OpenBeOs Developers Talk About Progress

DeltaSigma writes: "Michael Phipps, of the OpenBeos team, recently hosted a public Q&A Session where many of the public musings over a completely new open source operating system have been addressed. The answer to all the 'is there room in the market?' questions was answered in a way: 'We are an OSS project. Marketing is not our job.' Perhaps more /.ers could keep this in mind ..."

Comments

Re:If you don't think marketing is your job...

[Skyshadow]

As a group, we decided to adopt restrictive licenses in order to prevent our creations from being used in a manner we did not approve of and we decided that we actually cared who adopted our operating systems, our programs, and we decided that we were going to compete against organizations like Microsoft.

Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.

Whoa, slow down there, cowboy.

The licenses which make OSS possible are there to do just that -- force people and organizations to stay honest and not simply take advantage of the efforts of others. What you can *do* with that software is pretty much unfettered -- consider all of the places you can find Linux in one form or another.

Besides that, who said we (we as in the community) had decided to compete against Microsoft? Competition implies that the OSS community is tied up in a parry-and-jab with MS, which we most definately are not -- why else would we be so eager to interoperate with Windows boxen, even when it means trying to adhere to MS's broken "standards"?

OSS is about a way to develop software, and nothing else. My personal interest, and I dare say the interest of most people involved in the development or use of OSS, is only to obtain and use the best possible software solution for our needs.

Raising the awareness of the project is important, but generally good and useful software concepts attract users and developers far more effectively tan "marketing".