Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Dolphin Smalltalk, and the race to the bottom

It was with great sadness that I read about the end of Dolphin Smalltalk. While I’ve always used Cincom Smalltalk—largely because I don’t have a Windows machine—I’ve always admired the innovative ideas that the people at Object Arts brought to the environment. There’s one bit of their farewell I wanted to focus on, as it has created an enormous kerfuffle in some areas:

There will no doubt be a number of you who would suggest that we Open
Source Dolphin. Of course, you are free harbour such opinions and to
discuss the idea on the newsgroup but please do not expect us to be
persuaded. It simply will not happen! Both Blair and I dislike the
Open Source movement intensely and we would rather see Dolphin
gradually disappear into the sands of time than instantly lose all
commercial value in one fell swoop. But this is a discussion for
another thread. The best, and probably only, way in which the future
of Dolphin could be assured would be a sale of the assets to another
company. Whilst we are not actively seeking buyers, serious
negotiations can be started by writing to me at my e-mail address.

As one can imagine, this has brought out the geeks-with-pitchforks, eager to tie Andy to the stake and set it ablaze for such an act of wanton heresy. And yet, I understand what he is saying. While much good has come out of the open source movement, dating back to the earliest days before Richard Stallman hijacked the whole thing, an enormous amount of the infrastructure for the modern Internet is founded on similar principles.

Having said that, however, I do think that the open source movement has created a difficult environment for innovation. While there are sporadic examples of true innovation in open source, a vast majority is, in my opinion, derivative and out-and-out copies. Even Linux, the high temple of self-righteous puffery, is little more than a rip-off of 30 year old ideas that weren’t particularly original in the first place, and weren’t particularly well implemented in the knock-off.

Sadly, innovation is exceedingly hard. It requires not just intelligence, but a certain freedom to explore that is often lacking in any environment, along with a heaping handful of luck. The industry is littered with “innovative ideas” that went nowhere, and there are even a few in the open source world. The problem I have is that somehow there is this imaginary world that exists where the value of a developer’s time asymptotically approaches zero.

While I admire developers who dedicate their time to the open source world, and I have done so in the past, I wonder what, exactly, they think the world would look like if no commercial software companies existed? Who would pay their salaries that they use to subsidize their side efforts? Where would all the ideas come from that they mercilessly criticize, and then ruthlessly steal?

This is not to argue that there are zero innovative ideas out of the open source community, or that commercial software is somehow a fount of creativity; it’s not. It is however, a symbiotic relationship that continues to exist for a multitude of reasons, many of which are less altruistic than their proponents would have you believe.

In the end, it is those that write the software, and this includes those that write the paychecks to those who write the software, that get to decide the terms by which it is used. Like it or not, that’s the basic foundation of ownership. It’s time for the open source world to put up, or shut up. Either start putting out things that aren’t simply derivatives of things sold commercially, with perhaps a slight improvement in some technical characteristic, or quit complaining.