Still not getting it
May. 28th, 2004 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn this e-week article, David Coursey wrote: "It is easy to think of open source simply as a dopey social movement akin to communism-- and with about as much hope of ultimate success. No matter what anybody tells you, software isn't free and isn't supposed to be. Writing software is work, and people deserve to be rewarded for that."
Coursey still doesn't understand what the word free means when people talk of "free software." Saying that "software is work" is like saying "mechanical design is work." Of course it is. But the point that Linux drives home is that OS design and implementation went from being a specialist activity to being a commodity activity. Claiming that this "shouldn't be so" is a bit like saying that the Benz family deserves royalties from Chrysler because Benz figured out how the automotive internal combustion engine works.
He also writes that "Linux is commodity computing at popular prices and likely to fragment." The first part is not only true but essentially true: Microsoft wants to be commodity computing at popular prices, but can neither reach down to the popular price point nor really get the "commodity" aspects right as long as it continues to treat any version of Windows as a trade secret.
Commodity knowledge evolves upwards. The internal combustion engine is an integration of earlier commodity knowledge about metalworking and hydraulics. The modern car with its power, efficiency, and emissions refinements is a further evolution of the craft-- and nobody "owns" the catalytic convertor anymore.
Dodge, Chrysler, and so forth don't exist because they own proprietary automotive intellectual property: they exist because the material costs of manufacturing make cars expensive to produce. But let's face it, a lot more "intellectual output" goes to making the cars sexy and integrating existing technologies, not creating new ones. Refinement efforts are small; the rest is marketing.
Coursey still doesn't understand what the word free means when people talk of "free software." Saying that "software is work" is like saying "mechanical design is work." Of course it is. But the point that Linux drives home is that OS design and implementation went from being a specialist activity to being a commodity activity. Claiming that this "shouldn't be so" is a bit like saying that the Benz family deserves royalties from Chrysler because Benz figured out how the automotive internal combustion engine works.
He also writes that "Linux is commodity computing at popular prices and likely to fragment." The first part is not only true but essentially true: Microsoft wants to be commodity computing at popular prices, but can neither reach down to the popular price point nor really get the "commodity" aspects right as long as it continues to treat any version of Windows as a trade secret.
Commodity knowledge evolves upwards. The internal combustion engine is an integration of earlier commodity knowledge about metalworking and hydraulics. The modern car with its power, efficiency, and emissions refinements is a further evolution of the craft-- and nobody "owns" the catalytic convertor anymore.
Dodge, Chrysler, and so forth don't exist because they own proprietary automotive intellectual property: they exist because the material costs of manufacturing make cars expensive to produce. But let's face it, a lot more "intellectual output" goes to making the cars sexy and integrating existing technologies, not creating new ones. Refinement efforts are small; the rest is marketing.
