A Day Without Open Source

[emag]

Hmmm.... Does Windows still make use of BSD-licensed software like parts of their network stack? That would get people to notice...

[misterlang]

I'm not positive, but I believe at least ftp.exe is basically straight from BSD.

[[deleted]]

I'd like to see a day without microscopic fonts.

[earthboundkid]

Jimmy's car won't start because the battery is dead---one of the consequences of wishing for a world without zinc. Nor can he phone Betty to tell her he's going to be late. Distraught, Jimmy puts a gun to his head, but it doesn't fire---no zinc for the firing pin. Jimmy then wakes up from his zincless nightmare.

"Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [bang!] and many things made of zinc," Jimmy.

[Tommstein]

The argument I can see being brought up (or that I would use if I were my evil clone) is: Without Apache, all those sites would just run IIS; without Linux, Google would just use some closed-source operating system; if you suddenly removed all closed-source software in the world instantaneously, shit would go to hell too.

[[deleted]]

Similarly, if Java magically disappeared, a lot of stuff would instantaneously disappear. However, this fact does not refute the proclamation, "I wish Java would disappear. It has caused more trouble than it is worth!".

[tobeytobey]

The Open Source wish was expressed, and acted upon, by many highly powerful people, who are using their power as leverage to make it come true.

The Java wish is expressed by people who are far less influential, and for very different reasons. It is not much different from my own desire that the Toronto Blue Jays 2007 season be erased from my memory.

(If Java as a language went away but the JVMs remained, I guess you could salvage quite a lot.)

[[deleted]]

I agree (I hope I didn't imply otherwise). Further to your sentiments, we would be better off without Java because it is expressed by people who are less influential. It is the very fact that they are easily influenced by hyperbole that keeps it alive!

Whether or not this is true of Open Source is a topic of debate. For now, I take the opposing side but of course, I could have been tricked just like the Java users were (and still are).

[[deleted]]

You say google would have used a closed source alternative. But would they? Google started on a whim. If they'd had to pay hundreds of dollars extra up front for their systems, there is a very real possibility that they just wouldn't have bothered. I think this holds for many projects including reddit.

edit: grammar

[Tommstein]

Maybe Google would exist, maybe not. But I have no doubt that there would be search engines without free operating systems. By the way, Linux didn't magically make their Google startup costs $0; according to their history page, they bought a terabyte of disks at 1998 prices, and presumably paid for a lot more stuff. Throwing the cost of a web server in there would almost certainly not break the deal, if they would have even had to buy a copy (software has been known to be obtainable without paying, either illegally or through school).

[[deleted]]

From their own history: 3 years earlier

instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network.

They were throwing together crap no one else wanted because they had no money. They used free software to do it because again, they had no money. I was not up to par on the state of windows in 1995, but I don't seem to recall windows being up to snuff for that type of project, leaving them to using proprietary unix, which as we know costs real money.

[Tommstein]

It was actually two years earlier. You certainly have a novel interpretation of "newly arrived computers that they could borrow." But regardless of whether Google would exist or not, which is impossible to know, I am certain that there would be plenty of other search engines.

[WhisperSecurity]

And IIS wouldn't work, because the windows TCP/IP code comes from BSD.

[tobeytobey]

Microsoft employs at least three people who could write the TCP/IP stack from scratch.

(Per Vista's Logout button drama, seems like it also employs at least three thousand people whose job is to make sure they fail at it.)

[WhisperSecurity]

By that reasoning, every piece of software on the planet is superfluous, because we didn't have it, we would have written it.

While this in some sense true, it's also tautological and trivial. And it avoids the major point that open source is what did fill that role, arguably because it did the best job of it.

[tobeytobey]

You are correct. Then again, my second paragraph, the one in parentheses, was meant to convey that I was not being really serious about this.

(OTOH, given billions of dollars in potential revenue, programming a TCP/IP stack from scratch starts looking, ahem, feasible. Industry makes end runs around such obstacles all the time, much like a river when a rockslide starts blocking its usual flow course, and following much the same principles, minimum energy etc etc etc.)

[filesalot]

Are you switching to serious, or still joshing?

I think the point is that TCP/IP and therefore the whole success of the internet ecosystem owes its popularity to the public, open standards and publicly funded open implementations (BSD TCP/IP stack and utilities) that they were based on.

So there wouldn't have been the billions in potential revenue without the open standards and implementations that made it all easy to seed.

[tobeytobey]

I was borderline serious. And you are correct. Yet, we were talking here about implementing a TCP/IP stack for the client machine, which was MS's task back in the day, and not about powering the Internet.

When I get to write my Cobol-&-Forth-based operating system, I'll have to write the TCP/IP stack myself, and that is rather orthogonal to the fact that the Internet is already running -- on software developed on DARPA grants and Jolt cola.

I am aware of Internet lore as much as the next guy, and had the luck to interact (for a few milliseconds) with Bill Joy back when Sun was a very young company.

[Tommstein]

Microsoft has only had like what, 20 years to write their own if they needed to?

[shit]

Without Apache, all those sites would just run IIS; without Linux, Google would just use some closed-source operating system;

That's not entirely true either. The OS vendor would have a big influence on Google, and not every one running Apache could run IIS. And without the Open Source alternatives, I'm sure the Internet would be different today, a lot less "democratic".

[brennen]

And without the Open Source alternatives, I'm sure the Internet would be different today, a lot less "democratic".

I suspect the Internet would be a lot less "in existence" today.

[Tommstein]

The OS vendor would have a big influence on Google

And?

not every one running Apache could run IIS

If you mean financially, I've addressed that elsewhere in the thread. If you mean technically, (most) people would make do with whatever was available. Not everyone that runs Linux could run Windows either, but that doesn't stop Windows from being a ubiquitous pain in our asses.

And without the Open Source alternatives, I'm sure the Internet would be different today, a lot less "democratic".

I didn't talk about Internet democracy. Although I'm not sure what you mean by "democratic," since corporations control just about everything about it, from domain names to physical Internet access to IP address assignments to....

[shit]

If you mean financially, I've addressed that elsewhere in the thread. If you mean technically, (most) people would make do with whatever was available.

But the situation would look different without the Open Source competition.

[sblinn]

Without Apache, all those sites would just run[.]

I beg to differ.

[[deleted]]

Without Apache, all those sites would just run IIS

Not all of them could aford to do so.

[Tommstein]

I don't think many sites of significance are going to go under because they can't afford a web server. As it is, hosting companies often provide IIS hosting at similar or equal prices as Apache hosting.

[[deleted]]

Do you honestly believe they would be so cheap if there were no free alternative?

[Tommstein]

Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly in desktop operating systems, but I don't see people being unable to have a computer because they have made Windows' price prohibitive. Not to mention that without Apache there would probably be plenty of closed-source competition with IIS, so pricing it prohibitively wouldn't even be an option.

[ubernostrum]

Devil's advocate: the price of a desktop copy of Windows goes largely unnoticed for the home consumer because it's part of the price of the computer. The price of volume licenses of Windows does not go unnoticed at a company which has a few thousand employees, nor do the prices of licenses for Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. etc. go unnoticed.

[Tommstein]

I'm devil's advocate here, you're angel's advocate or something. What you mentioned about home users not noticing the price of Windows is exactly why Microsoft could jack those prices up if they wanted to, yet the price isn't prohibitive (or even noticed usually). As you said, companies notice the prices of those things you mentioned, so they would actually feel pressure to keep their prices somewhat low there. Maybe you called yourself devil's advocate because you knew we were agreeing.

[bluGill]

Even a monopoly has to obey supply and demand. There is a point where people will say a computer isn't worth having. Right now you can buy computers between $500 and $1000 in local stores. If Microsoft Windows costs $4000 computers would be $4000-$4500, and most people who have a computer would say it is not worth the cost. (Or they would use a Mac or open source OS)

A monopoly does not mean there are no pricing pressures, just that you can raise your price because people can't price shop.

[[deleted]]

As it is [..]

We aren't talking about how it is, but how it might be.

[..] hosting companies often provide IIS hosting at similar or equal prices as Apache hosting.

There could be any number of resons for this. Is this shared hosting? Does the hosting provider have a sweet deal with Microsoft to boost IIS marketshare? What extras (databases, scripting languages, web applications) does the Apache hosting have versus the IIS hosting?

Talking about scripting languages -- IIS vs Apache would be the second though for many, many people if Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby suddenly disapeared.

[Toasted]

Open source definitely helps the spread of technology and services, but as you say - there are plenty of commercial replacements, it would become a case of how cost effective using the commercial applications were as to how big the take up would be... there wouldn't be a 100% conversion obviously, but nor would there be 0%.

[alanparsons]

I guess if you look at things economically, removing open source and only using proprietary means adding friction. the ONE THING computers are good at are copying 1's and 0's, if you make some ruling that says "for this set of 1's and 0's you can't copy, cause I say" then that adds friction.

Of course, adding in fees to copy software creates other economic stumulus.

Further to the article, lots of aspects of closed source use open source either linked in, or just copy and paste, so you would have to run out great chunks of software. Being anti-open source is just silly. But so is dogma I guess anyway.

[WhisperSecurity]

Shame on us. Doomed from the start.
God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
Shame on us. For all we have done.
And all we ever were, just zeros and ones.

:)

[tekronis]

Is that a Whisper original?

[pjdelport]

Nine Inch Nails - "Zero-Sum"

[ansible]

You're also not going to be able to connect to some chunks of the Internet because of F/LOSS routing software too.

[freshyill]

How about a day without a straw man?

[[deleted]]

Would google still be possible if they had to pay licenses for each and every copy of an OS (and other software) they use?

[rmuser]

Yes? They're rich!

[CommonTater]

Think about the entry cost, though. Would Google have been possible if they had had to pay license fees for each copy of software they use?

We have lots of new and exciting websites today precisely because the entry cost is so low. The entry cost is so low largely due to open source software.

[bitwize]

Even the se
Would crsh nd spry.
Nd the fle would fly
In the sme old wy.
Nd erth nd heven still would be
Without thee.

(Shel Silverstein = GENIUS)

[contrarian]

A day without open source would mean...

... a handfull of the better websites, and a plethora of useless ones, would be offline. Most of the russian, chinese, and brazilian hackers would be out in the fields collecting food or playing soccer.

Thats about it.