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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.'"
Yay woot let's give ourselves some publicity for once! We don't do that often enough. Well except me cause I cunningly put the link to my main project in my signature..
You just got troll'd!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Cool idea (although I'm more in the Free Software camp than the Open Source one, but what the hell, we can all be friends). Here's my stuff:
ZEUS-MP -- Not originally mine, but I've done a lot of work on it and released this version of an older parallel MHD code for astronomy.
Misc. Free stuff -- bunch of perl and python scripts along with some LaTeX macros (including one for making business cards).
Sadly, with all the work trying to finish my dissertation these days I haven't updated anything in a while.
Well, all the computers in my institute run on Linux.
Almost all of the supercomputers run Linux or BSD.[1]
As John Ousterhout said: "The second problem I have seen (really more of a limitation) is that open-source software hasn't broken out of the "tools and systems" arena."
So while I can give you that, it makes me think about Apache, Firefox, MySQL etc.
So, yeah, "open source has been a ridiculously huge success".
To be fair, GPP was referring to Linux on the desktop. With the exception of gaming, the examples you game were not desktop apps - And most gamers use Windows.
I'm a huge Linux fan but, despite the progress it's making, the truth is that it has not yet gained widespread acceptance as a desktop OS.
Of course, it does appear that GPP misunderstood moderatorrater's post as implying that Linux had desktop acceptance when in fact, he'd admitted just the opposite...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s ..., there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world.
You've missed a lot of computing history. Maybe the capitalized phrase "Open Source" was new, but the practice wasn't. For instance, before the mini/micro-computer "revolution", I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which used VM as their main OS. VM originated in academia, and its source was always available to anyone interested. Of course, not too many people wanted it unless they had an IBM mainframe. Most such installations had a VM guru on the staff, and the VM gurus I knew were quite open with their source.
Around the same time, on one such machines, the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's unix system, which ran on VM of course. When we asked about source, the reply was "That's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." "Open Source" may not have been a catch phrase yet, but Amdahl was happy to have customers with employees who could read the source, since that made their support job a lot easier. In fact, I sent them a kernel bug fix about a month after we got the system installed; I got back a nice "Thanks!" letter and was added to their published list of code contributors.
A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name. Software vendors routinely gave source to customers who wanted it, with the expectation that customers would find and fix bugs and maybe add new features. One of Microsoft's innovations was to hold their source as proprietary, so as not to allow customers to improve the software. A lot of people were amazed that customers actually accepted this. You heard a lot of questions like "Would they buy a truck or car that couldn't be worked on by any mechanics except the manufacturer's?" But then, when it became clear that Microsoft had gotten away with such a dodgy scheme, it was quickly adopted by others, so that customers would have to pay them for patching up the bugs.
It still sorta amazes me that customers can be so dense as to pay money for products that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer (and usually now not even by them). So much for the economists' idea of a rational marketplace.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You understand that the whole idea of New Coke was change the type of sugar without people noticing/complaining? They took the original off the selves. When original code was reintroduced, it was not exactly the same.
And why is the Tcl interpreter so brain-dead?
Because it's simple. Deliberately so. It's inspired by Lisp.
There's 11 rules that define the complete syntax for Tcl, everything else including control structures is built up on top of that.
I'm responsible for some of the complexity that IS in there, originally there wasn't a distinction between {...} lists and "..." strings at all: I'm the one who suggested that variable substitution be allowed inside "...".
But if you have an expression like
set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
it will refuse to work.
No, that one's OK, but if you have
set foo "bar"; # {oops forgot a closing brace
it may not work.
The reason is that the parsing of comments happens at the block level, but the parsing of blocks happens at the list level. So {# this list happens to start with "pound sign"} is a list. The fact that that list might happen to be code as well doesn't make a difference when it's parsing lists.
No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
No, I don't think the picture is like you paint it.
I don't work for free. I prefer to write code that is released under the GPL, but not for free. Someone pays me to write such software because they have a use for it. In the past, too much of the code I've written for employers ends up rotting. They change systems, and bury or destroy old stuff for a variety of reasons that are mostly antisocial. It can be good to make a fresh start, but that's not what concerns them. They worry that competitors or lawsuit minded customers could do something with any such info. They are dismissive of reasons why it would be to their benefit to not lock up or destroy old software.
Avoid reinventing the wheel? That's the broken window fallacy. We don't like that when businesses try to pull that crap on us. A good example of that is being pushed to buy our music collections all over again to get them in a new format, as happened in the move from vinyl to CD, but which shouldn't be necessary to go from CD to mp3 or even worse from mp3 on old computer to same mp3 on new computer. Except possibly some tit for tat retaliation, most of us are not going to be hypocrites and try to pull that on businesses! We will show them a good example by not being antisocial. Yes, there can be some short term gain to sharp dealing, but long term, it's foolish. Just look at Microsoft. Yes, I know they've been very successful, but where are they going? You should not fear that we'll run out of work to do either.
Don't own our own work? Darn right! But no one else owns or can own it either. Unlike some businesses, we relinquish control and require they do so too, so that all our customers need not fear that someone will make abusive but legal (maybe) use of copyright to deny them use of software they have purchased. Otherwise a rival may be able to hurt them by acquiring the rights in some fashion, either by forcing them or us to sell the "ownership" of the software, or by buying us. Or fear that there will be no choice but to start over if the main programmer is "hit by a bus".
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I think 10Base5 was pretty much on its deathbed when Microsoft appeared on the scene. The cable was thick and unwieldy to install. It was costly, as you needed active devices to connect to the cable. 10Base2 was a lot cheaper, and it offered the flexibility to re-wire a network. 10BaseT was cheaper still, and much more fault tolerant.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
set foo [list {#valid list item} {bar} {baz}]; # { unmatched brace in a comment produces error here
There's no distinction in Tcl between {#valid list item} and {#a code block starting with a comment}.
Here's another example that might help you understand: These two "if" statements are the same, as far as Tcl is concerned. A Tcl block consists of Tcl statements separated by newlines and semicolons. Each tcl statement is a list, with the first element of the list being a command, and the rest being the arguments. So that "if" statement is the command "if" with two arguments, or it's a three element list containing "if", {[lindex $separators $token] >= 0} and $block.
Whether the block is the result of a variable substitution or not isn't relevant. So the parser operates on lists, one list at a time. If a block is used, it gets JIT interpreted as that code and the resulting code is stored in the object alongside the list format, so the next time around it doesn't get recompiled and execution stays in the bytecode interpreter... but that's a side effect of the implementation. As far as the language is concerned it's all just strings that may be lists, code, or plain text.
The reference you refer to uses the words "open source" in a sense closer to the sense of "open source military intelligence", which was a well-known usage at that time and still continues to be used. It means something that has value but wasn't taken from a secret source. In early February 1998, the phrase gained a new usage which was promoted by the Open Source Initiative.
I will not, however, take any credit for the usage of "Open Source" in a series of articles by one "Violet Blue". This seems to be closer to the military sense "not a secret" than the sense I have promoted :-)
Bruce Perens.