Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Open Source -- a world onto itself

Author:calvin@xmission.com
Posted:7/21/2000; 10:56:30 AM
Topic:Open Source -- a world onto itself
Msg #:18881 (In response to 18809)
Prev/Next:18880 / 18882

Dave Winer: By user I mean, in the old (crude, sexist, ageist) Apple way of talking about users, "mom".

Someone who clicks on things they should know better than to click on. Someone who prefers fewer features and to have them organized better. Not people who run websites, but people who design them.

Paul Snively: I agree, this is not merely a vital, but in the long run, the vital set of people's hearts to woo to any craft or culture.

I couldn't disagree with this more. I don't think OSS exists, or its' existence depends upon a user base outside the developers and hackers that use the software. "The One True OSS Motivation" is scratch your own itch.

Scratching your own itch means you solve your own problem, you figure out your own solution. That makes you a developer, not a user, not "Mom". OSS will continue to exist perfectly well with no Mom's.

What often happens though is in scratching your own itch, a lot of other peoples itches can get scratched too. That's where a revenue stream can come from. I think Userland is a perfect example of this. Dave scratched his own itch with content management and scripting software...he scratched his own itch with writing tools and outliners. He also realized the potential to scratch other peoples itches.

Pesonally I think of Dave as an open source developer using two models defined by ESR. The widget frosting model, with a twist. Dave's widget is Frontier instead of hardware, but the frosting, all those scripts and bits and extras are the frosting to make Frontier run, or run better. The other model is the "Give away the recipe and open a restaurant". I think this one is still in early days, but this could easily be what Manila becomes...but it's still maybe to early to tell, but Dave hasn't patented Manila which means he open sourced the business processes.

In all these things though, Dave seems to be scratching his own itch, he's not really scratching mine with his software so I'm not his "customer"...but in some real sense no one is his customer (at least I don't see it, I don't see ads for frontier, or marketing for frontier etc etc). Dave talks about his itch, his scratching and updates all the time, and other people read about it and say, "why I have that exact same problem, I have to try this out!" Linus did the exact same thing, only he was really young and didn't know how to go about making money from it and probably didn't want to anyway

Dave needs to make money to continue to develop software at the level Userland develops software, but that is entirely a different proposition, than the motivation and continued development of Userland type software in toto. OSS development(or Dave's software development process) can grow and contract like anyother sort of ogranization, but I doubt it would die like so many corporations have...what happened to More, was it killed off by Symantec?

The only concern I would have with OSS software, like Perl for instance, would be if Larry Wall died...but he's thought about this and it should continue on. (But the death of Larry Wall is a real tragedy much more so than any corporation closing down. On the other hand if software gets abandoned and it's open sourced, someone else can pick it up and get it moving again. OSS allows developer ownership.

I guess the best analogy I can make is that OSS software development is really accepting that it is art. Developers are artists. OSS makes that situation explicit. In a corporation, the corporation owns the artwork (which is not a static thing...it needs servicing) and for that reason the artist of some software can get fired, transfered, or the software can get killed off for no reason at all but the CFO's inability to understand. OSS provides a kind of protection against that...and makes the artists that create software the owners and gatekeepers for their own work. It becomes an artists choice about what happens...and artists like to impress their artist friends and that's just how OSS seems to work.

Something Dave said (apart from his own feelings that he is a code artist) the other day reminded me of this. Since he went to a DSL line he's pushing himself to speed up the code in frontier because he can't hide, what he sees as a kind of flaw, behind a T1 line. My own feelings are that Microsoft would just expect you to upgrade your machine to the newer faster better to run their software release at a reasonable speed (my feelings are the same about Apple, my System Folder is huge!) Dave takes his software personally, like a musician a musician who wants to get her performance just right...even if the crowd is very small...or no one at all.

-calvin

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