I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). Foreign governments who are concerned about NSA backdoors would have their fears allayed. Is there any way it could seriously damage their business model?
Who is going to support 20 million lines of code other than Microsoft employees as amateurs bungle their way through thirty years of patches for backward compatibility wrapped around stupid and clever things OEM's and third party developers did to get their code to work?
It's not like Linux because there isn't a team of experienced volunteers already working on the code base and the Windows code base contains a lot functionality for business reasons that Torvalds has been in a position to not just say "no" but to add "and go fuck yourself."
The answer is that nobody will support it as-is... they would just use the source to make or improve other things. Because this is what would be in the interests of the users. Even if it meant Windows got buried.
But this is strictly imaginary because I doubt that 20 million lines of code are all under the unilateral control of Microsoft.
I think open source is great and I even admire Stallman because of not despite his single mindedness. I also don't think Windows being closed source is problematic. Choice is good and Windows is able to solve a particular set of problems efficiently by virtue of Microsoft's business model.
That model fit my needs and interests for many years. Less so now because my needs and interests have changed to where the tradeoffs Linux and Open Source impose are outweighed by their advantages. But other people have other needs and there are already enough first world problem zealots in the world.
>Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.
This is just not true. Show me a completely open source smart phone... thing is you can't, the baseband and radio will always for sure be closed source. There are markets where having knowledge that your competition doesn't is vital to success, that is why some things will always be closed source.
A closed source project can license closed source technology and save development costs while avoiding putting 1.0 code for an edge case into their core product. The exchange of money helps keep the interest in support, maintenance, and extension by those who first developed the technology.
Open source projects can also release v1.0 with bugs, it's not like there is some Open Source Police stopping you from doing that. You can also pay for support of open source software, and that benefits everyone and not just the company that happened to have money to invest in it.
There's still money licensing Fortran libraries that have been around for decades. They are fast and good and cheaper than achieving the same levels of fast and good from scratch. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using some gem written over a weekend of craft beer. It just may not make sense to bet a business on it even when you can read the source code
StackOverflow is an example of why the choice is beneficial. The source code being proprietary is irrelevant because the content is Creative Commons.
No one "supports" it. People will improve the bits that bother them. In the aggregate, these activities amount to more than you could ever pay to have done.
The beauty of open source model is it gives the desperately motivated the means to fix their problems in a way that benefits everyone.
It's all in isolation unless the trunk takes pull requests. Forking doesn't change that either. There's still got to be someone evaluating changes in light of their impact on 20 million lines of code.
You're right, it would be hard to contribute to such a codebase. I think the benefits of open sourcing Windows aren't really "developers will start contributing to it" as much as "developers will start reading the source code". Microsoft would continue supporting it.
I'm pretty sure the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Asus, NVidia and AMD would simply fork Windows for their own usage, and stop paying licensing... that would mean huge gaps in Microsoft's income... bad idea.
Opening .Net up, I feel is for a couple reasons. First, keeping developer mindshare. Second, Keeping Azure as a first-class platform for deploying .Net code. Third, reducing costs within Azure division that are tied to Windows' licensing. The fact that it's probably the right thing to do, is probably farther down the list.
Sometimes I forget that they did the Shared Source release several years ago. However, once in a while I see it mentioned in an academic paper.
Point being, the most common reason companies give for not releasing source for a project is that they have code from contractors that they aren't able to release. That shouldn't be the case with Windows.
> Point being, the most common reason companies give for not releasing source for a project is that they have code from contractors that they aren't able to release. That shouldn't be the case with Windows.
There are probably some parts that won't make it like Pinball [old new thing] but it shouldn't be significant at all.
>> Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.
[old new thing] blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851.aspx
> Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already).
I seriously doubt piracy of Windows is a huge concern in most markets; MS will still be making a lot of money from Dell, HP, Lenovo, et al selling their stuff.
Nadella has worked on the cloud computing at Microsoft. Microsoft is betting big time on the cloud. Although MS never publicly admits, the OS business for the end user is slowly fading away with the tablets, smart phones taking over and Browser becoming the new OS.
You can see this by looking at their Office 365 strategy (iOS, Android release, online version push). Making Windows 10 free to 8 users, removing licensing fees for windows phones, making Visual Studio available for free. Making the ASP.NET vNext to run on Linux.
Instead, MS sees the growth in Azure. Whether they use Linux or Windows servers, MS can make money off of the enterprise/startup segment. Whether or not it is a sustainable strategy in the long run, we will see. But in the short term, at least for the "consumer" market, MS is giving up on Windows and it is moving its focus to Azure and the software that runs on top of Azure (Office, Sharepoint, Dev Services, XBox, Bing, etc).
The marketing strategy behind this is also interesting. Things are still labeled "Windows" to give the illusion that the "Windows" the end user gets on their new laptop is somehow "related" to the Windows in the cloud (Azure). Interesting strategy to make the "Windows" brand live for a little more at least..
I'm not sure Windows (and transitively Microsoft) is a positive brand and its continuity an illusion worth keeping. It reminds me of antivirus, slow boots, periodic reinstalls to make XP quick again, BSOD and many other things that drove me away from it years ago. Anyway, if one never tried anything else not to leave home could be reassuring and it seems that Win7 wasn't so bad anymore (but I still get calls from friends with infested Windows machines).
It's certainly not "official" but we already have Wine and Mono. I understand that they don't promise write once run anywhere but the support is pretty good. For awhile it was one of the only ways to get Netflix working on Linux based platforms.
.Net actually promises a bit more 'write once run anywhere' than Java. Java stuff is not, and does not seek to be, binary compatible across platforms. .Net is. I'd really love to see, once .Net is all open, browser makers to throw the CLR into the browser. Overnight it would release us from the tyranny of js and let us use basically any language we ever want.
As a practical matter, I doubt that they can. There's probably quite a lot of third-party code intertwined with Windows itself (especially in the device drivers that ship with it) that's subject to strict redistribution and publication restrictions.
Some Windows drivers run in user space, but many run in kernel space (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff... shows Windows has kernel drivers; the some/many distinction is my guesstimate, based on the fact that anything that needs to process data fast benefits from being a kernel driver)
As someone who has done Windows driver development, I can assure you drivers run at ring0, kernel context. Not in userland (except maybe some USB device and printer drivers).
The NT kernel is not a microkernel. It all runs in ring 0, including device drivers: I/O, graphics, HID, file systems, etc. It's modular, but there is no protection between the various parts, which all run in a single kernel process, with a single address space.
The NT kernel is sometimes called a _hybrid_ microkernel, but this refers only to the fact that the internal modules are logically decoupled (with message passing between them, for example). Also, graphics actually used to run in userland until they moved it into the kernel for Windows 2000.
Since NT 6.0 (Vista), graphics drivers run primarily in user mode. There is still a kernel mode component, the miniport driver, but it is kept small to reduce the likelihood of crashes.
There are some other drivers that also run in user mode, but graphics drivers were the really big change. Most bluescreens in Windows XP were caused by graphics drivers.
Since Vista, Windows has been able to recover from a failure in the graphics driver. The screen blinks for a second, and then a balloon notification comes up, saying that the graphics driver has been restarted.
NT is a hybrid kernel for sure. In a monolithic kernel everything would be running in ring 0.
NT is a hybrid kernel because some drivers run in ring 0, others (typically peripheral drivers) run outside ring 0. Some drivers (specifically graphics card drivers) run split in kernel mode and user mode: A small part runs in kernel mode, while the complex part runs in user mode.
While you are correct that the graphics driver was moved to kernel mode for Windows 2000/XP, it was actually moved half-way back with Vista. This was in fact the reason why graphics drivers sucked in the beginning for Vista: MS only gave the vendors 4 months since the last change to the graphics driver model before Vista was released.
It's still running pretty much everything in ring 0 that a traditional monolithic kernel would. All the "complex parts" run in kernel mode.
The new WDDM driver model runs a user-mode driver, but it's still backed by a set of kernel-mode drivers [1], including the "display miniport" driver.
As kernels go, it's pretty monolithic. What makes it more like a microkernel is that many of the internal APIs use a message-passing model rather than direct calls.
On Linux the OpenGL implementation of the graphics driver (which is by far the most complex part) runs in user space, as do drivers for printers and a lot of other USB devices. However that doesn't make Linux a "hybrid kernel", and neither does what you said make NT one.
I don't think so, the windows manager is also in userland. It's not the most documented thing, and it depends on what are "the things" of windows, there are many. :)
For one, it's big. When I was working on part of the UIPlat team for Windows, my private enlistment just included build infra and maybe 5% of the sources and associated tools/tests and it still took up 60+ GB (100+ GB with binaries). I don't think you can just throw it on Github.
Two, compatibility. Even if you fix a bug, it usually needs to be versioned in some way to avoid breaking apps that rely on the bug. OS code, once shipped, becomes feature. Fixes require a fair amount of due diligence besides just identifying the problem and the correct fix. The historical context of how the issue was introduced and how it has migrated to other branches needs to be understood by grepping through the source history graph. Suites of build verification tests, regression tests, integration tests, and unit tests need to pass. Although Microsoft has extensive infrastructure for buddy builds and integration staging, external parties won't. So at best they could suggest a fix to Microsoft to complete the due diligence on. But usually suggesting a fix is easy and vetting it is the grueling part.
Three, private forks of Windows seem like maintenance and compatibility nightmares. Fragmentation would likely disrupt windows update's ability to apply patches and keep the system secure. Windows' ability to run across so many devices is kept sane by keeping a relatively small, consistent trusted computing base. Merging together forked Windows repos is a disaster. The XBOX team forked Windows 8 for a few months and made some tweaks to get XBOX One out the door, and then some folks had the nasty job of having to try and consolidate the codebases against moving targets. No one has enough context or time to perform these kinds of merges individually, nor would ever volunteer to, so they need to be massive coordinated efforts between teams.
Four, variants. You're not going to want to deal with all the possible permutations of Windows SKUs, processor architectures (ARM/X86/AMD64/IA64), build flavors, etc.
Five, it's a mess. There's plenty of archaic cruft, possible trade secrets, and lurking vulnerabilities. Open sourcing everything would be like opening Pandora's Box. It's too risky. Curating out some portion of this to open-source would be a massive undertaking and ongoing maintenance cost.
I think it makes more sense to take more mature modules, like .NET core or Roslyn, and open source them as separate entities. Modules are more reusable, and community-driven changes are easier to curate when they can be isolated. Windows has some components which it probably makes sense to open-source, but the entity as a whole is too unwieldy in its current form. .NET is designed more modularly.
TL;DR - Windows is an unwieldy behemoth and would be difficult to open source.
I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft.
Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is already running Windows, so I don't see what they'd really have to gain. The small but loud minority of open-source zealots won't be happy until every single Microsoft product is open.
>I don't see why everything needs to be open source.
I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing.
If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.
"If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do."
I'm sorry to point out to you but a large set of computing devices are black boxes and it does not hurt their marketability. Cars, phones (the OS running the hardware, not Android), ... the pilot in the passenger plane does not want to hack his planes OS, nor most likely does the mechanics crew.
Practically, lots of people just want to get their job/art project/email/browsing done and do not care about the blackness of the box just as long as it works.
I think one of the reasons RMS got going was that he was irritated that the software from vendors did not work.
The software markets have advanced some what. Nowadays, for any product with a sizeable market it is fairly safe to presume the software works or at least won't fail miserably. And if it does, it's not just the lone consumer but thousands/million others who are pissed off as well. Yeah, crap gets released though.
The reality of your software being a black box is not a matter of marketability. It is a matter of what you are able to know and control about what your personal machine is actually doing. Obviously there are manifest examples of people running all manner of black boxes, but as someone else pointed out, they are at the complete mercy of their black box vendor (unless someone wants to reverse engineer the box). If your vendor folds up and a critical vulnerability is exposed or is being openly exploited, well, congratulations on your new black brick.
On the other hand, if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario.
We know people will run black boxes, drink poisoned sugar drinks, support genocidal megalomaniacs, torture others for limited monetary gain and/or endorphin rushes, etc. None of those realities imply that others should follow in the same footsteps, especially when there are workable alternatives that don't suffer from the same permanent failure scenarios.
I think you are a bit too idealistic about the hacking capabilities and willingness of people in general. It is convenient the correct functioning of my car or my phone is the responsibility of someone specific else than me.
Civilization is characterized by specialization of people. I cherish the notion that hardware and software should be based on open standards. For day to day work, I just want my gear to work. If it fails, I certainly do not have the time to dig in to the software layer because I have a work, children, housekeeping duties, and a bunch of art projects and higher level concepts I want to focus on.
"if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario."
You presume all software is trivially simple. I can tell you, it is not. A large category of software requires years of specialization to actually grok what is happening.
As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.
> As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.
But would you download an alternative distribution made by a group of enthusiastic aeronautics professionals that has been used by tons of other people with no problems? Think Cyanogenmod.
If I was a manufacturer of planes I would probably figure out if it could be used. As a private individual - no way.
In this plane software example if I was a plane manufacturing org I could dedicate people to integrate it and test it.
There is a difference between an organization dedicated to making a product and a group of hobbyists coming together to scratch their itch. There is a scale, a threshold, above which you need big-org organization and sharing of responsibilities.
Small expert teams are fantastic for the sort of projects that can be done by small expert teams. For larger things there needs to be a bit more infrastructure and organization, or at least continuity of many, many years.
There is a threshold in software complexity after which one really needs lots of organized testing and fixing.
As a private user, if I fail the firmware update on my shiny plane, it's all on me. Unless there was some weird insurance to cover the costs.
Considering the quality of cyanogenmods "stable" releases, never. Hobbyist professionals are still hobbyists and not liable for the damage their code may do.
> I'm sorry to point out to you but a large set of computing devices are black boxes and it does not hurt their marketability.
Free software should be looked on from the point of ethics, and not from financial gain. Proprietary software is immoral, and that is the reason you shouldn't be building it.
It's one thing to laud the common benefits of FOSS, or the ethical gains of charity. These things resonate with me. But I fundamentally disagree with - and as a proprietary software developer, am alienated by - your statement.
Is that actually what you mean? My day job - making games - is immoral? A daily dose of evil? If so, this is the kind of attitude that puts me off contributing to anything even remotely related to "free software".
Perhaps you're fine with that, but I feel it leaves us all poorer.
If you are selling cars with the hoods welded shut and all systems permeated with DRM, are you making the world better, because, hey, cars are good? Or are you in effect making your customers helpless, teaching them that they are not, and should not even want to be, in control of their own cars?
DRM and closed source software are not the same thing. Closed source software is commonly used to manipulate open data. Free software facilitates the openness of data and is absolutely essential but it does not make in any way closed source software evil.
> True, but in this situation they have the same effect which I wanted to highlight, i.e. loss of control on the part of the owner/user.
Analogies are a bit awkward. With cars, DRM would equal to each car manufacturer having their own road barred to other car manufacturers. If the welded-shut-bonnet bothers you just switch cars. This is what I meant with open data - it's what one does with the product that matters, and can one practically choose another.
As to the "evilness" of the situation, I cannot think I could work professionally in software as a field - which I love - if there were no established large companies with closed source products. If my analysis is flawed I would value pointers why.
As my employer is a closed source software vendor, to me the economics situation looks as follows: vendor provides software, end user uses it to add value to their work. End user reports bugs, vendor fixes the bugs. There is an efficient responsibility interface to the whole thing. And the area is well competed in, if vendor a screws up customers will move to vendor b, c, or d...
With an established product there is an established revenue stream which enables stable income for all employees.
The way I choose to work on my profession, I will take stable revenue stream with specific work hours over some 24/7 freelancer role to fix bugs here and there. This simply would not be compatible with a family, with small kids I'm barely able to cope with the stresses at home and work as they are. If I had to worry after the next mortgage payment I would probably go nuts, and that is no exaggeration.
Open source simply does not work that well as a revenue model in general. It works as an enabler for all sorts of practical interactions, and is absolutely essential, but people need to eat and feed their families. Open source provides value, but few people are able to capture that value. That's why there are non-profits to organize critical work in this area.
If the product of my company was open sourced, several enterprising individuals would simply copy the product, relabel it, and sell it. Thus eating to the market share, thus probably leaving me to find another job. Thus, to me, closed source software provides housing, food and security to me and my family.
> If you are selling cars with the hoods welded shut and all systems permeated with DRM, are you making the world better, because, hey, cars are good?
My cellphone might as well be welded shut - because of system-on-a-chip design. I can't replace the GPU, the CPU, the memory, or any number of things I've repeatedly replaced on my desktops with my current lack of soldering skills or equipment. Is SOC design also immoral? Even as it enables access to the internet to an ever growing number of people, something some have been calling a human right?
But let us return to your analogy instead of playing analogy ping pong.
> If you are selling cars with the hoods welded shut and all systems permeated with DRM
Assuming the price remains around the same, I'd simply not buy that car because it's stupidly designed, and going to be a pain to maintain. I'd also not buy a car where I had to replace the engine block to replace the front headlights, no matter what percentage of it's software is GPLed, or how many of it's parts have 3D printer schematics available for me to replace them in my own basement. Neither choice is based on ethics.
I also think it's good we have government laws forcing car companies to make their maintenance documentation etc. available to 3rd party mechanics. Cars are expensive enough to maintain that society is well served by competition. And while proprietary systems aren't inherently immoral, unexpected predatory pricing based on vendor lock-in certainly can be a problem. I've seen the short end of that stick enough times to know it sucks. I think it's worth limiting what a car company can do to help avoid the circumstances that can even lead to that, even if some of the things we're prohibiting them from doing were perfectly ethical for them to do on their own.
But you'll be hard pressed to convince me it's a problem for your $3 copy of Canabalt. It doesn't need an oil change. With several games, I complain if 3rd parties figure out how it works - when multiplayer suddenly becomes plagued with aimhacks, wallhacks, maphacks, and other unfair competition.
If I owned a car, it might as well have been welded shut – I am not a mechanic. Does this fact make it ethically OK for someone else to sell a “closed” car to me?
> […] I'd simply not buy that car […]
That was not the question. The question was if would be ethically OK to sell that car, not if you (or anyone else) would buy it or not.
> But you'll be hard pressed to convince me it's a problem for your $3 copy of Canabalt.
It also wouldn’t really be a large issue with a simple enough car or car-like conveyance, like maybe a bicycle, or a Segway. Does this make it OK?
> It doesn't need an oil change.
Software needs updating. Static software is dead code.
> If I owned a car, it might as well have been welded shut – I am not a mechanic. Does this fact make it ethically OK for someone else to sell a “closed” car to me?
That's not the deciding factor. I've no particular ethical qualm with it if you know full well what you're getting into and choose it.
>> […] I'd simply not buy that car […]
> That was not the question. The question was if would be ethically OK to sell that car, not if you (or anyone else) would buy it or not.
"Neither choice is based on ethics." The ethics of the sale would depend on the other particulars, but if we assume those other particulars were all ethical, then yes, I'd say it's ethically OK to sell you that car.
Let's take a few concrete examples where a car has indeed been welded shut.
- I'm selling you the car for you to resell at a profit as scrap metal.
- I'm selling a clunker I tried to "repair". A few poorly followed DIY guides later and... well, I made some mistakes.
- In a fit of mental illness, or for the sake of a harmless prank, I welded my car shut intentionally.
In which circumstances should I feel guilt trying to sell it to you? To me, it's the ones where I'm trying to mislead you. That could be any of the above (I lie and say it's not welded, lie about the scrap tonnage, I try to convince you welded cars are in vogue, etc.) or none of the above (I'm upfront about the facts and ensure you know what you're getting into.)
>> But you'll be hard pressed to convince me it's a problem for your $3 copy of Canabalt.
> It also wouldn’t really be a large issue with a simple enough car or car-like conveyance, like maybe a bicycle, or a Segway. Does this make it OK?
I didn't say you'll be hard pressed to convince me it's a "small enough" issue or problem to fly under some ethical radar or waterline. I'm saying you'll be hard pressed to convince me it's a problem, period.
>> It doesn't need an oil change.
> Software needs updating. Static software is dead code.
I disagree with your assertions. You might want to update it, but there's a big difference between want and need. Plenty of old DOS and cartridge games are still quite playable. And for the purposes of archival and preservation of the commons, I think a focus on emulation provides more bang for the buck than trying to modernize every abandoned application - and, it should be noted, doesn't require updating the software.
EDIT: On the subject of unanswered questions, I'll repose my original one to you since the original poster isn't answering.
Do you actually think my day job - making (proprietary) games - is immoral? A daily dose of evil?
> I've no particular ethical qualm with it if you know full well what you're getting into and choose it. […] I'm upfront about the facts and ensure you know what you're getting into.
One could make the same argument about any laissez-faire economical proposal, like “Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery?” Some things are prohibited, even though people are, in theory, well aware of what they are doing. One could argue that this is one of those things that ought to be prohibited.
> You might want to update it, but there's a big difference between want and need.
I would argue that it is my right to update the software to changing circumstances. Otherwise, it’s like a solid-block car with DRM; unchangeable, and (once support is dropped) increasingly unusable due to changes in its environment. These characteristics (pay for a limited time of support, after which it becomes practically unusable) is more akin to renting than buying. If I buy a thing, I would expect it to be my right to modify it according to my circumstances for all time, since I now own it. For software, I can’t practically do so without the source code.
> Do you actually think my day job - making (proprietary) games - is immoral? A daily dose of evil?
Words like “evil” have unreasonable amounts of emotional attachments, so since you are pressing me, I feel like you are setting an rhetorical trap, so I will refuse to use that word. I will say, though, that you are quite possibly making the world slightly worse instead of better. The fact that people are taught to be helpless and powerless is a bad thing. Whether you are, on the whole, doing a bad thing depends on whether any positive impact of your game (your game, mind you, as compared to any possible replacement game) is large enough to offset this. This could possibly be true, and perhaps not – I do not feel competent to judge this.
> Words like “evil” have unreasonable amounts of emotional attachments, so since you are pressing me, I feel like you are setting an rhetorical trap, so I will refuse to use that word.
Please note this thread started with some rather emotionally attached wordage applied broadly. And with me very explicitly responding to that wordage. The entire basis of my question centered around that phrasing. It's what I responded to. If you're not interested in handling it... what exactly are you trying to help explain from davorb's post? Are you sure that what you're explaining was in davorb's post?
I think the difference between you and I is a simple one of opinion. Correct me if I'm wrong: You see providing ease of modification as a rights driven moral mandate. I see providing ease of modification as a virtue worth encouraging - sometimes through law - especially when the good to society outweighs the burden or harm to the authors. But I do not see it as a moral mandate, because I do not see 'ease of modification of another's work' to be a right. I do not see it as a right because I see imposing that much burden on the author to be a clear violation of their rights. I have no right to demand a novelist's draft notes or plotline sketches, the LaTeX documents that generated their PDFs, none of it.
Where rights collide, one must strike a careful balance. Let us suppose that one has a right to modification: I think the current length of copyright is unreasonably long, unreasonably in favor of the author, harming the commons and that 'right to modification'. But I agree with the original principle of copyright - to provide an author a means to support themselves via temporary monopoly of the fruits of their labor - and feel that demanding they make it easy to subvert that monopoly from the very get go, to be unreasonably against the author. And although I'm fine with e.g. legalizing jail-breaking a phone, I feel I've no right to demand it be easy.
My ideal world involves much shorter copyright durations (somewhere between 5-20 years max?), better enforced (and perhaps simply by being more reasonable, it will be more respected?), with a richer commons at the end. You could even try to make these rights balance against each other: e.g. for software only providing the protections of copyright only to those who provide their source code.
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>> I've no particular ethical qualm with it if you know full well what you're getting into and choose it.
> One could make the same argument about any laissez-faire economical proposal
I'm not arguing about "any" laissez-faire economical proposal, I'm arguing about a car I welded shut.
I'm also not arguing that there aren't other particulars that must be considered.
A mugger clearly explains to you so you know what you're getting into and offers you a choice: Give him all your money in exchange for not shooting you. I'm not saying that's ethical!
> like “Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery?” Some things are prohibited
Tell that to a court-martial when you change your mind about enlisting after a war starts. I have many ethical concerns about military recruiting and some of the incentive structures around enlistment, but no particular problem with allowing enlistment. I absolutely cannot fathom those who would want to do this, however, as to me, they very much are selling themselves into slavery - a potentially very dangerous slavery - a slavery which may very well last for the rest of their lives.
> These characteristics (pay for a limited time of support, after which it becomes practically unusable) is more akin to renting than buying. If I buy a thing, I would expect it to be my right to modify it according to my circumstances for all time, since I now own it. For software, I can’t practically do so without the source code.
Do you consider free as in beer - but proprietary - software to be immoral? You didn't buy it. Do you consider free as in beer - but proprietary, and subscription requiring - software to be immoral? You're clearly renting it. Do you consider renting out to people to be immoral?
I can sympathize a little with the "I thought I was buying it but all I got was renting a license" argument. Enough I could potentially agree with, say, an argument that DRMed music is immoral. I'm of the opinion that invasive and negligently DRMed music is immoral (see: Sony rootkits.) But I certainly don't assume I'm buying a DRM-free game complete with source access when I buy a game off Steam - nor I think do most gamers. And being okay with subscription payment model, but not okay with a one time fee payment model, requires some level of cognitive dissonance I simply don't have. I also have no fundamental moral issue with rental, software or otherwise.
> Words like “evil” have unreasonable amounts of emotional attachments, so since you are pressing me, I feel like you are setting an rhetorical trap, so I will refuse to use that word. I will say, though, that you are quite possibly making the world slightly worse instead of better.
You're quite suspicious of me. But to your credit, you're at least not jumping to conclusions.
> The fact that people are taught to be helpless and powerless is a bad thing.
Given just how rampant piracy and cracking, or hacking and modding is, it's a hard sell to me to say that proprietary software is actually teaching this. In fact, I'd argue just the opposite - it's clear any and all barriers proprietary software devs try to come up with to protect their profits are overcome by the users with time. And by "with time" I mean a possibly negative amount of time, where cracked versions of the game release before the non-cracked version does. Vibrant and awesome modding societies pop up around proprietary games - including those that were intentionally hostile to modding (e.g. in a bid to make lives more difficult for cheaters.) Some good, some bad.
And while I'd generally agree with your statement, I admit - I wouldn't consider it a bad thing if pirates felt a bit more helpless and powerless when it comes to intentionally and willfully draining a dev's resources (server bandwidth, support resources, etc.) under false pretext ("I totally bought your game!") while giving nothing in return. Because that's simply not a fair or equitable exchange.
> Whether you are, on the whole, doing a bad thing depends on whether any positive impact of your game (your game, mind you, as compared to any possible replacement game) is large enough to offset this. This could possibly be true, and perhaps not – I do not feel competent to judge this.
And yet I feel judged. To be fair, I asked to hear it, so thank you for responding. But: surely it's only fair to compare the positive impact of my game against the positive impact of the activity that would have replaced it, not against every possible activity? Otherwise, even if I've done zero harm, I'm left competing with "solving world hunger, cancer, and heart disease" all at once. Even if we limit it to games, there was that protein folding puzzle game, wasn't there?
> what exactly are you trying to help explain from davorb's post? Are you sure that what you're explaining was in davorb's post?
One can never be sure about what someone else is thinking, buy davorb did link to the FSF page “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software” (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....), and since I am fairly familiar with the FSF’s world view, I thought I could clarify, since you seemed to have actual trouble even conceiving any other point of view than the contrasting Open Source one. I suggest that you simply read the linked page, it explains it more explicitly and at more length.
Regarding copyright in general, I am personally very suspicious of the concept (as explained by many others elsewhere). But the FSF’s view is more narrow, focused on software, and your work is producing software, which makes this relevant. And the FSF’s argument why, for software, the right of modification (with implied source code) is important, is, I think, a compelling one.
(You can’t argue that selling yourself into slavery is OK since enlisting oneself is allowed. If that was not the argument you were trying to make, I don’t understand it.)
> Do you consider free as in beer - but proprietary - software to be immoral?
I would have to say yes. It is offering something nice which contains a hidden trap.
> Do you consider free as in beer - but proprietary, and subscription requiring - software to be immoral?
I don’t think so. What you are paying for is not the software, but the service, of which the software is a tool the provider uses to provide the service. Of course, this has other dangers (privacy and dependency), but it is not, I think, necessarily inherently a bad thing.
> I can sympathize a little with the "I thought I was buying it but all I got was renting a license" argument.
It also dilutes the very concept of “owning”. When the Playstation was remotely downgraded by Sony, I saw the argument made that of course Sony had a right to do that to everybody’s Playstation, since it was, and I quote, “their [i.e. Sony’s] console”. People actually had the idea that, even though people had paid money for a console and owned it, it was still, and forevermore, within the domain of Sony, and that Sony therefore had the right to do whatever they wanted to it. This is a dangerous dilution of the concept of ownership.
> And being okay with subscription payment model, but not okay with a one time fee payment model, requires some level of cognitive dissonance I simply don't have.
It’s a question of what causes people to dilute the concept of ownership, and what teaches people to be more downtrodden, helpless, dependent, and afraid. I am against that which does this. Technically the same deal, presented differently, might not have this effect, in which case I would not object to it (on these grounds, at least).
> And while I'd generally agree with your statement, I admit - I wouldn't consider it a bad thing if pirates felt a bit more helpless and powerless
Who are you referring to when you say “pirates”? Are they the ones who crack the game? Those people are incorrigible and will only be aggravated by more copy protection and DRM. Are you instead referring to those which use a cracked copy of the game? Those people are impossible to make more helpless than your regular users. Your regular users, however, will be made to feel helpless if only DRM and online-only play (and no modding tools or source code) is provided.
> Because that's simply not a fair or equitable exchange.
I’d be more sympathetic if 99% of the server components of modern games weren’t only for their DRM-like properties (online-only play even for single-player campaigns, etc.) If, on the other hand, the servers were an optional component, you might solve the ethical problem by simply charging a recurring service fee for the server access.
> And yet I feel judged.
Them’s the breaks.
> But: surely it's only fair to compare the positive impact of my game against the positive impact of the activity that would have replaced it,
> I thought I could clarify, since you seemed to have actual trouble even conceiving any other point of view than the contrasting Open Source one.
Ahh, I see. Thank you. But it's not that I have trouble conceiving the the point of view put forth by the FSF and others. I can see their concerns, their desires, the benifits of a right of modification and the many ways people (including myself) have been harmed by not being able to enjoy such a right, suffering vendor lock-in etc.
What I have trouble with is understanding the jump to the more absolutest position, to say that there is no exception to the rule, to say that all proprietary software is immoral. Certainly, some hold this position - I would say RMS probably does - but I see it as a harmful stance and a rare stance. Those who appear to hold it usually have a fundamental difference of opinion - one that neither of us will make any headway trying to convince the other of in debate - or are speaking hyperbolicly, in which case I would point out the harm of that.
> I suggest that you simply read the linked page, it explains it more explicitly and at more length.
I have, a couple of times at least.
> (You can’t argue that selling yourself into slavery is OK since enlisting oneself is allowed. If that was not the argument you were trying to make, I don’t understand it.)
I'm arguing we allow a form of slavery, in the form of enlistment. This doesn't make it moral. I think in some circumstances it can be moral - but this is an unbacked and unsubstantiated opinion, presented only to help provide my point of view.
>> I can sympathize a little with the "I thought I was buying it but all I got was renting a license" argument.
> It also dilutes the very concept of “owning”. When the Playstation was remotely downgraded by Sony
They were rightfully slapped with lawsuits for advertising a feature and then pulling it. This is wrong regardless of ownership. You could be renting or leasing your console and it'd still not be right. Ownership doesn't grant you the right to do anything you want with it - but that works both ways too.
> Who are you referring to when you say “pirates”?
I was specifically referring to people using the software without paying the license holder for it, in a copyright infringing manner. This does not include people using a no-cd crack on a copy of the game they own, this does not include people buying copies second hand. It didn't include the creators of cracks either, although my opinion would still apply to them. (EDIT: Subject clarity.)
> Are they the ones who crack the game? Those people are incorrigible and will only be aggravated by more copy protection and DRM
They will also be delayed, which is generally the goal of companies applying these techniques (sometimes successfully.)
> Are you instead referring to those which use a cracked copy of the game? Those people are impossible to make more helpless than your regular users.
They cannot be made more helpless, but they can be deterred (sometimes successfully.) I do recognize this reality.
> Your regular users, however, will be made to feel helpless if only DRM and online-only play (and no modding tools or source code) is provided.
I am not made to feel helpless when lightweight DRM doesn't get in my way. I am not made to feel helpless when I can't play Planetside offline, because the game makes no sense to play offline. Make no mistake though - I don't buy games with heavyweight DRM, and I don't buy games with stupid online-only requirements (I'll not buy the latest Sim City, for example.)
> I’d be more sympathetic if 99% of the server components of modern games weren’t only for their DRM-like properties
This is hyperbolic to the point of being untrue. I suspect you know that. Were it true, I would still ask you not to judge the "1%" by the actions of the other "99%" - if for no other reason than your own self interest in giving that "1%" (however small) a reason to not become 0% (however small that reason also is.)
>> But: surely it's only fair to compare the positive impact of my game against the positive impact of the activity that would have replaced it,
> Yes.
>> not against every possible activity?
> That was not my intention.
Cool. Then as part of the "1%" building games with optional server components, I'm doing better than the other "99%" - I like my chances.
"Free software should be looked on from the point of ethics, and not from financial gain."
I think the word 'markets' was a bit misguiding in terms of argumentation. I meant "things which bring people added value and joy" and not "things which can be sold for money". Markets encompass both but I was thinking the consumer added-value in this instance.
"Proprietary software is immoral, and that is the reason you shouldn't be building it"
I think taken without any other context this is not realistic.
I think the concept of ownerhip and responsibility are far more important for high quality software for the point of view of short term end user value than openness.
Software has a philosophical and a mathematical dimension. I don't think anyone should be able to own those and that most software patents are harmful in this way. However.
Software is used as an enabling component everywhere. As an enabling component it's added value does not depend on it's freedom or openness, but from it's capability to function bug free and provide the features end users need. As the canvas in the art program, as the automatic stabilizer in the plane and so forth.
In these instances I claim the biggest human value those softwares bring is indenpendent from their openness.
To enable the example softwares to function correctly require lots of hard labour that is not fun at all. I.e. work. Often it is repeating the same old concepts over and over again, knitting the specific system together piece by piece.
I think there is no Photoshop killer because the people to whom it brings most added value are not programmers and it's usually not fun or rewarding at all to work with such a large codebase. Blender is a fantastic counterexample.
Of course, software should utilize open and hackable data formats so that the data does not vanish.
The long term value for the user and the concept of the software providing free speech capabilities then depends on the underlying software ecosystem, and there open source most definitely helps.
Open formats, open tools to hack on them, open platforms. Yes, definetly! Any other way is harmfull to all stakeholders. IMO, products can be closed source.
I have definitely had my Stallman phase, but after seeing some Free As In Freedom™ projects fail spectacularly, I've realized that there are in fact benefits to keeping some things out of the public eye (from a moral point of view).
Wanting your machine to work is also caring what your machine is doing.
I'm sure the IRS is kicking themselves for running XP for over a decade, building up such an extreme dependency on it that they are now paying huge sums of money for Microsoft to continue to support them.
The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed. It is in Microsofts business interests to make sure it works, but they also want you paying them money while maintaining control of your computer.
But when it does break, your only option is the true owner of your computer, who will milk you for all you are worth, because you are now trapped. You don't know you are in a cage until you want out.
>The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed.
To most users Linux is just as much of a black box as Windows is.
Even among Linux fans, the number of people who actually need to customize the kernel is tiny. The number of people who can customize the kernel is even smaller.
So where's the freedom? At the OS level, all that's happened is that the lockdown has moved from corporations to a subset of the developer community.
Most end users aren't any more empowered than they used to be.
Now - it's different in the web and language spaces, where there's a steady simmer of framework development, and many popular web projects/products wouldn't have been possible without framework sharing.
But there's still plenty of proprietary content there. Just try to get Google or Facebook to share their data collections with you and see how politically relevant open source 'freedom' is then.
If that seems like a tangent, it's missing the point that the value of a system doesn't come from the source code - it comes from the system as a whole, and includes usability, community reach, innovation, invention, and data.
Open source pretends to be a huge lever for freedom, but it's more like a battered fork caught in an avalanche.
In computing, the world-changing leverage is elsewhere, and always has been.
Comments in this thread keep mentioning "most users" or "the average user". But they're not supposed to be the direct beneficiaries of Free Software. We are, and in line with the rule that 80% of users use 20% of features but never the same 20%, it's perfectly reasonable for us developers to expect a feature (open source code) that nobody else will use.
The endlessly apathetic hypothetical "average" user can't see past next week's paycheck, let alone their long-term best software interests. We are the ones who have to look to the future and prepare for it now. Wanting access to source code of core infrastructure is part of that preparation, and "average" users will be indirect beneficiaries via our improved ability to write reliable software.
To add another perspective, constantly targeting "average" is a great way to stay mediocre (see regression to the mean).
Finally, "average" users will benefit immensely from those who are inspired by the ability to tinker at a young age.
The user of open source, in the absence of the skills necessary to change code themselves, can easily pay any other developer on the free market to do it for them.
You can never do that with proprietary software. If you want something changed or fixed, you must appeal to the singular entity with monopoly access to the source.
My mum and dad both uses their computers on a daily basis and yes on occasions things don't always work as expected.
When that happens they ask me to fix it and if it wasn't me, then yes they would take it to a computer technician.
Just like they take their car to the mechanic.
Guess what. Not everyone is or wants to be a computer programmer and that group makes up the majority of all Windows users.
And why Windows has been so successful is you can get away with knowing very little about computers (like my mum and dad) yet still find Windows easy to use.
The number floated around for XP continued support is $200 per machine per year. Redhat, which is one of the few companies that supports a Linux distro for as long as Microsoft supports their products, charges $49/year for the equivalent of Windows Update, and doesn't have any information whatsoever on extended support. So, for the average customer which wants their desktops to have the same lifespan as XP in order to minimize training and other associated costs, ending up with a year or two of Extended Support while you finish your transition is still cheaper than any of the Linux providers.
I'm pretty sure Dell and HP provide support on all their Ubuntu machines, as do System76 et al. And they have extended support offerings all the same. Not sure on pricing, though.
Software support, not hardware. Patches, etc. RedHat is pretty much the only distro maker that will provide software support for the same timeframe as Windows releases are supported. Ubuntu, you'd have gone through the compatibility testing, upgrade testing, migration, etc cycle at least once more often than Windows, and deployments for anyone with custom software get expensive fast.
Besides RHEL there is also SuSE SLES / SLED with apparently 7 years of "general support" + 3 more of "self support" (guess that means you just get serious security fixes).
In addition to the shorter support time, with Ubuntu LTS it's a bit too easy to install packages from "universe" that aren't actually supported for more than 18 months...
The first and biggest effect (presuming a GPL-compatible license) is that Wine would suddenly work much better, and so Ubuntu and OSX would likely ship their following versions with "the ability to run Windows software alongside native software with no performance loss" as a feature. OSX N+3 or so might even eliminate Boot Camp, saying that there's no need to install Windows as a whole if all the software "Just Works."
Then why would anyone build native applications when Windows apps would be WORA? The only incentive I see for Apple is that they are in many ways a hardware company first. They want to sell hardware and this is one reason they haven't feared bootcanp.
Years ago I saw a demo of a Windows subsystem running an ELF Apache server directly on Windows NT. It isn't anything that Microsoft would release though, because once you make it so Windows can run Linux applications, who is going to write Windows apps? It erodes the platform.
I see an official WINE for OSX, that has a perfectly working subsystem, introducing the same problems to that ecosystem.
I dunno about Linux, but OS X has resisted cross-platform applications to a ludicrous degree. It's a good thing in my opinion, moving to Windows recently really highlighted the quality (in design and general OS fit) that indie OS X apps achieve.
There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much.
Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.
The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between.
Oracle Linux certainly exists, but I'm certainly not about to hold that monstrosity on any sort of pedestal.
As for the others, yeah, they're making money on FOSS (and not killing said FOSS in the process), though such free software tends to be integrated in very much proprietary end results (like OS X / iOS and the vast majority of Android distributions).
MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore.
And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE.
Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.
OpenJDK is unofficially ported and built for numerous platforms. But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK. To contribute to it, you sign Oracle's contributor's license agreement.
Oracle's no golden example as a leader in open source (let alone libre software), but they demonstrate the probable trajectory for the Microsoft projects at this point: a healthy, cohesive community of developers (developers!) using the technology in an ever increasing number of projects and platforms.
>Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.
What do you mean? I use VirtualBox for lots of stuff and it gets regular updates... it's also faster than VMWare in most benchmarks I've seen. Perhaps you're thinking of something else when speaking of 'not doing anything'?
I listed MySQL as an "exception" because of it not being a Sun product, regardless of whether or not it's dead.
However, there are still plenty of environments using MySQL (and I'd know; I maintain quite a few such environments). MariaDB is an obvious migration path, of course.
It is funny. At some point Redhat said "screw those guys" and started obfuscating its patches to the kernel (Oracle Linux was based on RHEL's code which was open source) to make it harder for Oracle to apply and create the (what was seen as) a competing Enterprise Linux Distro.
> People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open.
You're forgetting that a lot of people traditionally haven't liked Microsoft because their software wasn't/isn't open. Yeah, Windows would still be a steaming pile of bovine manure regardless of which license it was made available under, but the availability of that source code would make it easy for better, Unix-like operating systems to pick up the necessary pieces to support Windows software, thus continuing to allow Microsoft to profit on their non-operating-system software (Office, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Internet Explorer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSpartan, etc.) regardless of whether or not Windows itself is widespread in usage.
Good debugging tools that filter out the irrelevant are perhaps better. Odds are that any time you break out the debugger the fix is in your code not Windows, Linux, the JVM etc. That's not to say those things don't have bugs, only that they are orders if magnitude more debugged than most code under development.
I worked with a closed source stack in the past (java).
Even if the bug wasn't in our code, it was really helpful to see what's going on inside, helped us figure out why something didn't work a lot of time. Making false assumptions, passing stuff in a different format than the system expects etc.
We all, always worked with a decompiler in eclipse, just because it really did make life so much easier sometimes. And well, of course, sometimes there really was a bug in the stack, and finding a workaround is much easier when you know what's going on.
You are so completely wrong. Follow the Wine project for a few weeks/months to get familiar with just how buggy, inconsistent and inconceivably obscure all of Windows' APIs are.
If Windows was good and near-bug-free, Wine would have long been completed. Windows is not just its kernel.
Wine has to duplicate all of the duct tape and bailing wire Microsoft has used to provide backwards compatibility for their customers' existing applications. Just as Wine is an important kludge serving as a compatibility layer [It's Not an Emulator], all those undocumented API's are the same sort of kludge as compatibility layer.
And of course Wine is an outlier. Not only in that it contains its own 20 years of legacy code but in the fact that it is black box reverse engineering. It can't use disassembly to suss out details. Wine's difficulties stem from its requirements as much as anything else. These days VM's are the way to go if the going is intended to get things done. A Windows box in the cloud is pennies per hour.
So far as I am aware, ALL usable operating systems are burdened with that sort of thing. I'd really like to see someone at least attempt a clean-slate OS. Make it 64-bit only from the start, vector fonts to support HighDPI displays from the beginning, etc. It would likely accumulate such cruft over time, but I would expect there to be substantial advantages to building from scratch something that rolls in all of the research advances and assumes capable modern hardware.
