This post has 5 comments

• 

  Radu C
  August 7th, 2008
  

  Open source has an advantage that companies, regardless of their business model, will never have (or I don’t see it anyway): it doesn’t lose market share when something goes wrong (unless it goes terribly wrong, and it takes a week for things to be written from scratch, after which things get back to normal again, and world domination gets back on track).

  When a bug affects one company’s product, users will flock to the support line. And the wire will get so hot and crowded, and the waiting queue so long, that customers will eventually just give up.

  In open source you don’t have ONE company taking care of the product. You have LOTS. And when a bug is found, THEY flock to fix the bug before the commercial users even let out a whine. So when the phone lines start to heat up, all you have to tell your customers is to update their systems, and possibly kindly offer to help smooth the process. But I doubt that they heat up.

  Now, a closed source company could also avoid having the hot line problem. But they’d need a number of employees that matches the number of open source software maintainers and hackers. That would bring the company down faster than a Romanian MIG military plane

  There’s one thing: closed source seems to be a dying a slow but certain death. Only exotic algorithms will be able to survive. Closed software, like totalitarianism, can’t survive if the people start wanting more and more progress, and they want to help that progress happen.

  Now that I mentioned totalitarianism, and the last image in the above paragraph, it occurred to me that people don’t want communism controlled by a central body, but socialism controlled by the people, on their own terms. While coming up with the socialism part of this paragraph, I also connected to what the EU is doing, which was summarized by an analyst as “socialism at work”, which made me think about what democracy really is, and why I like the European one over the American one.

  There’s a balance that comes out of all this, but I fail to put it coherently in words. And when there’s balance, everyone is happy.

  Looks like European socialism is a democratic system where people can kick companies in the balls, whereas the American capitalism is the opposite, while still being democratic: the companies kick you in the balls (if you have them).

  Now back to open source and openness: if you associate America with closed source and Europe with open source, then get the happiness numbers from both places, you may be getting somewhere (where I’m failing to take you right now).

  Does that all make (any) sense?

• 

  Alina Popescu
  August 7th, 2008
  

  Hi Radu, haven’t seen you in a while

  I agree the open source community is so wide spread and knowledgeable they never get thousands calling for each issue. But most people don’t have time to read three tutorials to upgrade a software and don’t want to register on ten forums just to get fixes.

  You might say open source companies could sell support or their software, but let’s face it, once you know enough you wouldn’t pay and even if you do, I haven’t heard of support divisions of such companies being extremely profitable.

  Closed source will die a slow death if they don’t learn how to copycat some of the open source industry’s advantages: such as transparency and reacting quickly.

  Trust me, I know a bit about immense queues of emails asking the very same thing. It gets solved with automatic replies that take less than a minute to be sent.

  I will not get into the political aspect you mentioned, simply because I don’t know enough to agree or contradict you. But I’ve been “kicked in the balls” by so many local companies I think we either aren’t in Europe, or there’s a flaw right there. Besides, if America is closed source, what other more privately kept metaphor would you assign to other countries and continents? Say China?

• 

  Radu C
  August 7th, 2008
  

  Hi,

  Nice exchanging words with you again.

  Well, China is “you use what we tall you to use, and if it has bugs, those aren’t really bugs, they were meant by the government to be that way, and we all know that the government knows best and we must not argue about its wisdom”.

  About those automated replies: boy do I hate those. And what I hate more than automated replies: manual replies that I can use in court to prove that my question wasn’t read at all, and the person was just playing “computer” while the automated reply systems were down.

  What happens in the open source community is that you usually don’t call the support line. You go to a forum. And in that forum, although you get some guys that work for the company in question, you also get a bunch of technical enthusiasts that will toss your idea on all sides so the company itself doesn’t have to. You get to solve your problem in a friendly environment, as opposed to a corporate environment. We all hate corporations, but we all love having friends. You could also have a beer and a tan while getting your problem solved, which means having an enjoyable day. That’s what people want, and when you think of a solution to a problem, you should think what makes people enjoy their lives. That doesn’t mean giving away free hamburgers It means talking to people, and not putting them away or making them feel miserable. It also means giving them all the time they need, and not put them off because there are other people in line (which also means you need more people to handle inquiries while others are busy, as to reduce the stress).

  I wonder how that would work in ordinary establishments. The tech support line is one-on-one, and when the person you’re speaking to doesn’t know the answer, and it’s not in the canned responses list, you’ll get transferred to a supervisor, who will transfer you to his supervisor, and so on, until there are no more supervisors left and what you’ll leave with will be the same “we opened a ticket” answer you would have received from the first person, except you spend more time on the phone. The forum on the other hand, although it doesn’t give you an instant answer, it will give you lots of answers later, from different people, and maybe even spark a debate which will lead to what your problem actually is (because sometimes people describe the wrong problem). These being said, I was thinking about how a big company, or government facility, could implement the forum paradigm instead of the one-on-one office meeting (or phone call) paradigm.

  Hmm…

  The first thing would be having self-service machines all over the place (the job lays off problem will be just temporary). Accessible from your laptop over the Internet would be best, but not all of us have computers, and if we do, we might not carry them with us all over the place. Then, in addition to machines, you’d need a lounge where consultants would sit. And you’ll also need helpful people around, so when you don’t know something, you can just ask, and a helpful person that just happens to be there will show you how things work. I do that from time to time, especially when I notice that the people paid to do the same thing freak out, get a memory block, or simply have no idea what is asked of them (and in addition they don’t know where to look for the answer). And each time everyone leaves the situation with a smile, and that includes the office worker.

  I think what I describe is something related to the idea of “cooperation”. It requires some brain power of the people involved though, and some times people just want stuff done with the least thinking done possible. Sometimes, they outright refuse to think and cooperate, and consider it is their God-given right to refuse to think, and it’s your God-imposed obligation to solve their problems (and clean their toilets while at it). That’s actually how wars are started The same people think that getting along with your peers is a utopian idea (which makes the part of England that I’ve seen so far be equivalent to Utopia), and refuse to consider that it could be any other way.

  To summarize: For things to work out, you need:
  - stress free environments
  - people that are willing to help
  - people that are willing to find solutions themselves
  - people that aren’t always on the go
  - people that don’t hate life, but love every moment of it
  - people willing to wait a bit for a solution rather than have it served to them instantly
  - people willing to go into debates
  - get rid of the neanderthal part of our lives

• 

  Alina Popescu
  August 7th, 2008
  

  Hi Radu!

  I was referring to only one type of standard replies: those explaining a known problem and showing you how to solve it. Other than that it all needs to be over viewed carefully and a human touch always does the trick.

  As far as technical enthusiasts and self-proclaimed evangelists, they exist for all companies, including close source software vendors. I know it all to well and whenever they encounter a problem, their take on it is ” hey fix this so your product can keep rocking”. They do provide technical assistance on forums and other outlets as well.

• 

  Radu C
  August 7th, 2008
  

  I got so distracted with my own point of view, that I missed the big company evangelists completely. Yeah, you have those. Me and my friends like to make fun of them when a problem can be solved by source code editing only, and while they praise “Big Company Inc.”, they’re also at its mercy, because they can not edit the source code and make a patch. They can only open a ticket. Actually they can do two things: open a ticket and pray I find that kind of helplessness unacceptable.

  “When a bug affects one company’s product, users will flock to the support line. And the wire will get so hot and crowded, and the waiting queue so long, that customers will eventually just give up.”

  This wouldn’t happen if the company was able to create a fix for the problem, and instead of trying to temper down the customers, would just point them to the fix, or push an automated fix. But companies usually focus on making money, and its employees focus on working and making money rather involve themselves in tech support. Hmmm… there’s a BIG ANNOYING GAP when you have two teams on the same software. And we all know that if you bring new people in, it takes time to understand what the other people wrote, even if they followed the greatest, leanest and cleanest of coding standards in existence. And you get a lot of ping-pong going on, while the annoyed customer crowed increases in the call center’s headphones.

  Actually, because of that helplessness, I don’t bother fixing people’s Windows computers anymore. Have a Linux box? Let me at it. Have a Windows machine? Be prepared to pay big, because I don’t like breaking my fingers with a sledge hammer. When Windows is fixed by pulling the network cable out of the machine… that’s not fixing the problem, unless you can live without the network (I’ve heard a true story on the subject, and the person that pulled the network plug had some MS certification).

  In your article you say that what closed source companies should learn from open source is that “every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs.”

  I find something wrong here: people aren’t annoyed with bugs not because they are known and that they know what to expect (I think you get the same with Microsoft’s Knowledge Base), but because lots of people around the world fix those bugs (either because they like doing it, they get paid to do it, or are just bored out of their skulls and their Xbox doesn’t cut it). Even if it takes a while for the fix to be integrated in the main branch, you can count that some guy out there will provide a home-made compilation with the fixed software and give it to people (so you don’t have to compile anything yourself – just install and run). I hear a few voices in the background saying that this is the case with some closed source too. That’s true. But do you know what happened when someone “fixed” closed source programs? They got sued for unauthorized reverse engineering. And the companies didn’t even bother to look at the fix, less integrate it. Wait, what? That bug is known, people should know what to expect, not fix it, what the heck? What’s wrong with these people that don’t trust the company and want to do everything themselves?

  So it’s not about “hiding it under the carpet” (and shoot anyone who takes it out of there). It’s about capacity. Even if you have a million employees, they are so swamped with current projects that it will take forever (or a bit less) to get a problem fixed. But I guess that’s how you keep shrinks busy

  You also say “[...] how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to.” Let me split that one up: “[...] how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry”: Very important. And if you want to make huge profits, you know that it’s very important that YOU DON NOT do any of those things (but you can fake them); “and what the lack of these values can lead to.”: yeah, they can lead to huge profits. But if you tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth… you know what happens then, don’t you? Shares drop like flies. Now that would be bad right? Which directly implies that lying is good, and telling the truth is bad. Need more proof? I’m sure some big shot CEO would point out that open source companies don’t make that much money. Even if they’re not doing so bad financially.

  What would happen if Axigen or Windows ever went open source? Well, in the case of the second, MS profits will take a nose dive (as a whole bunch of other people would be able to tinker with the software and become pros in fixing problems with this beast – and then offer their services on the free market), but if they’d play their cards right, they’d be able to hold on to a quite good market share. On Axigen’s part, I’m not sure what that would accomplish that putting a bunch of open source software together and then selling solutions based on that can’t match. People could even just rip it apart and integrate it into already existing solutions – not good for the company. In any case, if one goes open source, they have to target mostly companies, not individuals, because that’s where the money is, and companies usually don’t want to be bothered with tinkering with the software. They just want it to work, regardless of the development model. Users on the other hand won’t turn to the company as the first point of getting help (like I said before, everybody hates corporations), but turn to their geek friends instead. Wouldn’t it be nice if their geek friends could fix the problem without having to go through the company call center? Either that, or have them break the law, but the company still won’t see a dime out of it.

  Whichever way I go, I get advocating open source And selling services and solutions rather than products. Just put tag that says “if your geek friend fucks the system up and you come crying to us for help, we’ll charge you extra”.

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