[SC.LUG] Guardians Jack Schofields reply to my letter

[David Holden]

On Thursday 22 Jan 2004 2:35 pm, Jason Lucas wrote:
> Perhaps we should invite him to one of our meetings and explain to him
> that people can and do use Linux without having to be a kernel coder. -
> And then Ian can discuss kernel coding with him!
>
> J.
>

I'm sure it wasn't worth it but I sent him the following reply:


>There are undoubted benefits to allowing millions of programmers to
>check and correct source code. Even proprietary software providers such
>as Apple, IBM and Microsoft now agree on this. However, this is only the
>most trivial meaning of "open source", and the fact that you can see the
>source does not stop software from being either commercial or proprietary.

 Agreed its down to its licensing.


>There are also undoubted benefits from running open source software,
>though the financial ones can be small or even negative.

They can also be large and positive (it depends on the circumstances). One of 
the positive benefit from an end user point of view is that it prevent one 
company monopolising an area and then making  80% plus margins on a product, 
see for instance Microsoft Windows or Office.


>Companies are bound to be tempted by the idea of getting something
>for nothing, but in business, the selling price of a program is not a
>significant proportion of its TCO (total cost of ownership).
>It is easy to save $10 a year on soft ware and lose $10 a day in
>productivity, either from incompatibilities or poor ease of use or
>other factors.

Very true, but if these are statements in favour of proprietary software
lets consider one real life example:

As an employee whose company now runs largely on Linux we had no down time
or any problems whatsoever from the recent spate of virus attacks, its
been quoted that billions of pounds have been lost to companies running
a certain proprietary operating system due to this particular problem.



>The facility to fix bugs yourself and to modify programs also sounds
>attractive. However, fixing bugs is not practical for most companies,
>and modifications can be positively dangerous.

However having the source code available often means that you don't have
to fix the bug yourself because someone else has come across the problem
and already fixed it. Not having the source code available means that the
only way you can get the problem resolved is from your software supplier,
these often have no interest in fixing problems unless it affects one
of their large customers, I have direct experience of this.


>If you are really going to do these things, you need to hire
>several reliable programmers with kernel-level skills: not a cheap
>proposition. The bug-fixes and extensions you get will be more or less
>untested, and bug-fixes can introduce as many problems as they solve.


This is relevant only if you have a kernel level problem, In respect
of Linux and the kernel, I suspect a large reason that oracle and many
other companies are moving over to Linux is that they can get access to
the kernel source and hence tune their software to run both faster and
more reliably, open source is not just about the end user.


>Of course, your changes can be fed back into the mainstream source code,
>but there is no guarantee they will be accepted, and there is no appeals
>procedure. It may even be that different and incompatible changes are
>accepted instead, leaving you with no choice but to undo your work or
>risk a "fork" - then you really are on your own without a paddle.


No but with open source you at least have this option, with proprietary
code again we are back trying to convince a proprietary vendor that
changes you need are important, maybe if you are Boeing or Ford you can
get Microsoft to make changes to their "kernel" for your purposes, good
luck as a SME in doing this.



>I don't always agree with Oracle's chief executive Larry Ellison. However,
>the whole argument for Oracle's e-business suite is to make it easy
>to install and cheap to run, but you lose both benefits if you muck
>about with it. "'No code modification' is the correct message," says
>Ellison. (Softwar, p213).


I often don't agree with what certain CEO say (they change their tune
depending on the current needs of their businesses - quite rightly) ,
however Ellison may have said this but his company is moving over to
Linux at a rapid rate.


>Indeed, the whole progress of commercial computing has been from expensive
>hand-written, bug-ridden, company-specific programs to cheaper but more
>powerful off-the-shelf packages. From that point of view, open source
>is a throwback.


So you support open source?


>Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the movement did not
>have any way of creating software architectures. A reader disputed this
>in Feedback, citing three programs: Perl, Python and Apache. These are
>excellent programs, but not what I'd call a software architecture.


Whether they fit your definition of a software architecture or not they
are one of many open source software systems that are used by millions
of people around the world on a daily basis with incredible reliability,
and robustness, so to me this point is moot.


>Curiously, also, none of them was developed by the open source movement,
>though they have of course been adopted and improved by it. Larry Wall
>developed Perl while working at Unisys; both Python and Apache came out
>of academia.

I have to say I find this statement misleading and just plain wrong.
It seems to me that where a piece of software is "started" is not relevant
Perl/Python apache are all developed using the open source methodology
and their current incarnations are a direct and sole result of that 
methodology.


>The open source/free software movement is well worth having if it can
>fix up failed commercial programs (Netscape, Star Office) and help
>turn academic ones into enterprise class software (Python, Apache),
>etc. I'm all in favour. But I get the impression that its ambitions are
>rather higher.

Open source software is worth having if it improves code quality and
reduces total cost of ownership, more and more people are convinced this
is exactly what it is doing.

 Best regards,

   Dr. David Holden.

-- 
Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer)
Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org>

Thanks in advance:-
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See: <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html>

UK Privacy (R.I.P)  : http://www.stand.org.uk/commentary.php3
Public GPG key available on request.
-------------------------------------------------------------