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The Care and Feeding of Open Source Software
An anonymous reader writes "You might find The Care and Feeding of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) interesting. This article debunks a lot of the myths and misunderstandings about the open-source software development process."
... FOSS has flourished in recent years is a tiny nuicance up in Seattle.
So tiny that Balmer spents a considerable amount of time each year flying out to meet governments and institutions in an effort to persuade them not to migrate to Linux.
Microsoft crushed (almost) all competitors in their main markets, OSes,
Microsoft has failed to control or dominate the server market, and is experiencing strong competition from Linux.
productivity suits
I don't see Open Office being crushed.
and browsers.
Erm. Firefox.
The only way to avoid this fate was to produce free software, using the same tactic MS has employed.
The same tactic? So Microsoft has published source code and provided free cross-platform versions of their products.
1) He doesn't seem aware that Mac OS X is a Unix derivative (more so than Linux). He firsts fails to include it in his list of popular commercial variants of Unix, and then he says that Linux will shortly be the only prominent Unix variant. I think most people think Mac OS X will be around longer than shortly, and it is the most widely used commercial Unix variant.
2) He keeps calling it Macintosh, which is the general name for the hardware. The operating system is called Mac OS X.
Other than that, an interesting enough article.
Your horizons don't extend far enough back in time. It wasn't Gates who started commercial software.
I did a number of projects on PDP 11s in the late 1970's and early 1980s and often had to buy software for it. In one instance I remember paying £3000 for a Pascal compiler. In another, I paid a similar amounts for both a Unix System V licence and for Emacs.
By the beginning of the 1980's independent database vendors such as Oracle were selling software (our company competed for a while with similar product, but the company pulled out when the business plan showed we would have to sell a 1000 copies to recover the investment - and we decided to concentrate on bespoke application system development)
Most people don't actually care about the philosophy behind FOSS. GPL? Whazzat?
/rant
Yes, but most people care even less about paying hundreds of bucks for buggy software that is vulnerable to viruses, with EULAs out the wazoo and built-in obsolescence.
The reason why proprietary software is so popular in people's homes (I'm not talking about corporations) is because 1) They don't really have a choice. They use what comes with the computer they bought or 2) they just copy it for free from some computer savvy person in their family/circle of friends.
I suspect that if everybody really had to pay, and if they really were well informed about the choices, things might be different... Which is not to say that OSS is perfect and shouldn't get better (but it does rapidly, so bravo to the coders out there!).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
1. sharing is invented. ftp. ppp. bbs. web.
2. expansion happens. ftp bots. scp. rsyns. napster.
3. consolidation. napster, ftp, scp die. other propriatary p2p apps keep going. gnutella pulls a lot of supprort, www keeps going. bittorrent is a new idea, but pulls in and gets some supprot which will soon be pulled together with more secure tech. gnunet gets started based on p2p with security in mind.
4. maturity in a few years. secure p2p. gnunet. oss and private companiest that use propriety protocols.
5. FOSS dom. propriety sw vendors are forced to open their logs to the government, and oss are not.
6.... left as an excercise.