Andrew Plato wrote:
>Honestly Seth, I really don't think giving the state the source
>code would do much good?
>
It's about giving the State choice in who to outsource support to. No, I
don't expect the State IT staffers to actually do very much with the
source other than turn it around to whoever won the support contract
this year.
>Second, no commercial firm in the WORLD is going to just hand over
>their intellectual assets to and organization so they can go about
>using it and expanding upon it and cutting out the maker. If this
>were the case, I GUARANTEE you would see prices of commercial
>software skyrocket to utterly unobtainable prices. These costs
>would be necessary to compensate for the numerous people who would
>simply steal the source code and go off and make their own products
>and sell them.
>
Hmmm. Here's a couple of counter-examples:
* Sun releases the source code for Solaris under the Community
Source license. Not an open source license, but you can get the code.
* Microsoft has offered their source code to significant customers,
under whatever-they're-calling-it licensing terms.
>Furthermore, we already HAVE third parties supporting commercial products.
>My firm sells about 50 different technologies from IDSs, firewalls, servers,
>sniffers, etc. We support all those products (in addition to the support
>the manufacturer provides.) And we don't have to own the source code.
>
And the quality of the support you can provide suffers as a result of
not having the code. The support you can offer for closed-source
products amounts to a really good user's manual: you know how to
configure & use the software really well, and thus can help with
configuration & usage problems. This is a very valuable service, hence
the thriving industry.
However, because of the lack of source code, Anitian cannot actually fix
bugs. Bugs have to be reported to the vendor, who may or may not see it
as enough of a priority to do anything about it. If Anitian had source
code, then bugs could be fixed as needed.
>So, we already have this infrastructure you seek and companies can
>retain their intellectual assets. Why would we un-do this situation?
>What motivation is there to hand over source code when nobody really
>wants it or even needs it.
>
Because:
1. Some people really do want and need the source, and have been
saying so quite loudly. Some of them say so by choosing open
source products :)
2. The State doesn't know what it wants; they're too busy fighting
allegators to drain the swamp. Kenji came to us to get input on
what the State *should* want, and in the opinion of at least half
of the people who have responded so far, the State should want the
source.
>And your friend, who works at Large Company, answered this question
>perfectly - he already modifies everything, including MS products.
>So why do we need to hand over source code to these people when only
>a handful of people may benefit from it?
>
Because screwing around with binary patches is an expensive waste of time :)
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX http://wirex.com/~crispin/
Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Sep 24 2002 - 15:25:53 PDT