An Economics Perspective to the Open Source Movement

[GreyGeek]

Re: An Economics Perspective to the Open Source Movement

Speaking of LGPL, does anyone know about Qt's trajectory (if there's any movement at all) for becoming closer to the GPL license than it is now?

Trolltech and the KDE Foundation negotiated an agreement several years ago which made Qt source available under the GPL. Both Qt3 and Qt4 have been under the GPL for several years. If Trolltech went out of business, or took Qt totally proprietary then the KDE Foundation could take the last released GPL version and continue on with it without Trolltech support. When Nokia bought Trolltech and changed it's name to QtSoftware, it also added the LGPL license to the GPL and it's own commercial license. in order to make it more agreeable to proprietary interests. More licensing information is here. As far as the LGPL is concerned my views are similar to those of the creator of the GPL and the LGPL, Richard Stallman.

On a side note ... During the last 2 years of work I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant young man who was working part-time on his PhD in Economics. His code was outstanding! My own areas of expertise include Physics, Math and Biochemistry, subjects I taught at the college level for almost a decade. We had lots of discussions similar to the one in this thread. It still amazes me when I think about the faith he has in the market to resolve all problems, even the putative market "solutions" violated the laws of physics. So, according to him, there is no energy shortage -- we will find what ever oil we need in what ever quantities we need it for the foreseeable future. Profit will solve everything.

[Prescience]

Re: An Economics Perspective to the Open Source Movement

Thanks for the info. Why is GTK used so much then (I already know it's history) qt in business? How different is it to use from a programmers perspective? Would it be hard or time consuming to switch a program from using GTK to using qt?

Your college, sounds like a really smart guy. I've thought about going back to school for a PhD in economics at some point. I don't know if I will though. While I do have tremendous faith in free markets, I do believe there is a role of government. The problem is I just don't trust them to do it as competently lot of the time. Take your example of oil for instance. I believe the free market would solve the oil issue on it's own. Unfortunately the market isn't really free. Almost all of the oil exporting nations devalue their currency and then sell oil at that artificially low price, causing an unnaturally high level of oil consumption. Also, most of the developing world subsidizes oil consumption. This causes them to use oil for almost everything, even in many of their power plants! It also causes them to waste a lot. As oil begins to run low, prices will rise and people will use less. Research and development will be heavily invested in to find solutions as well as extra oil exploration. Some of the solutions may not be with oil. This means that in a free market, oil wouldn't just run out. It would just be a relatively slow process for it being phased out. Besides, as I understand it, there's actually a ton more oil in the ground. The only problem is that it's very expensive to process so that we can use. Oil shale is one example of this. Since the market already has such strong interventions in place, it may be necessary for the government to step in to prevent the "cheaply" available oil from being used up to quickly. That's my view anyway.

[GreyGeek]

Re: An Economics Perspective to the Open Source Movement

Thanks for the info. Why is GTK used so much then (I already know it's history) qt in business? How different is it to use from a programmers perspective? Would it be hard or time consuming to switch a program from using GTK to using qt?

Before Nokia put Qt4 under the LGPL, KDE and Qt could not compete against GNOME and GTK because RedHat, Novell and other commercial distro makers did not have to buy a GTK license to code their distro branding and other binary and/or proprietary apps (including 3rd party software houses) that required a binary connection, which the LGPL allows. For them to write an application in Qt4 which they planned to sell as a closed source binary they had to purchase a commercial license at $3,000/developer, with about $1,500/yr renewal costs for the support and the additional apps which were not GPL but allowed Qt4 to link to Oracle and other proprietary databases. While FOSS distros had no problem because they used the GPL version of Qt4 exclusively, RedHat and Novell did not want to pay those Qt4 commercial fees, so they went with GNOME/GTK. It is Ubuntu's success with DELL and with Shuttleworth's marketing skills that made Ubuntu (and GNOME, hence the GTK) a household word which became synonymous with Linux. Prior to the appearance of Canonical the Linux desktop market was probably 85% KDE and the rest divided between GNOME and the 20 or so other Linux DEs. I am just guessing but now I'd say that the Linux DE market, because of Ubuntu and Novell, is probably 60-70% GNOME and 30-40% KDE. Few of the 20 or so other DEs are in great use. With Nokia adding Qt4 to the widget tools that use the LGPL I expect that KDE4 will become a commercial desktop because proprietary houses can take the LGPL version of KDE4 and bind in their proprietaries without having to reveal the source. It wouldn't suprise me of Microsoft took that route to add Word, Excel or other Linux version of their applications to the KDE4 desktop, unless they take the .NET binary version of those apps and add them to the Ubuntu .NET DE, which is more likely.

Your college, sounds like a really smart guy.

Ho Phu is VERY intelligent and a dedicated capitalist!

I've thought about going back to school for a PhD in economics at some point. I don't know if I will though.

IF you think that IF you still have the mental ability and can afford to go back, you should. The longer you wait the more difficult, mentally, it will be. Your peak mental year is around 28 years old. Most scientists do their best work and have the most inventions before they are thirty. The older they get the more their productivity falls off. Rarely do you hear of a scientist making a great discovery after they are 55 years old.

I attended college for seven years while I worked my way through at 40 hr/week, got married, had two kids and maintained a 3.58 GPA. What really helped was being awarded a Welch Foundation Research Grant in grad school (The grapes guy) for three years, which paid me more per year than my first job as an Assoc Prof of Nat. Sci at a small midwest college. My research was in anti-cancer metabolites. Didn't find any of those, but I did create a broad spectrum anti-biotic active at 1 mg/L, which was non-toxic. I was able to create batches of the stuff (3-Amino-3,4-dihydro-1-hydroxy Carbostyril) that were above 95% pure without recrystallization. Make the batch very acidic in the final step and the stuff fell out of solution like a heavy snow storm. After one recrystallization the batch was 99.99% pure. A couple of pharmaceuticals wrote and asked me about the key step which caused the great yields. Their intent was to create an analog and then patent it, and in the process my compound, so they could market it. Normally, I would drop in drops of 1 Molar HCL until the pH was acidic by a litmus paper test. That rarely got product at over 5% of theoretical, so it was hard to come by for testing. I had a blow-out with my major prof and after the discussion I stormed into may lab, saw that the 1 Molar HCL bottle was empty, and in a fit of anger picked up the concentrated HCL (37%) and dropped a couple CC's into the flask. That caused the snow storm. I didn't believe it was the stuff I was trying to synthesize and figured the excess acidity had broken something, but I made an IR spectra of it anyway, and to my surprise it produced the best spectra of my compound ever made. Equally important, it raised the melting point of my product by over 5 C and sharpened it from a 2-3 C spread to one of less than 0.25 C. And, it proved my point about the IR spectra of the old product being a mixture of my compound and a similar one where the OH acid group was replaced by H, which my prof and I had argued about. By the time I got my Master in Biochemistry my wife was begging for us to quit school and for me find a job so we could have a "normal" life. Had I been single I would have stayed till I earned a PhD, probably in Physics or Math, or at least find out if I was smart enough to do so. There were, at the time, only 200 PhDs in Math awarded per year in the whole country. Anyway, not staying in for the PhD was my greatest regret.

While I do have tremendous faith in free markets,

I have NO faith in free markets because they are no longer free. The fact that Microsoft continues in "business as usual" and has done even much worse than it was convicted of but never truly punished for, yet remains free to continue corrupting the business climate, pretty well establishes that fact. As long as corporations can buy votes with impunity in Washington (BOTH parties) my vote and your vote mean nothing. Essential we have a cabal running this country, and they've already fleeced the treasury with the greatest heist ever. The fall out from that has not yet been fully felt, but you and my grandchildren will feel the full brunt of it in years to come. America may become like Detroit all over and as long as the majority of job holders are working for minimum wages in part-time jobs with no benies, there is no tax base from which we can maintain our infrastructure, let alone solve the energy crisis (replace fossil fuels with a renewable source) and without Universal Health Care the number of uninsured Americans will continue to climb beyond 30% or 40%. In fact, I expect free universal health care to become reality ONLY when 51% of the voters do not have health insurance and cannot afford to go to doctors who charge $1,800 for a simple operation on the thumb, or $10,000 for a 20 minute roto-rooter on your urethra, or $15,000 for a watch-pocket appendectomy. The corporate CEOs, the parms, the insurance and the legal professions will have to be overhauled to bring those professions down to earth, where the rest of the people live. That CEOs make 275 times what their employees make is criminal. NO ONE has more responsibility or is worth more than the POTUS, and he makes less than $500K/yr, unless he's in on graft and corruption, which most politicians in Washington are. To have CEO's and "Investors" make $200M/yr plus $20M "bonuses" for driving their companies into the ground merely proves the system is rigged for fleecing.

I do believe there is a role of government. The problem is I just don't trust them to do it as competently lot of the time.

I've learned to trust business even less. At least, I can still vote out a rascal. IF we vote out enough of them, ASAP, perhaps... we can begin to clean up the mess. But, how can we choose ethical people when the people themselves are scoff-laws (if a person won't honor simple traffic laws what keeps them legal in the big things?), cheats and drug abusers? And, how can I fire Ballmer or Gates?

Take your example of oil for instance. I believe the free market would solve the oil issue on it's own.

That's what Ho Phu believed! The "free market", allowing for a moment, its existence, cannot create oil where none exists. And, it cannot create a suitable alternative merely by investing money. Look at how much money has been spent on fusion reactors over the last 50 years, yet it is always "50 years" away from working power plants.

For three years, before grad school, I was an analytical chemist for Bradford Labs, a subsidiary of Calgon Corp. Bradford Labs analyzed water used in secondary oil recovery. Some claim there is a LOT of oil "out there" if the gov would "only let us develop it". That is not true. First, it does not take into account the RATE at which we are consuming oil. IF the WORLD were a ball of oil, at our present rate of consumption, and assuming the existence of enough Oxygen, we would burn it up in under 400 years, and still there are folks claiming nonsense like this or this.

Thirty-six giant oilfields that were all discovered over 40-years ago still produce close to a combined 16 million barrels a day. In contrast, twelve giant oilfields found in the past decade now produce less than a tenth of this amount, or 1.5 million barrels a day, 2% of the world’s daily supply. However, no new field now being developed is projected to have daily production in excess of 250,000 barrels. In sharp contrast, the world’s 19 largest “old giant fields” still produce an average over 500,000 barrels per day, in spite of an average age of almost 70 years! Read about it here. It goes to show just HOW dependent we and the world are on Arab oil, and will continue to be until we get the only practical renewable resource on line, Solar. Yet, no one outside of the Royal Family KNOWS how much oil is in the big UAE fields, and they probably don't either! Seventy years and still producing 1/2 MILLION barrels of oil a day in their biggest field! One day, perhaps sooner than we think, there were will be a sudden drop in the flow, and the party will be over. I was in the West Texas oil fields when they began their collapse. One day a well was producing 100,000 barrels, the next month 10,000, the month after that 1,000 bbls. Tertiary recover only helps small fry make money, it does not alliviate the over all oil shortage.

A good measure of oil availability is the bbls of oil recovered per foot drilled. In the 1940's it was something like 5,000 bbls/foot. As the statistics continued to be collected it was obvious that at some time in the future the bbls/foot would cross zero, when it would cost more energy to recover a barrel of oil than was in that barrel of oil. We are within a few years of that zero point as we continue to drill deeper and deeper. Back in 1965 I was analyzing water from 19,000 foot wells, almost 4 miles down. Now they are down to 7 miles, and some at that is at the bottom of the oceans. You've seen oil wells burning and/or leaking on land. What will happen to the ocean environment if a large well dumps 50,000 bbls of oil per day onto the ocean bottom, 7 miles down? The environmental damage would be beyond measure. No amount of free market pressure can make oil yield more energy than in the total amount of Carbon it contains. The combustion of Carbon, regardless of source, yields a fixed amount of MegaJoules per Kg. "Investments" can't change that.

The most recent "giant" oil field located at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was measured to deliver 5 Billion barrels of recoverable oil. The USA alone consumes 8 Billion barrels of oil per year. That "giant" field would last the USA barely 2/3rd of a year. The biggest oil field is still owned by the UAE and will be until we finally switch to Solar or make a giant leap back to horses and bycicles after the UAE fields collapse. The Baalkans Oil field in Northern North Dakota has already peaked, and there NEVER was as much oil as some of the scammers were claiming. BTW, My father-in-law lost over $5K of his saving in 1965 when he bought into a scammer's scheme to "fract" dead wells and "bring them to life". Paul was ignorant of how oil is recovered and the scammers took advantage of his ignorance by appealing to the illusion of quick riches.

With China coming on line as a prosperous 1st World country reaching for the same standard of living we once enjoyed, and which was only available due to the RATE of our consumption of oil, the pressure on the existing oil supplies can only increase, meaning that they must be spread among more users, and be produced and consumed more quickly, not that the pressure will result in more discoveries of the size of fields that were discovered 60-70 years ago. Remember, in this country, as in most of the world, farming is only a way of using land to convert oil into food. No oil? No food. If someone thinks it is unethical for our country to go to war over oil, they should ask themselves if it is in their ethics for them and over 90% of the fellow citizens of their country to die of starvation. If the oil stops most people in the USA, and MOST other countries of the world as well, are only two to three weeks away from starving to death. The grocery shelves and warehouses will be stripped clean. Folks who were wise enough to store food for emergencies will find themselves targets of thieves willing to use lethal force, IF the thieves know of their supplied. IF you have emergency rations and continue to look well fed and maintain energy and health while those around you begin to show the signs of starvation, weakness and illness, those who are starving will figure out that you have a food cache. They'll do what ever is necessary to get it from you. Will each become his own Fortress America?

Unfortunately the market isn't really free. Almost all of the oil exporting nations devalue their currency and then sell oil at that artificially low price, causing an unnaturally high level of oil consumption. Also, most of the developing world subsidizes oil consumption. This causes them to use oil for almost everything, even in many of their power plants! It also causes them to waste a lot. As oil begins to run low, prices will rise and people will use less. Research and development will be heavily invested in to find solutions as well as extra oil exploration. Some of the solutions may not be with oil. This means that in a free market, oil wouldn't just run out. It would just be a relatively slow process for it being phased out. Besides, as I understand it, there's actually a ton more oil in the ground. The only problem is that it's very expensive to process so that we can use. Oil shale is one example of this. Since the market already has such strong interventions in place, it may be necessary for the government to step in to prevent the "cheaply" available oil from being used up to quickly. That's my view anyway.

Raise the price of oil and that will put even more people out of work, and force food and heating oil prices even higher. Raise them high enough and people will began to freeze in the winter and starve, and that will cause even greater dislocations, strife and turmoil. Any natural or federally mandated rise in oil prices will cause chaos, and could lead to a civil revolt. The $5/gal prices of a couple years ago was only a small sample of what a big price hike could do. Part of the problem then was that most of the vehicles on the road got only

It does NOT matter how much oil remains in the ground IF it takes more energy to drill, process, refine and use a barrel of oil than the energy in that barrel of oil. That was the fundamental problem with Corn. It was only subsidies that made Ethanol production economically sustainable. I can show, on an energy content basis, that it takes seven gallons of Ethanol to replace one gallon of oil. To replace all of our oil with Ethanol we would have needed 44 million more acres of agricultural land growing Corn than ALL of the agricultural land we have, just to meet our current oil consumption needs! What would we eat if we burned our Corn? In other words, some people got rich selling the pipe dream of replacing the oil fields of the Mid-East with the Corn fields of the Mid-West, and they took their money and ran before the truth came out. Our Senator, Ben Nelson, campaigned using that phrase "replacing the oil fields ..."