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:37:31 +0000

Ok, thanks for your insights. Seems like BitKeeper/monotone etc was a bad example.

Maybe my other examples are bad to;-)

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

cmccabe — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:14:23 +0000

> My bonus is related to the number of bugs fixed. And yes, the bugs must be
> "reported from the field". Fixing bugs before they reach the customer is
> no good.

http://i18.tinypic.com/34461wi.jpg

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

njs — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:51:11 +0000

> the idea is a distributed version control system

Not to be contrary, but I'm not sure this is an "idea" in any meaningful sense. Whether or not a VCS system happens to be distributed (i.e., support some kind of disconnected operation) is much less important than its history representation, merge algorithms, branch tracking, storage mechanisms, UI, etc. And depending on what choices are made for these, the word "distributed" ends up meaning very different things.

BK is distributed because they make copies to do branching, and because the traditional kernel development model is distributed. Monotone was distributed because it was designed with integrity as a core goal and lots of copies keep stuff safe. (Note that in Monotone, branches themselves are distributed, while in the BK/git/hg/etc. approach each branch exists in only one place.) Codeville tried to copy the basic SVN workflow, while also supporting a disconnected commit mode. I'm not sure why Arch was distributed; maybe because Tom Lord places a high value on a system's ability to survive the collapse of civilization? I think it's mainly an accident of history (and the fact that the word "distributed" is very sexy to geeks!) that it became the generic tag for all modern VCS systems. It's like saying that Unix isn't innovative because there existed previous OS's that had things called "filesystems" in them.

I can't say what exactly was going through Graydon Hoare or David Roundy or Tom Lord's mind when they started sketching out system designs, though! I suppose you could ask them if you're curious.

> Btw, was content-addressed snapshots + chained hashing a monotone invention or had it been used before in the context of [D]VCS.

It was a monotone invention, but I'm not sure whether monotone was the *first* place it was invented :-). Codeville used a similar system (instead of hashing the snapshot + the history pointer, they hashed the *delta* + the history pointer, which is a bad idea because it bakes your delta algorithm into your history representation, but otherwise has similar properties). OpenCM may have had something isomorphic too, I'm not sure. (Unfortunately, while OpenCM was FOSS, it was developed as an academic project and never really influenced anyone else much, AFAIK.)

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

pboddie — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:15:08 +0000

Sorry. That was a semi-intentional troll (and slightly off-topic). The article is talking about OSS (something I believe in), not Free Software.

No problem. But it should be a matter of concern for those who refuse to defend open source software on the basis of the freedoms it can provide - those who choose instead to emphasise the processes around some kinds of open source development and their supposedly measurable and desirable consequences - that the merits of open source can be repeatedly called into question by people who claim to have numbers showing that some other development process or style is superior.

Meanwhile, when one makes the case about the end-user having the freedom of the code - that is, control over their own systems - the only objection anyone can really raise is that they don't want the end-user to have that kind of thing. And then you have to wonder why they don't want it. But no-one can really come along with some numbers and say that such end-user freedoms are suddenly 28% worse than something else, and thus "freedom is a bad thing".

And another thing that came up in another thread in this discussion: people can argue that "open source doesn't innovate", which I don't think is true, but ultimately all software is written by people working within social and organisational frameworks, and regardless of how they put it together, if a project is made available as Free Software then you can't argue against the freedom aspects just because the development process was more "skunkworks" than "Linux kernel": the freedoms and the processes involved are largely orthogonal concerns.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

dlang — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:34:44 +0000

you need to make it a negative feedback mechanism.

the developer gets X bonus, reduced by Y for each bug reported after the release.

if you really want to get fancy, have the amount reduced by an amount for each day between when the bug is reported and when it's fixed (and fixes that don't work go back to the original reported date for the penalty.

measure three times, mark twice, cut once

tialaramex — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:13:31 +0000

No, you will get what you measure.

Policy: Giving a bonus only if you fix someone else's code.

Result: Nobody wants to fix their own bugs because there's no bonus for that. Everybody wants to see poor quality code from other people, because that means more bug fixes for them.

Policy: Give bonuses for developers with the least bugs reported from the field.

Result: Developers seek to work on features that are trivial and will see least use, since those won't cause bug reports.

Figure out what you actually want, and measure that. If (more likely, when) you discover that you can't, give up and just pay an honest wage for an honest day's work. We all know (at least we should if we paid any attention to the research) that these bullshit incentives (bonus schemes etc.) aren't very effective outside of mundane work that ought to be being done by a machine anyway.

Here's an example of a real way to motivate employees: One day a week we get to work on any project we like. If there's a piece of code that we think stinks and should be rewritten, that's what we do. If we think Python will be huge and we should learn it, that's what we do. Very often the truth is that employees have a better idea what ought to be done, and which of those things should be done sooner than later, than the managers who notionally have responsibility for such decisions. Devolving some of the power can seriously improve overall productivity AND morale.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

wahern — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:41:31 +0000

I've taken many sociology courses, economics courses, and majored in int'l politics back in the day. There are indeed many fine academics in all those fields with an exceptional grasp of statistics and more than capable of constructing and deconstructing solid studies and experiments.

But IMO they're in the minority (and in any event, statistics is hard, and even in the hard sciences many, perhaps most, scientists simply apply rote formulas). The volume of work that has been published in just the past few years alone is tremendous. It's voluminous. The vast majority of new "academic" papers in the social sciences are hardly any more than musings that rigorously follow the letter of citation guidelines, but not the spirit.

To reiterate, I'm not saying that social science academics are any less capable or intelligent than in the hard sciences. Nor am I saying that the empirical pursuits in social science aren't continuing to progress, as they have steadily since the 1970s. But relatively speaking, because of the enormous amount of new work, quality is decreasing. So when you happen upon some paper making bold assertions, odds are it's the scholastic version of a troll.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

Trelane — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:34:53 +0000

Would monotone or Arch have been implemented if BitKeeper hadn't existed?

The original author and maintainer of GNU arch was Thomas Lord who started the project in 2001.

The decision made in 2002 to use BitKeeper for Linux kernel development was a controversial one.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

klbrun — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:39:03 +0000

If everyone graduating from high school in the US were required to pass a probability course (I am thinking of a pre-requisite course for statistics), a lot of US social scientists would end up being laughed from the field. Unfortunately, when most people in the US hear "math", their brains shut down.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

NAR — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:25:24 +0000

Now that's a not well thought out incentive - or it's just the manager being developer-friendly, because this is better on your bonus than e.g. "all high priority bugs should be fixed in 7 days or no bonus" or "every day slipped with the release -20% of bonus"...

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

mti — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:59:59 +0000

Sorry, I didn't mean copying as in copying implementation details but rather as copying the idea of a useful tool. In this case the idea is a distributed version control system. And yes I know BitKeeper wasn't the first DVCS but I think it was the first one that got a large mindshare in the open source community. I don't know of any open source DVCS before BitKeeper.

Therefore I think it is fair to say that all open source DVCS are copies of BitKeeper. Or rather the idea of "lets write a DVCS" was inspired by the fact that BitKeeper already existed and was well known.

Would monotone or Arch have been implemented if BitKeeper hadn't existed? (It is an honest question. If the answer is "yes" my argument falls.)

Btw, was content-addressed snapshots + chained hashing a monotone invention or had it been used before in the context of [D]VCS.

I absolutely agree with your last paragraph.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

endecotp — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:57:53 +0000

Quote:
"direct funding [by government] of OSS production would yield a
host of familiar problems.

* First, policymakers seldom, if ever, know which projects are
likely to deliver the most social benefit per euro invested.

Historically, this has notoriously persuaded governments to
invest in projects with little or no value."

And with fantastically good timing:

http://blog.symbian.org/2010/11/01/euromillions-for-the-s...

"the Symbian platform was this week ... identified as a
unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric
mobile software development.

As a result, a total investment of over 22million has been
committed to the development of next generation technologies
for the Symbian platform."

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

Seegras — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:45:27 +0000

Tactics. If you realise open source is not going away, you can at least try to cut off gouvernement funding and keep it down to 20% of the market.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

ajb — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:43:19 +0000

I agree that OSS enables collaboration. But the article seems to be arguing that it also *inhibits competition*. I don't see that: we have mysql competing with postgresSql, many web server implementations, python/perl/ruby, etc.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

alsuren — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:29:55 +0000

Sorry. That was a semi-intentional troll (and slightly off-topic). The article is talking about OSS (something I believe in), not Free Software.

I think that the idea of copyleft is good in that it encourages the development of standardised code bases (compare the Linux kernel against the BSD one). I also have a lot of respect for the programming skills of FSF members. The point I was trying to make was that I'm not entirely convinced by their marketing strategy, but I don't think that this is the best place to discuss that. Sorry.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

iabervon — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:23:25 +0000

This paper seems to cite their more real paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1542180) in support of a claim not made in the abstract of that paper. That paper claims that OSS has the same effect that an agreement not to compete on quality would have, not that the output is limited. I'm not entirely clear why they seem to misunderstand their own paper, but its actual point is at least not incoherent (although I think it is still wrong).

On the point of the claim of their GSPP paper, they're probably right in the general case, but the important cases are mostly not the general case. For one thing, if there are competing projects in the same space that disagree over design philosophy or implementation methods, and they each have a moderate share of the total market, and different companies support different ones, they will compete on quality; each company believes that it would be able to steal customers from companies that back an alternative, and the code they produce can't just be adopted by the other project because of technical differences. There's also the possibility of companies competing to provide the best services, and having the quality of their services limited by the quality of their software; in order to differentiate yourself from your competition on tech support, the right answers that only you are smart enough to give have to exist in the first place. And there's the normal economic principle that, if you're competing in one market, you benefit from reducing the availability of profits in the adjacent markets, which applies to a lot of infrastructure software; various companies improve X not because they think they can make money on X, but because they think they can make more money on their applications if X is better.

I think the core truth they're seeing is that, in a completely ideal OSS market, no company would bother to improve software just for the sake of quality. But I think that sort of work is not actually useful anyway; if you can't find some specific reason to make some change, it's probably not actually worth making.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

alsuren — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:12:11 +0000

The OSS development model should indeed lead to a reduction in software diversity when it's done right. That's the whole point of OSS: sharing code, standardisation and reduced duplication of effort. It's when it's "done wrong" that it makes the news.

There is infighting among open source companies, and they do compete against each other a bit. If given a choice between stealing business from Microsoft or stealing it from Canonical, I'd wager that Red Hat et al would pick MS wherever they can. This is what the authors meant by de facto cartels.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

njs — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:51:34 +0000

> monotone and company are copies of BitKeeper

You have this one pretty much backwards, actually. I was there at the beginning of monotone, and *not* copying BK was a high priority. (Not that there was much danger, since we were forbidden from downloading or using BK anyway. But we had some vague idea of how it did various things, and that made those approaches *less* attractive.). We didn't really learn much about how BK worked until after Tridge did his reverse-engineering, and even then it was a mix of "huh, interesting idea, but..." and "they do *what*? WHY?". For instance, the most important design idea in monotone was content-addressed snapshots + chained hashing, and BK doesn't use crypto at all. (The most important design idea in BK is the use of SCCS weaves, but (1) weaves are not as awesome as Larry thinks they are, and (2) FOSS folk reinvented the important parts before Tridge's work.) To the extent that BK and monotone are similar, I think it has more to do with convergent evolution than anything else. (There were other projects around then using other approaches, like Arch -- but you don't remember them now.)

Arguably git/mercurial took monotone's ideas about history representation and combined them with BK's approach to branch tracking (the whole clone-to-branch workflow), but then, darcs was already using that approach, and I don't know that they got it from BK either.

If anything, the development of modern VCS systems is a great success story for FOSS. It's not just an area where we developed better software, it's an area where we developed better theory.

But it doesn't make much sense to talk about whether "proprietary software" or "FOSS" are better at innovation -- neither of them is a development model! BK was basically Larry's project; monotone was Graydon's project, bzr was Martin's, arch was Tom Lord's, darcs was David Roundy's, codeville was Bram Cohen's, git was Linus's, hg was Matt Mackall's.... plus other interested people in all cases. Each group built the best software they could, and Larry's penchant for proprietary licensing did not really give him any advantages or disadvantages in doing good distributed systems design. The proprietary licensing + business model *did* allow him to attract contributors a different way (by hiring them) and get more hours per week of contribution... but OTOH, it also meant they were stuck with a product to support, while the rest of us were exploring a larger space of ideas and eventually found better ones. (While Larry raged, made misleading claims about how BK worked, and generally tried his very best to hold the whole field back!)

There are certainly advantages to an organizational structure that lets one person say "okay, we're throwing a thousand hours of developer time into this vision I just wrote on a napkin" -- it's true that they'll tend to get to some approximation of that vision faster than many other organizational models. But I suspect the main "advantages" of proprietary software with regard to innovation is (1) there's more proprietary software out there period, so no wonder if there are more innovative ones in *absolute* terms (if that's even true -- most proprietary software is not very innovative!), (2) if someone does have an innovative idea like, say, PageRank, they're still more likely to take it proprietary than to release it as FOSS. That doesn't reflect the superiority of the proprietary model, just its attraction.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

marcH — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:37:11 +0000

> The article is advocating balance and diversity in the economy. It also seems balanced and well written. If it advocated 100% open source then I think it would be unrealistic.

The article makes the assumption that companies are either open-source or closed source which is utter non-sense.

I am looking forward to their next article promoting diversity in the bakery market, with an ideal 80%/20% balance between white bread and brown bread.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

pboddie — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:27:15 +0000

Thanks for the entertainment! It's like "Citation Needed - The Ultimate Collection".

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

pboddie — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:25:46 +0000

I think that this article is more usefully pro-open-source than anything the FSF has come out with recently.

And at the first hurdle...

The FSF is all about Free Software, of course, and this nicely sidesteps any "talking points" various advocacy groups might make about, say, the supposed efficiency, security or productivity aspects of "open source" (or purported lack thereof). It's all about the freedoms: anything else is really a bonus, but it's not the main selling point.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

pboddie — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:18:23 +0000

Apocryphal?

I have to agree with the question mark. Anyone thinking that counterproductive "colleague performance" measures don't really occur in the real world hasn't worked under "broad brush" management, especially when such management have decided that things on a project aren't going quite as well as they had hoped and that "something must be done".

Utter rubbish

vonbrand — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:18:18 +0000

More to the point, it shows the dangers of using the wrong measure. Software development success can't be measured in "lines of code written", as they assume throughout.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance (Voxeu.org)

vonbrand — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:16:00 +0000

Innovation in software is far in between, period. It doesn't matter if it is open or closed source. The "real" innovations in the last 50 years or so I can think of are word processors, spreadsheets, CAD, the web, search engines like Google. Perhaps one could throw stuff like modules/OOP and threads into the mix, add GUIs and integrated development suites, and (arguably) integrated office suites, but I don't see much more. It isn't so surprising that of a dozen or so real innovations over the last 50 years open source has not got large share.

Obligatory

cesarb — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:15:08 +0000

Since we are talking about innovation, someone has to link to this article: The Most Important Software Innovations.

(Chosing a somewhat random point in the thread to do so.)