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A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit
Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"
Are you suggesting Microsoft is pulling a Coca-Cola? Change their formula to suck then bring back the original and make billions? I guess it could work...
I realize that a creator is not responsible in any way for the various ways in which is creation is used. But I have to wrestle with Tcl code every day because it was packaged with a large commercial application my team supports. Its strength is also its weakness: almost anyone can learn to use it (and frequently badly).
And why is the Tcl interpreter so brain-dead? Consider the complaints from the interpreter when encountering "unbalanced grouping symbols" that are contained within a comment. Most parsers throw out all contents of a comment as soon as it's identified. But if you have an expression like
set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
it will refuse to work. WTF?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
...ants are an ineffective species because few people keep them as pets. This is slashdot. We use car analogies around here. Saying Linux (and FOSS in general) isn't a huge success because it hasn't taken over the desktop is kind of like saying tractor-trailers are an ineffective vehicle because few people keep them in their garages.He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
How the heck would you know, Mr. know-it-all? What, where you at the VA Linux Systems meeting or something? Next you're gonna say you personally know Christine Petersen. Or even RMS.
(I am kidding. I know who Bruce Perens is, mostly thanks to seeing this a few years ago.)