Competition is good
Miguel makes an excellent point that illustrates my point of view on software development communities.
“What we got here is a case of an underserved market. This is why competition is good.”
Richard Stallman once gave us a license so that we could compete with each other in a social way. However, he didn’t inject the reason why I do what I do. I code because I love competing and because I’m passionate about technology. I found that I’m not the only one within the group of opensource minded developers with those reasons.
I don’t code because of the holy grail of the GPL license. There’s no GPL or GNU heaven after death. The license has nothing to do with why I’ve put so much of my time in free software licensed projects! The license itself is just necessary evil. Lucky for us Richard was foolish enough to put his time on that, and passionate to do it good enough for it to be valid in court.
If we as a community start banning Microsoft from competing with us, we wont ever be any better at the core of our policies as their strategic division has been for the last ten years. By banning their technologies we simply utilize our own invented form of broken protectionism. Just like how patents are a broken form of protectionism, too.
I happen to hate most forms of protectionism. I happen to like freedom in ever single aspect of life. Including the possibility to choose for both Microsoft tech and opensource at the same time without getting torched online by the Slashdot accounts (people who are usually naive and often don’t know wtf they are talking about).
If somebody wants to create a patent system for the mind, by morally forbidding people from using and developing with and for closed source softwares, then for me his ideology is as wrong as the very system he seems to be fighting.
On top of that wont Microsoft loose any battle if we reject their technologies. It’s not only up to the opensource community what the next technology trend will be. Although we influenced the IT scene in the past. Just like how Microsoft influenced the same scene. The situation is what I call: realism. Pragmatism with modest ideology made us rock. Puristic ideology will or would be our downfall.
I’ll conclude this blog item with Miguel, a human being who I admire for his passion. His work on Mono, the community he has build around it, his work on GNOME and the communities that grew around it, the founding of Ximian, GNummeric, Evolution, his team at Novell, Silverlight, Bonobo, etc etc: very few people on this planet did so many great things for opensource. On top of that has his personality been like a role model for people like me. Seeing Miguel passionately telling about whatever thing he was working on always made me want to … do that too.
Thanks, Miguel. I hope you realize that for some people, it matters a lot and that it did make a difference.
The “do it” mentality matters far more than the religious ideology.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Hi,
i’m not a hacker but just a free software user and a regular reader of planet.gnome.org.
First let me say, that i agree with a lot of things Miguel (and you) said about Microsoft and Mono/Moonlight. I also like Mono and use it regularly.
Now some comments to your article:
> The license has nothing to do with why I’ve put so
> much of my time in free software licensed projects!
So you would put your time and energy also in non-free software projects? I hope not, that would be a waste of your talent.
> If we as a community start banning Microsoft from
> competing with us…
I think that’s not the point. I hope everyone want to compete with Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t want to compete with us and uses both software licenses and patents to prevent competition. They say we can’t compete because we violate their patents and they say that nobody can compete because they keep their software proprietary.
If Microsoft is ready for real competition i think the free software world is ready to go.
> I happen to hate most forms of protectionism. I
> happen to like freedom in ever single aspect of life.
But i hope you like protectionism of freedom! That’s what our laws are all about (or at least should be all about): Let everyone do whatever he wants as long as he doesn’t violate the freedom of others.
> If somebody wants to create a patent system for the
> mind, by morally forbidding people from using and
> developing with and for closed source softwares, then
> for me his ideology is as wrong as the very system he
> seems to be fighting.
I’m not in favor of such “laws”. But why would it be wrong?
Is it wrong to forbid slavery? Is it wrong to forbid theft? Is it wrong to forbid murder? Is it wrong to…
I don’t think this is wrong. I thing this is right. Because also a free society needs boundaries and a very natural boundary is that your freedom ends where my freedom begans.
January 5th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
> So you would put your time and energy also in non-free
> software projects? I hope not, that would be a waste of
> your talent.
I do and have done this for several companies. Right now I’m working on a non-free software licensed project that drives the motors of the future Mexican (city) trams and metros for Alstom. This software is highly specialised for the purpose of driving those motors. It might also contains the reasons why their system is better than their competition. It’s for a large part written in Motorola assembler and C and burned directly on a chip. They don’t really consider it as being software, but rather as being part of the electronics.
You might call this “firmware”. But really, it’s software just like any other software. Why is it a waste of my talent if I work on this?
If Nokia would have been more early at getting me a contract to continue working on Modest and Tinymail, I would probably have been working on my personal LGPL pet project, Tinymail, during these weeks.
They didn’t so I found myself a new customer. This is very simply supply & demand. As a supplier of knowledge, I can give a company the knowledge (code) to make their devices do cool things. Some companies and a lot of people enjoy getting that knowledge to become licensed in a free software license (hence making it more social reusable).
Usually I agree with that point of view. When I made things on my own, like Tinymail, I often picked such a free software license in the past. But if the “demand” is not interested in converting my knowledge to a free software licensed piece of work, then that’s the problem of the receiver of my knowledge. Not my problem, nor my decision.
Especially not if I want to stay in business and if I don’t want to get sued by my customers.
I don’t see this as a waste of my talent. Just a way of trusting “the good use of my talent” to my paying customer. I can use the payment for new things. To give my girlfriend gifts and to feed her and myself. To buy myself a house.
In Belgium, where I live, it’s quite difficult to develop (free) software without electricity, an Internet connection and a house where you have a bed where you can sleep. All those things cost money.
So in reality, I need to make money to produce free software. Right?
So how is it a waste of my talent?
(in fact, I think I’m a far better judge for knowing whether or not something is a waste of “my” talent, than you are)
> I think that’s not the point. I hope everyone want to compete with
> Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t want to compete
> with us
They do compete with us, so I’m guessing they want to compete with us too.
> and uses both software licenses and patents to prevent competition.
And I’m saying that morally forbidding people to therefore use their technology, is as bad as what their strategic division has been doing for the last ten years. So this point of yours was addressed in the blog item.
> They say we can’t compete because we violate their patents and
> they say that nobody can compete because they keep their software
> proprietary.
Microsoft is a big company. Not everybody at Microsoft agrees with how patents are used by their own company. They clearly have a strategic/marketing division. That division’s goal is to make money. And they are good at it.
I agree that the morals of that division are low. I specifically dislike that about Microsoft. But technologically seen has Microsoft done great things. It’s not because Vista is a flop that this fact changed (some people seem to think that it implies that they can now freely assume that everything about Microsoft sucks).
It’s the black/white view of those people that I equally dislike when I compare “disliking of” with how I dislike the Microsoft’s strategic division’s morals
> If Microsoft is ready for real competition i think the free software
> world is ready to go.
It sure looks like they specified .NET and OOXML the way we have been asking them to do for years now. It’s a huge difference compared to how Microsoft did comparable things in the past.
For me it looks like right now it’s “the free software world” who are being the idiot kids. And they will loose me as a developer if they don’t stop doing that, indeed.
> But i hope you like protectionism of freedom! That’s what our
> laws are all about (or at least should be all about): Let everyone
> do whatever he wants as long as he doesn’t violate the freedom
> of others.
With Silverlight and OOXML I don’t see how Microsofts violates the freedom of others. Please enlighten me. Note that I’m quite aware of both technologies and documents that have been released by Microsoft. And that I find their openness about it, very good.
I do think that the puristic ideologists of the free software world are a danger for other people’s freedoms IF they’d have the power to enforce their views upon us.
Some of these purists’s extreme form of enforced socialism is in my opinion a far worse form of state controlled fascistic anti-ownership than anything I have ever seen.
So they wont ever get my vote. And I’m clearly not the only free software developing software developer with that opinion.
And that’s good, diversity of opinions is not a bad thing. I’m also not into punishing or forbidding puristic and extreme ideology opinions. I just flat out disagree with those people, at the most pure part of my opinion. At the deepest points in my thoughts and philosophy, I disagree.
> I’m not in favor of such “laws”. But why would it be wrong?
Because it halts healthy competition.
> Is it wrong to forbid slavery?
I don’t see how slavery is related.
> Is it wrong to forbid theft? Is it wrong to forbid murder? Is it wrong to…
None of these are in any way related and contribute to trying to make this a black/white issue. It’s not a black/white issue. Clearly, it’s not.
> I don’t think this is wrong. I thing this is right. Because also a free
> society needs boundaries and a very natural boundary is that your
> freedom ends where my freedom begans.
So how did Microsoft threatened your freedoms?
Enlighten me with specific examples in YOUR life. Not abstract ones. Please give me realistic and real ones.
I will in return give you a bunch of examples that illustrate how Microsoft gave you MORE freedoms. Just in case you are going to make it a black/white kind of race to illustrate Microsoft’s blackness. Because I have quite a lot of examples of how Microsoft did good things for humanity, too (so much for it being a black/white issue, right?)