Forbes reports on the philosophy of Larry McVoy regarding Open Source Software.

The meat of the article boils down to this (the quotes are pieced together by me, and I've taken care not to mess with the context. Read the article to get the whole picture.) :

Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame)
"Open source actually builds on a base that works even without any commercial interest [which] is almost always secondary. The so-called 'big boys' come along only after the project has proven itself to be better than what those same big boys tried to do on their own. So don't fall into the trap of thinking that open source is dependent on the commercial interests."

Larry McVoy (of BitKeeper and Sun fame)
"Open source software is like handing you a doctor's bag and the architectural plans for a hospital and saying, 'Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here are all the tools you need--and it's free'. I'd rather pay someone to take care of me.

The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero.

Try to name one significant thing--one innovative product--that has come out of Red Hat."

I've never been a huge fan of OSS (neither am I a huge fan of most 'big boys'), not for lofty reasons of innovation, but because I usually have to trawl the Internet for support and documentation. Take the introduction to Apache Struts for example:

Struts provides its own Controller component and integrates with other technologies to provide the Model and the View. For the Model, Struts can interact with standard data access technologies, like JDBC and EJB, as well as most any third-party packages, like Hibernate, iBATIS, or Object Relational Bridge. For the View, Struts works well with JavaServer Pages, including JSTL and JSF, as well as Velocity Templates, XSLT, and other presentation systems.

Imagine coming into this website not knowing what the MVC pattern is (Gasp! Unforgiveable!). The API (non Javadoc version) isn't any better. This beans tags portion of the API, for example, nearly gave me heart failure back when I was attempting to learn Struts. They couldn't be more obscure and enigmatic if they tried.

If reading the official documentation doesn't help, then one turns to Google and begins trawling for relevant information in forums or web tutorials (Java Boutique is excellent by the way). Good luck to you too, if you ever need help desperately and post topics in forums just begging for someone to help you. It has never worked for me, not in time anyway. The concept of community support is fine and dandy, but expect to have to sift through useless replies and be prepared for a long wait.

I have to pick up JUnit extensions like DBUnit and HttpUnit during the internship, and am reliving the experience of :

FrustrationLevel myFrustrationLvl = new FrustrationLevel();
readOfficialDoc();
puke(True);
while (!projectDone) {
searchForums();
searchWebTuts();
trialAndErrorOnPC();
myFrustrationLvl.increment();
if (myFrustrationLvl.exceeds(CONSTANTS.MAX_TOLERANCE))
breakDownAndCry(True);
}

Not much fun, I assure you.

Granted, I haven't exactly tried the support provided by the 'big boys' so I may be biased. But at least most of the times, the library has relevant tomes of references on their products. Both the search engines for LINC and NLB laughed at me when I searched for DBUnit. This is not a fault of OSS for sure, but it's still an inconvience that some cannot put up with.

As for innovation, I think it can be achieved for a short while using the open source model, be it established firms or individuals who are doing the innovating. Whether or not innovation can be sustained in the long run, however, is fairly dubious. Like McVoy says:

"It costs a huge amount of money to develop a single innovative software product. You have to have a business model that will let you recoup those costs. [..] Show me how to build a software-development house and fund it off open source revenue. My claim is it can't be done." "

Hear hear.

















Okay. Time for Microsoft to reward me for my subtle and backhanded endorsement.

Filed under: Article, Technology