[room] [lord@emf.net: [Gnu-arch-users] the way forward]

[Alexey Voinov <voins@voins.program.ru>]

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Мне это письмо показалось интересным. Может ещё кому также покажется...


----- Forwarded message from Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net> -----

From: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
To: gnu-arch-users@gnu.org, discuss@lists.userlinux.com
Cc: 
Subject: [Gnu-arch-users] the way forward
Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2005 18:41:00 -0700

   Nice post, Cason.  [I would include Sun, Apple, Microsoft, HP, Novell/SuSe
   and other players in the CC list except that I don't have even a slender
   semblance of personal connection to any of those folk.]

   Cason points out that organizations which buy from Red Hat, Novell, etc.
   give up freedom in exchange for support.  In this message, I'll elaborate
   on that a little bit, explain why it's a problem, point out ways in which
   Canonical increases the problem, say a word or two about "community
   participation", and finally wrap up with some ideas of where one might go
   from here.  I'll do this "whitepaper  style", although this has come out a
   bit longer than the average whitepaper:

                       Bugs in the Distribution Business

                   and Recommendations About How to Fix Them

                          Thomas Lord, [1]lord@emf.net

                                    Abstract

           The FOSS (free and open source software) industry leaders have
           recreated and refined the freedom-robbing nature of the
           proprietary software industry.   In the process, distribution
           vendors and proprietary ISVs win while customers and contributing
           engineers lose.

           This paper explains the meaning of those claims and argues that
           they are true.

           This paper concludes with recommendations about how to repair the
           situation.

           For better or worse, a paper which criticizes the worst practices
           of the leaders of our industry also doubles as a recipe-book,
           condensing and providing a guide to repeating and enhancing the
           worst offenses.   Readers in positions of relative power will have
           to decide for themselves how to take the information here: as
           corrective or as guide for further exploitation -- that's a
           personal, moral decision.  This aims to be a dangerous paper.

    Freedom vs. Popular GNU/Linux Business Models

   Distribution vendors have focused on:

     * freedom for 3rd party ISVs, especially ISVs selling  proprietary code
     * lock-in for customers
     * lock-in and for community volunteers

   Taking those point by point:

      1. Freedom for 3rd Party ISVs, Especially Proprietary Code Vendors

   Freedom for ISVs ("independent software vendors" -- companies selling
   "applications") means that vendors have cooperated on standards which make
   third party applications easy to port between distributions, ideally by
   virtue of binary compatibility.   Especially in the fairly early days of
   these distributions, before it was clear that they would have large
   customer bases, vendors of major applications (e.g., Oracle) had limited
   incentive to port their applications to GNU/Linux yet without the
   availability of those apps (or free software replacements for them), the
   enterprise market for these distributions was limited --- a chicken and
   egg problem.  The prospect of a splintered GNU/Linux market made up of
   many maddeningly incompatible distributions, each requiring an additional
   support cost for each ISV, was uninviting.  Efforts such as  the [2]Free
   Standards Group -- Open Standards for Open Source promised enough
   cross-vendor compatibility that big ISVs could perceive the credible
   promise of a more or less singular, cross-distribution GNU/Linux platform
   to support.

   It's noteworthy that as the distribution business shook out a bit, the
   winning distribution vendors then had some incentive to claim back some
   "distribution-specificity" of big ISV offerings.   This led to an
   increased emphasis on certification programs and stronger partnering
   between distribution vendors and ISVs:  sure, the proprietary app XYZZY
   may run just fine on distributions A, B, and C but it's certified
   (implying an ongoing commitment to testing, etc) on A and the vendors of
   XYZZY and A mutually endorse one another.  In the extreme, an ISV might
   even refuse to sell to or support customers running distributions B and C.

   There is no contradiction, from the ISV perspective, between standards and
   certification.   Standards assure that ISVs are not locked to any one
   distribution.   Certification costs ISVs little and it yields them
   technical, marketing, and sales help from those distribution vendors with
   whom they partner.  Unlike porting between incompatible distributions,
   certification is not an exclusive relationship nor a technically
   challenging one -- a classic win-win for distribution vendors and
   proprietary ISVs.

   Finally, it's interesting to note in this context the enormous advantage
   enjoyed by proprietary platform vendors as compared to GNU/Linux vendors.
   Proprietary platforms are, by definition, singular.   If a proprietary
   platform is used by a sufficiently large number of customers, ISVs have
   incentive to target that platform.   To facilitate and encourage that
   targeting, proprietary platform vendors don't have to rely on standards:
   they can make stronger and more useful promises.   A Sun Microsystems or
   Microsoft can (and do) provide key ISVs with the unique source code for
   their platforms and can (and do) make and keep very broad promises about
   how upward compatibility will be maintained between releases.   In those
   ways, they can maintain a relationship with ISVs that is closer in form to
   an intra-organizational engineering effort.   (There are arguably
   potential technical quality advantages to the source-permeable
   dividing-wall of the standards-based approach used by GNU/Linux vendors
   but when those are not realized in practice they have little or no effect
   on the business decisions in play here.)

      2. Lock-in for Customers

   The costs incurred by customers when they install a platform are different
   from those incurred by ISVs when they port to that platform.   Customers
   must provide system administration for their platforms, including regular
   patching and upgrading, backups, security, and so forth.

   The most prominent decision-driving considerations for enterprise
   customers selecting an operating system platform are utility and
   short-term cost:  Will this platform run the applications my firm depends
   on? and Will maintaining this platform for the next few years cost me less
   than maintaining that other platform?  It is worth bearing in mind that
   enterprise customers are historically accustomed to accepting lock-in to
   proprietary operating system platforms for years at a time and therefore
   have never (and are not) clamoring for freedom from a particular platform
   vendor: their driving considerations are costs and utility over small
   numbers of years.  When looking beyond a few years, their primary concern
   is not much more specific than not to be stuck with a legacy system which
   will be too expensive (even infinitely expensive) to migrate beyond --
   though the technical prowess of the software engineering industry as a
   whole has given them (unrealistic) expectations that that is not a serious
   problem no matter what platform they choose today.

   In this climate, achieving customer lock-in is fairly easy:

     * make sure frequent updates are necessary and come from a single
       supplier
     * make sure that system administration skills are distribution-specific
     * control customer access to proprietary infrastructure needed for
       system administration
     * encourage customers to rely on distribution-specific applications
       (raise the cost of migration-away)

   The leading commercial GNU/Linux vendors embraced this circumstance and
   used it as a point of differentiation in as many ways as they could get
   away with.  Red Hat make an interesting case study:

   The Red Hat Network (RHN) is a non-freely-redistributable network service
   providing frequent, critical upgrades to the Red Hat GNU/Linux operating
   system offerings.   To maintain a secure installation, enterprise users of
   Red Hat platforms must be subscribers to RHN network services and their
   attendant human support services.  In spite of the alleged openness and
   freedoms afforded by free software and open source licensing, RHN is very
   much a platform-specific, proprietary service:  the work to provide timely
   updates is closely guarded;  updates are provided primarily in binary
   form; the infrastructure which runs RHN is kept private;  RHN is not
   applicable to platforms distributed by other GNU/Linux distributors and
   the corresponding update systems of those other vendors do not apply to
   Red Hat's platforms.   In some enterprise configurations, a software
   component is installed at the customer site but customers are
   contractually obligated not to copy, modify, redistribute, or use for
   unauthorized purposes that software.  In effect, a customer who chooses a
   Red Hat platform for their enterprise for the next 5 years is committed to
   being a customer of RHN for that same duration -- customer lock-in.

   Seen in this light, Red Hat is not truly a free software company: it is a
   proprietary software company who's proprietary product (the Red Hat
   Network)  happens to constitute a transmitter/receiver for free software
   and open source code.

   The effort to lock-in customers permeates even the market for IT
   professionals.  For example, vendors such as Red Hat create
   credential-offering programs for IT professionals.   They have succeeded
   in substituting "Red Hat expert" for "unix expert" and "software
   professional" as the kind of qualification enterprise employers look for
   when hiring IT staff.

   One net effect here is that while, to ISVs, the GNU/Linux commercial
   distributions are a standards-based abstract platform, to enterprise
   customers, each GNU/Linux commercial distribution is a de facto
   proprietary platform, differentiated from traditional proprietary
   platforms mainly by considerations such as cost.  (I say "mainly" because
   customer fear of historically offensive practices by Microsoft and
   historic reliance on expensive hardware by Sun also play a role.   Those
   considerations are trending downwards, though, as Microsoft becomes a more
   sophisticated service provider and Sun migrates to commodity hardware.)

      3. Lock-in for Community Volunteers

   GNU/Linux distribution vendors sit between proprietary ISVs to whom they
   want to grant freedom and customers whom they wish to deprive of
   freedom.   The vendors are in the interesting position of not employing
   most of the engineering talent that produces the software which
   constitutes a GNU/Linux platform: they depend on volunteers (and, as is
   much celebrated, contribute voluntary efforts of their own).

   Who are the volunteers?   Studies and opinions abound.   Certainly many
   are employed as software engineers and many of those within the free
   software and open source industry.   Many are young people (under 30,
   let's say), often participating for a mixture of fun and inspired by the
   promise of career development.   Many are employed at proprietary software
   jobs and do free software work in their spare time.  Many have carved out
   limited rights from their employer to ship out some of their day-job
   work-product as public project participation.   Few arrive on the scene as
   seasoned or even well-educated engineers -- the space of volunteer
   participation is, as much as anything else, a de facto open university for
   software engineering.

   Although the vendors do not employ the majority of the software
   engineering talent they rely on, they do collectively seek and achieve
   influence and control over that talent.   To understand this process, we
   should look first at what the vendors would want to do with influence and
   control over developers, and second, how they go about achieving those
   goals.

        Volunteer Lock-in Objective: Market Dubious Standards

   We observed earlier that vendors want a level of industry-wide standards
   conformance in order to grant certain freedoms to ISVs, especially
   proprietary software ISVs.   At the same time, the standards must not make
   GNU/Linux platform products interchangeable and should not stabilize those
   platforms.  This requires that the standards be developed, that work is
   performed to bring the relevant software components "up to snuff", and
   more subtly that the standards in question be generally acknowledged and
   approved of by the
   developer community even though the standards themselves must not
   challenge the goal of customer lock-in.   In short, the vendors must
   market poor standards.

        Volunteer Lock-in Objective: Bloated Software Stacks and Intricate
        Dependencies

   We observed earlier that, to achieve customer lock-in, vendors rely on a
   need for frequent updates of installed systems and benefit greatly from
   customer reliance on applications that are at least GNU/Linux-specific and
   ideally specific to the GNU/Linux platform distributed by a particular
   vendor.   Software which more or less works but needs frequent repair,
   software which thwarts migration away from the platform, and software for
   which maintenance work can not be broken down into independent efforts is
   the ideal.  In software engineering we know that the best way to achieve
   these aims is to produce systems comprised of many more lines of code than
   is actually needed, to sprinkle that code with platform-specific
   assumptions, to make each component depend on as many others as possible,
   and to make certain that the interfaces between components are poorly
   controlled and subject to frequent change.  The aims can be achieved by
   leading volunteer engineers into habits which are simply the negation of
   best software engineering practices.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Exclude Thoughtful Engineers from Executive
        Management

   It is well known that venture capitalists tend to eject thoughtful
   engineers from the companies they found, refuse to help other thoughtful
   engineers start new companies, and install management who are
   under-informed (to put it politely) about the nature of computing
   systems.   Such is the power and coherence of capital that it casually
   destroys promising engineer-led efforts, ultimately without even any good
   financial reason.  (See the web sites and writings of Gabriel, Graham, and
   Greenspun for starting points to explore this.)

   With no sympathetic ears --- indeed, no ears capable of comprehending
   basic facts of software engineering --- in the executive corridors, there
   is no chance for engineers further down the hierarchy to plead their case
   for shifts in the practices employed in industry.   The three G's
   (Gabriel, Graham, and Greenspun) were at least privileged enough to have
   fall-back opportunities but they are exceptional that way.   In general,
   with this approach to corporate control, objectives such as marketing poor
   standards and promoting the negation of best software engineering
   practices face no threat of challenge from above.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Dominate the Press

   The often young, often under-educated volunteer community is largely
   informed by news and information outlets such as NewsForge, Slashdot, and
   O'Reilly press.   Well funded and well socially connected GNU/Linux
   vendors can influence these outlets in numerous ways with the aim of
   shaping everything from selection of editors to placement of articles and
   titles.   Venerable and sometimes more thoughtful news sources (e.g., ACM
   Queue) -- who might be (and in fact turn out to be) sometimes critical of
   ongoing GNU/Linux vendor practices -- can't compete: their content is
   addressed at readers more sophisticated than typical vendors and their
   business models are slow to adapt to the large free software and open
   source developer community.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Dominate Professional Conferences

   Vendors are in the economic and social position to influence (so-called)
   professional and trade conferences that serve the free software and open
   source community.   Influence can range from conventional marketing
   (spending a lot on booths) to more subtle forms (selection of program
   committees, occupation of keynote-address positions).   From these
   broadcast opportunities, industry executives can guide popular opinion
   about "what's important".

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Isolate and Surround Key Maintainers

   GNU/Linux vendors can't employ everyone they need but they can employ and
   influence the thought-leaders of that community.  In most cases, a popular
   maintainer can be made a regular employee whose public participation is
   limited and who is personally "sold" on the idea that the best way to
   advance their project is to steer it in the directions most consonant with
   the needs of their employer.  In a few cases where the maintainer would
   otherwise have enough social capital to override their employer's intents
   it is helpful to preserve an appearance of independence by erecting a
   consortium-type non-profit around one or a few maintainers.

   An innovative extension of this strategy is to invest heavily in growing
   new popular maintainers "in house" by spending social and press capital on
   promoting them.   The employer receives the benefit of much volunteer
   labor as the new maintainer can muster.

   An innovation on top of that innovation, currently being pursued by
   CollabNet, is to sell training to companies which promises to teach them
   how they, too, can can create new thought-leader maintainers.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Encourage Conflation of Vendor Prosperity
        with Community Success

   It is helpful to promote a distorted (if not outright false) notion of a
   common enemy such as Microsoft.   As a vendor of proprietary software,
   Microsoft is no less or more offensive to the notion of software freedom
   than the GNU/Linux vendors themselves but they do stand out by virtue of
   history, size, and licensing practices.

   Volunteers can be inspired to be uncritical of many GNU/Linux vendor
   practices by selling the message that the primary goal is to defeat
   Microsoft by any means necessary.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Trash and Take Over Threatening Projects

   At certain times, projects that arise outside of the business activities
   of GNU/Linux vendors may achieve a momentum and trajectory of their own
   which undermines the interests of those vendors (GCC under Kenner vs.
   Cygnus;  GNU Arch vs. Canonical).   With only moderate spending on
   falsely-friendly "forks", such projects can be reliably taken over and
   their maintainers discredited and pushed to the sidelines.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Celebrate Bloated, Intertwingled Solutions

   The goal of customer lock-in demands a delicate balance: one needs a
   GNU/Linux platform which works today but reparably breaks tomorrow, and
   the next day, and the day after that.  The goal is to addict customers to
   a service which provides an infinite stream of duct-tape patches.

   Therefore, vendors must reject all efforts from their engineers to
   institute "major internal cleanups" to code and, to be proactive, must
   celebrate software systems which are sufficiently bloated and have
   sufficient poorly controlled interdependencies to generate a need for
   perpetual patching.

   Simple, robust solutions can be discredited using press influence, control
   over thought leaders, and the like.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Claim Neutrality -- "Who, me?!?"

   The public in general, and the volunteer community is no exception, are
   generally naive about the role of social connections and biased trade
   arrangements at the executive and capital allocation level of industry.
   Especially popular among many engineer-volunteers are sentiments of naive
   libertarianism and false individualism.

   In that condition, it is easy and desirable to keep the efforts to
   influence and control the volunteer community hidden.   Messages such as
   "we only create opportunities to participate -- volunteers can choose or
   reject those as they see fit" are likely to resonate.  Truths such as the
   information awareness of volunteers can be controlled and the
   opportunities offered them can be limited can be plausibly denied.

        Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Control the Hubs of Cooperation

   Volunteers are, like the rest of us, fundamentally lazy -- they are
   inclined to seek the most convenient means to express their good will and
   disinclined to be critical of the implications of those means.
   Simultaneously, vendors which have the most timely access to urgent
   patches or new features have an advantageous position relative to their
   competitors.   Simultaneously, in the name of customer lock-in, there is a
   perpetual need to discourage volunteers from cleaning up their pessimal
   software engineering practices  -- one needs to sustain customer addiction
   to barely-tractable platforms which need constant patching and which are
   characterized by bloated, intertwingled software.

   This is convenient for vendors: Vendors can control the portals of
   participation  and thus install themselves as a kind of "Maxwell's Daemon"
   -- making room for some kinds of patching and feature addition (duct-tape
   and bloat-expansion work) while discouraging others (best practices;
   massive clean-up; simplification work).  Fedora, OpenSuSE, and Ubuntu are
   the leaders in this space and their examples point the way forward for
   further pursuing these evil strategies.  If the Collabnet pattern repeats
   itself, soon we will see classes offering third parties instruction in how
   to deploy similar manipulative tactics against the volunteer community.

   By making it easier to cooperate with a centralized hub soliciting
   incremental improvements to a barely functioning platform, vendors can
   distract volunteers from a sensible program of creating a tractable
   platorm.  (This could be dubbed the illusion of tractability strategy.)

    The Technological Tragedy -- How Customers and Volunteer Engineers are
    Screwed

   The result of the business and social practices analyzed above is bloated,
   hopelessly intertwingled software and a social arrangement of volunteers
   which creates and perpetuates this.  The software beyond human scale; it
   is out of control; and it is software on which, nevertheless, millions if
   not billions depend.   Proportional to the success of the GNU/Linux
   vendors is the degree of life-criticality of the systems they offer.   The
   negative properties of these offerings are sustained, encouraged, and
   expanded by the leadership role the vendors assume for themselves within
   the volunteer community.   An entire generation of socially and
   cooperatively inclined young engineers are led to neglect fundamental
   lessons of software engineering learned in the seventies (because the
   consequences of those lessons would be inconvenient to the vendors'
   business models).

   Ironically, these shortcomings of the commercial free software and open
   source offerings are a very broad opportunity for proprietary vendors,
   especially Microsoft and speculatively, Google.  With a vastly more
   intelligently organized workforce, those firms (and other minor players
   such as Apple and Sun) have ample opportunity and incentive to utterly
   leapfrog current free software and open source offerings with technically
   superior offerings.

   It is interesting in this context to note that these pattern of business
   practices have resulted in the lack of incentives to create free software
   projects that would seriously challenge, for example, the "Oracle
   hegemony".  (The curious phenomenon of the technologically anemic MySQL's
   ascendence combined with the struggles of the better foundation, Postgres,
   is interesting to observe.   It should come as no surprise, though, after
   witnessing the Linux kernel commercially trounce the freed-up BSD for no
   technically justifiable reason whatsoever.)

   It is also disappointing to note the utter failure of vendors to lead
   their customers in the direction of having genuinely source-based
   installs.  In the event of any number of foreseeable crises, life and
   enterprise critical customers will be unable to access binary updates from
   their GNU/Linux vendor (who may, indeed, be in no position to produce such
   updates at all).

    What's a Better Alternative -- Recommendations

   To investors we can say this: computing systems have geopoltical
   significance and (or yet) your investment choices have enormous influence
   over their evolution and hence the environment in which you operate.   As
   most mammalian species know, one shouldn't defecate where one consumes
   and, at least metaphorically, you are no exception.   Investment and
   executive-level control which is, without engineering wisdom, applied by
   inappropriate analogy from other industries to the computing systems
   industry is socially irresponsible and, if it doesn't hurt you personally,
   it will surely hurt your children and grandchildren.  Adjust your goals
   and invest anyway: look to beat conservative bonds, not to find a
   boom-driven windfall.  Seek out and embrace opportunities for personal
   professional development by learning more about software engineering than
   you (most of you) can currently imagine there is to learn.  Stand up
   straight and live up to the responsibilities of your privilege.  Turn
   against your peers who do not adopt these principles.

   A sane way to approach the problem of commercializing and profiting from
   the existence and interest in free software is to first understand the
   challenges as an engineering problem.  Engineering problems are
   characterized by a conjunction of financial constrains, social
   responsibilities, customer goals, and technical realities and degrees of
   freedom.   The best engineers simply refuse and indeed actively fight
   against deployments of capital which do not weigh these considerations
   carefully.   Alas, a wealth of sycophantic and irresponsible people with
   engineering talent are likely to be all too influential with investors.
   Still, where does engineering experience lead us, in the specific case of
   platform development and support:

   History gives us a richness of examples of platform development and
   support.   Reaching far back, we find ITS at MIT.  Progressing, we find
   Unix from Bell Labs and then BSD from the University of California.   A
   mere ~20 years ago, we find the Athena project at MIT and the Andrew
   project at CMU.   All of these have in common a modest ratio
   (1:a-few-or-several-hundred) of platform engineers to users.   In all
   cases, we have tight and often personal feedback between platform
   engineers and users.   In all cases we have platform engineer teams that
   top out at a few 10s of hackers, able to operate entirely autonomously,
   but also federated with similar teams elsewhere to leverage cooperation
   while not having to operate autonomously.  That ratio, and the human-scale
   platform-engineering it implies, and the federation is a formula for
   sanity and success.

   An abstract proscription?  You bet.   If you wanna get down to specifics,
   give me incentive.

    About the Author

   The author, Tom Lord, is the creator of GNU Arch, the hackerlab C library,
   GNU Guile, and more.

   He has enough capital left in the world to buy food for himself and his
   family for about 11 days.   A small amount more is promised in the form of
   a gift from a supporter that will extend that by a few days.   He has
   lacked access to professional health care for quite a few years and
   recently is suffering rather severely from the effects of osteoarthritis.

   Tom Lord has a reputation as a hot-head and generally bad-attitude guy but
   this perception is strongly contradicted by meeting him in person or
   examining his work product and history of dedication to helping free
   software succeed.

   If you are an executive who has interacted personally with him you
   probably have the impression that he has come to hate and despise you and
   would do anything at all to cause you harm -- but such perceptions will
   not hold up if you interact in a serious-minded and helpful way with
   him.   You will find that he is open minded, intellectually engaging,
   reasonably smart about basic economics and business, and generally
   forgiving and forward focused.

   Officially, Tom Lord has only a high school degree (though from a
   prestigious private school).  Unofficially, he is extremely well educated
   and well rounded and suffers mainly from the clique-ism, classism, and
   authentically bad attitudes of the FOSS industry executive leadership.

   -t

References

   Visible links
   1. mailto:lord@emf.ent
   2. http://www.freestandards.info/

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GNU arch home page:
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Best Regards!
Alexey Voinov
             
voins@voins.program.ru
voins@altlinux.ru


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