Open Source And The Obligation To Recycle

Lisa writes "Tim O'Reilly has a piece called "Open Source and the Obligation to Recycle" in his weblog, where he urges every company whose products are "obsolete" to consider making them available under an open source license, or putting them in the public domain, thereby enriching the soil of our collective commons. (Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog disagrees, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)""

Comments

Re:Just think of how good it would be for BeOS

[Catroaster]

Yes, if BeOS could open-source it...

However, they can't: they don't actually own all the code on that BeOS CD, and it would cost a reasonably large amount to divest all the non-BeOS code from the code that they could legally open-source. Besides, doesn't Sony own it all now anyway?

Re:Why dosen't he follow his own advice

[checkitout]

But if you look at the complete Open Books list, you'll also see a number of out of print books. These books were open sourced not because we wanted to spread the software or the ideas, but because we felt an obligation to make the material available to those who could make use of it even after we were no longer able to sell the books profitably ourselves. This is recycling in action.

If had you bothered to read the article, he mentions that he has.

If you want the games..

[coltrane99]

You may want to look around on the Web for 'abandonware' sites, which make such programs available (sometimes without the proper permissions). Simply searching google for the keyword 'abandonware' with the title of the game in question should get you somewhere. The line is pretty blurry between abandonware and warez sometimes though, beware.

Re:Just think of how good it would be for BeOS

[alkali]

This makes perfect sense, especially for companies going under. Why leave some closed-source relic behind as a worthless chapter 11 asset when you can give it to people who can continue to develop it?

Companies in bankruptcy can't give away assets; they have to be sold to pay off creditors. (Though if software is truly worthless, perhaps the highest bidder might be someone who would pay $1 to open source it.)

Re:Silly counter-argument

[benedict]

What Glass doesn't get is that that would be a
*good* thing. In your example, let's say Oracle
loses half their market share to a free product.
That means that companies around the world have
billions and billions of dollars that they used
to spend on database software that they can now
spend on other things. It would be like a tax
cut!

Re:Problems with this

[exodus2]

But they could release their code without the source of the libraries and it wouldnt compile. You then go look at where the build falied and remove the calls to the copy protection stuff, at most you now know the function call for the copyright crap

Lawrence Lessig

[blkros]

had something similar in Wired a few months ago. He proposed that software be held in trust by the patent office, (or was it copyright?), and when the patent(copyright) expired(a shorter time than regular copyright, because of the nature of software), be put out to the public. Sounds good to me.

Re:What about Eazel.

[dublin]

GEOS *was* cool - I still think it's the most impressive single hack I've ever seen. The 286 version was a much later derivative: the original version put a whole GUI/Windowing environment and a decent set of basic apps (Word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) on a Commodore 64!

That's right, a window system/OS analog and apps all in 64 KILObytes of main memory. Damn impressive hack.

It wasn't just for show, either: I actually used it to turn out all the papers, reports, etc. I wrote my senior year in college. (Now I'm dating myself... ;-) )

Re:Silly counter-argument

[NutscrapeSucks]

Factual problems -- Microsoft did not "win", in fact they settled for $20M (link), which is a pretty good price if you consider that Mosaic was technologically obsolete by the time MS started using it (didn't support popular Netscapisms like tables and frames), and had less than a 10% marketshare at the time.

On top of that $20M, they spent many millions of dollars and a couple years developing IE into something that was actually competitive with Netscape, and for the most part no longer resembled Mosaic.

I do agree that they probably _tried_ to steal Mosaic, but they didn't get away with it, and nor was the deal essential to IE's eventual market dominiation. It's also sad that a company with $4B/year revenue would try to dick over some doomed-to-failure pipsqueaks like Spyglass.