[Noisebridge-discuss] City of Berkeley explanation of why not using open source.. Open Source vs. "proprietary" software

[travis+ml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 02:47:59PM -0700, Wladyslaw Zbikowski wrote:
> A. That the Rent Board needs a customized database engine or operating
> system, and finding an open-source developer to do it would be a
> prohibitive undertaking.

By the way, a while back (five or more years) I saw some VCs saying
they had money for companies forming around open-source "back end
office" solutions.  Presumably one would create trouble ticket,
inventory, CRM engines and so forth, and then customize them to the
particular business needs and workflows of various orgs, sharing
the common stuff across them.

In practice, getting an org to change the way it does business is very
hard, but a lot of orgs were willing do it for 1980s technology like
SAP, and are still doing it.  I assume it requires selling them on the
advantages, since the cost will be obvious.

> > Once a vendor has modified the base
> > code, it could become proprietary unless they turn around an publish it,
> > thereby counteracting the benefit of going with Open Source in the first
> > place.
> 
> Bizarre. He is saying what could happen is:
> 
> 1. Ownership of MySQL turns unfriendly
> 2. XYZ Corp starts a fork called XyzSQL
> 3. XYZ also turn out to be shitheads and take their code proprietary
> 4. Therefore the ability to fork is worthless

I think he's saying:

Code forks
We depend on the fork
fork goes commercial
now we're stuck

In practice, F/LOSS tends to work rather well and not require updates
like commercial software.  It also does not "go commercial", that is
what makes it F/LOSS, as opposed to open-source.

I had statically linked ircii and vi binaries from 1992 that worked
well in BSD Unix (NetBSD, FreeBSD) well into 2005.  It simply doesn't
suffer from the "bit rot" or shifting OS API because the OS API didn't
shift very much, unlike the commercial software "upgrade cycle".  If
you don't believe in this, show me a modern system that can run
Windows 1.0 multimedia applications.  Perhaps this is the problem;
that they fundamentally assume that software must be upgraded
constantly in order to continue functioning.

More discussion on my homepage here (in the "documents about
Microsoft"):
http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/

Most web site designers are still stuck with MSIE6 because a lot of
intranet software was coded to it (and still is coded to inActiveX
crap) and so corporate customers couldn't migrate when MSIE7 changed
the way it did things.  Since they don't have source, they can neither
recompile nor modify the source.  This is a problem with business
software designed to non-open standards.

That having been said, modifying source is a prohibitive undertaking
depending on how complex the source was - see jwz's comments about how
going open-source didn't save Netscape/Mozilla.  That code base was
complex and took some study before you could become productive.
Sometimes system software can be so simple that any C programmer can
modify it, but not always.

Perhaps you've seen this if you've looked at some code... if it's all
printf and write, you can get right to work.  But if it's all calls to
unfamiliar method names, on unfamiliar classes, it's not so easy, you
have to learn the problem domain a little before modifying code.

> > City programmers are competent at creating small,
> > specialized applications for those needs that can't be filled by commercial
> > software -- customizing databases and operating systems exceeds their skill
> > set.
> 
> Again, the idea that the Rent Board needs to write a custom database
> engine to use an open source database is a total red herring. Someone
> is feeding them misinformation.

I think they're talking about webapps, but confusing it with databases
and operating systems.
-- 
http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/
He who lives by the computer, dies by the computer.
If you are a spammer, please email john at subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.
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