In a post at Crooked Timber, there’s a discussion of how the notions that widespread ownership of guns saves lives, tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand, and global warming is a myth are often seen in close association with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software. Sounds like a useful, multi-criteria litmus test for blockheads, if you ask me . . . .
One aspect of this is the proliferation of “studies” and “benchmarks” that purport to show how open source products are either a hopeless dead-end for business (ie, non-hobbyists) or unsuitable for real work. The Alexis de Toqueville Institute study has been mentioned in these pages before, and I found this updated analysis when I was looking for some detail for a comment on CT.
I.D.E.A.L. Technology Corporation – Press Center:
[A revised and renamed section of the AdTI document] contains more fallacious arguments like:
1) Capitalism means getting paid is the best motivation to succeed
2) Paid programmers bring commercial products to market
3) If no one buys the software, there is no incentive to innovateConclusion: No more innovation.
This flies in the face of the reality of software development. Most really successful Open Source software projects like the Linux kernel, Samba, Apache, PHP, Perl and the GNU tools are providing commodity applications which not intended to be particularly innovative in and of themselves, although many are. However, they provide a nice foundation to be innovative on.
Commercial companies can still make money innovating, but the most financially successful software company, Microsoft, is making most of its money off of software commodity items, namely an set of operating systems and an office productivity suite. It can only make these profits because it has created a barrier to competition to keep the prices high.
I have to admit I haven’t seen an innovative word processing feature in years. Of course, it doesn’t need one because it is a mature product! You’d imagine word processors would be like light bulbs after 25 years in the market, but strangely enough I still can’t open a formatted document in the word processor of my choice and send it to someone with any hope it will be viewable as I sent it.
The last part should be a big cluestick for people who think we’ve come a long way, but I suspect most of the MSFT fanboys have never exchanged files without anyone outside the Pale of an MSFT monoculture. Of course, you can send someone a file created in one OS’s version of Word and have it fail to be recognized in the other. And this is innovation . . .
Their sole innovation, if you can call it that, was to get hardware makers to pay for Windows to be pre-installed: the hardware makers needed Windows to sell their non-innovative beige boxes and a license deal with Dell or Compaq was a lot easier to manage than shipping bunches of shrinkwrapped boxes in Circuit City or CompUSA.
If the end-user had to buy a bare-bones system and then choose and install their OS, we would either have seen far lower penetration of the home market or better products (have you ever installed Windows from scratch and compared it to anything else? Mac OS [9, X], RedHat Linux . . . ).
Of course, the author points out some areas where innovation is thriving:
Now, clustering technologies and niche technologies like processing satellite imagery, those are areas companies can innovate! Oh wait, there are already Open Source projects for innovative clustering ( http://www.beowulf.org/ and http://www.mosix.org/) and remote sensing
(http://www.remotesensing.org/) technologies. Looks like Open Source software is innovating pretty [well] without a direct link-up to the engine of capitalism by way of expensive software licenses.