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: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.

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: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... ;-) )