FC: CEI blasts Linux as unsuitable for government, business use

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

CEI is a free-market think tank in Washington. It may be best known for its 
work on environmental issues, where it has pointed out government reliance 
on junk science.

Jim Delong, who wrote the below message, is an occasional contributor to 
Politech. Jim wrote a piece over the summer supporting the general approach 
of the Berman anti-P2P bill:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03711.html

CEI received a small-to-moderate amount of money from Microsoft during the 
antitrust trial days, but based on my knowledge of CEI, I'd say I'm 
positive that Jim's views are his and his alone (he's an economist, and it 
can't be helped). :)

Jim is responding to this New York Times editorial yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/opinion/18WED2.html

-Declan

---

Subject: CEI's Weekly Commentary:  Software Wars
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 17:13:37 -0400
From: "Richard Morrison" <rmorrison@cei.org>

CEI C:\SPIN

This issue:  Software Wars:  Open Source and the N. Y. Times


This week's c:\spin, is by James V. DeLong, Senior Fellow, Project on 
Technology and Innovation, CEI, September 19July 19, 2002.


The New York Times recently editorialized about Linux and open source 
software, exuberant that an operating system written and updated by 
volunteer programmers in a communitarian spirit, and available for free 
might challenge Microsoft s Windows and result in major savings in computer 
costs.


The paper also exulted that governments such as Germany and China are 
pushing Linux, and it urged everyone, including U.S. agencies, to join them 
so as to foster competition.


The NYT view has some gold.  Competition is always good.  And the Linux 
backers have hold of an important truth, which is that persuading a lot of 
smart people each to devote a small part of their time to an effort can 
produce impressive results.  They are also right to think that opening up 
computer code to the eyes of the whole programming community can be 
extremely productive.  Microsoft itself sees increasing virtue in this 
idea, and is developing shared source to open up code to scrutiny while the 
company keeps firm hold of the pen.


But the NYT misses in some ways.  First, none of this is free.   Software 
is a complicated industrial product requiring continuing re-creation and 
support, and money to support it must come from somewhere.  Linux 
programmers are not street people who sleep on steam grates so as to 
indulge their passion.  They are supported, often handsomely, by 
universities and IT companies.  Even this support is not sufficient to keep 
Linux going, and hardware companies, notably IBM, are now pouring billions 
into it.  There is nothing wrong with this; IBM has good competitive 
reasons in that it wants to dish Sun and Microsoft.  But the movement is 
not the folk song army depicted in the NYT.


If  IT companies, universities, and IBM want to donate the fruits of their 
labor  to computer purchasers, including governments, that is their 
privilege.  But we have just gone through a half a decade in which the 
business model was give it away, and it did not work.  In the end, software 
might be bundled with hardware, or vendors might give away software tied to 
a services contract both are increasingly common -- but the code writers 
will want pay for producing it, which means money must ultimately come from 
the users somehow.


A second problem is the creation of applications for Linux. The General 
Public License that controls the program s distribution can be paraphrased 
as thou shalt not charge for this program and its source code shall be 
public.   This license is also viral; if you write an ap for Linux, and 
incorporate any code covered by the GPL, then your ap is also subject to 
the GPL, and it too becomes open source and free.


True open source believers think that this is just fine -- all aps should 
be open and free.  But it is not clear that the freeware spirit, or the 
IT/university willingness to subsidize, runs deep enough to provide 
anything approaching the number of aps available for Windows, where good 
old reliable greed creates an incentive for developers.  The Linux 
community is moving toward proprietary aps, but it is chancy.  Writing aps 
without incorporating some operating system code is difficult, and those 
who want to engraft proprietary aps onto Linux are taking a legal risk.


Finally, governments should not treat this as an arena for industrial 
policy.  The incentives fueling the Linux movement are not necessarily 
those required for long-term production of software suited for the public 
as well as the nerds.  Governments, which are as naïve as editorial 
writers, should keep their hands off.




  C:\SPIN is produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.





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