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Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 9 comments
voxeu.org; By Sebastian v. Engelhardt, Andreas Freytag and Stephen M Maurer 		Mail this story
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Governments are increasingly interested in promoting open source software. Yet policymakers have seldom laid out any clear theoretical or empirical justification for these policies. This column explores recent studies suggesting that open source and proprietary software strengthen each other and should co-exist – too much open source could actually be a bad thing.

[Found this on Groklaw, I agree with PJ's take. Linux is not a cartel. - Scott]

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Comments (9)

tuxchick ·
He makes a lot of bogus assumptions, such as "consider an all-OSS world in which each company offers consumers exactly the same shared code as every other company. " That's just silly. Some will modify it, some won't, and so what? Should they make changes just because? Then he uses the loathesome concept of "balance", which usually means the person speaking has little clue about their subject, or they're obscuring the real issues and they're saying the equivalent of "We need to balance the ratio of dog doo to punch in the punch bowl!" Because they're really in favor of dog doo but won't come right out and say it.

At the least, any government-supported software project should be completely open and accessible to us peons who paid for it.
jezuch ·
I guess it's a "can't we all just get along?"-type argument made by a known to be oppressive, now losing side.
Scott_Ruecker Story submitter ·
What I do not like about the article is the idea that taxes could be used to regulate the CSS and OSS market?

What!?!? Is he kidding? I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..

djohnston ·
[sarcasm]

Quoting:More recently, however, some politicians have begun to argue that society needs a “balance” of CSS and OSS firms (CSIS 2008).
Well, politicians are surely qualified to judge the merits of different software.

Quoting:But how can policymakers recognise the right “balance”? Pro-OSS interventions make very little sense if there are too many OSS firms already.
There are too many OSS firms, peddling too many distro versions which contain too many different desktop environments, each of which has too many configuration options.

[/sarcasm]
hkwint ·
Quoting:I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..


They're not the only ones who went to work overseas, so did I. What this thread needs is a tiny bit of 'Follow the money'; so of we go:

Let's take a closer look at the writers.

Sebastian Engelhardt is easy. His current PhD thesis is sponsored by the "Klaus Tschira foundation" (http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3981).

Very same Klaus which made €3,4billion with SAP (http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/10/2004/LIR.jhtml?passLi...)passListType=Person&uniqueId=2UD0&datatype=Person).

Andreas Freytag is much harder. He's listed as Senior Fellow of ECIPE. ECIPE is funded by Free Enterprise Foundation in Sweden (http://www.ecipe.org/about-us - last paragraph). Beware - there's also a Free Enterprise Foundation in North Carolina, not the one we're looking for. This is their website: http://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/english/?csref=_umk_english Turns out (found via Almega) all IT&Telekomföretagen members are (automatically?) also members of the Swedish Enterprise Foundation. http://www.almega.se/web/About_us.aspx

So, we go looking for the members of IT&T; http://www.almega.se/web/Medlemmar_1.aspx And - surprise - the usual suspects (among others) show up: Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Nokia Svenska, Symantec Nordic, AutoDesk, and last but not least Accenture (of LSE-crash fame!). If you look at more chars of the alphabet, I'm sure you find more usual suspects.

Stephen M. Maurer is left as an exercise for the reader.
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hkwint ·
If you need help with the exercise (spoiler alert!):

http://gspp.berkeley.edu/iths/MaurerCV.htm
TxtEdMacs ·
Quoting:Quoted: I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..
I am ready to go, all I need to do is find my passport and get funds for the trip with expenses and I will shill for anyone.

YBT

azerthoth ·
*humor* Maybe we could do a helios style collection and pay MBT here to shill for linux at some point too */humor*
Scott_Ruecker Story submitter ·
If I could only afford him Az, if I could only afford him..;-)

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