Slashdot Mirror
Has Open Source Lost Its Halo?
PetManimal writes "Open-source software development once had a reputation as a grassroots movement, but it is increasingly a mainstream IT profit center, and according to Computerworld, some in the industry are asking whether 'open source' has become a cloak used by IT vendors large and small to disguise ruthless and self-serving behavior. Citing an online opinion piece by Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc., the article notes that HP and IBM have not only profited from open-source at the expense of competitors, but have also boosted their images in the open-source community. The Computerworld article also mentions the efforts by the Microsoft/Windows camp to promote open-source credentials: '[InfoWorld columnist Dave] Rosenberg is more disturbed by the bandwagon jumpers: the companies, mostly startups, belatedly going open-source in order to ride a trend, while paying only lip service to the community and its values. Take Aras Corp., a provider of Windows-based product lifecycle management (PLM) software that in January decided to go open-source. Rosenberg depicted the firm in his blog as an opportunistic Johnny-Come-Lately. "I'm not impressed when a company whose software is totally built on Microsoft technologies goes open-source," said Rosenberg, who even suspects that the company is being promoted by Microsoft as a shill to burnish Redmond's image in open-source circles."'"
One of the big benefits of the GPL is that it helps businesses to protect themselves from bad vendor behavior.
No, it is not a panacea. Anyone who thinks so will get what they probably deserve. However, it is certainly an improvement over what vendors of, say, closed-source accounting and CRM packages are able to do to their customers.
Of course, there will still be slimy business behavior - that is what capitalism is all about.
Tell me how I can hack my Tivo to do neat things?
Tivo didn't give any implied blessing, Tivo locked down the Series 2 cryptographically to prevent me from copying off the shows I recorded, and making the only conduit the slow and broken TivoToGo. 2 hours to copy a half hour show, I'm glad they take the time to encrypt it on the fly for my protection.
Let me reiterate: Tivo saw hackers doing neat things, based largely on the openness of linux, and locked the system down to prevent it.
The only "hack" I can pull off is 'put in a bigger harddrive with exact same system partition', and that explicitly voids my license. I don't know if they've ever done so, but they could as easily blacklist me off the service for doing this, as MSFT could boot me from XBox live for having a mod chip.
Actually, I heard that the above hack no longer works on Series 3, which include the partition tables in the cryptographic jibber jabber somehow.
I like Tivo as a product, but as a company, they behave as a company, and the fact that they use linux is irrelevant.
Actually, linux is probably the reason it takes 5 minutes for a tivo to reboot.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
We aren't. Some "journalist" is trying to drum up page hits.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
> Are you sure TiVo has never made patches to the kernel that got accepted?
They've made modifications anyway. Get them here.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Uhm, actually the GPL does say you are free to use the work of others. You just can't sell it to someone else or make proprietary changes to the base code and sell/distribute that. You are free to sell the services and add-ons though, which is exactly what IBM and others are doing. Despite what Stallman thinks, GPL isn't the dirty hippy communist utopia that he wants.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
By IBM I assume you mean the Eclipse Foundation, of which Borland is a member. In fact, future versions of Borland's IDE will be based on the Eclipse platform; I imagine that Borland was perfectly happy to see widespread adoption for Eclipse, since they'll be cashing in on that adoption soon.
Actually, you have the right to sell GPL'd software that you didn't write or change in any way. You just need to sell it under the GPL, with the source code and the same rights that you received when you downloaded it.
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