Economics and Open Source

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 4th, 2021

Economics and Open Source

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 4th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 4th included Edwin Peer, James Todd, Peter Corless, Matt Campbell, jasonbking, Simeon Miteff, Josh Clulow, Ian, Joe Thompson, Dan Cross, Tom Lyon, Tim Burnham, and vint serp. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Mark Jones Lorenzo (2017) Endless Loop: The History of the BASIC Programming Language book
  • John Kemeny wiki
• [@3:11](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=191) Tim’s excellent tweet
  • William Gibson wiki
  • John Browne (1996) The Bug Count Also Rises short story
• [@5:38](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=338) Growing up with BASIC
• [@8:03](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=483) Braille ’n Speak PDA (intro video), BASIC programming
• TI-BASIC language
• [@10:39](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=639) Speaking program reading off system calls in real time
  • snoop could output to /dev/audio
• [@13:39](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=819) Joel Spolsky (2002) Strategy Letter V blog
  • Bryan’s (2004) The Economics of Software blog
  • Software “maintenance”
• [@20:02](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1202) Cathedral and the Bazaar, wiki
  • “Forkophilic” development model and the Alan Cox -ac Linux tree
• [@26:07](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1567) Open source as something in the commercial best interest of a business
  • SCO v IBM wiki
  • Halloween documents wiki
  • Steve Ballmer’s “Linux is a cancer” quote in the Chicago Sun-Times
  • OpenOffice.org wiki (open sourced from StarOffice)
• [@30:29](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1829) Document editing as a service. Services and open source
• Richard Stallman on SaaS
• [@33:34](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2014) The Joel Test link
  • Joel’s (2007) Strategy Letter VI blog
  • “Everybody wants to be a platform”
• [@38:58](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2338) Joel’s take on Sun
  • Making the pie larger. Porting NFS to rival platforms
  • The Sun Network Filesystem: Design, Implementation and Experience has a section on porting experiences.
  • Monetizing software - “Sun could never monetize software, only hardware”
• [@44:44](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2684) Window toolkits, “cross platform”, write once run anywhere
• “Write once, debug everywhere”
• What’s the directory separator on MVS? or Stratos VOS?
• [@51:40](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3100) James’ experience working on Tomcat
  • Joel’s (2002) Lord Palmerston on Programming blog
  • Graphics toolkits, Electron/Web vs Native
• [@1:05:21](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3921) “OpenSolaris downloads are potential buyers for the ZFS appliance”
• [@1:06:17](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3977) Jason Hoffman “The Sun does not shine on me”
  • Strategy cannot make up for poor execution
  • Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz didn’t travel to meet customers
  • Demoing to a hostile audience
  • “Asteroid named Linux on a collision course” tweet
• [@1:13:20](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4400) Open-core, AWS services, monetizing open source
  • “People will pay for a service”
  • Could Apple open source?
• [@1:18:43](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4723) Packaged solutions; giving mom a linux box. Free software: free for whom?
  • Support relationships. People want support
• [@1:22:05](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4925) Why didn’t Sun embrace Linux?
  • ZFS on Linux, Ubuntu
  • The Sourceware Operating System Proposal – Larry McVoy’s open source SunOS 4 proposal.
  • Sun bought Cobalt wiki
• [@1:25:33](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5133) “The writing was on the wall for Sun..”
  • x86 price-performance
  • “Couldn’t you buy like 100 x86 computers for that price?”
  • RISC machine in-fighting, while Intel undercuts the market
• [@1:31:01](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5461) Josh’s work on frustrating hardware configuration
• [@1:33:25](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5605) Peter’s experience as a Sun customer
  • Vertical scaling, but not so much horizontal scaling
  • Clusters of cheap commodity hardware outperforming big multiway boxes
  • Importance of open source for big internet companies
  • Traders used Sun workstations, for fast trading
• [@1:38:39](ht...