[Liverpool] Discussions at the last LivLUG regarding Symbian

[Sebastian Arcus]

I absolutely agree with all the points that you make, *but*, if Linus 
and everybody else in the Open Source community would have looked at 
things the same way, we would have none of the great software we are all 
using.

There is another way of looking at it. If you keep your software closed 
source, it saves you 50% of the time compared to releasing it open 
source. However, if you release it as open source, it saves *others*, in 
total, 100% * 20000 times - in time (using the example you brought up). 
So the benefits to the community when work is done the open source way 
increase exponentially. I would say that is a lot of time saved.

For a popular piece of software, you could possibly end up saving other 
people more then the 3 billion seconds you hope to spend in total on 
this Earth. That's not bad going.

That being said, open source people like freedom of choice, so anybody 
wanting to keep software to himself/herself is welcome to do so.


Sebastian



On 04/08/2011 10:53 AM, Simon Johnson wrote:
> I write a lot of software and it's all very much closed source. In fact,
> it's closed distribution because I don't even distribute it. I write
> software, I use it privately, and never give it to anyone.
>
> The reason is not so much a dislike of free software (quite the
> opposite, I use free software daily) but rather the problem that being a
> free software developer/distributor is a /lot /of work.
>
> I once wrote an application that auto-updates a block list of ActiveX
> controls on a local computer. It did this by downloading a publicly
> available block list and adding to the registry on the computer in
> question. At its peak, I had around 20,000 downloads. A moderate
> success, you'll agree.
>
> The problem comes from the users.
>
>     * They'll write to you and complain it doesn't work,
>     * They'll write to you asking for feature x, feature y,
>     * Then you'll get people who say they installed it on their network
>       and a core app no longer works and they're being blamed and it's
>       somehow your fault.
>
> Meanwhile, you're bored of your application that you wrote to scratch
> your own itch and want to move on to something else.
>
> Worse, writing free software is /harder/ than closed source stuff. You
> have to write higher quality code. You have to organise it sensibly, you
> have to come up with coding guidelines for submitting patches, you have
> document it so that people can alter it. All this is good software
> engineering practice, but it takes a lot more effort than some app you
> design for yourself.
>
> Therefore, I have concluded that to release the same application as a
> free software application, I will have to spend twice the effort to
> release it as I would if I just kept it to myself. If I do release it, I
> have an obligation to maintain it, patch it and fix security issues.
> This adds a post delivery on going cost which could run for the rest of
> my life.
>
>   In free software the primary currency is /time/. If I'm lucky, I'll
> spend approximately three billion seconds on earth. That time is
> precious. In the time I can dedicate to programming outside work, I'd
> like to spend almost all of that time on interesting programming
> problems - not on the overhead of delivering free software.
>
> When I do the return on investment calculation, it turns out that the
> closed source is the best idea.
>
> I do wonder how many businesses make the same calculation, not out of
> a philosophical objection to free software, but on the basis that it
> simply costs more to be involved in the free software community?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 8 April 2011 05:20, Andrew Bates <oscillik at gmail.com
> <mailto:oscillik at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     The other night we were discussing Nokia and their seemingly
>     contradictory statements that Symbian is now "no longer open
>     source", to the disbelief of many luggers!
>
>     well, here is the link to their official statement
>     http://symbian.nokia.com/blog/2011/04/04/not-open-source-just-open-for-business/
>
>     yeah, as I'm sure we can all agree - Nokia seem to have a somewhat
>     strange way of dealing with things!
>
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