Open Source is Not Innovative

Your going to need them in order to wade through the crap spewed by this one. All I have to say is WOW! lol rofl

Considering that the article is posted at "Huffington-Puffington-Blow-It-Down" Post (aka Huffington Post), it shouldn't be surprising that you would need waders to navigate through the crap, LOL. ;-)

Cheers, John

I hate sites (blogs! in effect) that expect you to log in to post comments. I wanted to point out the obvious about cars as they often get to be the OS comparator.

What is a 21st century car like the latest Ford Mondeo, oh hang on it's a copy of the original idea but with a century of refinement and innovation. They still have doors, a bonnet and a boot are steered by a wheel and have gears often with a stick!

Is it all really a matter of confusing revolution with innovation?

The best is the mumbojumbo about that professor Krzysztof Klincewicz. He teaches management, how likely is it that guy actually having a clue about technology in order to properly judge technical innovation? D'oh.

Well, given that his definition of innovation is apparently something that you go, "Wow, that's a mind-blowing original idea that nobody has ever thought about before!" there's really no such thing as innovation in the IT industry. Hence, open source cannot be innovative.

From an economic viewpoint, original ideas have a value of exactly $0. The combination of original ideas plus a way to make them practical has positive value. Improving on existing implementations is valuable. Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, any successful technology company spends most of its resources improving existing technology. And by the way, Sam Walton and every successful retailer copied ideas all the time. Maybe he should read Drucker.

Putting Dr. in front of his name really adds credibility, doesn't it? He's apparently got a Ph.D. in psychology!

Guess just one more reason to not read the Huffington Post.

johnb316 ... wrt your comment, absolutely :D

What else would one expect at the "Huffington Post".

The guy DECIDED that Firefox was not innovative ... implying that M$ Internet Explorer is. However, it was IE that was the copy and Netscape that was the original browser. Same with real player.

Every time there is innovation in the open source process, Microsoft steals it, wraps it tightly into their source code (Because it is, OF COURSE, an "INTEGRAL" part of the "CORE" functionality of the OS and could not possibly be UNCOUPLED from their CODE.

Never mind the fact that in the open source world, that same functionality is DESIGNED to be wrapped in with any number of other programs (you pick between the 10,000 available packages and it "JUST WORKS" together).

Not innovative ... PLEASE :D

>>However, it was IE that was the copy and Netscape that was the original browser.

Um, not to detract from your point, with which I agree, I do wish to add this for the sake of accuracy: Open IE in your WINE installation, and pull down Help/About. Here is the info for those who do not have any access to IE:

"Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc. Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp. Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation. Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law."

hughesjr:

> However, it was IE that was the copy and Netscape that was the original browser.

No. Mosaic was the original graphical browser.

Aladdin_Sane:

> Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM)...

Which just sort of proves hughesjr's comment that:

> Every time there is innovation in the open source process, Microsoft steals it, wraps it tightly into their source code ...

I used Mosaic. It was a fairly good browser in it's day. IE warped it beyond all recognition.

I sure can say that people you know don't know much. You tout yourself as Dr, have a fifteen page resume, profess in Washington University and still manage to sound like a Microsoft hackjob. Do you honestly think Linux is not innovative or just pretend it. If it's latter then, I understand, there are many like you who would like to spread the FUD in order to spoon with Microsoft execs. But if you really believe what you say then I feel sorry for the people you teach, who think you know something.

You do not consider Linux innovative because it was inspired from UNIX. Does that mean you also don't consider Boeing 787 an innovation because it still works on the same principles as the wright brothers' airplane. Dig a little deeper on Linux before comment on it and you will find where the real innovation lies. You can start with comments on your huffington post blog. Maybe this metaphorical pot of ignorance will wear off and you will see things clearly.

http://getthefudge.com

Well, I have a question: Open Source is not innovative. And the question is: WHO CARES? :)

@jezuch - EXACTLY ...

Back from my early days in the military, an older and wiser civilian supervisor (who was also a retired Chief Master Sergeant) used to tell me: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

>It's essentially a copy of another operating system

What a maroon. An utterly and completely dishonest maroon. The Dr. in his name means this guy should know better. Linux is not a copy of anything. It is a Unix workalike. Just like a BMW is a Ford or a Toyota workalike. Being a workalike means you show a certain face. It has nothing --- NOTHING -- to do with anything behind the face, which can be loaded to the gills with innovation.

>one percent -- were examples of radical innovation.

Ahem..."radical" innovation? Never mind the subjectivity inherent in making that call, but how much commercial software is an example of radical innovation? Radical innovation doesn't happen very often. If it did, it wouldn't be radical.

If being an "expert" on Innovation means that you can be as capricious as you like in its use and meaning, then he is definitely an "expert".

By the way, how does the concept of "Innovation" fall anywhere near the field of Psychology anyway?

>By the way, how does the concept of "Innovation" fall anywhere near the field of Psychology anyway?

Billing.

>Billing.

LOL!!

As my Father would say in his darkly sarcastic tone..

"You know what the only thing money can't buy you is? Poverty."



I'm still not comfortable with how often he is right about things. ;-)

Did anyone else do a Google Scholar search on this guy? He has a paper entitled "Ethical Aspects of Sponsorship", here's the abstract: "The paper regards sponsorship as an agreement, in which the sponsor undertakes an action with economic nature for the sake of a sponsored subject. Typical cases related to unethical conduct of sponsors and subjects are described, as well as some social contexts of sponsorship and its influence on the public opinion." Sounds like MS and SCO!! But I don't have access to that journal.

Anyway, about the innovation research, Klincewicz's paper is here:

http://pascal.case.unibz.it/handle/2038/552?mode=full

After explaining that any project with phrases like "similar to" was classified as non-innovative, Klincewicz writes: "Redundancy is a serious problem: “yet another” application offering similar functionality creates unnecessary competition for scarce resources within the OSS developer community, reducing their effective utilization. The observed multiplicity of comparable projects results often from code base forking ... or ambitions to implement something better than others, instead of helping improve existing projects."

So, having an ambition to create something better is explicitly NOT innovation for Klincewicz... If so, THANK GOODNESS Linux is not innovative. :)

As others have said, "innovation" is a red herring and Dr. Swayer is a kneebiter.

> "yet another” application offering similar functionality creates unnecessary competition for scarce resources within the OSS developer community, reducing their effective utilization.

He's not the only one to have that opinion. You hear it all the time. The people who hold it obviously have little idea what freedom means or what voluntary cooperation is all about. Trying to force someone to contribute to a project they have no interest in, in the name of "effective utilization" is counter to the entire set of concepts underlying free software.

Free software developers work on a project for one of two reasons. They want to, or they're paid to. Sometimes both.

Remember the old saying:

Quoting:"If you build a better mousetrap, The world will be a path to your door!"

Well this guys version of the saying is:

Quoting:"If you build a better mousetrap, you're wasting everyone's time. We already have mousetraps, why do we ever have to improve anything and make it better?

So slow incremental improvements in technology are to be laughed at. You must upset the apple cart with a completely new 'paradigm' or your ideas are worthless.

We might as well go back to cave dwelling, that was innovative shelter. Everything else has just been a derivative.

So utterly idiotic.

There are so many ways and places to innovate, some of which are invisible to the user/consumer because they are innovations in manufacture/design/engineering that make the product more reliable, cheaper, safer, etc.

Butter knives haven't changed much over the centuries. A really good design is a really good design and the basic butter knife was perfected years ago. I would bet, however, that there has been some serious manufacturing and materials science innovation along the way, not to mention major changes in how we acquire the fool things in the first place.

dino,

Have you ever had a good bread knife?

These things are really hard to find. Most people get their bread pre-spliced.

The blade is usually a very thin strip of flat flexible metal. Like spring steel, but flat not coiled. The edge is not really sharpened but it may be tapered, and it really isn't serrated.

The blade doesn't need to be sharp as the steel is thin enough for bread, and the edge is like a wave shape not serrated like teeth. A good bread knife cuts evenly through a loaf of soft bread without tearing the soft interior and without having to exert so much pressure that you squash the loaf.

My wife and I bought a hundred year old house about a decade ago and spent the next six years fixing it up. One of the treasures we found in the house was one of these old bread knifes.

Now that was an innovative product! The greatest thing before sliced, well you get the idea.