Re: tlug: PJE

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Chris Sekiya <chris@example.com> wrote,

> On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
> >     jb> If a proprietary product that good comes along,
> >     jb> then the Open Source authors, too, must innovate if they want
> >     jb> to maintain market share.  That's competition.  That's good.
> >     jb> That's the market system.  That's good.
> > 
> > Yeah, what he said.  Chris?
> 
> Hmmm.  I'll take a stab at it.
> 
> Most Open Source (as opposed to Free Software) coders wouldn't have
> bothered to code if a similar product were available.  Linus, too -- I
> refer to his quote about the effect an available 386BSD would have had on
> his initial Linux work.
> 
> Real-world example: JWP.  Used to be the best/only Japanese wapuro on
> English Intel boxes.  Source code was readily available.
> 
> JWP died as soon as (hmmm, can't remember the name of the product --
> memory is going) became available.  There was no longer any point to JWP
> from the developer's point of view[1].
> 
> I fear that this will happen more and more frequently ...

I don't think so; on the contrary, I think the recent
popularity of Linux, in particular, and the Open Source
model, in general, may cause the most profound change in
the software industry ever. (And that is another reason why
a widespread Linux is a Good Thing.)

You have to see that the software industry as a whole is in
considerable trouble since a long time.  The problem is the
method for developing software and has been called the
`software crisis' for some time.  Actually, this was one of
the reasons why the discipline know as `software
engineering' was founded, and I don't know how many software
development and project management models have been invented
since then.  These days people are using the word software
crisis not so often anymore, but not because there have been
fundamental changes, but just because everybody started to
accept the situation.

Open Source might provide the paradigm change needed and, I
think, people are starting to get this idea.  The fact that
IEEE Software (one of the major scientific publications
concerned with software engineering) <http://computer.org/software/>
does a special issue on Linux

  http://www.linuxresources.com/news/ieee-call.html

tells a lot.  Software is fundamentally different from other
(wo)man-made `things'.  Not only that you can copy it, but
it is more complex than anything else.  Industry may finally
realize that the traditional closed development model, which
works great for hardware, is inadequate for software.  That
is probably what esr is hoping for.  But software project
managers don't want to hear about another theory, they want
to see hard results first.  If Linux ever manages to be a
serious threat - ie, loss of market share - to say NT, this
would be a very convincing result, I guess.

Cheers,

Manuel



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