Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Spreads Beyond Software
B'Trey writes "Britain's Prospect Magazine is running an article entitled 'The Microsoft Killers.' The article covers the success of Open Source software in particular but also looks at how the methods and practices of Open Source are moving outside the software environment."
..I think the idea is extremely novel! however, i don't think it will work simply because of the measurability of "good things". ie. in software we can always pick, and recommend, Mozilla over IE., not only cos it is open source, but because it is better security wise. however how do you tell someone that "OpenCoke" is better than Coca-cola, can this be done? if it tasted as good and didn't rot your teeth i guess so.. heh, but i dont think prices can be cut - and freeness is one of the big drawing factors to OS/GPL products... what do you think?
by the way, i'm allergic to flames!
Tim
tim
A little premature for such a title maybe. F/OSS needs to concentrate on the details.. God is in the details, and this is where MIcrosoft excels. Sure, they have their shortcoming, but they Human Interface designs are uniform at least..
I would suspect that Open Source is limited to particular categories of work. Labor intensive, but not capital intensive, activities are ideal for open source. With capital intensive endevours, the people that own the money want to own the output. Fortunatly, the captial required for many activities is dropping. With the low cost and ubiquity of technlogy, many formly expensive activities can be done by amateurs on an open source basis (software, indie films, encyclopedias/wikis, helpdesk/help forums, etc.).
For bigger open source projects, the problem is monetization -- converting the fruits of open source into money that goes to pay the burgeoning and unavoidable expenses of a large project. The free-software, expensive service model (RedHat) or free software, expensive hardware & service model (IBM) seems popular.
But there are limits. I doubt we will ever see open source retail stores, hardware factories, or apartment buildings (except on an unusual donation basis). Probably the only capital-intensive forms of "open source" is university science -- the scientists provide the labor, release there findngs to the public, and the government provides the money for the equipment (even here, university IP people try to own the fruits of the academic labors).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Open Music anyone?
;)
My only concern is, is it free for the idea of freedom or because nobody would pay for it anyway?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
As you recognized towards the end of your post, the small details are being addressed at many levels. Stay tuned for a Linux distribution near you.
In fact, your specific example has been dealt with by Mandrake and Suse for the past 2/3 years. Where have you been?
And how do they do it? Better than Windows, most times.
No driver CD necessary. If it's supported, plug in the camera and it shows up on your desktop. Click on it and get your pictures. Now that was easy, wasn't it.
I am not impervious to criticism and there are tons of things that need improvement, but they are coming. Anyone who has used Linux for the past five years cannot be blind to the huge improvements in ease-of-use and consistency that have been made.
Finally, the community aspect of Linux is not to be dismissed. When I set somebody up with Linux, I make sure that his/her every whim is satisfied so that the experience is more positive than it was with their prior OS.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
The open source movement eschews proprietary controls and its software is usually produced not by firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of an application."
Groklaw is an example of this exact method, even though it is not involved in software development. It is a legal site that encourages anyone to join in, the results are not produced by law firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of the legal brief. It started as one woman's personal blog and then took off when the FOSS community saw the usefulness of having a subject matter expert in law commenting on cases that mattered to the community. So the community joined in and now it's a distributed project on the exact model of an Open Source programming project.
So these principles work for more than just programming. It's a useful model for any community project. The power of the community made manifest. We're stronger when we work together.
I think it's very appropriate to compare the universe of software development, or even business to an ecosystem.
I spent years in the environmental world, and to this day every time I walk in the woods I see examples of cutthroat competition and stunning examples of cooperation. I think the rise of free software/open source in a sense mirrors this property of complex systems of individual agents to have cooperation emerge as a major form of interaction. It is a restoring of a natural equillibrium that was disrupted by a decade or so of exponential growth. Closed operating systems and software that performs other, nearly universal functions are like weeds that prosper by being able to use the resources freed by the disruption to colonize new niches. Cooperative models can't self assemble quickly enough at first to compete.
In the long term the equillibrium will swing the other way, although not totally because cooperation is not a natural model in many situations. For example in vertical markets, the disincentives of cooperations outweigh the benefits. In that case internally developed systems make sense, and closed "black box" COT software is an acceptible compromise which maintains at least a level playing field.
I think cooperative models of production will always exist as long as the contract doesn't become the sole form of human relationship. But it will always coexist with competition as a pardigm. Speculation: as long as world population grows exponentially, and the world economy grows exponentially with it, competition will remain the dominant form of human economic interaction. It's interesting to speculate what will happen if world population stabilizes and growth switches from exponential to linear growth or steady state.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.