[Gllug] "Open source has its own problems" - article in Computing

[Benedikt Heinen]

> I'm not going to type in the whole thing, so I will paraphrase the major 
> sections:

> Intellectual Property - he states that all work done when in full time 
> employment, whether at work or at home on personal time, is property of the 
> employer, the natural conclusion of this is that most OSS is actually stolen 
> from people's employers.

It depends - I've seen contracts where you might enter a gray area here 
(but that also depends on what you're writing out of your office hours). 
I.e. if outside of office hours you work on something that you need to aid 
in your work, it might well fall to the IP of the company (especially, if 
it was company IP that enabled you doing it in the first place).

But - it strongly depends on the contract (and partially on the country) 
you're working in.

Whether all of these rules are enforcible is a separate issue.


> Conceptual integrity - good software needs a single designer with a clear 
> vision, and this can't happen with OSS

I wouldn't go as far as saying it *can't* happen with Open Source, but 
usually I would think it's true (simply because if there are too many 
people just quickly thinking of something they want to patch on - I doubt 
they're going to read through "architectural documents" of the software in 
question before doing the patch.   (That is - if there even ARE documents 
about the architecture used).

On the other hand, I've seen commercial software being patched to death, 
i.e. especially in companies with a high fluctuation rate, there isn't 
going to be a continued architecture.

Also, Agile/XP comes with it's very own set of unique problems in terms of 
having a clean architecture. In my very own diploma thesis work, which was 
developed in an agile/XP fashion, during the write-up and description of 
the whole thing when I got around to reverse-engineering the classes to 
make some class diagrams, I saw that there were a few not very "optically 
pleasing" kludges used which made the class diagram look ugly as hell. An 
up-front design approach would not have produced this... ...on the other 
hand, the kludge made the software itself fairly elegant and easier to 
extend - so it's not always a problem.


> Professionalism - he likens the OSS movement to the games industry of the 
> early 1980s, where apparently bedroom coders produced really bad games which 
> nearly ruined the whole industry

It can be that way - it depends on the project - and it it's in a sense 
certainly more difficult to achieve in open source. In commercial 
environments, you only hire people that will work with the team (or ditch 
them again, if they don't work out) and so you can streamline better.
On the other hand again, in the commercial world, projects are often 
driven by people with little or no knowledge of the development process, 
and hence face "political" problems the kind of which are rather rare in 
open source.


> Innovation - OSS is mostly just rip offs of proprietary software

This works both ways - there was open source stuff that made it into 
mainstream, as well as closed source being "copied".

e.g. I loved VMware when it came out - and I wish VMware the best of luck 
in their work; so I didn't think it was a good/ethical move by some open 
source people to start FreeMWare/Plex86, which was clearly aimed to do 
what VMware was doing.

In this case, VMware invested money and proved the concept to work, and 
then open source went in to start something similar.

On the other hand, commercial software is also more often than not 
actually trying to keep up with the increasingly improving free 
counterparts.

Besides, how much "innovation" nowadays would really be there, if it 
weren't for the Internet making it big - something that started as 
(more-or-less) open source, and even now still has lots of areas where 
open source software "rules", i.e. Apache hosting a huge share of the web, 
sendmail still being used on many major sites, bind still being the most 
popular DNS service, ...   ...and all are tools gladly used by commercial 
vendors as well, as it saves them money, too.




   Benedikt


   ALLIANCE, n.  In international politics, the union of two thieves who
     have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that
     they cannot separately plunder a third.
 			(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)
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