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Andreesssen: Why Open Source Will Boom - in 103 Words
An anonymous reader writes "You gotta love Marc Andreessen's 12 reasons why Open Source is set to boom: can anyone use fewer than 103 words and still adduce as many reasons as he does?"
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Actually dude...
I hate to break it to ya... Lots of it is anti-American sentiments. It's part of the same reason the world hates MicroSoft... The US is on top for now. People don't like other people/countries richer than they are... Thus, anti-US sentiment.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
"The Internet is powered by open source."
Only on the server level. The Internet, though, encompasses more than servers. It's an interaction between servers, routers, and desktops (not to mention the lines of transmission between them). Linux does not dominate in routers, and sure as hell doesn't dominate in desktops.
"The Internet is the carrier for open source."
Irrelevant, really. If the world was still dominated by BBSes, open source would still spread, and, in fact, did during that time (anyone still remember the term "freeware"?).
"The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
And the chaos that is part and parcel of the Internet (the same chaos that allows the Internet to actually function) tends to cripple FOSS projects due to the "too many cooks" principle. The most successful FOSS projects have always kept their core creators as a limited, contained group.
"It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
Spouting the party line. No, it's not going to be more secure first thing out of the box, so to speak. It'll be more secure because of the perpetual code audits by many eyes. Not really "simple" per se.
"Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Good for the rest of the world. Bad for the fact that the US has a very large concentration of tech pros who might become alienated by this attitude and stop contributing.
"Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
-1, Overrated. Just another reiteration of the "scratch an itch" principle. And as someone else said, this has a tendency to devolve into mutual pats on the back and development of cliques, which is not a productive way of operating.
"Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
Which "giants"? IBM, whose support for Linux has been mostly self-serving and a way to escape the massive proprietary mentality that's crippled them in the past? HP/Compaq, Dell, and other companies who won't release a Linux desktop machine without begging, pleading, and sellings of first-born children to become Carly's and Mike's bondspeople? Or is it software giants like Microsoft (tee hee) or Adobe (Photoshop on Linux may never exist)? The only "giant" he can be speaking of is the progenitor of the project that became Mozilla, and, gee, who was partially responsible for that?
"Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
Implying that servers don't run on Intel. Guess that I must have been imagining Itanic boxes or (to extend it into the immediately family) Opteron boxes, which are outselling the proprietary Sun and Unix servers these days. Maybe he's talking about the commoditization of servers that x86/Itanic has allowed, in which case, there are solutions other than Linux from names more trusted in the server area. Or is Solaris x86 a figment of Marc's imagination?
"Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
But are still a niche market. Revisit this argument in another ten years.
"There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
As someone said, virtually any large corporation has an IT staff working on in-house solutions for their own particular needs. How many of these programs get released to the community? Virtually none, because there's no use. And if you take another tack to his argument, namely that there are software contributions out there from non-software companies, is anyone going to trust them?
"Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
In the areas where Linux has made inroads, namely commodity servers. People in IT can't see this because of their concentration on servers, but the real war is yet to be fought, namely on the desktops, and that one will be a decade-long slog at the very least.
"It's free."
Again, someone else brought up TCO, and right now, the up-front costs
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
"The point is: people remember the Cold War"
Do they remember that if it weren't for America most of Europe would be speaking Russian ? Or that Europe would still be a pile of bombed ruins ? Or that Russia would have starved if it weren't for US free grain shipments ?
History did not start in the year 2000 !
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
because you were too squeamish to do what had to be done?
Marc Andreessen is nobody. Once upon a time, he was a project manager at UIUC, not a good enough programmer himself to hack the alpha Mosaic browser to render images. Famously, he asked a team programmer to add inline images to the HTML rendering engine. The programmer replied "But that will destroy the Internet!", so Andreessen got him to add just inline "icons". Andreesen hacked that into the thoroughly bad support for rendering images that plagues HTML layout to this day, and destroyed the Internet. On the way out the door after graduation, the visionary Jim Clark of SGI turned Mosaic and its figurehead, Andreesen, into Netscape, destroyed the Internet, and cleared the way for the pretty cool Internet of today (mostly saved by Apache). But Andreessen peaked at UIUC, after which he turned against the system that blessed him: publicly crying over his IPO millions that tax money was wasted at public research institutions, and disappearing in a puff of hype after his turn at spokesmodel quickly evaporated. Why does anyone publish this clown anymore? *We're* the ones responsible for his riches, now his only claim to fame.
--
make install -not war
What are the means used to produce software?
In whose hands do they lie?
Who owns them? Who owns the software?
Come on, surely you can't think that Stallman never read Marx?
+&x