Comment by RobertoG
8 years ago
"Some corporations are bad, some are good, some are in the middle."
I don't think we need to bring morality to the discussion and complicate the issue.
Corporations are organized around profit, open-source is not. With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
To put Mozilla, a not-profit, in this context, in the same set that Google and Apple is not fair, by the way.
"Corporations are organized around profit, open-source is not. With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases. "
All three of these statements seem like nonsense.
First, "Corporations are organized around profit". No, they are legal entities, organized around articles of incorporation. These have a purpose statement. Often, those purpose statements are directed toward lawful business goals. But you do not have to be.
Non-profit vs profit corporations can, quite literally, have the same set of purposes. The only difference between the two is what you can do with profits.
"open-source is not".
I'm not even sure what you are trying to say here. Very large amounts of popular open source, is, in fact, produced by for-profit companies, and has been since the beginning of open-source. The term was even created by a group of people at a for-profit company. So ....
"With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases."
No, you can let whatever biases you seem to have stoke your imagination and prognosticate. You can't actually predict what will happen. There are plenty of happy, well functioning for-profit companies in open source that have been helping open source for many many many years. There are also plenty of non-profits that have harmed open source greatly.
It takes a lot of blindness to see this stuff as simply black and white.
So let's discuss your argument by taking Red Hat. For-profit, pure open source company. Founded 1993. Are we (I work at Red Hat) behaving badly?
I explicitly tried to put out "god" and "bad" from the discussion but OK, let's do that.
Red-Hat main worry is to be profitable. That's is above any other concern.
You can be sure that, if their bottom line was threatened, they will be pushed, in order to survive, to change their business model and they will not be beyond behaving in a "bad" (but legal) way if they don't see other way around the problem.
If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.
I'm sure you're aware of the Solaris exodus that happened when Oracle decided to make OpenSolaris proprietary after acquiring it from Sun. The entire OpenSolaris engineering division quit in the span of a month. Do you think the same wouldn't happen if RedHat decided to start doing horrible things to their customers or the community?
You're acting as though nobody who works at Red Hat cares about the community which they worked with before they had a job at Red Hat. I work at SUSE, and I work primarily as a member of a community. If SUSE started mistreating their customers or the wider community I would quit.
I hope that if you found that your company was mistreating the wider community you would also quit.
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My point is not that "all companies are good". I'm saying that making a judgement that "all companies will harm free software at the end of the day" ignores the fact that companies still need humans to work for them that do said contributions. Personally I find that many people who work in free software have quite strong ethics when it comes to things like this, but that's just my anecdote.
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If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.
You could argue that, but you would almost certainly be wrong. It is a myth that management at a company is always required to seek profit above everything else. Indeed, many companies explicitly do not do this, for example by having policies about operating in an environmentally friendly way for ethical reasons.
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did you support and push systemd?
Corporations are just legal structures.
For instance, you call Mozilla a non-profit. But it is a non-profit corporation, a legal entity that has organized itself in a certain way and applied for special tax treatment.
For profit or non-profit, makes a huge difference, in my opinion.
The goals and the incentives are very different.
Isn't Mozilla organized as a for-profit that owns a non-profit? Actually, if you look at US tax law there are reasons that some non-profits have for-profit parts. I know Mayo was organized that way. I think it had to do with some salary requirements, but its been twenty years, so I'm a bit fuzzy.
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Sure, as stated in the articles of incorporation. Many states offer an in-between type of corporation called a benefit corporation. It is for-profit, but the articles of incorporation require it behave, additionally, with social benefit in mind. And they are obligated by their charter, and can be dissolved by the state responsible for the entity's creation, if they don't follow it. The public would have some degree of standing that wouldn't necessarily apply to other corporations.
Technically, non-profit only means that the corporation is not allowed to directly redistribute profit to it's shareholders. This reduces the amount of pressure from shareholders to generate large profits, but still even non-profit corporation has to pay it's expeditures somehow and not lose money doing so.
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In the usa, most 'non-profit' are specifically orged for making huge profits. AAA would be a prime example. The church of towing cars some call it for using the loopholes.
> With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
With just this information and no other, I think I'd predict corporations to make better software than open source. I take it that's not what you had in mind.
(This is for similar reasons that I expect for-profit companies to provide better service than government-run ones. I don't particularly want to get into a debate right now about whether that actually happens, just trying to explain my intuitions.)
I'd agree with this. We can all agree Windows is infinitely better than Linux because people pay for it.
Also Internet Explorer is infinitely better than Chrome and Firefox.
For a non-technical user Windows is the infinitely better product than typical Linux desktops, you should see the pain that people go through that use commercial software nominally supported on Linux such as Cadence tools compared to the same experience on Windows, not to mention the lack of any serious well made office suite.
Heck in direct comparison Ubuntu 16.04 looks like a joke system compared to Windows 10, for example Ubuntu doesn't let me use my on board sound and only displays the dedicated sound card, but only half of the time. It has a horrible toy like ripped off user interface with ugly buttons, I can't think of a single application that is actually better than an equivalent application that is also available on Windows.The only reason I'm using Linux is because in a lot of areas including the field I work in it has achieved the same lock in that windows has for the general desktop market.
It is kind of sad that the only two alternatives are a clone of 70s technology or a clone of 80s technology. I feel like there should be a way to get things unstuck, but research into operating system design has all but ceased, with very few exceptions, many of them ironically coming from Microsoft.
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It's so frustrating that the data derived from this reality never agrees with these simple economic theories I derived from first principles and my econ 101 class that are so obviously correct.
I blame the so-called "experts" and their propaganda about "complexity" and "human behaviour" for distorting the efficient market. In the cases of historical data it seems they have even retroactively distorted the markets.
I didn't say corporations make better software than open source. I said that if I had only a single piece of information that's the prediction I'd make.
I have opinions about to what extent my counterfactual prediction is correct; and to what extent it's not; and why it fails, in the cases that it fails. I left them out because they weren't relevant. If you wanted to talk about them, that's a thing I might be willing to do. But I'm not interested in being snarkily accused of mistakes I didn't make.
I have no idea who makes better software.
What I mean is this: If you mix open-source with a for-profit entity, don't be surprise when that entity try to extract profits even in orthogonal ways to the original intention of the project.
Of course, in practice, and by the nature of open-source, this is a very difficult to do and, normally, can be prevented, but the trend is there and should be take into account.