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Long Live Closed-Source Software?
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.'"
Windows which is now discovering these new things called micro kernels and moving things out of ring0. Linux is up to date with usb and proc filesystems which are object oriented and beryl can do things that make Vista look primitive regardless of the fact that yes, /, /bin, and /usr are 30 years old. How old is the c:\ prompt?
http://saveie6.com/
As opposed to the dozens of Linux distros we have now, each with their own repositories of custom compiled software that typically doesn't work anywhere but on that specific version of that specific distro.
"I don't consider eye candy to be innovation."
Clearly, you have never developed user interfaces before. There is a lot of creative design in a good command line interface. A gui is several times more difficult to develop and get right. When it is right, it fits like a glove around the uses its intended audience puts it to. When it is done poorly, we get...errr....windoze.
Most of us use guis because we have better things to do than bang out indecipheral text commands invested with years of learning how to do something we normal people use maybe once, twice a year. If your investment in non-eye candy interfaces makes you proud of yourself, please, pleasure yourself with them to your hearts content.
Gerry
is crap: see Apache and MediaWiki. The closed-source model has never produced anything nearly as radical, important and innovative as either of those two projects. The iphone's interface is laughable in comparison.