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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.'"
Even without the acceptance of Linux on the desktop, there's no doubt that open source has been a ridiculously huge success since then. Equal acceptance (at least) as a server OS, it runs the majority of web servers and web scripting languages. Overall, a very successful life so far. I'm excited to see where it ends up ten years from now.
I'm a huge fan of OSS, but what I love even more are the spin-off movements, namely the open content projects. Of those, the two I love most are Wikipedia (of course) and the just ramping-up Metagovernment project. Together, these are in the process of completely transforming how human society operates.
The most expensive OS ever developed by the largest OS maker in history was produced just to allow Microsoft to buy an overall mediocre online company? Vista's not doing as badly as it could, but it will cost the company millions in revenue at least, and the loss of brand prestige will do millions if not billions of dollars of damage if vista's widely considered a failure. I'm going to guess that your guess is wrong.
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).
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
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 open source movement was already well under way before the Open Source summit. It was already well on its way before the GNU manifesto and the founding of the FSF. There's a perception that it's big events like these that "created" the open source movement. That's not so, it's the open source movement that's created the possibility of big exciting events.
Even people talking about f/l/oss before these events seem to miss it. for example, Ousterhout's comment "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."
The Software Tools applications and libraries date back to the '70s. So does Emacs. So do the enormous collection of software published in Dr Dobbs' journal. So do the DECUS and other user group tapes. Much of this was game software, but it also included free compilers and interpreters (Forth, Small C, Tiny C, Tiny Basic, Tiny Pascal), editors (including emacs), operating system monitors (and early attempts at UNIX workalikes), and networks. Usenet was an open source project, and there were soon open source gateways between Usenet and networks like Fidonet... and one of the earliest Usenet groups was "net.sources".
I would say the first open source decade was the '70s, though in a way it's as old as the computer industry: "in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years" -- Richard Stallman. It's been argued that it wasn't really until the '70s that closed source really got under way, so one might say that it was the creation of a binary, non-shared, closed-source software industry that created what became the open-source movement (under whatever name you like).
So depending on whether you include the '60s, we're coming up on the end of the 4th or 5th "open source decade", the '00s. Not the first.
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.
The primary driver for free software was the post office. DECUS tapes, Dr Dobbs' Journal, Software Tools, all the user group floppy collections. Then the primary driver for free software became the phone company. Usenet, Fidonet, BBSes. The Internet didn't get into the game, really, until the '90s... free/open/watchamacallit software was decades old by then. :)
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.