Hi @Nebucatnetzer, I’d like to make some clarifications.
On the value of products:
You are speaking of the nebulous concept of market capitalization value, which is a kind of weird measure of faith. I am speaking of investment value, which includes the time employees put into the development of a product, and the initial capital investment. I suppose I should have included more of the quote from Treasure of the Sierra Madre:
A thousand men, say, go searching for gold. After six months, one of 'em is lucky - one out of the thousand. His find represents not only his own labor but that of nine hundred and ninety-nine others to boot. That’s uh, six thousand months or five hundred years scrabbling over mountains, going hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the finding and the getting of it.
Unless you think there was no capital investment and the time of the employees is worthless, there’s inherent value in Obsidian as an intellectual property. To say,
is to say that no products related to IT have inherent value. I disagree, thus my original statement of perspective.
Hardware and software are two very different things. Even my coffee maker has a microprocessor in it, so “IT-related” hardware is no different from other tangible goods when it comes to sourcing of raw materials, supply lines, manufacturing, inventory, shipping, etc. Then there is the economy of scale that allows a manufacturer to offer a better unit price for a large-quantity order. I could go into why that is, but I don’t think any talk of hardware is germane to the topic of software intellectual property as it applies to Obsidian.
Yes, but it’s not as if it’s an annuity that will continue to pay without effort. Even after Obsidian becomes a mature product, it will continue to be maintained to keep up with changes in the underlying software stack, including the OS. It will continue to have to provide support (that magical thing that’s completely lacking in open-source) and it will continue to have to address bugs and feature requests. I just quashed a bug in our CM system that’s been there for 10 years. There’s no end to that software maintenance.
On the topic of why open source doesn’t enjoy the success of MS Office:
The progeny of Star Office can read/write .docx and .xlsx files, so I’m not seeing the lock-in or proprietary formats as an issue, nor the subsequent issues. The product that is Microsoft Office wasn’t always the market behemoth it is today; all products start from zero. What it always has been, though, is commercial for-sale software. And that made all the difference, because for software to survive over the “long-haul,” it must be continually maintained. Open-source maintainers contribute out of interest, while professional software developers contribute out of career choice. When open-source contributors lose interest / move on, the continued stability of the software is only assured by the uptake of contributors. When professional developers working on a commercial product lose interest and move on, they are simply replaced. This is why, on a software “geologic time scale,” open-source is DOA, and why I said
On Redhat:
If Free Software costs money, it’s not free, so I find this argument to be a bit specious. We pay 6-figures for a RedHat site license. That’s the most expensive “free software” I’ve ever seen. What they did was find a way to monetize open-source in a way that costs just as much as proprietary commercial software by maintaining the commercial model: they get fed, you get guarantees. Besides, they’re only obligated to open source the open-source software, nothing they write themselves. Your software isn’t open-source just because it talks to open-source software.
Then I guess you don’t need their source code! What an insult to the Obsidian team.
My statements on commercial software aren’t meant to be an absolute, applying to all for-sale software. There are plenty of examples of poor commercial software; just look at the dumpster fire that is the Play Store (just the name tells you they aren’t ready for business). My statements are meant to reflect my perspective based on what I personally look for in products, and what are good products.
The point of the Disney example is to provide the foundation for my trust model. I did say,
So no, it’s not meant to say one should make everything oneself. That’s not really possible. The point is, one has to choose wisely in establishing that trust. When it comes to software, I want something that will be around for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean forever; nothing is forever. It does mean, though, that open-source software has a lousy track record overall, compared to commercial software.
On commercial software having end-of-life dates:
This is a part of the calculus in determining my trust level for a product that I need to just work. How old is the company? How old/stable is the product? Is it one person in a garage? Do they have a privacy statement? Do they have a release model? Do they have a roadmap? Etc. For example, I don’t know if Apple actually states their software update model someplace, but they have a long history of a major OS update every year, so that is their de facto update model.
On open-source being written by a loosely-coupled group of strangers with no ultimate responsibility:
And the central core is typically very small, leading to stability issues. As for other contributions, it’s a band of strangers. I’ll wager that he vast majority of people who use open-source software don’t actually read the source code. If they did, maybe the promise of multiple eyes making a product more secure, robust, etc., would come true. I’m not seeing it.
A strange thing happens when money changes hands: legal strictures come into play. Large commercial software products have well established review processes in place. This is dictated by the notion that a major issue with a major product threatens the survival of the enterprise. Said another way, to a software company, a major problem is an existential threat. And if, somehow, a nefarious employee manages to get malicious code into the product, the company knows the identity of that person, and there are legal and civil repercussions. The same cannot be said for free software. Have you ever seen something similar to this statement:
No warranty expressed or implied, as to the fitness or suitability of this product to a particular purpose.
Here’s my interpretation:
You’re an idiot if you run this software, because we won’t even guarantee that it’ll do what we wrote it to do.
Sometimes the use of software under these circumstances is unavoidable. In those circumstances, I’ll have to employ risk mitigation techniques.
This is all just a matter of perspective. If I play a computer game, I don’t expect it to be error-free. This is the hobbyist side of my life. But every person has a portion of their life that represents business, and that portion has to be run like a business, which means I expect that software to just work and have guarantees of support if it doesn’t, because that’s how businesses operate: guarantees up and down the supply chain so that all parties have assurances. I don’t need the source code to a product, I just need assurances to plug into the trust calculation. If your trust model requires you to have the source code, then you’re free to not use the product. Expecting Obsidian to change their business model and release the source code in order to fit your trust calculation is the tail wagging the dog, as they say.
