Open Source vs. Market Leaders

The software world seems dominated by big name software costing a great deal more than the price of a PC and PCs with lots of cut down time limited software pre-installed for you to use. Well there are alternatives, but people seem to doubt that such alternatives are viable. Here I will try and de-bunk the multi-million giants who instil fear in PC users that to try something different will break your PC!

When PCs started we had IBM DOS, MS DOS, DR DOS, CP/M amongst many others and principally word processing applications like MS Word, Wordstar and so on and similarly different spreadsheet software. Whilst in my terms the software was not that cheap but in the terms of number of PC’s in the world, the cost was dirt cheap.

Having built microcomputers since 1978, I built my first PC in 1983, it ran Basic. In those days most programs were interpreted basic and came presented in source form. That meant that the users, with a little bit of skill were able to see the inner workings of a program. In those days most users were programmers. Adaptation and addition was a cornerstone of the industry. You could basically "steal" someone else's source, modify it and have your own product available shortly afterward. This is how Lotus 1-2-3 was built, as a clone of Visicalc. How different the world might have been had it stayed this way. But in the name of efficiency we converted these interpreted programs into compiled programs and in so doing started to restrict them to particular hardware and operating systems. Flexibility was lost for a while and budding programmers who had good ideas could no longer adapt these products often for free use and the marketing benefit of the originating program.

Compiled EXE files came into commercial use with the arrival of the IBM PC in 1982. Lotus was one of the first products built on the tollgate model. In the tollgate model what you do as a vendor is develop a program and present it to users as a means of doing a business task that they have. At first your main aim is to get as much traffic onto your "highway" as possible. You do this with marketing campaigns and by introducing the product at a very competitive price.

Once you have high traffic, you put up a tollgate, a software upgrade or an annual licence fee. The marketing department has the job of deciding how high the price of the revenues without our users jumping off the road. The users find it difficult to move their data and their systems and they like the ability to exchange data with others on the highway. They are reluctant to get off. So it's not surprising that prices for these packages keep rising and will continue to do so unless we as users can jump off. Money went into marketing as opposed development and innovation was stifled for a while.

Tollgate vendors also have a strong legal department to make sure that no other vendor copies the product and puts up a parallel highway that will give the users the ability to jump off to a cheaper option. This is what all the legal cases were about over the last 20 years: Xerox vs Apple, Apple vs Microsoft, Microsoft vs DRDOS. Lotus killed off anyone that attempted to make a spreadsheet, so companies like VP Planner or Lucid 3D disappeared. This is basically how all the early Dos products were built, Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase, Novell networks. So if everyone was doing it; what made some win and some lose? Remember, I said innovation was stifled; well some packages added the ability to modify and customise the product through scripting and add-ins, but if you were unlucky to spend years developing such an addition, you were likely to find that work integrated in the next release without even acknowledgement and no hope against the legal resources of the tollgate. So the market narrowed, prices rose.

The masters of the Tollgate model were, and still are, Microsoft. Starting from 1992, with Windows, they got users onto the toll road. Early versions of Windows were free. At first windows ran as an application on top of DOS, but eventually Windows became the ticket to the tollgate. It was only after the operating system became successful that the prices started to rise. This however was not enough for a rapacious revenue machine, so using the advantage of the operating system they started to chase down all the application vendors. This is how Lotus 1-2-3 gave way to Excel, Word Perfect to Word, Dbase to Access, Novell to Windows NT, and Netscape to IE5. This is how a word processor moved from costing £20 to £250. This is why an operating system has gone from being almost free to become the most expensive part of a computer purchase. Of course if you were a big PC producer you got and still do substantial discounts to bundle operating systems and software with your PCs, but only if you promised not to sell your PCs with anything else. This effectively killed the smaller PC manufacturer and the alternative operating systems, although smaller tollgates still exist like Apple, but for how long?

In the mid nineties a new movement, the Open Source movement started in the development community. This has a completely different approach. Its starts out with the position that the Software belongs to the users. The highway is built by the users and programmers listening to users. The users have the advantage that they have access to the working of the program and they have the obligation that if they make improvements to the system that these improvements must be provided back to the community free of charge. The biggest success of the Model had been the Linux, TCP/IP and the Apache web server. Most of the Internet has been built on Open Source software. Recent successes by MySQL in the database market have shown that even bigger users are ready for Open Source.

Recently more business packages have started to become available under the Open Source licence. Most successful of these are Openoffice.org and Mozilla. This has given those frustrated programmers a way to innovate as it was in the early days and these packages are building in strength reliability and flexibility.

The Tollgate vendors argue that the software is their intellectual copyright and that they need the revenues to sustain their extensive development (as opposed marketing departments?). The real reality is users need development according to need, ease of use and reliability in this the tollgates are failing users.

Tollgate suppliers hold the users to ransom and pervert the development process. It is more important for a tollgate vendor to keep you on the road than it is to innovate. You actually end up paying for a legion of salesmen not programmers. Features disappear in one release and reappear in the next or are only available from a higher level product.

In the Word Processor market. It is a simple matter to build a world class word processor. It would take a lot of money and several years, but that is small compared to the hundreds of Millions that Microsoft makes out of the Word processor market in South Africa alone.. They hold the users to ransom, not by quality research, but by the fact that their closed data format makes it difficult to know for certain that someone else can read your document if you don't use Word to write it. The product itself has hardly improved over the last 10 years, but the price has moved from £30 to £200!

So now I will address the set of products currently recommended and why. There are three principal factors which influence me,

Firstly and as far as possible the programs are platform independent - they can be compiled for Linux or Windows or Apple Macs; this is important  as this independence will usually create a reliability in the product on Windows operating system as changes to Windows with its' monthly updates seem to upset so many programs as they are too tied to those shared DLLs which get updated. Alongside with this requirement is the spin-off that users might eventually be prepared to move to other operating systems as 95% of their work involves the applications not operating systems.

Secondly they are low cost or free and based on open source software or don't appear to be working to the tollgate model.

Thirdly if they are not open source the companies are still working at delivering the applications for multi platform operating systems.

S. Hemingway BSc(eng) ACGI PGCE