Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
However the prevailing cult of OSS is so dominant that even the most obviously proprietary projects have to pretend to be open source. (The fact that all of the individuals with “commit” privileges happen to work for a single company is purely coincidental.) And try telling any OSS enthusiast that they ought to be “open” to a world with multiple open source operating systems…
Anyway, by picking out the most provocative paragraph, I’m doing an injustice to Jaron. It really is an interesting piece, especially what it has to say about the importance of speciation. Check it out.
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I also think that Jaron’s first paragraph conflates political and technological conservatism in a way that fundamentally misundersands what each is — and why political radicalism of GNU might be fundamentally dependent upon technological conservatism.
The article provides three examples of what Jaron considers exciting. Two of the examples arguably amount to chrome, and one is obviously incredibly innovative — but depends on a stable ecosystem that could support it. (More on that later.)
I’m completely flabbergasted that he includes Flash on the list — if we’re looking for innovations of that era, I think HTML kicks Flash’s butt. Every time I encounter a Flash-based Web site, I groan. HTML, by contrast, opened up the creation and distribution of electronic documents to zillions of people. In the absence of HTML, Flash would be even less useful than it is now. What makes Flash cool, as code, to Jaron? I don’t get the feeling that he’s done a lot of Flash development, though I could certainly be wrong.
The iPhone, well, is a lovely example of a proprietary platform — built on top of Unix. It’s shiny and full of chrome, true, but its guts don’t differ much from what Jaron condemns. If Jaron’s point is that proprietary products have nicer chrome, that’s absolutely true. (I, for one, am willing to pay for chrome: I love my Mac, and believe that the chrome makes it more functional than a similarly-functional Linux box. But I’m not conflating chrome with infrastructure, or with “technologically interesting.”) Moreover, without a conservative infrastructure to support it, the iPhone would be a pretty but useless demo. Its real utility rests on its support for TCP/IP, HTML, SMTP, and GSM.
PageRank is cool. It also runs on top of *nix, and depends on the existence of an open infrastructure — HTML and HTTP. (Does Google search within Flash? As far as I know, it doesn’t.) I’m also not entirely sure that it’s fair to claim that it comes out of “proprietary development,” being a University project that grew into a commercially viable enterprise. It’s true that, as it’s evolved, PageRank has become both better and more proprietary, but the central insight that made PageRank worth evolving came out of a University, and its presumably open intellectual forum.
In other words, the revolutionary feature of the Internet was the ability to communicate with other people, and all three examples that Jaron lists relate to communication: producing content (Flash), direct transmission of content (iPhone), and location of content (PageRank).
I think that, if your goal is to communicate with other people, an open platform is desirable, in part because I haven’t seen much of a tradition of interoperability emerging from closed platforms. I’m sure that you remember the book that O’Reilly put out in the early-mid-nineties (just before SMTP-based e-mail over always-up Internet connections became commonplace), which contained instructions for connecting among the dozens of proprietary e-mail networks.
Which is a long-winded way of getting back to that technological conservatism, and the political radicalism.
The political radicalism amounts to handing everybody the Means of Production, as one of those political radicals might say, in such a way that puts them on a more-or-less equal footing with the best such equipment available. It’s no accident that Google’s PageRank democratizes the determination of relevance, to the point that they’re looking at including human opinions as part of that loop. And if there’s a proprietary communications device niftier than the iPhone, I haven’t seen it. It’s no accident that I despise Flash, which is in this sense counterrevolutionary, as it’s (relatively) expensive and (largely) closed.
But putting everybody on an even footing, as Stallman proposes, almost demands a common technological place for everyone to stand. Theoretically, this is a dependence on open protocols rather than open software, but in practice it’s expensive and difficult to develop yet another tcp/ip stack. Thus even Microsoft took the BSD-licensed TCP/IP stack from the *BSD flavors for Windows 2000.
I also think Jaron needs to read Worse is Better again.
I’m not sure he understands why Linux succeeded, or why if it hadn’t, a *bsd flavor would be running the nerd infrastructure today. I’m not sure what he thinks might have happened to make proprietary software interesting in the absence of open source.
Does he remember the late eighties through mid-nineties? The most technologically interesting computer interfaces (Amiga, NeWS, MacOS 7 and earlier) were to varying degrees commercial failures, which lost in part due to network effects, the inability of their providers to “sell” the advantages of their systems, and various other justifiable reasons for failures.
The rest of us, as I best recall, were using Motif, and Microsoft Windows 3.x, its own look heavily borrowing from Motif. Even Windows 95 was mighty clunky, and borrowing from other systems (e.g., MacOS). I don’t see a whole lot of reason to believe that the market would have evolved as rapidly and as thoroughly as it did without open-source competition. (Even Mac OS X is a rehash of NeXTStep, with alpha blending. And that, again, was basically Unix with a nice thick layer of semi-proprietary frosting.)
Does Jaron really believe that we’d have seen radically different software or system architectures in the absence of *nix success from the mid-nineties onward, via Linux and open source software? I’m happy to admit that OSS hasn’t broken much ground with regard to chrome and interface design, and is absolutely best at copying existing designs, but I don’t see anyone — proprietary, open-source, or mixed — breaking a ton of ground architecturally or functionally.
I like what we’re doing at Isilon, and I like ZFS, but that seems to me like a very small corner of the universe, where we’re nibbling at new designs, we’re heavily dependent upon existing open architectures, and neither has proven itself to be commercially durable as yet.
In the end, really, maybe I’m just confused because I don’t understand the commonalities that define what Jaron thinks is cool, or how he thinks that open-source has reduced the percentage or viability of cool things. I for one recognize that Google, Flickr, LiveJournal, RSS, and e-mail — things that have changed my life more than any application that lives on my computer — would have been too expensive to develop without an open-source infrastructure to reduce development and deployment costs. At the same time, I recognize that Google, Flickr, LiveJournal, Google News, Google Mail, and Apple Mail are all more-or-less proprietary applications that I use, which run on that local computer. Which is itself running Unix, with a proprietary layer.
I also think that “Web 2.0″ may be as radical as the Amiga was, and pointed in the direction of making it easier for people to develop cool proprietary or semi-proprietary things.
Hmm… perhaps this can be summarized as “I wish Jaron would distinguish between architecture and product.” I agree that open source isn’t great for cool products, but he doesn’t give a single example that speaks against open-source-based architectures, and doesn’t seem to recognize that those products he thinks are cool are all pretty heavily dependent upon those open architectures. (Interestingly, those open architectures develop with the same “punctuated openness” that he advocates for software — that’s where the IETF fits in.)
Lanier is incorrect, I think, that Unix is hindering radical creativity. It may well be a well-polished antique, but the presence of mechanisms in our own genes conserved from the very beginning of terrestrial life seems to clearly show that even “radical creativity” is not an entirely unconservative process.
But more importantly, the whole debate is nothing but hot air and bullshit. We don’t have to even make high level moral arguments such as Lanier’s or Dyson’s . They’re neither right nor wrong, they’re irrelevant.
We have a process of natural selection, the marketplace, which will consign what doesn’t work to the dustbin of history or bankruptcy, and the rest will remain. The relative values of creativity, conservatism, open- or closed-source will be settled by reality, not by argument.
If you want to work open-source, work open-source. If you want to work closed-source, work closed-source. If you can’t make a living doing something, you’ll have to do something else.
(I think it was Techdirt that pointed out recently that innovation — turning inventions into value — is vastly more important than invention itself. This may be tautological or circular: Innovators have to be capital owners, whom we already reward just for owning capital, but the point at least deserves investigation.)
What a curious pair of responses.
I think that Jaron is arguing that many people are misunderstanding what open source is good at, and that as a result they are making certain mistakes. Specifically, he’s suggesting that open source is not good at generating new inventions; it’s good at taking existing winners away from monopoly rentiers and driving their costs down to (more or less) zero. It does this by creating a new kind of “volunteer monopoly”; while this is an efficient way of driving down cost, like all monopolies it tends to resist disruptive innovation. We do see a few real inventions in the open source world, but they tend to be either “greenfield” opportunities or ways of reinforcing an OSS monopoly, like Linux or Apache.
Does this matter? The Bum seems to want to take a Keynsian long term view (”i.e. “In the long term we’re all dead) and rely on the mythical efficiency of the marketplace. But when it comes to deciding “what shall we do next”, it is absolutely not “hot air and bullshit” to discuss business strategy; in fact, it would be irresponsible not to do so.
For good or ill, the current venture capital model depends on funding a large number of promising ideas with the expectation that some fraction of them will prove successful. I take Lanier’s thesis to be that in the new field of “synthetic biology”, many of the participants are seduced by the idea that they could emulate the open source pattern that has been “successful” in the area of systems software. (They even have their own Pied Piper, with Freeman Dyson – out of his area of expertise – playing the role of Richard Stallman.) Lanier is saying that they are making a mistake: they misunderstand why open source software has succeeded, and the approach they’re taking is dead wrong for a virgin field like “synthetic biology”. There is no existing winner to commoditize. They’re at the wrong point of the cycle.
I don’t think the efficiency of the marketplace is at all a myth, and I’m not looking at the “we’re all dead” long term. I think it’s a myth to hold that the market is all powerful, but that it is in fact quite powerful for a wide variety of endeavors seems, if not entirely uncontroversial, then at least with strong evidentiary support.
My point is that I don’t think it’s useful to discuss open- vs. closed-source sans context: Any discussion is better focused on which paradigm is better for some specific task. Again, the evidence that both paradigms have been successful (and unsuccessful) for particular projects seems strong: Firefox, the iPod, Linux, Windows XP.
My point is that in any endeavor, whether it be software development and synthetic biology, there’s simply no need to choose between the open- and closed-source paradigm in a general way. Employ them both.
I think Lanier is perpetuating a category error when he relates the open- and closed-source paradigms to the generation of creativity. Both are techniques, rather, for turning creativity into value. The problem with creativity is not that there isn’t enough of it, it’s that there’s too much: We have to select which creative ideas are actually valuable, and which are without value.
If one reads Lanier’s article as simply establishing the viability of the closed-source paradigm side-by-side with open-source, his ideas are unobjectionable. My criticism, though, is that he is at least writing opaquely regarding pluralism, if not actually advocating the closed-source paradigm exclusively or predominantly.
[...] Geoff Arnold on Jaron Lanier Published December 31, 2007 Uncategorized Great comments about the recent Jaron Lanier “open-source stifles creativity” article over at Geoff Arnold’s blog. [...]
If that was his point, I think it’s at least possibly true. However, I don’t see any way in which his article provides logical arguments or even solid examples of this. I see him arguing-from-authority more than providing evidence.
For what it’s worth, Stallman does the same, only for Stallman the argument is a moral argument, not a practical one. Jaron seems to be saying that there’s a measurable, practical difference, but I don’t think he demonstrates this. So when he says, “Flash is innovative,” I can say, “Python is innovative, too.”
I’m a big fan of the venture capital model. But I think that the Barefoot Bum is absolutely on the money when he says that it’s about context. If you’re trying to make a business go by writing open-source software, I’ll scratch my head. (Unless, perhaps, you’re really a service provider: I’m not sure that keeping Flickr’s source code proprietary is what makes them successful — it’s providing a reliable, highly performant service that uses that software, which takes a lot more than the code itself to do.) If you tell me that you’re building a great new semi-proprietary platform (e.g., Facebook) and that as a matter of being more creative you’re not running on top of an existing open-source platform, I’ll scratch my head there too.
I suspect that synthetic biology may require both a “platform” and “application” level as well, and that if the platform tools (organisms, techniques, whatever) are proprietary and locked up, that’ll stifle competition and slow progress. (i.e., there will be a monopoly situation, which can stifle creativity.)
If the platform tools are open and available, proprietary competition above that level will be much healthier. (What would it cost to build Google if there wasn’t an open-source operating system running beneath it? Can you imagine paying for Windows licenses on every one of those boxes in each data center…)
On the other hand, I think I’m with Bill Joy on this one, and I’m not sure I relish the healthy competition of artificial organisms without a lot more forethought than folks are putting into it.
The worst thing about Linux [or more specifically about Ubuntu Linux these days] is the community itself. You couldn’t convince these people that 2 + 2 = 4 let alone that an OS is a tool and not a way of life. More about this can be found at The Truth about Linux.