Why I think that IDEA going open source is not a good sign
beust.com/weblog/archives/000520.htmlPosted Oct 17, 2009, 2:30 PM UTC
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beust.com
these guys have come up with a lot of concepts that are now part of every developer's daily life.
Honest question: what?
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Most things that are now in Eclipse are direct ripoffs of what IDEA did. If IDEA goes bankrupt I predict what happens in most free software projects will also start hapenning with Eclipse: an huge innovation blackhole and stagnation.
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I predict what happens in most free software projects
Could you name some free software projects that suffer from this? Aside from the obvious ones such as OpenOffice.
Firefox is fairly innovative, so are the many window managers, and the GIMP isn't bad either (at least it's innovative in how awful it can be sometimes? :S)
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Blah. I came here thinking "But IDEA is open source". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Data_Encryption_Algorithm
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Well, that's better than reading it as IKEA as I did.
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At least the patent is finally about to expire!
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I can't think of a single example where a struggling commercial software suddenly started regaining market share when they went open source. Can you?
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OpenOffice has much more market share nowadays than StarOffice ever had. Firefox has regained quite a good part of the market share Netscape use to have. SuSE went full open and apparently it didn't hurt it. So did NetBeans, QT, etc.
Looks like this is a gratuitous affirmation meaning nothing after all.
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Thank you.
Arguing from ignorance never ends well...
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[deleted]
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Netscape (sort of) and Blender
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In the case of Blender, hadn't the company whose product it used to be gone bust before it was open sourced?
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Netscape (sort of) and Blender
Don't know about Blender but FF is a gratis ABM product, predominantly sponsored by one big player.
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[deleted]
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Mozilla has made no money, Mozilla has (yet) a financially strong Sponsor.
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Certainly: Eclipse itself started out as Visual Age.
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Sun with Glassfish/SJSAS.
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is GlassFish gaining the market from Jetty and Tomcat? I don't know what most people use these days...
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Nope. Also, 95% of development is Java, and that's where Eclipse already dominates..
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What?
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Well, going open source sure didn't help 4front with their OSS (Open Sound System):
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How well was it doing before that though?
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Because it was years too late and Linux already had ALSA which was quite established, as a replacement for the old OSS/Free.
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Do you think it's a bad idea?
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Eclipse already pushed away JBuilder, NetBeans and several other IDEs. OTOH, even a company that sells more or less the Standard Eclipse distribution can exist. So, who knows?
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If all a company does is putting together plugins developed by someone else then I guess yes, it can exists.
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yeah, I mean just look at blender eh
pure FUD, there are a plethora of OSS projects which are well managed, and produce high quality software, just look at GIMP, GNOME, GNU toolchain, Linux kernel, BSD, OpenSSH, Apache projects, the list is innumerable, in many cases producing higher quality software than the commercial alternatives.
If the software has merit, then it will flourish as open source, however if it's something mediocre, or used to have a niche that is now gone then it will perish.
How well IntelliJ does depends squarely on how well it compares to Eclipse and Netbeans. If it proves to add value for the developers over the alternatives, people will use it.
Well, I think it's fair to say that open source communities are bad at project management. Most successful OSS projects are led by a benevolent dictator or a company/foundation with enough cash to pay full-time developers. That is, the model is quite similar to that of commercial software.
I think the fundamental difference is in motivation, OSS projects exists because people want to work on them, not just for monetary gain, and turns out that is an important factor in producing quality software.
Right, motivation (besides money) is important, no question. But what does that have to do with the whole "product management" argument? And why would this be any different for commercial software? Many professional software developers (including myself) like the work they're being paid for.
Because:
2)Releases go out when they're done, not based on this quarter's profits or the promises of some marketing droid. That leads to less technical debt.
The reason it's important is because the argument is often made that when people make thing in their spare time or as a hobbi, it will have inferior quality to something made by a business whith the traditional carrot and stick motivation.
Being paid for work does little in and out of itself to motivate you to do good work. I have no issues with being paid for what I do, but the reason I work where I work is because I enjoy the environment and I find the work interesting.
Blender? Netscape did suck, today I use it exclusively now that it's been open sourced and become Firefox.
Blender is a 3D graphics suite, and has improved immensely since being open sourced.
GIMP is high quality software?
Yes, actually.