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Can Open Source and Commercial Software Coexist?
morrison asks: "In recent years, the Open-Source movement has increased dramatically. Harnessing the power of thousands of developers and testers has proven successful, to varying degrees, in developing operating systems, graphics applications, and web tools, including Linux, POV-Ray, Blender, Gimp, and Apache. In a SIGGRAPH 2005 discussion panel, the questions will be raised as to whether the open-source model is relevant and useful to the graphics community. Does the model of proprietary application research, development, and usage serve the industry better? Or will commercial facilities continue to primarily choose off-the-shelf solutions? Can all models work together? As a large portion of the Slashdot and Open Source community will be at SIGGRAPH, I'd really like to hear some moderated arguments beforehand before stepping up to the microphone."
And as for graphics specifically, I'd love to run GIMP on Windows, if it weren't such a pain in the ass to install.
You're kidding, right?
Just run GTK installer and then Gimp installer. How could it be easier?
The company I work for uses a proprietary billing system with an open-source back-end interface to our customer database. The proprietary system was sold to us from a commercial vendor and has as its major requirement a Red Hat-based OS, which is of course open source.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
FOSS and commercial software bring completely different attributes to the table. FOSS tends to be better quality from a code perspective, so more stable. It improves as it matures - more bugtracking and less feature creep is the order of the day.
The closed source community, by contrast, is great at blazing trails. The Cathedral model means that an innovative project doesn't have to worry so much about gaining "critical mass". In fast-moving fields such as games, closed source should have no trouble staying ahead of FOSS. It's only when closed source tries to rest on its laurels that it gets scalped by FOSS.
Open source needs closed source to show it where it risks losing market share. And closed source needs open source to keep it motivated. Neither side of this equation can be expected to be very happy about it, but the resulting balance is great for the consumer.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Can Open Source and Commercial Software Coexist?
According to RMS, no.
Sorry, but wrong! RMS argues against proprietary software, but he can perfectly well live with commercial (free as in speech) software. That's also why he says:
This is why we say that free software is a matter of freedom, not price.
I agree with RMS that sometimes, it's necessary to use exact wording. This is one of those times.
Your problem is not a corporate environment. Your problem is that your corporation sucks.
No one here has to jump through hoops the way you do. Instead, tasks are encapsulated at conception, and a development team and a testing team are assigned. The development team knows what they're trying to do (and they are free to innovate) and the testing team is tasked to make sure that (a) the original goal was met and (b) that it works, which is not always a minor issue. When it comes out of testing, it goes in the mainline code. No paperwork. None. Just conceptualization, sometimes with a proof of concept, sometimes not, coding, debugging, and pixel-pushing (we're a graphics company.)
Your enemy isn't the corporate environment. Your enemy arose spontaneously from a poor choice of employers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I agree. Autopackage is an awesome advancement in Linux. Unfortunately, not even one distro has embraced it! :-(
They don't need to embrace it! A distro packaing itself with autopakages would be foolish - the autopackage developers themselves will tell you this. Autopackage will work happily with any distro, be it rpm, dpkg, tgz or source based (presuming things are in somewhat predictable locations).
It is the commercial developers that need to use Autopackage, not the distros. It matter not a jot what the distros use, all the commercial developers have to do is build an autopackage for their software, and potentially some extra autopackages for any potential dependencies they think might be unmet on some systems - not that hard to do as long as you plan ahead and write your linux version with autopackaging in mind. If they do that, then that autopackage is a simple click install on almost any distro.
Packaging commercial software for linux is easy providing you plan ahead enough to allow yourself to build autopackages. Yes, that means current commercial packages possibly have some rewriting to do, but it is unlikely to be that much, and the benefits are clear. Linux is not lacking a means for packaging commercial software for it, it is lacking sufficient publiity of what is a fairly recently developed means for packaging commercial software for it. In another year or two people will not be talking about this problem in the same way, and soon enough it won't get mentioned at all.
Jedidiah.
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