
Kuhn's Paradox - g1n016399
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/19/kuhns-paradox.html
======
a-nikolaev
At least in the past, it was in good taste to just call your observation
simply a paradox, and let the public decide if it's worthy to stick author's
name to it or not.

Let alone that for many people, the name "Kuhn" is primarily associated with
Thomas Kuhn, rather than Bradley Kuhn- adding to the confusion.

~~~
ianamartin
Agreed. When I first saw the title, I was wondering if I missed something from
_The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_.

And it doesn't really qualify as a paradox in my opinion. Perhaps briefly
counterintuitive. But the real question of "X is free and does the 'same
thing' as Y, which is not free: so why are more people using Y?" Is perfectly
easy to explain via UI/UX, discoverability, ease of install/uninstall, or
network effects (all my friends/coworkers use Y, so I will too).

This seems like an uninteresting question named after a very interesting
writer.

------
gamegod
It feels like open core is the new "embrace, extend, extinguish". (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)
)

On the other hand, the economy just doesn't incentivize open source
communities to build the very best software for average users, compared to
say, making a billion bucks with by building my new shiny walled garden social
network. Anecdotal examples and lots of great FOSS project aside, cash is king
and capitalism doesn't favour open source.

------
jondubois
It's baffling to me how the FSF came to the conclusion that JavaScript is not
'Free software'. I know the name 'JavaScript' is proprietary but the
technology itself seems to be as free as it can possibly get.

I think a problem that's coming up now is that the lines between proprietary
and free software have blurred. The FSF movement made sense in the old days
when we had to pay a one-time cost to buy a CD with software on it. Today
because everything is delivered as a service, it becomes very difficult to
distinguish the software from the service itself. We're not just paying for
the software anymore - We're also paying for continuous software updates,
security patches and the ongoing management of underlying hardware
infrastructure... The money has to come from somewhere.

I just don't understand the purpose of the FSF anymore... For the same reason
that a 'Free Hardware Foundation' wouldn't make sense - You have to pay people
to look after the software infrastructure in the same way that you have to pay
people to get the silicon out of the ground to build your hardware.

~~~
chei0aiV
You are mischaracterising what the opinion of the FSF is in relation to
JavaScript; their actual opinion is here:

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-
trap.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html)

------
mulligan
More people in the world than ever have access to clean potable water. More
people in the world than ever have no access to clean potable water.

------
chei0aiV
It is a horrible shame that Kuhn's Paradox is true.

I wonder how we can stop this from happening?

~~~
js8
Easy to answer, but you won't like it: Avoid BSD-style licenses and use GPL.

~~~
j_m_b
Because the only way to be free is to be more restrictive!

~~~
js8
No, the only way to be free is to constantly fight for it, even at your
inconvenience. Convenience (mostly ability to use the same code at work) is
the reason why so many people today, who contribute to open source, prefer
BSD.

That's why you won't like the answer (I certainly don't); it's an extra effort
in politics that people would rather avoid.

------
justin_vanw
The observation stated in this 'paradox' isn't even true, and if it were true
it wouldn't be a paradox.

First, it's not even remotely factually true:

\- It's easier and easier to use computers while avoiding more and more
'proprietary' software. 25 years ago you could barely do anything without a
paid for operating system, now you would be considered a bit of an idiot if
you tried to suggest a major datacenter running anything but Linux. The same
goes for office applications etc, there used to be nothing at all, now there
are multiple high quality options. The same goes for web browsers, and look at
the demise of Flash and IE6-only websites. So for basically every category,
the last 25 years has been a story of going from complete dominance of
proprietary shrink-wrapped software to one where open source alternatives are
almost as good or much better.

Secondly, if it became true, it wouldn't be a "a statement or proposition
that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises,
leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-
contradictory."

\- A lot of or even most of the 'proprietary' software being created has no
real value as open source to begin with. Lets say Twitter open sources their
mobile client, then what? Are you going to modify it and use your modified
version? That is absurd, virtually nobody would do this because of the
difficulty of even running your modified version on a platform with trusted
computing, but lets say you don't care about that. What is the benefit of
doing so? So you can tweak a font or add a button? Twitter is releasing all of
the open source they can extract from their codebase that they think people
would actually find useful, look at all of it:
[https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/projects](https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/projects)
. The fact that the twitter.app for IOS isn't open source is 'meh', there is
nothing interesting or hard about that app, and you can find a dozen open
source equivalents , some of which are actually better.

So the claim is false, and if it is someday true, it's not even surprising,
much less a 'paradox'.

------
blablabla123
Lol... I have never used fewer commercial applications like today. 10 or 15
ago I struggled with buying or downloading expensive software because
computers were not much fun without that back then. But now... Just out of
convenience I have an OS X computer, didn't buy it myself though, I would be
perfectly fine with a Linux computer too. My web browser(s) are open source,
same is true for my mail client, my shell, almost all of my dev tools.

It's quite amazing, computers are so much more fun with open software.

------
yongjik
I don't even think there's any paradox. Software is much more ubiquitous than
before, much more powerful, and takes much more resource to develop.
Obviously, a lot of stuff that were previously held by wires and switches are
going to use software, and since people are selling these stuff, a lot of this
stuff will be proprietary.

An average user has zero reason to "avoid proprietary software while
completing their necessary work on a computer." They are too busy trying to do
their necessary work.

~~~
dagw
_and takes much more resource to develop_

This is I do not believe at all. Programming is today is so much more trivial
than it was even just 10 years ago it's not even funny. I mean just recently I
wrote a little app the allowed people to remotely connect to a server and not
only interactively view 3d data stored on that server, but change the shading
of the model depending on what factors they where interested in and to click
on the models and based on the properties of the triangle they clicked query a
database to get more information. A few years ago that would have taken a team
of experts month to get up and running. Today I could do it by myself, in a
few days, including the time it took for me to get up to speed on
webgl/three.js, which I had never used before.

------
lindig
The paradox ignores that more people than ever use computing devices,
especially mobile devices. If we limited the view to users of software
equivalent to those that used computers in the (say) nineties, the paradox
might be less severe. But maybe then the programmers to create open-source
code wouldn't exist either.

------
stuartaxelowen
I'd think this is caused by efficient markets and competition between software
companies.

After all, developer productivity is greatly based on tools, and the best
tools are rarely free.

~~~
bikamonki
I could type a long list of best productivity tools that are free, starting
with: using a free browser to search for free answers on SO hence saving devs
a ton of time. Perhaps you were thinking on some 'very specialized tools'
where the paid version is better? Which would be explained by the nature of
niche markets and not necessarily efficiency.

~~~
TTPrograms
Is SO free? The paradox is referring to free as in speech, not free as in
beer. Free browsers in that sense are also in the minority these days.

~~~
jeremysmyth
SO subscriber content (e.g. answers) are CC BY-SA[0] which "is often compared
to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses"[1]

[0] "all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is perpetually
and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons
Attribution Share Alike license"
[http://stackexchange.com/legal](http://stackexchange.com/legal)

[1]
[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

------
bikamonki
I am no victim of the paradox: from a practical perspective all my stack is
free and open source. I say practical b/c I am sure that some drivers are
proprietary but I have not paid for any end-user software license that allows
me to complete my work since I don't know when.

~~~
chei0aiV
You are accessing a website that runs proprietary software on the server as
well as in your browser.

------
elcapitan
The My Own Paradox: Each day, I have walked more miles accumulatively than I
have walked ever before in human history; and yet, the world population also
uses increasingly more cars every day.

