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Bannor
January 3rd, 2008, 07:10 PM
interesting article presented intellegently by the other side.




Long Live Closed-Source Software!
12.11.2007
There's a reason the iPhone doesn't come with Linux.
by Jaron Lanier

If you’ve just been cornered by Martha Stewart at an interdisciplinary science conference and chastised for being a wimp, you could only be at one event: Sci Foo, an experimental, invitation-only, wikilike annual conference that takes place at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There is almost no preplanned agenda. Instead, there’s a moment early on when the crowd of scientists rushes up to blank poster-size calendars and scrawls on them to reserve rooms and times for talks on whatever topic comes to mind. For instance, physicist Lee Smolin, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and I talked about the relationship between time and math (touching on ideas presented in my October 2006 column).

The wimp comment was directed at me, and Martha was right. I hadn’t stood up for myself in a group interaction. I’ve always been the shy one in the schoolyard. Back in the 1980s, I was drawn to the possibility that virtual reality would help extend the magical, creative qualities of childhood into adulthood. Indeed, the effect of digital technology on culture has been exactly that, but childhood is not entirely easy. If Lee hadn’t forged through the crowd to create our session, I never would have done it. What made Martha’s critique particularly memorable, though, is that her observation was directly relevant to what emerged from Sci Foo as the big idea about the future of science.

It wasn’t official, of course, but the big idea kept popping up: Science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of “Web 2.0,” becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux. And that goes double for synthetic biology, the current buzzword for a superambitious type of biotechnology that draws on the techniques of computer science. There were more sessions devoted to ideas along these lines than to any other topic, and the presenters of those sessions tended to be the younger ones, indicating that the notion is ascendant.

It’s a trend that seems ill-founded to me, and to explain why, I’ll tell a story from my early twenties. Visualize, if you will, the most transcendentally messy, hirsute, and otherwise eccentric pair of young nerds on the planet. One was me; the other was Richard Stallman. Richard was distraught to the point of tears. He had poured his energies into a celebrated project to build a radically new kind of computer called the LISP Machine. It wasn’t just a regular computer running LISP, a programming language beloved by artificial intelligence researchers. Instead it was a machine patterned on LISP from the bottom up, making a radical statement about what computing could be like at every level, from the underlying architecture to the user interface. For a brief period, every hot computer-science department had to own some of these refrigerator-size gadgets.

It came to pass that a company called Symbolics became the sole seller of LISP machines. Richard realized that a whole experimental subculture of computer science risked being dragged into the toilet if anything happened to that little company—and of course everything bad happened to it in short order.

So Richard hatched a plan. Never again would computer code, and the culture that grew up with it, be trapped inside a wall of commerce and legality. He would instigate a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, program: the Unix operating system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could control software culture. Eventually a kid named Linus Torvalds followed in Richard’s footsteps and did something related, but using the popular Intel chips instead. His effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded open-software movement.

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. 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.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

+++
Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed software-development shop on Earth?

There were plenty of calls at Sci Foo for developing synthetic biology along open-source lines. Under such a scheme, DNA sequences might float around from garage experimenter to garage experimenter via the Internet, following the trajectories of pirated music downloads and being recombined in endless ways.

A quintessential example of the open ideal showed up in Freeman Dyson’s otherwise wonderful piece about the future of synthetic biology in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. MIT bioengineer Drew Endy, one of the enfants terribles of synthetic biology, opened his spectacular talk at Sci Foo with a slide of Freeman’s article. I can’t express the degree to which I admire Freeman. Among other things, he was the one who turned me on to an amazing 11-sided geometric figure (see Jaron’s World, April 2007). In this case, though, we see things differently.

Freeman equates the beginnings of life on Earth with the Eden of Linux. Back when life first took hold, genes flowed around freely; genetic sequences skipped around from organism to organism in much the way they may soon on the Internet. In his article, Freeman derides the first organism that hoarded its genes as “evil,” like the nemesis of the open-*software movement, Bill Gates. Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. Freeman suggests that the coming era of synthetic biology will be a return to Eden. Species boundaries will be defunct, and genes will fly about, resulting in an orgy of creativity.

But the alternative to open development is not necessarily evil. My guess is that a poorly encapsulated, communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely guarded species for the same reason that the Linux community didn’t come up with the iPhone: Encapsulation serves a purpose.

Let’s say you have something complicated like a biological cell, or even something much less complicated, like a computer design or a scientific model. You put it through tests, and the results of the tests influence how the design will be changed. That can happen either in natural evolution or in a lab.

The universe won’t last long enough to test every possible combination of elements in a complicated construction like a cell. Therefore, the only option is to tie down as much as possible from test to test and proceed incrementally. After a series of encapsulated tests, it might seem as though a result appears magically, as if it couldn’t have been approached incrementally.

Fortunately, encapsulation in human affairs doesn’t need lawyers or a tyrant; it can be achieved within a wide variety of political structures. Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

The politically incorrect critique of Freeman’s point of view is that the restrictions created by species boundaries have similarly made billions of years of natural biology more like hardware than like software. To put it another way: There won’t be an orgy of creativity in an overly open version of synthetic biology because there have to be species for sex to make sense.

I seem to hold a minority opinion. I’ve taken a lot of heat for it! I can’t hire Martha Stewart as a life coach, so the one thing I hope synthetic biology won’t import from the open-software world is the cultlike mania that seems to grip so many open-source enthusiasts.
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http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/article_print

rfruth
January 3rd, 2008, 07:16 PM
They (Apple) want closed source :shock:

Bannor
January 3rd, 2008, 07:26 PM
I personally enjoyed the interesting perspective on what drives Stallman

gn2
January 3rd, 2008, 08:17 PM
interesting article presented intellegently by the other side.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/article_print

Pity you didn't just crop out the interesting bit and post it, because I couldn't find it.

arbulus
January 3rd, 2008, 08:31 PM
I have to disagree with this.

I believe that open source software is better than closed source because you have so many eyes looking at it. You have people all over the world filing bug reports, offering code, fixes, etc. where closed source has a room of 20 people working on one app, and they don't accept outside input. You end up with an open source app that is more stable, secure and better because it's so open. With closed source you end up with something like Windows ME.

And it's not just about the quality of the software either. It's about the freedom to do with it as you please. closed source companies force you to use their software only in ways they approve of. They tell you how many machines you can use it on, what you can do with it, and reserve the right to deactivate your software at anytime should you violate their rules. That's not the kind of world I want to live in. If I purchase or download a piece of software, then I should be free to use it, modify it, and do with it whatever I want, however I want.

The author also mentions that the Linux community didn't come up with anything like an iPhone because its diaspora hinders innovation. I completely disagree with this. The open source community as a whole is, in my opinion, ahead of the game with innovation. Look at features in Linux/Unix that the closed source folks are just now adopting: virtual desktops, compositing window managers, stability, security - these are things that have been a part of the community for years that the other guys are just now starting to look at. And if you want to talk about phones: I'm very much looking forward to the Open Moko Neo1973. Look also at other innovations: Asus eeePc, XO, devices that could really make a big difference in the electronics and education markets - there really aren't any others out there (beside the Classmate PC). But this is an area where the community did it first.

I definitely think the article is way off base.

saulgoode
January 3rd, 2008, 08:34 PM
Pity you didn't just crop out the interesting bit and post it, because I couldn't find it.

I think the interesting bit was that Martha Stewart attended an interdisciplinary science conference on synthetic biology.



The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things.

I should think the opposite true. Closed, proprietary solutions tend to be short-lived and rarely afforded the opportunity to realize any potential. Efforts expended are often lost and need to be replicated in order for progress to take place (and this assuming the patent situation even allows any but the original implementors to follow up on the techniques). The open source approach is what will provide the best solution in the long-term, as when innovations occur they are available for all to implement and improve.

shad0w_walker
January 3rd, 2008, 08:39 PM
arbulus: Gotta agree with you on pretty much everything.

On the topic of innovation. Did this guy just ignore whats happening BEHIND the scenes? Yes the iPhone has a shiny interface and 'revolutionry' multitouch setup, but behind that it is still the same old mac kernel. Looking behind the scenes at the linux kernel we have new managers and schedulers for a bunch of things, CFS for example, I don't recall seeing that elsewhere. It's a matter of highly visible innovation versus hidden innovation.

Mac and Windows and all the other closed companies get their innovation widely known because they have huge marketing budgets and can show it off.

Linux and other open source projects don't tend to have that much money and can't afford to flood the TV with iPhone ads or Vista ads every 5 seconds. The open source community focuses more on the innovating than advertising the innovation.

pjkoczan
January 3rd, 2008, 09:04 PM
Re: innovation.

There are only so many ways one can re-invent the wheel, and many good ideas withstand the test of time. Are you going to say that Intel chips aren't innovate because ENIAC had an add instruction first? Of course not, Intel innovates because they added new instructions and improved the underlying architecture, much like Linux has extended and solidified Unix, for instance.

Unix borrowed from Multics, just about everyone in the field of operating systems took ideas from Dykstra, and computing in general borrowed from the fields of math and physics. Borrowing does not necessarily mean lacking innovation.

While there are a few annoying archeologies in *nix (very limited modes and permissions come to mind), that doesn't stop it from being a viable OS and it doesn't suggest that OSS is simply a copy-and-paste job. In some ways OSS is playing catchup, mostly where proprietary software dictates the rules, like in closed formats. In many other ways, though, OSS is leading the way with huge performance gains and additional functionality.

Samhain13
January 3rd, 2008, 09:05 PM
The author must be confusing "invention", "innovation", and "originality"? One can't innovate on what has not been invented. And whether innovating or inventing, one can always strive to be original. :)

joe.turion64x2
January 3rd, 2008, 09:21 PM
Bad article to the very least, it let one think a lot about the guy's inteligence. And even considering its 'facts', closed source ends in a bad position: how comes a mere copy of a 30 years old OS beats in security and stability the 'top of the line' current closed source OS's?

Joe.

Steveway
January 3rd, 2008, 09:25 PM
Also, who cares about the iPhone?
The first Android based phones are announced to come out this February.
Android is one of the things that will drive 2008.
(Android is a GNU/Linux based Operating System for Mobile Phones by Google and some other Companys, it's pure awesome.)

Bannor
January 3rd, 2008, 10:25 PM
This article was not an attack on Linux. It was a critisism. I think he makes a very good point. Linux is very good at refining inovation and incorperating it. It is not great at doing the inovating. If open source was really doing things that not one else was than poeple would have to use open source stuff. Maybe this article hits the nail on the head. I love ubuntu despite the multiple headaches it has given me, I am constantly spreading the word, but let's not let our own huberis get in the way of our success

RebounD11
January 3rd, 2008, 10:30 PM
I didn't read the article but I would say the main reason that iPhone doesn't come with Linux is that it's made by Apple... and last time I remember Apple makes MacOS... it's like MS released a phone sth other than Windows Mobile.

Not impossible but I would bet on an alien crash landing in Redmond before that happens :D

arbulus
January 3rd, 2008, 11:00 PM
This article was not an attack on Linux. It was a critisism. I think he makes a very good point. Linux is very good at refining inovation and incorperating it. It is not great at doing the inovating. If open source was really doing things that not one else was than poeple would have to use open source stuff. Maybe this article hits the nail on the head. I love ubuntu despite the multiple headaches it has given me, I am constantly spreading the word, but let's not let our own huberis get in the way of our success



I think the crux of what he was saying is that the closed source model works really well because it's so closed and tightly controlled. conversely, the open source model doesn't work because it's so spread out and there are too many hands in the pot.

Those ideas should be completely reversed. Closed source model doesn't work because it's so closed and tightly controlled and open source model works so well because it's so open and there are so many people participating.

Are there improvements to be made in the community? Sure there are, there are always things we can improve upon. i don't see the acknowledgment of the open source model working better as hubris, but I also don't think that it's a cause to rest on our laurels either. There are always places to innovate, things to revolutionize, things to invent, things to make better.

The problem of current open source adoption isn't it's lack of quality or capability, it's the domination by the closed source folks and vendor lock in. Try going to a multi national corporation running Windows Active Directory to manage, control and deploy all of their systems, mail, etc., and try to ask them to convert to Linux. It would be essentially impossible due to vendor lock in. Their business model is so closely tied to Microsoft that anything outside of that is just unthinkable. It's the lock in like that which prevents more open source adoption. MS jumped into the software market at the birth of the PC age and have taken a strangle hold onto everyone's computers. It's widespread use doesn't make it good, it just makes it dominant.

The problem that the open source community faces is educating the public and showing that there are alternatives out there, that they don't have to be tied to one vendor, one system, so that in essence Microsoft owns their business or their personal data.

Erdaron
January 3rd, 2008, 11:24 PM
I don't think that open source community is entirely a diametric oppose of the closed source principle. For every OSS project, there is a specific group of people doing that one thing. It's not just random people coming and going, writing odd bits of code, and in the end it just works somehow. People interested in a specific issue get together and work it out.

The difference is that they are still open to others at every point during development. At any time someone else can look at their ideas and say, hey, I can use this to solve some other problem, and then do it. Or maybe implement them better in the same context.

Too many cooks in the kitchen is a problem, but in the OSS community it's fairly easy to say, "get your own kitchen." And while working in your own kitchen, you can peek into the other one.

gn2
January 3rd, 2008, 11:42 PM
I think the interesting bit was that Martha Stewart attended an interdisciplinary science conference

Who's she then, never heard of her.
Guess I'll Google her.

aysiu
January 3rd, 2008, 11:45 PM
I think the crux of what he was saying is that the closed source model works really well because it's so closed and tightly controlled. conversely, the open source model doesn't work because it's so spread out and there are too many hands in the pot.

Those ideas should be completely reversed. Closed source model doesn't work because it's so closed and tightly controlled and open source model works so well because it's so open and there are so many people participating. I don't know much about software development, but I'd say about any kind of organized endeavor that there are tradeoffs to growth.

The smaller the operation, the fewer disagreements there are and the less coordination there is that needs to happen among workers... but each worker has to do more actual work.

The bigger the operation, the more (wo)manpower you have, so the more you can get done... but you also spend more time fighting about what to do and coordinating efforts than actually expending the effort.

Small: more production work, less coordination.
Big: less production work, more coordination.

days_of_ruin
January 3rd, 2008, 11:51 PM
Could you link that wallpaper please :)

What does a piece of hardware have to do with software?
Gnu/Linux is about software not consumer electronics.:guitar:

days_of_ruin
January 3rd, 2008, 11:55 PM
I didn't read the article but I would say the main reason that iPhone doesn't come with Linux is that it's made by Apple... and last time I remember Apple makes MacOS... it's like MS released a phone sth other than Windows Mobile.

Not impossible but I would bet on an alien crash landing in Redmond before that happens :D


Maybe they will change from Microsoft(ware)
to Microhard(ware):lolflag:

BDNiner
January 4th, 2008, 12:00 AM
I don't think this article makes a good point because it seems like it is trying to compare hardware and software. Open source works with software because it is easy to obtain and modify that code. With hardware it is a different animal altogether. I don't think that hardware can be developed using an open source model since it would lack direction and take months to even years of incremental development since everyone will be on their own tangent.

Closed source software i feel has stunted the development of hardware since it is the software that pushes innovation not the hardware. manufactures have to make sure that their hardware can run certain software. That is why i feel that the personal computer hasn't changed much in nearly 20 years. All that has happened is the hardware gets faster and faster to handle the software instead of looking at the underlying model and changing it to make things more efficient.

Almost all architectures have fallen by the wayside when they went up against i386 architecture and all its derivatives. the only way i see the current situation changing is if the PC itself changes.

pjkoczan
January 4th, 2008, 12:03 AM
What does a piece of hardware have to do with software?
Gnu/Linux is about software not consumer electronics.:guitar:

Wait, aren't computers pieces of consumer electronics? And aren't many other pieces of consumer electronics (PDAs, MP3 players, phones) managed by computers, and have software written for them?

Software can't exist and has no point to exist without hardware. Without hardware, software is just a collection of words and punctuation that doesn't do anything, and makes the people who wrote it look crazy. By being in software you are in fact about hardware and consumer electronics.

Kzin
January 4th, 2008, 12:09 AM
A very eloquent, well written piece. However the writer does miss the focus of what open-source development is alltogether.

Creativity comes at many levels, the only thing that open source software would do is enhance it. Constantly “thinking outside the box” and working around obstacles, often the ones imposed by proprietary dev sheds, are prominent in any open-source programmer's toolbox. People wont write software for linux? Fine, we'll write software that will run other platform's software to open a wide range of possibilities for us. And as far as encapsulation is concerned, we have the freely available open-source code repositories have helped govern the potential disoganization implied by the article.

To the point, it would seem to me that there is a lot of "borrowing" from open source to proprietary and vice-versa, so I don't really see where he is going with the concept that open cannot come up with originals. Be it concepts, GUI designs or simply low level functionality, these two realms cross all the time. Heck, WinXP even has an /etc/hosts file (Don't bug me about relevance). One might go so far as to call it a symbiotic relationship.

Truly I would think that the only possible drawback to the open source community is people's ability to commit a percentage of their time "for free". The great thing being that because it is open source, someone can pick up and carry the flag to the next step (until they graduate or starve, whichever would come first). Furthermore, the writer misses the point that what a company can do with 51 billion annual revenue and 79,000 employees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) behind them can also be done through the philanthropy and good will of wo/man (Dare I say better; last I checked I didn't need 2GB o ram just to make my linux OS run smoothly).

Its not that the open source community cannot pull together enough to focus their efforts on one project, its that the people with the money do not want to share. There is already an iPhone hack out there (http://http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/IPhone-Linux) that is built on the existing hardware and could well have been a first generation release for the platform. If we could pull all the stops, Moore's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law) may itself be quantified from double bounds to quintuple bounds.

Jaron, the subject of your article drifts, therefore my reply follows suit. So in fuzzy conclusion, why are we reading drivel with lots of big words thrown in try to confuse us from the fact that you've considered the possibility of hiring Martha Stewart as a life coach?

Dyl.

P.S. I am not a communist and understand economy, free enterprise and the such. Good job Mac, M.$. for compiling peoples stuff and selling it, true business.