It is fair because he’s trying to formulate policy. If you’re going to formulate government policy toward software and are fundamentally ignorant of it, you need outside help from someone in the know. Why is he any different than some pimply teenager who knows a little about Linux? If he doesn’t really know much about the very model that he’s critiquing, that means that his opinion is for all intents and purposes based on ignorance.

Another thing, the people behind most of those projects started getting paid well after they started them. I don’t know if I really think that qualifies for the same thing. KDE was well into development when Trolltech and SuSE started picking up the slack.

It is fair because he’s trying to formulate policy. If you’re going to formulate government policy toward software and are fundamentally ignorant of it, you need outside help from someone in the know. Why is he any different than some pimply teenager who knows a little about Linux? If he doesn’t really know much about the very model that he’s critiquing, that means that his opinion is for all intents and purposes based on ignorance.

Another thing, the people behind most of those projects started getting paid well after they started them. I don’t know if I really think that qualifies for the same thing. KDE was well into development when Trolltech and SuSE started picking up the slack.

An excellent point! I may have over-stated my case a bit. I think the concept of a volunteer becomes kind of fuzzy when you’re talking about the brightest open source hackers. Most of them do appear to work for companies that pay them to more or less work on open source software full-time. But I’m not sure that proves that IBM or Red Hat or whomever is subsidizing Linux development. A company doesn’t hire a hacker like Linus in order to subsidize Linux. They hire Linus because Linus is an extremely talented and well-known hacker who can help out their company in a variety of ways. If Linus decided to stop working on Linux, it’s not likely that would have much impact on his earning prospects.

The more important point, however, is that no one company, or formal coalition of companies, controls or supervises the Linux development process. Structurally, it remains a “loose assemblage of voluntary contributors” supervised by the benevolent dictatorship of Linus Torvalds. Many of them happen to be paid to do it full time, but (as far as I know anyway) they still coordinate in a fundamentally decentralized manner.

Again, I think Linux is somewhat anomalous in that for a variety of reasons it has attracted a disproportionate share of corporate support. Apache might be a slightly more representative example. By my count, out of more than 50 contributors there are five engineers from IBM, one each from Red Hat, Transmeta, CNet, HP, Novell, Ask Jeeves, and half a dozen or so from academia. The rest–easily a majority–list themselves as “independent” or work for companies I’ve never heard of.

This is a “loose assemblage of voluntary contributors.” Removing the support of the big software vendors would certainly slow the development process down somewhat, but Apache could get along just fine without them.

And actually, I think this kind of head-counting over-states the impact of the big companies’ contributions. Much of the strength of the open source development process comes from hundreds of small contributions from hundreds of programmers who find and report bugs (with, ideally, a patch to fix the problem). This bug-fixing occurs practically for free under the open source development model, yet a commercial company would have to pay an army of testers to perform the same function.

Well, OK, that’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The legal profession regularly holds conferences on “technology law” wherein not one bona fide technologist is present. The editors of law review articles are overworked law students who have neither the time nor the resources to obtain peer review (or even basic sanity checking) by domain experts. As long as the article’s properly footnoted and appears to exercise legal doctrines in a plausible fashion, grave errors about reality (that messy real world that exists beyond the boundaries of statutes and case law) can easily slip through. And, of course, if you’re not a domain expert, then it’s not necessarily even clear which facts need a backing citation.

Tim: you say that the people deciding the “core direction” of Linux are mostly volunteers. I’m a little skeptical of this. I believe the most prominent kernel hackers (Linus, Alan Cox, etc.) are mostly in the employ of companies that pay them specifically to work on the kernel. See, e.g., this article in WIRED (a little outdated, but I doubt that kernel hacking’s grown less professionalized since 2001). Most successful large projects with which I’m familiar are similar. Most of the core KDE hackers, for example, are paid explicitly to hack on KDE.

This doesn’t make Epstein any less wrong; it just makes him wrong in a different way.

The only part that Epstein seems to have gotten right is the software patent threat, and the need to have big companies like IBM bringing their “nuclear patent arsenals” to bear on companies like SCO. That, however, is caused simply by the fact that we have software patents in the first place.

It’s not hard to find out that Google uses Linux and Python on pretty much all of its production servers. Python is one of their official languages! The company is a living testament to how open source is fit for a corporate enterprise setting. Few companies out there have the sort of massive infrastructure that Google does. Comparing Google to most of them owuld be like comparing the entire US military to the boy scouts. So… if open source software is good enough for Google, why is it still in doubt?

You know what, though? I wonder why Epstein never bothered to contact a few Computer Science professors to get some help in fleshing out his understanding of the scope of open source development. Surely that would have been a lot easier than to risk a complete underestimation of the scope of open source in use today.

Why isn’t it fair?

Back up to Professor Epstein’s claim about large-scale software projects: I think it’s reasonable to expect the professor to have read Dr. Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month before making any kind of claim about software engineering. That book is a classic in the field and “everyone” has read it.

So, why isn’t it fair to expect Professor Epstein to know something about Apache, Samba, Perl, Python, gcc, MySQL, KDE, Gnome, FreeBSD, OpenSSH?

The whole paper, in lots of words, basically says: “IP rights are good because they allow people to make money. I’m going to prove that by empirical argument. Here’s my opinion on why I’m right.”

I expected to find some sort of analysis of sales or market size. Perhaps some study of the number of patents issued vs. the amount of venture capital available.

Where was this empirical examination he claimed was neccessary?

The only part that Epstein seems to have gotten right is the software patent threat, and the need to have big companies like IBM bringing their “nuclear patent arsenals” to bear on companies like SCO. That, however, is caused simply by the fact that we have software patents in the first place.

It’s not hard to find out that Google uses Linux and Python on pretty much all of its production servers. Python is one of their official languages! The company is a living testament to how open source is fit for a corporate enterprise setting. Few companies out there have the sort of massive infrastructure that Google does. Comparing Google to most of them owuld be like comparing the entire US military to the boy scouts. So… if open source software is good enough for Google, why is it still in doubt?

You know what, though? I wonder why Epstein never bothered to contact a few Computer Science professors to get some help in fleshing out his understanding of the scope of open source development. Surely that would have been a lot easier than to risk a complete underestimation of the scope of open source in use today.

Why isn’t it fair?

Back up to Professor Epstein’s claim about large-scale software projects: I think it’s reasonable to expect the professor to have read Dr. Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month before making any kind of claim about software engineering. That book is a classic in the field and “everyone” has read it.

So, why isn’t it fair to expect Professor Epstein to know something about Apache, Samba, Perl, Python, gcc, MySQL, KDE, Gnome, FreeBSD, OpenSSH?