Subject: RE: [hackers-il] internal software

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:19:41 +0200

> Although I like many of the insightful ideas expressed in CatB 
> (those that were not lifted wholesale from the GNU manifesto, that
> is), I find the sources for most of its supporting evidence rather 
> dubious. I'd go as far as to speculate that, if indeed there is
> a connection between free software and software developed for in-
> house use, the self-selected group that attended the lecture
> could have an artificially high ratio of developers interested in
> free software, and therefore who develop for in-house use.

I develop monitoring software to monitor our 24/7 monitoring service (I kid
you not).
This software is strictly for inhouse use. It is an increadibly usefull
piece of software.  Not only does it allow us to keep the entire service
(more than 300 servers at 70 locations) alive at 24/7 basis, it also
monitors our *correctness*, using some neat statistical tricks we developed.
Being able to monitor our correctness gives us an incredible advantage over
our competitors. More than one customer switched to us because of this
ability.

No way this becomes free software :-)

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 12:21:03 +0200

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002, Chen Shapira wrote about "RE: [hackers-il] internal software":
>...

Who'd want this to become free software, except your 2-3 direct competitors??

Quoting something I wrote in http://nadav.harel.org.il/essays/lfe.html:

 "...The workers that used to produce the now-unneeded goods will move on, to
  produce the goods needed by the next generation. In the world of software
  this might mean less duplication of general-purpose efforts, and writing
  more special-purpose or embedded software."

Free software was "meant" for those "general-purpose efforts". An Operating
System. An Editor. A Web server. Something that thousands or millions of
people in the world will want to use. I don't see any moral (or other) reasons
why some very specialized software used by 3 companies around the world
should be free software.

Imagine NASA making its space-shuttle tracking software free software.
Besides being interesting for curious geeks, how exactly would that help
anyone outside NASA? It's not like a person, or even another country, can
take that software and apply it to its space shuttles ;)

Similarly, assuming your VCR has some sort of embedded CPU and runs some
sort of software on it - who would gain from it becoming free software?
It's not like you can change it and upload it back to the VCR's ROM...
The VCR company doesn't make money from selling this software seperately,
so they have nothing to lose from giving you the source - but they also
have nothing to gain from it (was "free source" a criterion for you last
time you bought a VCR?) so they have no reason to do it.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Tuesday, Feb 12 2002, 30 Shevat 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A smart man always covers his ass. A wise
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |man just keeps his pants on.