pleasant voice from open source
when you need to make money (it's that thing that puts food on your table, Halo 2 in your Xbox, coffee in your mug, politicians into office, and everything else into everything else), ethics are only as important as either a) the whole of the market regards them to be, or b) your customer regards them to be. if you're any kind of observer of human history, you know that particular importance now amounts to approximately jack sh*t, and jack is on the way out.
after suffering thru communist-style drivel on almost every open-source site I've been to thus far, reading Tiemann's analysis of the open source business model is like getting a clean shower after being repeatedly bathed in pigs' vomit by tribal village people from an island society still struggling with primitive tool-making and advanced motor skills.
the best quotes:
"...the freedom to use, distribute, and modify software will prevail against any model that attempts to limit that freedom. It will prevail not for ethical reasons, but for competitive, market-driven reasons."
"Ironically enough, we also disqualified managers who could not accept creating a closed-source component to our business. Open Source was a business strategy, not a philosophy, and we did not want to hire managers who were not flexible enough to manage either open or closed source products to meet overall company objectives."
"The concept of free market economics is so vast that I often like to joke that each year when it comes time to award the Nobel prize in economics, it goes to the economist who most eloquently paraphrases Adam Smith. But behind that joke lies a kernel of truth: there is untapped and unlimited economic potential waiting to be harnessed by using a more true free market system for software."
"Open-source software taps the intrinsic efficiency of the technical free market, but does so in an organic and unpredictable way. Open Source businesses take on the role of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' guiding it to both help the overall market and to achieve their own microeconomic goals."</div>
open source licenses
"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
The fuzziness of the words 'distribute' and 'publish' are the main problems. when is software distributed? when it is moved from development servers to production? any time it is copied? what about publishing? does that occur when you host the executable code on your website?
GPL-aholics will readily admit that this clause turns the GPL into a viral license, one which will extend itself to every work ever remotely related to the original GPL'd work. they will also attempt to justify the viral nature of the license with long-winded raves about freedom (not as in beer, of course!) and the supposedly eternal truth that freedom of modification and distribution of software will continue on forever to create the best software programs.
and they're right, but only so far. if someone can see the source code, they can see all the operations of the program, and can modify the program to fit their own needs, giving them complete control over the software...something very enticing to businesses.
but these businesses also have their own methods of operation, their own trade secrets, and their own vulnerabilities that become woven into the software that they create, and they don't want to be forced to expose these rightly owned things to everyone.
this is why the other licenses like the the Apache Software License, the BSD License, and LGPL are gaining acceptance in the corporate world, and the GPL is not. it carries with it the full benefits of the open-source license, but leaves behind the viral requirement on the part of the open-source user.
I have to agree with this approach. Requiring that the users of your software expose source code is just as restrictive and anti-'freedom' as requiring the users not to expose source code. It's the opposite end of the spectrum, but the same principle as going proprietary. Call it 'publietary'.
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non-political post
but now that you are adequately convinced of my deficient writing and communication skills, we can skip straight to the meat:
I was amazed at the amount of market analysis that confirms my amazingly optimistic 'gut feelings' about web services. a few of the key pieces are a summary of an official Radicati Group report stating that the market for web services solutions, management, integration, and security will be worth $6.2 billion by 2008. another is a brief article showing web service project spending by firms has survived the economic slow-down, leading to a market of several billion dollars over the next few years, so say analysts.
with things like this going around, I find it hard to recognize other developers' interest in anything else. I'm having limited success and un-limited frustration finding more developers that would be willing to contribute free time and resources to an open-source project in this vein, but I've never doubted that with a good amount of persistence, some of those billions can make their way into my pocket, and yours, if you want to help out.
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aversion to new stuff
from a sales-person for an IT product designed to handle data integration and business process management. nearly in the same breath, this person both says that their product embraces XML so much that much of their product runs off of XML-defined processes (BPML, specifically). but also bashes XML in comparison to EDI for b2b ecommerce.
they said that people went to XML and found out it was too flexible to be viable.
WTF?
now, I thought it would be in the best interest of a firm to be able to work with their data in their own way, such that they could adjust for the various demands of their business...but I guess that's not right. what we should do is have everyone use exactly the same kind of information to describe not only what, but how to display, an invoice, or a purchase order, or a Cementing Template. rather than let firms, or even industry comittees, adopt their data representations to fit their needs, we should all cling to out-dated and cryptic formats, described by either printed documents or proprietary schemas?
the flexibility of XML is its boon. if my firm needs to digitally receive price list updates from a small, non-technically-oriented vendor, we can work up an .xsd and send it to them in a matter of a few minutes. or, we could spend a few hours looking for the right EDI transaction set to use, and then bicker with them about the version, and any exceptions, oh, and yeah, they can't afford a VAN or and EDI parser. oops.
this guy was from a mega-corp that is used to dealing with mega-corps and it's obvious. this stuff is why I'm so excited about lamp5. none of these monolithic dinosaurs realize that open-source, open standards, and the internet are going to end up making the entire IS industry MORE disperse, flexible, and dynamic. it probably scares them too much that they won't control any portion of the market anymore. they will have to out-perform their competitors to keep customers. something these shops are not accustomed to.
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welcome
If you already know about web services, you'll know the name, 'WS-RandomThoughts', is a play on the naming conventions used in 2g (2nd generation) web services technologies. see http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/#drafts
I'm abandoning my xanga, since it was and is basically limited to draining brain power from OSU students who somehow become convinced that their social interactions deserve eternal digital archiving rights, no matter how insignificant and pointless said interactions are.
if you came here from lamp5, don't take my opinions to represent all of the lamp5 community, as I am just one member, and probably one of the less inteligent members, too.
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