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Lefkowitz cites open source oddities
Lefkowitz cites open source oddities
Filed under: Application Development
Open source software strategist Robert Lefkowitz, who spent more than 30 years as a software architect and systems designer in places such as Wall Street, brought his observations to the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Wednesday.
Lefkowitz, also known as r0ml, pondered situations of open source, such as noting that free software will put
out of business anything that is of worse quality. To charge money, the software has to be better than what is free.
Citing a recent survey that said the Eclipse IDE was last in user satisfaction, Lefkowitz said by definition it has to be of poor quality because it is free.
“At equilibrium, the open source software is always the crappiest software you can get,” he said.
The open source software movement arose when Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation sought out source code for a malfunctioning printer driver but could not get it. “It offends Richard because he wants to fix the bug himself,” Lefkowitz said.
Open source, is about “taking the law into your own hands,” so users can fix the software themselves. Open source is useful when users do not trust the vendor to provide quality software, according to Lefkowitz.
Ironically, both Microsoft commercial software licenses and the GNU General Public License carry disclaimers against liability, he said.
Lefkowitz also noted ironies in patents, in that they are approved of for pharmaceutical companies but frowned on in software. Tongue in cheek, he said “greedy” persons such as Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, never helped humanity. Showing a photo of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Lefkowitz said the software industry instead has “noble, good-hearted people.”
But Lefkowitz also displayed a photo of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has taken up philanthropy on a large scale lately. Using further sarcasm, Lefkowitz said it was inconceivable that someone who made billions of dollars in software would just give away billions of dollars to fight disease.
Lefkowitz also speculated that in the future, an IDE will be a rich media document with pictures, text, chaptered headings and tables of contents and that it will be simple enough because it will need to be used by everybody. He then displayed a photo of a product box for Microsoft Word 2000, suggesting that could be the prototype IDE.
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