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Exposure to New Things, Still Good (More on Maglev)

June 3rd, 2008 | Programming, Ruby, Smalltalk, Tech

I’m somewhat taken aback by all of the negative reaction to Gemstone being a closed source product in the wake of the Maglev announcement.

Look at this:

Cargo Ship

Do you really think that the people that own this ship care about paying for software?

I doubt it, but they probably care about things like development speed. And software reliability. And the ability to get someone on the phone immediately if something goes wrong with the software.

That’s the world the Gemstone comes from. I would bet that if the software running the shipping platform for this company falls over, it would lose more money over the course of a few hours then it would cost them to license Gemstone for an entire year.

Here’s another example where JP Morgan has a system built on top of Gemstone that they can not afford to shut down or migrate to another language because it would cost them too much money.

How is being exposed to the toolset that powers things like that going to be a bad thing?

Sure, it’s closed source, but if enough people use it and benefit from it then the community will just do what we always do:

Some of us will pay for it, some of will find clever ways to subvert the license, and the rest of us will get to work on building an open source clone of it.

That’s what always happens, and when it does happen some people will continue buying the closed source supported version (Oracle) and others will move to the free version (MySql).

What makes anyone think that something different is going to happen here?

  • Monty Williams
    @Kurt: here are links about the two GemStone applications you mentioned.
    http://www.cwhonors.org/search/his_4a_detail.as...
    http://www.cwhonors.org/search/his_4a_detail.as...
  • @CLR: So the only reason that people use open source is that they can see the code?

    We both know that's garbage. Many, many people use open source software for many reasons other than that.

    They are sure that the software will work for them because other people have used it before and it worked. That's all the "approval" that they need.

    Some people also used closed source software because they feel that it works better for them.

    Oddly enough, they can test this hypothesis by writing their software and seeing if it works on top of Oracle and it performs better than the alternative.

    In fact, I bet that if you're in a life threatening situation that had no cure, and Pfizer had a miracle drug that they wouldn't reveal the internals of, but several of your friends had taken it and lived, you'd be the next in line to take it.

    I certainly would be.
  • CLR
    Wow. Your characterization of OSS is waaaay strawman.

    Would you take a pill that was produced by Pfizer, even if Pfizer had never published any efficacy studies? If so, that's some kind of bravery, if that's the word for it. Personally, I would be a bit more than "annoyed" if Pfizer tried to market a drug that could save my life, but couldn't pass FDA approval because they wanted to keep its mechanism a secret.

    The entire basis of Western Scientific Method is peer-reviewed publication and verifiability. This is the principle behind OSS. Its a principle that has carried Western civilization pretty far, doncha think?

    It is enough justification for me to feel comfortable steering clear of MagLev.

    Also, PostgreSQL is a more appropriate free alternative to Oracle; MySQL doesn't really fit the analogy.
  • Adrian Madrid
    I think a lot of people are annoyed because they think of it as an all or nothing. They have said that at least some part of it will be open-source. I peronally don't ahve a problem with it. I'm all in for the shared OODB. If I could start using Gemstone transparently today in MRI I would be happy. But I guess I will have to wait.
  • I'm not sure why you would be surprised that be many people are disappointed to hear that this technology isn't going to be open source. People want to be able to learn from it and improve upon it, which is harder to do if it is open source.

    If Maglev delivers on it's promises, the Ruby community will be better off for it, but if Maglev delivered on its promises and was open source, that would be an even bigger benefit.
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