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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.'"
There was also freeware, trialware, crippleware, shareware, talk of varying types of licenses, and anything you didn't pay for normally came with caveats that fall into the 'you get what you pay for' category. So, yes, there was a lot of suspicion about OSS because of all that it was competing with.
That was even before MS had killed off all of its serious competitors.
Then there was just MS and Windows developers. There were a few areas of competition but Windows was just a far cry above what DOS programs were doing at the time. Do you remember paradox? Qbase? WordPerfect? WordStar? Novell? 10Base5 ethernet?
I'm quite glad that OSS has made it this far and one so much.
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Think it would be cool if every Slashdot reader listed the open source project they have released along with the Sourceforge, Freshmeat or or repo address. I for one haven't updated my project, PHPulse (a highly scalable lightweight MVC framework for PHP) or about a year even though I have code updates on my machine at home. Get busy helping corporate customers and forget the main project. http://code.google.com/p/phpulse/
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
They might have given it a name but there was a great deal of free software around 10 years ago. My impression from those times (and it was only 10 years, we're not talking a lifetime here) is that the primary driver for free software was the internet - not a bunch of people at a conference, even if they call it a summit.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The one quote that really bugged me is the following one from Ousterhout:
> The third thing that has negatively impressed me is
> that open source is often used as a desperate last-ditch
> effort for loser software. If a product is doing poorly
> in the marketplace, sometimes companies release it as
> open source, hoping that will somehow magically revive
> it and make it widely used. This almost never works.
Does this guy not realize that Firefox was born from Netscape going south? I'm sure there are other examples out there, but how obvious does one need to be?
now it is widely embraced
Er, no.
I still, on a daily basis, run into people who would rather buy software than use OSS alternatives because they firmly believe "you get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not even talking about fellow IT professionals.
Among them, I get much more polarized attitudes - They either embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck the system).
Me, I'll just use what works. Sometimes that means paying for software, but I can usually find something comparable and Free (and with a price tag of "free", I give "comparable" quite a bit of leeway).
What acceptance, where?
Let us see...
In industry?
Lots (I'm not going to bother to list, we all know where to look) of companies use OSS technologies for routing, traffic shaping, VPN, etc...
In commerce?
I've seen countless websites run on Apache which I've bought products from, you?
In the media?
In the home?
Tivo uses Linux, plenty of games use Vorbis...
I'm sure plenty of people could come up with better examples than I have. Maybe you're looking for huge sweeping changes at once but generally these changes are small and over time. They'll likely become more visible in a way that is pleasing to you in the next 10 years.
I may be trolling or flaming you, but that doesn't change the fact that you're dead wrong and missed the meat of my post.
The only WTF is that you've failed to fully grasp how Tcl works. Tcl requires something of an experienced and open-minded perspective. You can't take what you learned in your C or Java class and expect Tcl to work the same way.
There's a reason why comment parsing is the way it is, and generally speaking it's a good reason. Much like there's a reason Python uses whitespace for indentation. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but it serves a purpose. And much like Python's use of whitespace, Tcl's comment behavior is not nearly as bad in practice as you think.
Yeah, there's a couple of clearly strange things about Tcl, but from that strangeness comes a remarkably powerful language.
I recently gave myself the task to learn PHP (lots more PHP jobs than Tcl jobs, sadly) and was saddened to see all the hacks and special cases I had to remember about the language. Not that PHP is a bad language per se, but after living by choice with Tcl for over a decade, most other languages pale in comparison. Seriously. Tcl is one remarkably well designed language.
But, of course, we each have our own opinion of what makes for a good language. Just because Tcl doesn't meet your definition doesn't make it worse, just different.
Well, yahoo could fix all that if they wanted too. All they have to do is make a contract with an extremely large payout with an OSS company for a discount on Linux servers and support in exchange for GPLv3 and GPLv2 development on on OSS products over the next ten years. Make the discount something like a mandatory purchase over so many years which they will likely do because of growth anyways and set the traded development work for 10% or something off or a cost plus contract or something of the sorts. Then make the deal for 10 or 15 years with the outage conditions of the OSS company going out of business or a payout of 20 million to a billion or something.
Tack a committal to forever allow the use of any patent technologies related to any work they perform and make sure the committal is at least as permissive as the GPLv3 if not more so with a requirement for other licenses use too. I'm betting you would have created a situation where Microsoft wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole for the next 20 years. Anyways, as long as the Yahoo obligations is normal compared to what they already do except with the absurd payout and patent commitment should leave them in a position just as strong as they are today (or better) without causing too much problems for regulators. They could even present it in a way that benefits them because of the discount or price plus portions of the deals.
However, I think your wrong about the MS yahoo attraction. I think MS doesn't care what regulators think and only want Yahoo for their yahoo games section which could allow them to gradually force a switch to Vista by making certain popular games only compatible with Vista and then eventually all of them. A lot of the hold outs don't see a reason to switch to Vista, This would give quite a few of them one.
True. But to provide a completely anecdotal data point, we now have 3 Linux laptops running in my company of 35 people, as compared to one a year ago (and that was on the lead developer's box. Java app). We're a software company, but it's more than there have been in the past. Linux is rapidly approaching desktop usability for most people, and is past it for someone with Linux knowledge.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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, as people have repeatedly pointed out to you on slashdot, the term "open source" predates the OSI by several years. I know that people have repeatedly pointed out to you that the term "open source" in terms of available, distributable source code was used years before OSI purportedly came up with it. A search on usenet shows repeated use of this phrase back to at least 1991.
A lot of end-users use OSS without realizing it. A prime example would be Mac OS X and iPhone OS. They both are built around Mach, BSD, and the host of other OSS projects that is called Darwin. They run Safari (built on KHTML), PHP (and other scripting languages), MySQL (and other databases), and so on.
For that matter, I cannot imagine how many end-users use MySQL every day in all kinds of different ways. I've never looked into what runs /. but I imagine that the moment I click this submit button, I will be "using" MySQL and Perl.