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

Just think of how good it would be for BeOS

[whirred]

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?

This is exactly the problem for all the people who loved BeOS, and it's a shame that they haven't open sourced it for all the devoted supporters to use.

It's good to see that O'Reilly still has his head screwed on.

Why dosen't he follow his own advice

[jordanb]

And copyleft the texts to books that are out of print or didn't sell many copies?

Re:Silly counter-argument

[micromoog]

Bad software is not the argument. RTFP.

GPLing bad software cant't hurt anyone.

[bluephone]

Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.

That's silly. It can only help the community. If it's truly bad code, it'll either be fixed, or left to bit rot. While the "enriching the soil" thing is a nice metaphor, it fails when speaking of bad software. It's notsalt to good code's fertilizer, it's more likeplain dirt. It doesn't hurt, but without good things added to it, it won't help either. It's neutral. No one loses when code is GPLed.