polarization?
Polarization? - Craig Burton is usually cool about checking his facts before posting things, but his latest commentary on open source has me questioning some things. Mostly I take issue with the presuppositions supposited liberally throughout the article. For those who are not familiar with the rude device known as presupposition, consider the example of a lawyer asking a witness, “Answer me yes or no: was your boss aware that you are a wife-beater?” Craig first tries to get you to presuppose as fact that Mundie’s comments are aimed at somehow doing battle with “Microsoft Detractors”. The fact that we disagree with orthodox Raymondism or orthodox Stallmanism should be no surprise. And after five years worth of the so-called open-source “movement” speaking on the topic virtually unchallenged, you would think that people would welcome another perspective. Instead it seems that Craig would have Microsoft remain mute, since apparently anything that disagrees with Raymondism is “a hostile participant”. Markets are conversations, but god forbid that anyone should have a disagreement. And the presupposition that this is a conversation between “open source” and “Microsoft” is fundamentally flawed, and exactly the sort of thing that leads to the polarization that Craig laments. The fact is, there are many software licensing schemes available, and reasonable humans use the right license for the job. To say that “open source” people use only one particular license or that Microsoft uses only one particular license is completely wrong. Licensing choices lie on one big continuum and Microsoft and “open source” can and do overlap frequently (I am anxiously awaiting the release of IBM DB2 source code). Pointing this out seems the opposite of polarization, and in fact I cannot see how “fragmentation” and “polarization” can be anything other than semantically opposed. So, suppose we de-suppose the strange idea that Microsoft is “hostile”. Next Burton has us accept as fact that irrational investor pessimism is the main thing stopping Internet companies from making a difference these days. He argues that Microsoft’s questioning of the GPL lack of business model will make investor money tight. This reminds me of The Long Boom, in which the authors argue that optimism is the only engine of economic growth. I participated in an Internet startup in that time period between when Mosaic and Netscape were released, and I can testify that VC money is still a heck of alot easier to get than it was then. My experience leads me to believe that easy money from investors is useful only for con-games, and it really doesn’t take that much money to make a difference on the Internet. Maybe all of the baby-boomers who bet (and lost) their retirements on the Internet bubble will be happy to know that all it really takes is a positive mental outlook, instead of those difficult things like (for example) providing something of enough value that real people are willing to pay real money for it. Wild promises of overnight fortunes aren’t high on people’s lists of things they value anymore, so Craig can expect the VC money tree to be barren for awhile longer. Moving on, we are asked to presume that Microsoft’s attempt to engage in rational dialogue is “baiting”, and the statement that “this will happen whether Microsoft likes it or not”, comes close to presupposing that Microsoft is opposed to moving the Internet to the next level. Of course, Burton’s assertion about the core infrastructure of the Internet being open-source could mean many things, so it is hard to tell whether I agree or not. For example, many would consider Cisco to be a core of the Internet, and the operating system software that runs the Cisco routers (IOS) as being a key component. I think I missed the news release about that being GPL.