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A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the has-it-been-that-long dept.

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.'"

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. I remember those days by zappepcs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
  2. Last ditch effort for companies going south by Rabbit_Fish · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. you're dumb by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ok, I'm a heretic And a jackass. I said that linux hasn't been accepted on the desktop. Firefox is the only app that has had much success with the average user, and it's not very high.

    I don't think spin and wishful thinking furthers anyones aims I was referencing its success in the server/web/language market, where it's the leader. Apache's the #1 server on the web, php is the #1 language on the web, with ruby and perl also in the rankings. If you work on the web, you can't get away from open source.

    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.