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."

Comments

microsoft and this article

[TheRealJFM]

"the FOSS era is inevitable for operating systems."

if we look at this historically, isn't Microsoft already dead?

certainly this article makes it clear that Linux may well enter a stage where it is an accepted standard, and has crushed the previous groups.

in a way, isn't that what Microsoft already did? they were once the upstart defeating the giants of IBM and Apple. history repeats itself.

I certainly don't think we'll see the death of MS for decades, if ever, but we may just see them seriously reduced

this article certainly provides a good explanation for that, in my opinion anyway - it seems pretty clear cut. perhaps someone can refute that?

i'd be interested to hear ideas...

Paints a pretty picture

[Timesprout]

But I dont think FOSS goes further than step 4. Its already apparent from the server OS market. FOSS is never going to completely dominate. Its main effect is to take out all the small/medium players and polarize the market into FOSS and the commercial giants which is unfortunate because the smaller commercial endeavours are where (as far as I can see) most of the innovation tends to come from. FOSS also tends to lag behind the technology curve so by the time it starts to mature the market has moved on, creating new options for commercial software so FOSS will constantly be chasing a moving target.

Stage 5 Today

[mikey573]

Some current Stage 5 situation: (FOSS community begins to slowly but inexorably erode the technical lead held by the commercial offerings)

WS_FTP --> Filezilla
Winzip --> 7-zip

I'd be interested in seeing what factors it takes to push the above into Stage 6 (FOSS version dominates).

Re:but what about the programmers?

[YrWrstNtmr]

True, some do get paid for their direct FOSS efforts. But that is by far the minority.

Let's take a current project. GIMP, for instance. A viable competitor/alternative to PaintshopPro (not Photoshop). Where could the GIMP today be if there could be a dedicated team of fulltime developers? i.e. people getting paid to create and update GIMP, and nothing more.

One of the reasons GIMP is gaining popularity is because it is free as in beer. Not because it is an especially 'good' or easy to use tool, but it costs nothing to use. (Don't get me wrong, GIMP is fantastic at what it does and how it was built). Most people don't actually care about the philosophy behind FOSS. GPL? Whazzat?

For a tool such as GIMP, selling hardware, support, and installation doesn't work. Those income generators work at the corporate level, not the personal level. So how could the GIMP team get paid for producing GIMP (or similar level tools/programs)? Is it possible to do?

How many FOSS tools could move off the '0.0.2 alpha' stage if there was a team of fulltime developers that could also actually eat while doing it?

Re:The real reson

[cammoblammo]

IIRC, Emacs was around in it's ancestral form long before RMS started the GNU project. It was a collection of macros that fit on top of a particular editor, which was, as I recall, collated by RMS and others. There were commercial versions of this, or at least free-as-in-beer-you-pay-for.

When RMS decided to start GNU, the first thing he did was a complete rewrite of Emacs based on the earlier versions. This was licensed under the predecessor of the GPL, the Emacs Public License (or something like that.)

Again, this is working from memory, so don't trust the details, but I think this might explain where Emacs fits into the Free Software scheme of things. Please, anyone, feel free to correct me!