Explaining Open Source's Exponential Growth

Fitzcarraldo said on Monday, 17 March 2008

I've know for a while that in-flight entertainment systems installed by airlines are usually Linux-based, but this was brought home a couple of days ago on a long-haul flight as I watched Tux and the familiar Linux boot-up sequence appear on a fellow passenger's seat-back touch screen. Manufacturers have finally woken up to the potential FOSS has for embedded applications. Why pay the Microsoft 'tax' when a free, viable alternative exists? With the increase in smaller devices with embedded software, ultra-cheap PCs and laptops -- not to mention the huge number of legacy PCs that cannot run Vista -- Linux and other FOSS is really beginning to bloom. If you'd told me 18 months ago that I'd be using Linux and many FOSS applications almost exclusively I'd have laughed at you. Not any more.

zaine_ridling said on Tuesday, 18 March 2008

[Glyn]: Proprietary code has a very limited fecundity: it begets nothing outside its own immediate descendants, since its licence generally forbids use by others. Open source, by contrast, explicitly encourages its use by different projects. So the more code that is created, the greater the pool of code that is available for others to use and build on....
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Haven't thought of it this way, but considering how vague something like Microsoft's OSP is makes its confusing enough not to go near its development. That 'open source is simply written, whereas proprietary code must be publicized and sold,' reminds me of people comparing "sales" of Windows vs. Linux. Uh, Linux isn't "sold" at all unless you're an enterprise or you're buying a licensed distro like SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Great article.

On the other hand... said on Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Proprietary code works well in environments where the "minimal curve" of exponential growth cannot otherwise be achieved. There are lots of markets where this is the case. For example, if you ran a compliance firm in France for small businesses, you'd quickly find that the compliance software you write has no business being open-source - the market is small, the gains of OSS even smaller.

But there are plenty of areas where the trend is opposite - the more registratnts, the bigger the belack holde...

Rufus said on Wednesday, 19 March 2008

What a careless conclusion: Yes, Open Source encourages its use by different projects. But so does some proprietary software. It's called "libraries". And sometimes, one may wonder if the "library model" of re-usage is not more effective than the "not-invented-here model" than many open source projects use.

Also, what makes the author think, proprietary software have not had its exponential growth period? What would you call the first 10 or 15 years of Microsoft and other proprietary companies? Looks rather exponential to me.

I like Open Source as a competitor to Closed Source. But sometimes, its supporters just look at facts that support the made up myths instead of making a proper comparison. This entry here is another example of useless opinion pieces where the conclusion is not supported by the arguments.

Glyn Moody said on Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Well, last time I looked you couldn't just take any old library and use it. Most were available for use within the company that wrote them, or you needed to license them. That's clearly a barrier. With open source, by definition, there are no barriers. My point is that it trivially easy to take the work of others in open source and to build upon it; with proprietary software, there are obstacles, and so it is highly unlikely that the same sharing is going on.

I'm not quite sure where you get the idea that the "not-invented-here model" applies to open source when it applies more obviously to proprietary software. Every time a proprietary word processor is written, it has to be written from scratch: it cannot build on the code of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. The whole point about open source is that you don't re-invent the wheel: you can build on the work of others.

As to the exponential growth of Microsoft, I suppose you could say that the codebase of products like Windows

Glyn Moody said on Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Here's the rest of that sentence - CWUK must fix this bug:

As to the exponential growth of Microsoft, I suppose you could say that the codebase of products like Windows has been growing exponentially – with the result that Vista is almost unusable, at least judging by the fact that few people want to upgrade to it from XP. But that's really comparing apples and oranges: the report I was commenting on investigated the total amount of code written in the open source world, not how much Red Hat, say, was writing. I think there are some comments on the original research about this point.