Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software, but the reverse seems to be true. The open source business is thriving.
You're unlikely to find a datasheet for the latest MediaTek chipset through Google or Baidu, but you won't get sued for sharing a copy with a friend. You can't buy sample quantities through a distributor and MediaTek won't talk to you unless you're a serious player, but it's not hard to buy a couple of chips or a few reels if you know the right person.
Information isn't free, but it doesn't have a price tag either - it's exchanged as part of a reciprocal guanxi network. Much like the BBS warez scene, information gradually percolates from a core of well-connected peers to a wider network, creating a hierarchy of esteem and a duty of reciprocity that incentivises the continued flow of information. I share with you today, in the expectation that you will share with me tomorrow.
This describes most markets that are not in fungible commodities.
Context matters, I think is what we can all agree on. Unfortunately, in order to agree on the appropriate context, we have to see each other as peers and working for the same goal. (I think this is what's fucked with the current American political system -- it's less "you have your facts, I have mine" and more "you think this context/lens is what matters, I disagree and choose these base assumptions."
Naive realism wrote bigly.
I think its perceived more negatively nowadays by the Chinese with 'newish' (more 1990-2000s) terminologies such as the "关系户" (guanxi-hu) which is roughly translated into English as person with a lot of connections and/or is politically savvy and can gain a large advantage in society or conducting business through their network. Note that Chinese govt. (especially the lower rungs) tend to be corrupt/non-transparent and society is more about giving gifts (originally between friends and families, basically bribery if asking for a favour) so this tends to give a much more unfair advantage than Western society (the politically transparent ones).
Chinese people (usually media) either think negatively of these kind of people as they see them having an unfair advantage while some respect and aspire to be guanxi-hu because of how well-connected they are.
At least this Chinese version in the electronics is more democratic and let's the little Chinese startup try out things quickly and get into a full commercial relationship if things succeed. I understand American companies used to do this early on but eventually rent extraction mindset took over.
But this behavior extending up into actual corruption is very much a current problem for that country
Addressing guanxi seriously: My understanding is that guanxi works against opportunity and the free market; not anyone can get a loan at the bank, for example; instead it requires personal relationships. Economists I've read said the lack of arms-length commercial relationships hold back economic development and opportunity in China, but that was written maybe 20 years ago and possibly things have changed. I do know that Communist Party connections, and particularly connections to the 'royalty', the families of leaders, are highly valuable and are at least sometimes seen as necessary for success in business.
and, tbh, transparency doesn't matter at low volumes. If someone can afford to carry a prototype to production, the difference between the average and lowest potential guanxi price for a single chip is negligible.
I think one key is that Shenzhen's manufacturing culture was not too centralised or formalised. This let a culture to emerge. I think your emphasis on is right. Culture, not ruleset or ideology. Emergent, not designed by some philosopher.
Most people want an absolute answer, an absolute truth about intellectual property. A clear right and wrong that tells us what IP laws should be. The answer needs be true for chemistry in the 18th century, aeronautical engineering in the 19th, medicines in the 20th and software in the 21st. I don't think this truth exists.
Ideology is not the way out of this. Ideological thinking (eg Stallman, Rand, Marx, Plato) is important as an exercise, but when people actually buy into ideology we're doomed to fail. The way an ideological thought process goes is usually:
(1) Start from fundamental truths, usually moral truths. Property is exploitation. Unfree software is immoral. Selfishness is the only true love. Platonic forms are the truest truths. etc. Prove your truths metaphysically. Hold them self evident. Make them immutable.
(2) Find some complicated but (seemingly) airtight way that everything good about life, the universe and everything will inevitably follow when people accept the Fundamental Truth. Software will be better. The economy will be better. We will achieve a classless harmonious society. Technology will advance. etc.
To do this properly, you'll probably need to produce a very long, very boring book that works out all the details. This is how roads and police will work without government. This is how the economy will work without money. This is how software will be an industry when everything is strictly GNU. This is how hover boards will be invented.
This step is inside baseball. Anyone who can slog through "Objectivist Epistemology" or "Das Capital" is... you need to be a hardcore believer.
(3) Keep adding to no. 2. The more pages, the better. No. 1 can never change. No. 2 now needs to explain the entire world. Don't give up. Keep going. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue your way out of with enough new terms. Degenerate Socialist State. Core-periphery modes of production.
Keep going. Stay motivated. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue out of with enough focus on a relevant totality, the transitory nature of social forms and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction.
...This road goes nowhere. There is no absolute truth of life the universe and everything. You asked the wrong question.
I totally agree that the IP/copyright systems that exist today and are being promoted as the no. 1 priority in international law... they are not good systems. At least, it would be very helpful to have other systems as well. The best systems will probably emerge, not be designed by lawyers.
Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.
Look, guys, I'm not saying open-source isn't important! And I'm definitely not saying there aren't any great open-source programs out there! All I'm saying is: on the current market, most companies that produce software choose to distribute this software under a closed-source license. What's so hard to accept about this simple observation?!
[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share
Most companies' has a very limited audience and a very narrow purpose; it can't benefit from the network effect.
Closed:
Google search. Windows. Office. Facebook. Cisco. Intel. Amazon AWS. Amazon retail. Most Adobe products. Most Oracle products. iOS and most of what Apple does. Salesforce. Workday. Most of what nVidia does. Most of what Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and pretty much every other chip maker does. Most of what Samsung does. The core software of: PayPal, Square, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, et al. The list keeps going.
Most of what every major tech company does is closed off.
The tools are largely open source. The actual pieces of the companies that generate revenue are not. They love open source, when it isn't about their revenue generation.
Ask Facebook to show us all of their source code.
Nearly the entire tech industry is built on massive, closed products.
Google search by itself generates more operating income every year than every public open source company combined, by a factor of ten. Ask Google to show you all the source code to search.
The commodification of services that used to be cutting edge happens all the time, and if not for artificial patents would happen even faster.
You then need someone to pay what is essentially an administrator to keep track of the changes.
The reason why a company would do that is because of the name recognition advantage they get from this. "Oh you need someone to tune your Linux performance for your super computer cluster, we have the guy who it's named after on staff."
My point is that if you're not paying with your time, and most people are not, then someone else is paying for it. The rent doesn't go away, it's just getting covered by someone else.
But it's not a wash. The difference is that with Linux all those contributors not only get a usage license for an OS but they also get all the control over it.
You're a startup with some new kind of device or service? Good luck getting $PROPRIETARY_SOFTWARE ported to it if you're not HP/Dell/etc. and can guarantee sales in the millions. Heck, even HP didn't manage to convince Oracle and Microsoft to continue their IA64 support, despite major dollars being involved.
Where I work, one of two reasons for saying "we can't do that" is when hitting the limitations of nature (obviously). The only other one is when proprietary software is involved, commonly encountered with e.g. networking gear or server/BMC firmware.
While we don't get to not obey the laws of nature, the other one just sucks. It should be us doing the tradeoff between the benefits of doing something and the amount of work required to make it happen. It shouldn't be up to some 3rd-party vendor which is unlikely to consider us important enough to quickly implement a feature we want or heck, even fix a bug without having to wait $LONGTIME. With free software, that's exactly how it is.
If you want control over your own fortune, you don't get that with proprietary software.
2) There's nothing about commercial software that says that you can't give out/sell the source code to all or some customers.
Obviously desktops aren’t at 99% unless you’re running Linux.
No, compilers should also count, and i'm not just talking about drivers. Everything from data storage (file system) to data transfer between the different racks of a supercomputer is usually proprietary. Seriously, look it up.
> Obviously desktops aren’t at 99% unless you’re running Linux.
No, even your Linux desktop is far from being 100% open source. How about the BIOS? The Intel microcode? Even open source GPU drivers interface with proprietary interfaces on the actual hardware. And let's not forget that many Linux distros don't make it very clear if what you are installing is actually free software or a proprietary blob. The reality is that it's very hard to have something fully running on free/open source software from A to Z.
I feel like you’re listing small pieces of the system and for some reason acting as if those are the majority of the code.
Open source is a bit like that. Much like a book has to be read rather than merely used/worn, Open Source Software has to be cloned/forked/apt-get-ed/'make'd and so forth.
Now if you were to buy a pair of leather shoes then the particulars of what chemicals and processes were required to tan the leather may well be learned from the 'Principles of Leather Tanning' but tweaked a bit to a proprietary recipe that could be kept 'under wraps'.
Regarding the Open Source desktop applications, Libre Office is not a clone of Word/Excel/Access/Powerpoint. Same with Gimp, it is not a feeble clone of Photoshop. These tools may be able to use the same file formats but there is a different ethos to them. For some people the UX of Libre Office is far superior to MS Office - no ribbon and therefore no need to Google search the simplest of tasks. If you are dealing with data - as in CSV files - then OpenOffice is your friend, MS Office just ruins it. This does not affect people doing glorified to-do lists and glorified receipts in Excel but if you are reading in data from some code you have written then OpenOffice is the more productive tool.
Never mind that MS have a long long history of playing dirty.
I distinctly recall that back when the netbook first appeared, MS did a 180 on their efforts to kill Windows XP because Vista could not run on such low spec hardware.
Never mind that later on you could find Dell selling Windows equipped netbooks with a rebate campaign that made the higher spec Windows variant actually cheaper than the lower spec Linux (Ubuntu) variant (what is the chance that MS was funding that campaign?).
Damn it, these days Microsoft waves the OEM license fee for tablets with a screen below 9 inches.
For mobiles it is a little different, because iOS locks people to their browser, but at least on Android users would be using Chrome.
Heck I am typing this on a chromebook, simply because I realized 80% of what I do is webbrowsing anyway.
I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples:
1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system.
2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s.
3. Videogames.
4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook).
Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time...
Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.
Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most.
Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.
Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits.
Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers.
In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.
Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use.
The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.
The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again.
I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer
Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)
The last time I used powerpoint (several years ago) I found the learning curve much higher and even after I started getting the hang of things had to keep fighting it for stuff like code snippets.
Throw in a makefile with an inotifywait watcher and you've got a WYSIWYG interface.
That's precisely his point: Experienced users deal well with open-source software, because much of that was designed with them in mind. But in all too many cases, it doesn't play well with pretty much everybody else.
I'd call myself experienced but I could never use Open/LibreOffice. It wasn't just the UI; they just couldn't even open MS Office documents without destroying half of their layouts.
My other observation was that a lot of the "formatting" that I see in office documents is unnecessary and only there because the software makes it easy.
I tried it 5 minutes ago.
Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1YHaKdXh2olSeVdX8ybhF1SG6fyDm...
Most likely you're blocking cookies or some Google domains or something. Try on a clean browser. Or try
wget --content-disposition "$link"The problem with that statement is: if a colleague sends me his Word document, I don't care how unnecessary his formatting may or may not be, I want to see the stupid thing on my laptop, preferably in the same state he saved it in! And right now, LibreOffice rarely delivers on that.
Just because I would rather solve the task with R instead of Excel doesn't make me a more experienced user, it simply makes me an experienced open-source user rather than an experienced Microsoft user.
Were Excel data tables the same before 2007 (or was it 2010)? Right now they're very easy to use but not sure about earlier.
Sorry but that comes across as a bit ignorant in my opinion. It seems to me you have never studied how non-programmer powerusers use excel/word/powerpoint. People are running their entire businesses on excel macros/ms access/and other cobbled-together systems. Heck, I don't think you could even do pivot tables till office 2007. That rules out a large chunk of the financial industry.
No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.
In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community.
As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.
The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.
I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS.
Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris].
Apple confusingly renamed OS X to MacOS a few years ago.
Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)
Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.
It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.
And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.