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05/06/2005: "sexy books, lying vendors and the truth of FOSS"

I've been reading Peter "Practical Common Lisp" while out here in Las Vegas, mostly in the small spaces in my day not otherwise filled with N+I or dying relatives, or shuffling between my relatives houses.

The other day I was reading it at my father's kitchen table. When he came in, he inquired as to what I was reading. I showed him the cover. He wanted to know what Lisp was. I explained. He asked if I didn't already know how to program computers, so I explained how Lisp is different.

The discussion quickly devolved from there. Dad likes to know how things (ultimately) work, so we dived into computer architecture. I got to explain (again) that the the little transistors worked together to hold a voltage that represented 1s and 0s, and that the only real power that most computer architectures have is the ability to compare two bits and add one to another bit.

Along the way I got to explain that some modern CPUs have over 100 million transistors, and operate at a clock speed near 3 billion 'ticks' per second, that the feature size is now below 90nm, and that 1GB of memory, which can be had for less than $200, represents over 1 billion bytes, or about 8.5 billion bits.

He was floored.

We never did get back to Lisp, which is too bad, because I was anxious to see what he did with the idea of symbolic computation, .vs "doing math".

And yeah, I do agree, that book is dead sexy. Its got me charged to do things that I haven't wanted to do in a long time, or, in some cases, ever. I'll post a review when I'm finished.

The N+I keynote was sorta interesting:

Closing out his speech, Kriens likened the situation between technology vendors and their customers to campaign politics. The politicians, he said, were technology vendors who will say just about anything to get the customer’s business. And like politicians, once they were in the door of the client, the “campaign promises” of integration, performance, etc., were discovered to be not so true. Customers are like voters who choose to ignore the fact that there will always be a fast/good/cheap tradeoff, and buy into the vendor’s promises.

This situation is one of the things that frustrates me about the networking & computer industries. The vendors lie. Doc calls it "vendor sports", and in sports, as in life, some of the players cheat.

FOSS seems to be about mostly getting away from vendors. Oh sure, some vendors try to make money on FOSS, and even some of these are cheaters, but no vendor will ever get big on FOSS, at least, not for much longer than the normal technology cycle, the Efficient Market Hypothesis prevents anyone from building a monoploy on FOSS.

"An 'efficient' market is defined as a market where there are large numbers of rational, profit-maximizers actively competing, with each trying to predict future market values of individual securities, and where important current information is almost freely available to all participants. In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation where, at any point in time, actual prices of individual securities already reflect the effects of information based both on events that have already occurred and on events which, as of now, the market expects to take place in the future. In other words, in an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value."

(see http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/91malkiel.pdf and http://www.investorhome.com/emh.htm).

The transparency of efficient markets reveals the costs and value of operations undertaken by firms, and consequently a firm must demonstrate to the investor that it can offer something at a cheaper price than he could have done himself. For example, companies that merge or acquire otehrs often try to convince investors that they have added value by "diversifying", but the investor can easily and more cheaply diversity on his own, simply by purchasing shares in several different companies. There is no reason for him to prefer the generally more costly route offered by an merger.

By using FOSS, customers will not pay vendors for what they can do equally well themselves. Corporate projects based on FOSS are very transparent, Stalman's GPL envisions a world in which no programmer or company can hoarde software wealth. With the GPL, a company could always avail itself of the lowest cost to implement a project, add a feature to a program, or fix a bug in the program. Note carefully that the company *can* keep these things for which it has paid a minimum price completely to itself, unless it is in the business of shipping software, then it has to make an offer to provide the source code (or actually go ahead and provide the source code with the sale.) FOSS is *good* for business, though perhaps non-optimal for the technology business, since it creates an efficient market where programmers will bid a fair price to do the work that corporations need done.

In an efficent market, companies don't pay for features they don't use, they buy the features they need at a fair price, and I believe that Stalman's goal is, and continues to be to establish such a market, and the GPL is his lever.