While I am too far from the process to offer comment to the contents of the post below, the last paragraph of the post in some bizarre way did help crystallize a thought that I knew had been nagging in the back of my mind for months, perhaps as much of a year, but that I just could not quite bring to the foreground. FreeS/WAN occupies a position very rarely found in efficient markets, such as open source software. While the position is rarely encountered, it can nonetheless exist: I believe that FreeS/WAN is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies are usually only found in extremely small markets. The economic textbook example is a power company on an island of 50 people. The market size is simply too small to sustain the overhead of two companies, no matter how efficient both companies may become. Therefore, the market doesn't attract competitors, even absent any regulatory market distortions. (Hence the "natural" in "natural monopoly" :-) But for whatever reasons, FreeS/WAN has been holding such a natural monopoly position in by far the largest market in which I have ever seen such a beast. I find this fascinating. I wonder if economists will some day study the case to determine what factors brought it about. [I presume somebody other than the FreeS/WAN project may have written a few lines of Linux open source IPSec code, but they aren't competitors in that market any more than a guy walking around with a charged car battery offering service would be a competitor to the power company in the island example]. --Lucky, who simply had to share this revelation. Back to writing Mixmaster remailer code. -----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@lne.com [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@lne.com] On Behalf Of Anonymous Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 7:54 PM To: cypherpunks@lne.com; cryptography@wasabisystems.com Subject: RE: FreeSWAN Release 1.93 ships! On Sunday 09 December 2001 07:32 pm, Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> wrote:
The big question is: will FreeS/WAN latest release after some 4 or 5 years of development finally both compile and install cleanly on current versions of Red Hat Linux, FreeS/WAN's purported target platform?
The latest releases of both Suse and Mandrake are both able to install kernels with Freeswan already integrated. It's a little newer addition to Mandrake, so you may want to use Suse. Suse makes it easy to set up encrypted file systems and other nice features. The major problem that holds back the development of FreeS/WAN is with its management. [Management that cares more about sitting on its pulpit, than getting useful software into the hands of people.] Unless things have changed recently, they still won't accept contributions from the US. This makes no sense. GPG is shipping with every Linux distribution I know of, and the German's take contributions from the US. The primary kernel developers have been willing to integrate crypto into the kernel since the crypto regs were lowered. It's the policy of no US contributions that's holding back Linux IPSEC. IMHO: If Freeswan had never been created, an alternate, more mature implementation would already exist in the mainline Linux kernel. --Anonymous
FreeS/WAN occupies a position very rarely found in efficient markets, such as open source software. While the position is rarely encountered, it can nonetheless exist: I believe that FreeS/WAN is a natural monopoly. ... But for whatever reasons, FreeS/WAN has been holding such a natural monopoly position in by far the largest market in which I have ever seen such a beast. I find this fascinating. I wonder if economists will some day study the case to determine what factors brought it about.
I doubt it. The Linux kernels released by Linus Torvalds hold a similar 'natural monopoly' over every other variant of free operating system kernel. What could explain this puzzling economic phenomenon? Certainly the BSD folks have been puzzled by it. I mean, half a dozen people have rewritten 'grep', because it's just not that hard. And troff was cloned even though it was hard, because the original was such a piece of unmaintainable (and nonfree) crud. But you and you and you are all free to make your own variant of the Linux kernel, and keep maintaining it and throwing in improvements. Why don't you? Even big companies keep following Linus's version. Perhaps the puzzle results from someone who does a sufficiently hard job, sufficiently well, that nobody who is actually capable of competing WANTS to compete. They have better things to do. What puzzles me is how the mediocre X Window System has attracted no competitors. Yes, it's a hard job supporting all those hardware variants by all those lovely undocumented proprietary companies. But the X model sucks on SO many fronts, breaking typeahead/mouseahead, performance, display independence, having dozens of puzzling and incompatible window managers, etc. And have you looked at the 'object oriented' stuff layered on top of it? 743 root 17 0 50896 44M 6320 S 0.7 36.0 15292m X 874 gnu 11 0 14648 10M 3148 S 0.3 8.6 13:30 gnome-terminal That's a 50Mbyte process (44M resident) of window drivers, and a 14Mbyte (10M resident) terminal window that I'm typing into. I've seen the terminal window get as high as 60 Mbytes, with more than 50 resident. John
On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, John Gilmore wrote:
What puzzles me is how the mediocre X Window System has attracted no competitors. Yes, it's a hard job supporting all those hardware
Dude, there are HUNDREDS of alternate GUI front-ends (the vast majority are not compatible with X (aka MIT's Athens - there's your clue as to its popularity). Unfortunately they don't get the technical backing to get a significant 'bootstrap' percentage in the market up front. In other words, when X got started back in the 80's there were no other GUI's that were nearly that advanced. So people used it. By the time the market expanded the number of alternative GUI's had a much harder time to get into the market. -- ____________________________________________________________________ Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
At 06:35 AM 12/11/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
Dude, there are HUNDREDS of alternate GUI front-ends (the vast majority are not compatible with X (aka MIT's Athens - there's your clue as to its popularity). Unfortunately they don't get the technical backing to get a significant 'bootstrap' percentage in the market up front. In other words, when X got started back in the 80's there were no other GUI's that were nearly that advanced. So people used it. By the time the market expanded the number of alternative GUI's had a much harder time to get into the market.
MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC and [I forget -IBM?] workstations and so developed a device independent display server. That it was subject to code bloat is regrettable but its use is not mandatory.
On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC ^ What letter is next to 'a' on the keyboard? You really should refrain from ad hominims.
and [I forget -IBM?] workstations and so developed a device independent display server. That it was subject to code bloat is regrettable but its use is not mandatory.
Nobody said ANYTHING was mandatory, as usual changing the rules in the middle of the game. What happened was that it was the only game in town. It got picked up by the Unix geeks and next thing you know there was a collection of code and apps that were written for X. It would have cost entirely too much to change to something else and throw all that code away (eg consider the life time of a typical piece of COBOL). Economic & Technical Inertia -- ____________________________________________________________________ Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
At 06:15 PM 12/11/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC ^ What letter is next to 'a' on the keyboard? You really should refrain from ad hominims.
A simple spelling correction is not an ad hominim.
On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
At 06:15 PM 12/11/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC ^ What letter is next to 'a' on the keyboard? You really should refrain from ad hominims.
A simple spelling correction is not an ad hominim.
Your responce was by the tone. My spelling error was irrelevant to the issue at hand. If you really believed it was a simple spelling mistake you would have just glossed right over it. You didn't, that act speaks for itself. -- ____________________________________________________________________ Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (4)
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David Honig -
Jim Choate -
John Gilmore -
Lucky Green