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A good op-ed from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:
I see the current uproar between those who partner with Microsoft–Novell, Linspire and Xandros–and those that swear off Microsoft partnerships—Ubuntu and Mandriva—as being just another variation on the theme of open-source pragmatism versus free software idealism.
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Differences and all, though, the Linux companies still have more in common with each other than they do with Microsoft no matter who partners with the Windows giant or who doesn’t. One way or the other, they’re all out to carve out their own chunk from Microsoft’s territory.
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Sure, Microsoft loves to see the Linux companies fighting with each other. Microsoft hopes that this will lead to a repeat of the Unix wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which made sure that the Unix businesses never mounted a successful challenge to Microsoft’s desktop operating system business and eventually lost the x86 server market to Microsoft’s own NT, which was followed by Windows 2000 and Server 2003.
Linux isn’t Unix though.
Bottom line — there’s no civil war, just healthy disagreement among companies committed to open source. Read the whole thing.
§ June 19th, 2007 § Filed under ROI § 2 Comments
From The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretic Analysis by Hammad Siddiqi:
If a female finds the toilet seat in a wrong position then she will most probably yell at the male involved. This yelling inflicts a cost on the male. Based on this omission, women may argue that the analysis in [prior] papers is suspect.
In this paper, we internalize the cost of yelling and model the conflict as a non-cooperative game between two species, males and females.We find that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient. However, to our dismay, we also find that the social norm of always leaving the toilet seat down after use is not only a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies but is also trembling-hand perfect. So, we can complain all we like, but this norm is not likely to go away.
Bummer.
(h/t Andrew Sullivan)
§ June 18th, 2007 § Filed under Open Source Comments Off
Steven Vaughn-Nichols quotes Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire (who just signed a Linux deal with Microsoft):
“In the early days of Linux, we had no choice but to bang the ‘fight Microsoft’ drum (and as you know, no one did it better than Linspire) [Linspire was first known as Lindows and eventually reached an out of court settlement with Microsoft], because we needed to get everyone’s attention, including Microsoft’s, and to be honest, back then, Linux didn’t work very well on the desktop, so it was pretty much the only thing we could find to say about it to get attention.”
That’s no longer the case today, said Carmony. Microsoft has a better understanding of what Linux and open source is, and how to work in a cooperative manner with Linux, and we have a lot more interesting things to talk about.”
He continued, “It’s time to move past all of the idea that for Linux to succeed, Microsoft must fail. We need to let it go, and start working with ALL the players in the PC ecosystem, and that certainly includes Microsoft. I can’t speak for the rest of the Linux and open source community, but from Linspire, you can expect less fighting and name calling, and more attention to partnering to build a better Linux. We will certainly still compete, just like Apple and Microsoft still compete aggressively, but we’ve also [got to] build a bridge to work together when necessary.”
“There are those who want to isolate Linux from the other 99 percent of the desktop computing world, and if they succeed, Linux will never grow past 1 percent of the desktop market,” added Carmony. “I want to see Linux move in the opposite direction, and rather than be exclusive, more inclusive.”
§ June 16th, 2007 § Filed under Open Source Comments Off
Today I heard Steve Shreeve, founder and former CTO of Medsphere, speak at a local event on open source here in Pasadena. Shreeve and his brother founded Medsphere and were leading the effort to develop an open stack implementation of VistA (the VA health care software, not the proprietary desktop OS) until they were sued by Larry Augustin and the Medsphere board under the provisions of the DMCA.
Steve is an incredibly passionate guy, and has quite a story to tell of how Medsphere was founded and grew. He comes across as a very sympathetic person, as well as very bright (he has an undergrad EE degree with minors in Mathematics and Physics, then went to med school where he pursued a joint MD/MBA program). It’s hard not to like the guy.
But I’ve also heard Larry Augustin speak, and I was impressed with his grasp of the underlying economics of the open source software business. Medsphere is releasing its OpenVista in a two-tiered model, keeping much of the non-VA enhancements proprietary. I imagine their intent is to monetize the hell out of their development efforts, and I can’t blame them. It’s easy to see how Shreeve’s enthusiastic embrace of open source ran afoul of the Board’s desire for revenue.
So this is a cautionary tale: bright entrepreneur starts up company, and his VC-led Board ends up suing him for $50 million over an apparent mis-understanding regarding what was to be released under the GPL and what was to remain proprietary. Bottom line — get the details regarding what is to be released under which license nailed down before anything gets posted to SourceForge.