<< This Open Source thing intrigues me.
What would happen if Windows became open source?
Can anyone think of any circumstances under which Microsoft would do such a thing?
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Open Source programmers are for the most part folks who like to work on things that are exciting to them, new-ish, and most importantly in the public interest. The product being worked on needs to be a minor cause celeb, in other words.
This is a limited group of social activist programmers. Probably they are already a bit stretched doing GNU, Linux, and now Netscape.
I believe that Netscape being adsorbed by AOL will hurt progress on debugging the old Netscape browser. Netscape itself will go on the production of proprietary features for AOL and Netcenter, the old browser is at the end of it's rapid technical development as far as one can see from any announcements now, and so any work put in debugging the Netscape browser for volunteers is futile effort.
We should now concentrate on a free replacement for Mosaic.
The bloom is off the rose for Netscape - they are now part of the 'Other Evil Empire': AOL. Evidence of this attitude is the (immediately unclear how to eradicate,) several minute stopover at Netscape's somewhat slow graphics and detail laden messenger site every time you just want to take a few seconds to download any email you may have. It is very annoying and manipulative. This kind of thing will complete the killing off of enthusiasm for this company among the technical community as Netscape finishes becoming just another MSFT-like organization.
So, mostly those programmers who work for companies who have a business plan that calls for use of a modified or improved version of Netscape will continue working on it. For pay only.
So, to your question. Similarly to the case with Netscape, few legitimate programmers in the Open Source community will be much interested in this case. Some companies wanting to create specific products might be interested. However, under non disclosure, some source access is already possible for commercial applications.
Windows is far too messy and big to make major progress on in an ad hoc fashion without great enthusiasm and tens of thousands of volunteer programmers. For those programmers, the question will be: Why work for Bill Gates for free? Linux is free, in it's basic form. Ditto for various GNU products. So you won't get those programmers.
You might get some crackers. After all, this would be one way to get info needed for really pernicious viruses. And MSFT is not up to the management process required to keep that kind of thing from happening.
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The important thing that a lot of companies are missing here about open source is that first of all you have to be giving away the product to the public and/or to the companies that are based on it.
The second thing is that there is a very limited number of programmers like these, and they are picky. They also are often working part time on these things. So the resource to be applied to open source projects is finite.
Not all products can be fit into a business model where the base product is being 'given away', meaning all money must be made on services, wages, and so on.
I believe that the projects most interesting to the open source community are those where the customers are getting ripped off the worst, where the functionality is most fundamental, or where those customers are people with interests in common with the open source programmers.
- So, the first projects in open source were the developer tools: code editor, the C compiler, and so forth, all of which used to cost hundreds to tens of thousands.
- Then, enhancements to the Internet were the focus. No more getting charged thousands a month by IBM and AT&T.
- After that, an OS alternative to free you from the big companies and the regular reaming of developers stuck in the MSFT development process. No more Windows, Solaris, OS2.
- Then the web server and database tools.
- Next, perhaps an enhanced free set of office utilities, a simpler and decent set of which already exists, as Linux use grows.
You see how this works. First of all, developers are fighting back against being charged for things they can do for themselves. Second, they provide generic functionality to the public as well. Otherwise, the big companies will continue to charge every year for 'upgrades' to the same old functionality forever. And otherwise, programmers jobs will be the same old boring generic maintenance or clone programming every year, needing less and less intelligence to do less and less for the community. We want to raise the whole profession to a new level of work and accomplishment. We want to do genuinely new things, and the commercial system of software development usually does *not* provide that opportunity any more, as the emphasis has been on wiping out the competition and then raising the price for the same old thing forever.
Perhaps all generic home and commercial functionality will be made free. This is a way to fight monopoly. It is explicitly thought of in revolutionary terms. (So why help MSFT? In this community, they are explicitly the enemy, and open source our weapon.)
Hopefully, in the future, programming will be for vertical applications and new applications only, except in the rare case where truly new generic application ideas arise. It will require technical intelligence and provide variety to the hard core programmers, or alternatively development will be the kind based on easy to use tools used by folks who are specialists in some other area, the artists who use web page design products, the financial analysts who use spreadsheets, for instance, who need to know very little technically to do their jobs much more powerfully.
Maybe if Gates donned a hair shirt, and MSFT donated all profits to the UN? :-)
Chaz |
