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24th August 2012, 03:42 | #1 | Link |
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why did you choose to make your app open source?
i know this will most probably come off as some serious flame bait but the the title of this thread is something that has gnawed at me for more than a decade.
as some of you may remember me mentioning, back when i was in school one of my majors was comp sci and if truth be told i majored in it because i hoped to one day land a high paying job as a programmer, as such i am perplexed by programmers that give away the code they write for free. it personally strikes me as odd that one would spend hours, days, weeks, years, writing code simply to turn around and release it to the public. why does that strike me as odd? because it effectively eliminates a) any competitive advantage you might have had and b) it effectively erodes your revenue potential because anyone can take your code and compile a working binary. with regards to competitive advantage, i'm sure everyone here at one point or another has seen a closed source vs open source flame war, with the most popular one being the windows vs linux and the one that seems to have taken off these past 4 or 5 years proprietary encoder vs x264. the claim by the open source faithful is that the open source work is inherently superior and/or more secure because of the "many eyes looking at the code" model, i.e. that because it is open source more programmers can examine the code and fix/improve any deficiencies. this strikes me as a logical fallacy because it assumes that a) anyone looking at the code is skilled enough to understand it and be able to help improve it and b) that they are looking at the code for benign reasons. it seems to me that if an open source author were to create something truly better than the closed source competitors, either speed wise, security wise, stability wise, that said advantage would only last 1 or 2 development cycles of the proprietary software before the for profit developers lifted the algorithms or even just flat out stole a massive chunk of code and raised their proprietary software to the standards of the open source software. so basically i'm wondering, from those in this forum that develop open source software; why do you do it? and do you ever worry that some competitor, that sells closed source proprietary software, will simply steal your code, use various code obfuscation techniques to hide the theft and then make a nice profit as your advantage erodes? |
24th August 2012, 04:39 | #2 | Link | |||
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maybe it's just who i am but i would be more worried that someone would steal my code and render my app irrelevant. take x264 as an example, my understanding is that the 2 main developers took over the project back in 2003 or so from a guy that went to work for ateme. in the time since they have expanded the capabilities of the encoder, both in terms of speed and quality and perusing through the code reveals that they have spent quite some time hand coding lots of assembler, but let's just focus on one aspect of the encoder, say it's b-frames. x264 faithful almost always say that it has the best b-frames of any encoder and for the sake of argument let's say it true. DS and the penguin have spent significant amounts of time getting the code to where it is, if you were them wouldn't you worry that one of the competitors, say the folks behind main concept, apple, sony, any of them would decide "hey, these guys did all the hard work, let's just copy the code, get our b-frames at the same level as theirs and there's nothing they can do about it". the same goes for the linux kernel, kde, gcc, any open source project, i don't see how it's possible to be better than a closed source project. it's kind of like me going to chef school, developing a kick ass recipe that's low fat and tastes great, opening up a restaurant and then sharing my recipe with all my competitors, along with a list of my suppliers so they know where i get my supplies. i just don't get it. |
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24th August 2012, 06:38 | #3 | Link |
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24th August 2012, 20:42 | #5 | Link | ||
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Why make my software OpenSource (free software)? Because creating software alone and keeping it for yourself is boring!
Sharing your work, getting feedback from "real world" users and discussing problems with other developers is what gives you the ideas and the motivation to keep on improving your projects and your own skills Furthermore, making your software available under the GPL gives you access to existing code from the thousands of OpenSource projects that have been released under the GPL. If you keep your software CloseSource, you can't re-use any GPL'd code! Also if you really plan to make money from a software project of your own, a lot of nasty legal issues, like patenting fees, will arise... (Doesn't mean you can't make money from OpenSource software. Only look at what Red Hat and Co do! And "big players" like Intel certainly wouldn't contribute to Linux, if it didn't pay off from them) Or as Mr. Stallman said once: Quote:
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24th August 2012, 21:22 | #6 | Link | |
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25th August 2012, 21:12 | #7 | Link |
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there are more open source projects that have just died, Project Looking Glass comes to mind right off the bat, Linspire, Ximian Gnome (i used to love that desktop), Procmail, ReiserFS, there are ton of distros that came and went, hell i even put together a debian based distro, about 10 years ago, i called Deadrats' Linux that didn't go anywhere.
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25th August 2012, 21:47 | #8 | Link | ||
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@LordMulder
please note, that my biggest problem is with the GPL, as it's an infectious license, a cancer that contaminates everything it touches. i have no such problems with other open source licenses that are based on reality, like the MIT license or the BSD license, Intel's open source license (under which they released code for QS implementation) or any other similar license. Quote:
back when Microsoft was last sued by the feds for anti-trust issues, and before apple became the monster it is today, Microsoft came up with the idea to create the illusion that it wasn't a monopoly and decided to prop up several "competitors" by giving them a load of cash. to apple they game about $150 million bucks to keep them from going into bankruptcy, they bought a bunch of red hat server licenses for millions of dollars and they gave Suse about 6 million bucks in a cross licensing deal. there's only a handful of open source projects that make any real money, money that a viable software company can point to as having a functional business and each and every single one of them makes money only because of licensing agreements with primarily Microsoft, Google (though they stopped throwing money at the firefox project) and a handful of other multi billion dollar companies. but don't mistake that for a viable business, the open source projects are almost like a charity, they exist because it's advantageous from a tax and anti trust position to throw some spare change at them, it's not like the have a viable product that they can market to the end user within the general public. Quote:
i'm sure you can think of a number of code obfuscation techniques to hide the theft, what's really to stop some unscrupulous competitor, especially one that's in it to make money, from testing out your software, deciding that there's something that your software does better than his and stealing the code to that functionality and implementing it into his software as closed source? you really think that you could prove in a court of law, to people without a computer science background, that the code was stolen from you? you really think that a jury of joe-punch-clocks is going to understand or care about licensing issues with the GPL? you really think that you won't get sued and/or prosecuted for reverse engineering closed source proprietary software in violation of the DMCA and the software's own licensing agreement. you can't break into someone's home to get proof that they broke into your home and stole from you; likewise you can't reverse engineer someone's software to prove that they stole it from you. if i had to make a predication i would say that more likely than not the folks behind main concept, perhaps sony, have looked through the x264 code and lifted some code. i would be almsot willing to bet money one it. Last edited by Guest; 26th August 2012 at 00:31. Reason: rule 4: no insults |
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25th August 2012, 22:05 | #9 | Link |
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that's the only way the make some money, but they don't make any serious money, not the type of money you could call a business.
Open Office has been downloaded over 12 million times. if they sold the office suite at a measly 10 bucks a pop they would have made 120 million dollars. know how much they have actually made? don't know, i can't find a single source that claims they have made any money at all. in fact Open Office started as Star Office, a closed source proprietary competitor to MS Office. the company that made Star Office was bought by Sun for $73.5 million and the reason Sun bought them was because they wanted to escape paying license fees to Microsoft for MS Office (at the time Sun had over 42 thousand employees and the license fees were through the roof). in 2000, Sun made the source code to Star Office available for download under and they never made a single dime from the move, not a penny. you can't make money from "free", if you're business model relies on donations and some company feeling sorry for you and licensing your product but you don't have any actual paying customers, if you're giving your product away for free, then you don't have a business model, you're running a charity. if i'm a landlord that doesn't charge any rent then i'm running a homeless shelter. |
25th August 2012, 22:22 | #10 | Link | ||||
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26th August 2012, 04:38 | #11 | Link | ||||||
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and for the record, i'm not big on "stealing someone's code" i was just pointing out that with open source software it's very easy to do it and get away with it. now i will grant you, if i was selling a proprietary piece of software for a nice chunk of change and there was an open source project that was reputed to do somethings better than my software, i would definitely take a look at the code. Quote:
if you read through the list of cases you will note that there was never any dispute as to whether or not GPL'd code was used in a proprietary offering, only if they were allowed to do it. from the article: "NuSphere had allegedly violated MySQL's copyright by linking MySQL's GPL'ed code with NuSphere Gemini table without being in compliance with the license." "the netfilter/iptables project was granted a preliminary injunction against Sitecom Germany by Munich District Court after Sitecom refused to desist from distributing Netfilter's GPL'ed software in violation of the terms of the GPL." that's not the same thing i was talking about, i was talking about just lifting large chunks of code and using code obfuscation techniques to hide it within proprietary code. you would have one hell of a time proving that this took place. Quote:
http://www.redhat.com/promo/svvp/ http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/07/25/microsoft_suse_deal_renewed/ as you can see MS gave Novell $240 million in 2006, $100 million in 2008 and gave them another $100 million in 2011. as for whether these deals count as charity or not how's this little quote grab you: Quote:
as for Red Hat, straight from their site: http://www.redhat.com/about/company/history.html Quote:
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26th August 2012, 11:31 | #12 | Link | |
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26th August 2012, 13:02 | #13 | Link | ||
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BTW: If you really need to re-use some GPL'd code in your own software, but cannot make your own software GPL-compatible for whatever reasons, you may still contact the original authors and ask them to additionally release the code in question under a "proprietary" license and sell you one of these licenses. This is called "dual licensing" and many projects make use of it. x264 and Qt come to my mind here. Sure. Their target audience are "enterprise" customers. For a company it would be worthless to get all the software for free as "free software" (or OpenSource), but then there is nobody they can call in case of problems. They need to keep their server "up and running" 24/7. Every minute of downtime costs a lot of money. The "normal" community process (report the problem on bugtrackers, wait for the developers to have a look at it, etc.) would be too slow here. Thus companies like Red Hat offer OpenSource software plus service contracts. So, in case of any problems, you know who to call in order to get the issue resolved ASAP. For companies that is a very important factor. That plus "long term" support for ancient versions. Quote:
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Go to https://standforukraine.com/ to find legitimate Ukrainian Charities 🇺🇦✊ Last edited by LoRd_MuldeR; 26th August 2012 at 19:19. |
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26th August 2012, 13:11 | #14 | Link | |
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26th August 2012, 15:22 | #15 | Link | |
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@deadrats: The reason why somebody goes for some license varies greatly - and just because you are not on the same page, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Just as people come here helping others - that's kind of "giving away your advantage", too. Say you play single sports in a club, and you give some of your peers some pointers and that ends up giving them an edge the next time you play against them and you lose. So would you rather keep it all to yourself? It's as with all facets of live - sharing something has its advantages and drawbacks. How much you're willing to share and in what manner is up to you (or when it's about issues you're doing during the course of your work, your employer). There's quite a few people here that make their living writing software - some of that software might be purely commercial with no sharing of code whatsoever, other might be a mix and some might be purely open source. You might for instance share the work you do in your free time because it's a hobby. That might give somebody else a leg up, but if you don't care, what's wrong with sharing it? You said Quote:
If you're truly interested in hearing people's reasons why they chose a license, let them speak. But if all you intend it to show people how their decisions are wrong, we have to close this thread. BTW.. what's your stake in this? Do you make your living writing software? If not, I'm having a very hard time understanding how you can criticize people who share what they're best at, especially in a place like this that always had an affinity towards free software.
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26th August 2012, 18:42 | #17 | Link |
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yes, but what exactly is the limit of the term "derived work"? if i took avidemux and changed the gui so that it mimics either tmpg or vegas or some other offering, i could understand the demand and expectation that i release the resulting work as GPL'd code. but if i took the base application and heavily modified it, ported the code to Java, improved the threading substantially and made sure it could be compiled with Rootbeer so that it runs solely on a gpu, why should i be required to release that code as GPL'd software as well? one could argue that i took the basic foundation and build a magnificent castle, i could see a 'thank you to the original avidemux team' line during the installation process but to release all the code as GPL? how is that fair?
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26th August 2012, 18:49 | #18 | Link |
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Debates about licensing and GPL specifically are off-topic for this forum. It's also off-topic for this thread that *you* created. Thread closed.
Please follow up elsewhere if you wish to continue your campaign against open source software. Here are some starting points for you: http://www.fsf.org/ http://www.infoworld.com/category/tags/gpl-0 Last edited by Guest; 26th August 2012 at 19:17. |
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