Re: tlug: The Myth of Open Source Security

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "wile y" == Christopher Sekiya <wileyc@example.com> writes:

    wile y> [1] I can hear the rebuttal now: "well, if you're that
    wile y> concerned about it, why don't you
    wile y> take-ownership-of-the-sun4c-port/submit-patches-to-Dave/
    wile y> stop-using-sparc-linux-you-traitor?"  If you have to ask,
    wile y> you're missing the point ...

And if you think that's the rebuttal, _you're_ missing the point.

Sure, I do economics for a living.  So I can tell you that yes, the
market _is_ a viable way allocate resources.  Furthermore, it _does_
measure in a transparent, accurate[1] way the value that people (_real_
people like you and me, not just artificial ones like Microsoft and
Red Hat and Toyota) place on different activities, directly and
_indirectly_ (as inputs into other goods and services they want).

It is worth listening to what the market says about values.  It is
_much_ more diligent about digging out and polishing up indirect value
than any single human being is or can be.  Why shouldn't davem work
where the value is?  I'm not going to apologize for the market; it was
mankind's greatest invention before Linux, and still is.

Nor does the market refuse to support open source on its own terms---
you know very well that SourceForge does not run on a Classic Mac and
a couple of boxes of floppies.  There are nearly 1.5 TB and nearly
6000 projects online there as of last night!  SourceForge is less than
a year old, and look at that scale.  Not to mention some of the more
traditional archives like ftp.uu.net and gatekeeper.dec.com.  On the
other hand, attempts to directly introduce the market, sourceXchange
and Cosource.com, have a measly $400,000 in projects between them, and
that's mostly notional.  I think the markets _do_ "get it".  Big
business and free software _do_ mix.

But not necessarily in the way that the "traditional constituency"
(yup, Chris, I'm calling you a "reactionary") would like.  Salaries
(value for value) are going to draw developer resources away from some
of their current activities.  And there most definitely _are_ values
that are unpriced or hard to price in the market---Galt's Gulch is
fiction, and always was---but what are we going to do about that?

_I_ don't know.  _I_ wish there were better support for Sun4c, too.

But let's take a closer look at _my_ wish list.  _I_ wish that the
GNOME/Gtk+ crowd paid less attention to implementing transparent
windows badly and more to documenting the wc/mb/ucs string handling
functionality.  And guess what?  Fscking _IBM_ and _Sun_, BIG
businesses, not to mention the usual list of suspects like "Red Dog"
Linux, "Tub-o'" Linux" and "Sousa" Linux, big businesses themselves,
are bankrolling the effort.

Maybe you don't much care about I18N, not as much as the Sparc.  I can
and do respect that.  But I ask you to respect the fact that something
that in a pig's eye would happen soon without corporate support,
something that someone you know (and I hope respect) cares REALLY
deeply about, is going to happen because big business is behind it.
Win some, lose some.

    wile y> *chuckle* Point.  David has had his share of issues ...

    wile y> ... but he used to object to code on the basis of
    wile y> technical (and, yes, often personal) issues.  A bit
    wile y> different from dropping support for an arch because his
    wile y> employer doesn't think it's worthwhile to spend time on.

On balance, the market generally gets it more or less right: lots of
winners, and the (relatively small complement of) losers can go start
another sandbox and try again.  What's the alternative?  _Rule_ by the
minority is clearly out.

So what to do to get respect for minority needs?

  o _You_ _could_ "take ownership/submit patches/switch to *BSD", but
    not for all the projects there are; no question that's not the
    answer

  o So we need to find ways to create more OSS developers or free up
    time for existing ones ... some of them will work on any given
    project (given enough developers and time).[2]  But how?

  o Oh, and painful as it is for you, _you_ could spend a little more
    time on advocacy.  Not everybody can see what you see, you know.


Footnotes: 
[1]  If you think the market is neither transparent nor accurate,
shall we examine what happens to economies like the ones Kim "Jonggy
L", "the Blade" Putin, and Tanaka "Kaku-ii" (oops, he's dead, but then
so is the Nikkei) run?

[2]  Yes, that is the answer to the tyranny of davem or Red Hat's
financials; enough developers make a caucus, or in extreme cases a
fork, possible.  The DOS ports of GCC and Emacs were "in your eye"
responses to rms discriminating against an architecture he didn't
like; even that Master of Extremism eventually had to swallow them,
though.  The integration of Mule into Emacs was almost certainly a
response to the determined collection of developers called "The
Inheritors of JWZ", excuse me, XEmacs.org.  If you can't get that much
support, well, what's the rationale for throwing resources into it?
(I'm listening, but at the moment I honestly don't see one.)

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."
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