Power Point Pulpit

More Kamppi craneporn...

I noticed that an article, Netscape Co-Founder's 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source, about Marc Andreessen's comments last week at an Open Source in Government conference was making the rounds on the net. The 12 points spoken to a crowd of the willing to believe are mostly recycled rhetoric from the dot com heyday when people would say that computers could make monkies fly out of their ass and they'd get a press release and a call from a Valley Venture Capitalist who was ready to cut a check. I get annoyed with talking heads who proclaim that open source will 'prevail'. I mean, what are they expecting, angels on horseback with Carmina Burana playing dramatically in the background to signal victory? It already has prevailed and will continue to do so.

Open source evangelism in government and elsewhere has taken on a religious quality with all the drawbacks of religion and none of the promised benefits like eternal life or 80 virgins awaiting you after you die on your keyboard while trying to figure out where CVS ate your patch. Seems like a raw deal to me. The large majority of software users don't really give a rats ass where the software comes from or how it's licensed as long as it works for what they need. Since Andreessen's power point pulpit was aimed at bureaucrats, perhaps the hackneyed isn't quite so familiar to them, but a couple of the comments were unusual. I suppose I'm just really tired of the rhetoric of social software this and open software that. I have a laptop that runs an OS that is partly opensource and partly proprietary. Why do the open source pundits continue to feel the need to pitch 'we will prevail/dominate' when there seems to be an equilibrium of open and commercial software coming. I see this as the best of both worlds.

1. The Internet is powered by open source. ~ This is not entirely true. The internet is a big place where the networks are run by proprietary routers/network hardware and operating systems. Much of the rest of the internet is a mixture of commercial and open source hardware and software. The whole 'powered by' tagline is so 1997 that it hurts.
2. The Internet is the carrier for open source. ~ Carrier isn't really the right word here. Yes, the internet facilitated faster development over the years, but that has always been the case even before open source was a big technology buzzword. Open source is also distributed via CDROM and DVD.
3. The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed. ~ Platform is commonly defined as the hardware and software of your computer, e.g. OS X on a Mac is a platform. Calling the internet a platform is essentially meaningless. Perhaps what he was intending to convey is that open source often runs on a wide variety of platforms.
4. It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software. ~ This is one of those cargo cult mantras that hasn't ever been definitively proven. Crap software is still crap no matter if it's closed or open source and there is plenty of both to go around.
5. Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments. ~ I'd really like to know what he meant by this. Over the past 10 years, roughly 75% or more of the major contributors to Perl have been people who are not American. I know most of them and while they aren't anti-American they aren't, well, they weren't born in the US. What does anti-Americanism have to do with software? Does he think all proprietary software comes from the US?
6. Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers. ~ Yeah, there's an incentive, sure. That and 3 euro will get you a cup of coffee. Jarkko spent 3.5 years as the Perl pumpkin and we've both been doing stuff in Perl circles for almost a decade now. We're famous among tens of people. There have been a few bottles of whisky for 5.8 and 5.8.1 from the usual thoughtful suspects, but it's not a big geek love-in. You have to do this work because you are a sicko who gets off on spending 12 hours on fixing a bug whether or not you get 'respect' in the form of a 200 email thread full of flames and rants about how your patch sucks.
7. Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants. ~ Yes, but unless you are on the top, the view is always going to be someone elses ass. There are no 'giants' in open source, just regular people who aren't very keen on what Joe Johnston calls 'starfuckers'...and then there's ESR.
8. Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel. ~ Intel is proprietary. Linux also runs on Sun, HP and other proprietary hardware. NetBSD runs on nearly everything, cheap, expensive or ancient. Solaris is also free for non-commercial purposes. I just don't know what the big deal is about that bullet point.
9. Embedded devices are making greater use of open source. ~ Like RFID tags? I find it rather disconcerting that this was said to a group of government folks. "Your Orwellian future -- Powered by Linux!"
10. There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies. ~ Yes, but a lot of those companies are developing software with open source tools for internal use only. I suspect that companies are using whatever software that fits the job rather than making a political statement about open source.
11. Companies are increasingly supporting Linux. ~ They are, but mostly only in the server market, not in the desktop market. Until someone can make the Linux version of OS X, don't bet on that really happening in large numbers.
12. It's free. ~ It's free to download and install, yes, but that's where the freeness ends. There are a whole load of costs associated with software that goes far, far beyond the purchase price. Microsoft doesn't make it's money on licensing, it makes it on support and training contracts and other parts of the puzzle. Companies who buy Aeron chairs for each workstation probably aren't going to be bothered to buy MS Windows for the PCs when it comes bundled as an 'enterprise solution' that most employees will already be familiar with. I'll bet the guys from the Pentagon who pay $15,000 for a toilet seat were snoozing in the back row.

There are some interesting licensing and IP issues with government databases and the systems they run on, but when credit card companies have more information than the government does as well as people giving their information away to places like Orkut for reselling to marketers, I don't think the software is ultimately the problem or the solution rather the policies that regulate the data. A lot of geeks seem to be caught up in the legal battles over copyright and are worried about MS taking control when there are few policies and even fewer policies enforced with regard to the data itself. In a Aschroftian regime you can bet that no matter what the software, the policies regarding the data are much more frightening than Bill Gates.

I might be one of the few people who easily admit to being happy the dot bomb came for the tech industry a few years ago. Popularity tends to destroy the things you love, like artists and musicians who suddenly become far more focused on their fame than their craft. Ten years ago I was a Unix admin in a deliberately difficult to find office in a basement visited only rarely by grad students bearing chinese food and bottles of whisky to ply the intemperate BOFH who could fix their TeX documents or debug their SAS/SPSS jobs. During the boom, everything changed and the internet was suddenly popular and Unix admins got offices with windows and big salaries. Now, after the bust, things are returning to normal, but there are far too many who are still squeezing themselves in a Sally Field style hug and chanting, "You like me!", for no apparent reason. Open source people just need to stop constantly trying to reassure themselves and the rest of the world and just get back to doing the less glamorous side of the work.