What is an OPC server?

C
OK, So the cure for this disease is to pay the highwayman and congratulate him for his cleverness? And heavily patronize preditory monopolies because it's much easier than doing the right thing and encouraging competition?? The lawyer thought is well intentioned, I'm sure. But, the people who granted the morally bankrupt this kind of power are reading this. They didn't make billions with their legal staff. They simply put a tax on every machine sold with the willing consent of the public or at best their apathy. It's obvious who has to correct the balance. It just requires the will to do so. If you starve the beast, the lawyers will go away.

Regards

cww
 
I believe we are fighting to come to a new understanding about how to do business in knowledge based economies. Interestingly this OPC discussion has raised the "real" concers of those involved using OPC. A one answer to always or never use Microsoft technologies shows a lack of wisdom. That is where good decision making takes effect.

OpenOffice is slowly but surly making grounds in the office suite battle. I use it and I prefer it to MS office. The same can one day be true in the control market.

Steve Balmer makes a good point when he states "Nothing innovative has ever come out of open source developmnet". Aside from the obvious pitfalls of "nothing innovative" I think he is raising the question of how do we innovate with open source?

We want to ensure that our efforts are accounted for so we can continue to invent. It is very obvious that sharing ideas benefits both parties involved. We need new business models to reflect our new understandings of business. As a good example, look to the project "Compiere" at the sourceforge.net website. They make money by providing the services to end users and meanwhile continue to add knowledge to shared pool.

I friend once told me "If I have a hammer and you have a hammer and we both exchange hammers, each of us end up with a hammer. Contrastingly if I have an idea and you have an idea we both exchange ideas, we each walk away with 2 ideas"

Ghandi believed in non-resistance to evil. It was proven in the liberation of India. If we resist evil (greed) then we acknowledge its existence and in so doing give it power. It takes two people to argue and one to stop.

Yes lawyers are very much involved in dealing with evil, it is the reason the law exists in the first place.

To summarize, we need be aware of IP abuse to recognize when we should divert our attention to productive activities. Fighting only raises the walls higher, and those that would argue that sometimes you have to are not acting out of long term priciples. Focusing on identifying the problems, refining the goals and designing solutions with the intent of HELPING our customers will ensure they always want to be business partners and provide security. We are interdependent beings.

my $.02
-Mark
Lanigan, Sask, Canada
 
> Steve Balmer makes a good point when he states "Nothing innovative has ever
> come out of open source developmnet". Aside from the obvious pitfalls of
> "nothing innovative" I think he is raising the question of how do we
> innovate with open source? <

To be even-handed, it's also been said that nothing innovative has ever come out of Microsoft :)

The question, however, is real. How does one innovate? There seem to be at least two stages: thinking of a new idea, and bringing it into wide use.

As far as thinking of a new idea is concerned, that can really strike anywhere. However, the business world is often wary of new ideas. Except for the brief anomaly of the dot-com boom, business financiers want proven ideas, not pie-in-the-sky stuff. One can observe this effect in the entertainment industry, for instance, where nobody wants to be first, but everybody wants to be first to be second. Truly innovative ideas are likely to fare poorly
under a regime of commercial software.

Open Source's lower barriers to entry give some advantage when an inventor can't get financial backing because the idea is too new or too radical.

For bringing a new idea into wide use, both Microsoft and Open Source have well-established channels. Microsoft's perhaps work somewhat faster on a global scale, but at the cost of bringing the idea to everybody, regardless of whether or not it's useful to them - Clippy is a famous example of an idea whose time has come, but which should have been tuned to be somewhat less intrusive. On the individual scale, Open Source has the advantage: an
interested user can obtain the invention directly from the author or author's website with only low to moderate effort, without the whole marketing machinery interposed. This means that the feedback cycle between the author and the early adopters can be very short, allowing quick refinement of a (perhaps initially rough) new idea.

> Focusing on identifying the problems,
> refining the goals and designing solutions with the intent of HELPING our
> customers will ensure they always want to be business partners and provide
> security. We are interdependent beings. <

And that's a good business plan.

Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jirib
MAT LinuxPLC project --- http://mat.sf.net --- Machine Automation Tools
 
A

Andrey Romanenko

Hello,

It wasn't his first foot in the mouth. I believe there had been something like "open-source is not the American way".
Obviously he forgot about the open source networking code that, if I am not mistaken, MS innovatively used in their products. You may try to take a look at software beyond the scope of computer science or IT. Look at it as a tool for teachers, scientists, engineers, doctors. There is NETLIB with many pieces of code at the core of open-source and proprietary programs. There is GNU/RTLinux or RTAI to
shake the RTOS market. There is open-source automation and control software available, although it is at its early stage of development. And you already mentioned Openoffice.

Governments, universities, public and private businesses are innovating with open-source software. I suggest Steve Balmer look around better. Or look up the scientific peer-reviewed works of Y. Benkler; J. Lerner and J. Tirole G. von Krogh, and many, but many others. There is even a special issue of Research Policy magazine (vol32.issue7)
devoted to the topic.

Regards,
Andrey Romanenko
 
C
Now this, is an interesting thread.

On March 30, 2004, Jiri Baum wrote:
> On March 29, 2004, msluser wrote:
>>Steve Balmer makes a good point when he states "Nothing innovative has ever
>>come out of open source developmnet". Aside from the obvious pitfalls of
>>"nothing innovative" I think he is raising the question of how do we
>>innovate with open source? <
>
> To be even-handed, it's also been said that nothing innovative has ever come
> out of Microsoft :)
>
> The question, however, is real. How does one innovate? There seem to be at
> least two stages: thinking of a new idea, and bringing it into wide use.
>
> As far as thinking of a new idea is concerned, that can really strike
> anywhere. However, the business world is often wary of new ideas. Except for
> the brief anomaly of the dot-com boom, business financiers want proven ideas,
> not pie-in-the-sky stuff. One can observe this effect in the entertainment
> industry, for instance, where nobody wants to be first, but everybody wants
> to be first to be second. Truly innovative ideas are likely to fare poorly
> under a regime of commercial software.
>
> Open Source's lower barriers to entry give some advantage when an inventor
> can't get financial backing because the idea is too new or too radical.
>
> For bringing a new idea into wide use, both Microsoft and Open Source have
> well-established channels. Microsoft's perhaps work somewhat faster on a
> global scale, but at the cost of bringing the idea to everybody, regardless
> of whether or not it's useful to them - Clippy is a famous example of an idea
> whose time has come, but which should have been tuned to be somewhat less
> intrusive. On the individual scale, Open Source has the advantage: an
> interested user can obtain the invention directly from the author or author's
> website with only low to moderate effort, without the whole marketing
> machinery interposed. This means that the feedback cycle between the author
> and the early adopters can be very short, allowing quick refinement of a
> (perhaps initially rough) new idea. <

And to be a little bit more abstract (and I've been accused of being very abstract) the Open Source Process is an extremely close analog of the public scientific process. This is where information is freely exchanged and all progress from the knowledge gained. So often, leaps in
understanding take place even before the foundational work it is derived from is complete. This is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" model, which has been enormously successful compared to the private science model. This model is where knowledge gained from secret research is hoarded in hopes that the world will stand still until results are acheived. The scientists labor in isolation and some tiny percentage hit pay dirt. This system is responsible for the World drug crisis where desperately needed new pharmaceuticals are so expensive that even if
highly effective, the net effect on the problem is nil but they get filthy rich serving the rich. The metric is different. The public process achieves far greater understanding and distribution of knowledge. And the private model makes a lot of money for a few people. It's a good thing most scientists have some belief in the advancement metric or we wouldn't be reading this.

And now that there is a public alternative in this arena, there is a close parallel to the above. You can bet your money on either countless parallel duplicative efforts, all hoping for the big payoff if and when everybody adopts a whatever that they own. Or you can subscribe to the
public model where everyone can help each other towards making real progress. You can tell how successful at creating standards the first model has been. Might it not be a good idea to try the second?

But, getting back to innovation, the innovation of the OSS process itself is enormously significant as a singular example of cooperation unmatched in the rate of change and far outpacing the monopoly with it's billions and hoardes of paid developers. So it depends on your metric.

>>Focusing on identifying the problems,
>>refining the goals and designing solutions with the intent of HELPING our
>>customers will ensure they always want to be business partners and provide
>>security. We are interdependent beings. <

And when the focus is on helping we will be much further ahead by any metric.

Regards

cww
 
C
Hi Andrey

One should give credit where credit is due. Steve Balmer etal. of Redmond fame have produced tremendous innovation in the science of suppressing competition and building and protecting a monopoly. Their legal achievments in rendering the USDOJ impotent and of threatening the very existance of OSS is remarkable as well. And their political achievements in enacting legislation institutionalizing their world view and distroying the rights of computer users in the name of profit are no less than historic. They have achieved a lot.

Regards

cww
 
R

Ralph Mackiewicz

On March 30, 2004, Jiri Baum wrote:
> Truly innovative ideas are likely to fare poorly under a regime of
> commercial software. <

This is just as silly and self-serving as Ballmer claiming that open-source can't be innovative. As if no one can identify any successful innovation in industrial automation that is available as commercial software. Really now. Such exaggerated (to be kind) assertions are not an effective way of arguing in favor of open source solutions.

> Open Source's lower barriers to entry give some advantage when an
> inventor can't get financial backing because the idea is too new or
> too radical. <

When investors can figure out how people can make a profit
developing open source software for small niche markets (like industrial automation) without retaining ownership to the result of the development, then the lower entry barrier might actually produce IA companies with sufficient growth potential in which unrelated investors are likely to be interested.

IMHO, the more probable scenario is for innovative companies to produce commercial software that runs over an open source operating system, like Linux, where the bulk of the OSS development can be spread out over a much much larger developer base than exists in the IA world.

> On the individual scale, Open Source has the advantage: an
> interested user can obtain the invention directly from the author
> or author's website with only low to moderate effort, without the
> whole marketing machinery interposed. This means that the feedback
> cycle between the author and the early adopters can be very short,
> allowing quick refinement of a (perhaps initially rough) new idea. <

Marketing machinery can be cumbersome when it is run poorly, but there is a lot of value in marketing to both the vendor and the customer when it is run properly. Companies don't have marketing departments so that they can make life difficult for their customers. One of the primary purposes of marketing is to communicate information to potential customers so that they can make a decision. A developer without a marketing department is going to be spending an awful lot of time doing something other than development. Separating marketing and development is a division of labor that results in increased productivity that benefits both the company and their customers. That is why marketing departments exist. Even in very small companies. Any sane organization will have separated marketing and development activities. Numerous OSS organizations are smart enough to have separate marketing and development activities.

> > Focusing on identifying the problems,
> > refining the goals and designing solutions with the intent of
> > HELPING our customers will ensure they always want to be business
> > partners and provide security. We are interdependent beings. <
>
> And that's a good business plan. <

Agreed. That is the quintessential benefit provided by ANY
successful enterprise regardless of whether they use OSS or not.

Regards,
Ralph M.
 
On March 30, 2004, Jiri Baum wrote:
> > Truly innovative ideas are likely to fare poorly under a regime of
> > commercial software. <

On April 1, 2004, Ralph Mackiewicz wrote:
> This is just as silly and self-serving as Ballmer claiming that
> open-source can't be innovative. As if no one can identify any
> successful innovation in industrial automation that is available as
> commercial software. Really now. <

As I wrote, the difference is in degree. Ideas can strike anywhere. They're less likely to survive in a commercial regime, but by no means is it impossible.

> > Open Source's lower barriers to entry give some advantage when an
> > inventor can't get financial backing because the idea is too new or
> > too radical. <
>
> When investors can figure out how people can make a profit
... <

Of course, Open Source software is not necessarily predicated on making a profit. You're imposing additional conditions on the inventor, which make it more difficult for the innovative idea to ever see the light of day.

Obviously, making a profit is important; but it's orthogonal to the question of being innovative.

Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jirib
MAT LinuxPLC project --- http://mat.sf.net --- Machine Automation Tools
 
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