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Long Live Closed-Source Software?

Posted by Zonk on from the i-am-something-of-a-fan-of-closed-source-games dept.

EvilRyry writes "In an article for Discover Magazine, Jaron Lanier writes about his belief that open source produces nothing interesting because of a hide-bound mentality. 'Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.'"

4 of 676 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As a creative open source developer... by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    But there's nothing in Apache that makes you stand back and say, "Wow! That's absolutely brilliant thinking!"
    Whereas for a closed-source equivalent one only needs to look at clippy.
    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Re:As a creative open source developer... by Hognoxious · · Score: 2, Funny

    In any case, Haskell is open source. So is Erlang.
    Perl too? Though if the interpreter's anything like what it interprets, maybe it doesn't make much difference [/me ducks for cover].
    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique by Heembo · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique" WHAT? Have you actually looked at any of the linux source code? It's a complete mess with different styles, coding conventions and comments. It's a mess, at best. You want polished? Look no further than BSD. They pier-review the code (polish) on a regular basis. Now thats a real OS.

    --
    Horns are really just a broken halo.
  4. In other words... DOS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection.