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The Most Influential People In Open Source
mmaney writes "As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was mentioned because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent, however, are any influential women."
Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism, noting that several people on the list are there "not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments."
has been so remarkably well received
Give it another hour ... The absence of at least one of Torvalds, Stallman, ESR, Larry Wall, or even just a pro-OSS person we have actually heard of will have people screaming (perhaps rightfully so).
"They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without. That isn't happening today. These apps don't exist."
In my opinion, the reason those apps do not exist is that consumers really only care about 4 apps at most, and that number is really reduced to one app in this day and age. There are plenty of things I am doing with free/open source software that are could not be done without spending a fortune on proprietary licensing, but they are things that consumers do not care about. As a simple example, I frequently access systems remotely, sometimes while other people are using them; with Windows XP, this was not possible without purchasing an expensive, "enterprise edition" license, or using some kind of crack. Most people hear this and shrug -- they really do not see this as a particularly important feature or activity, more of a novelty than anything else, and it is certainly not convincing enough to get them to take the terrifying step of switching. It is the same with just about everything; even security is a tough sell, with most people having been conditioned that worms and viruses are just an unavoidable fact of life, certainly not worth the effort of using some software that they have never heard of.
It really boils down to whether or not proprietary licensing is causing a problem for them. For someone who is just browsing the web and using no-cost plugins like Flash, they will never encounter licensing restrictions in any meaningful way. The only desktop users who really feel the pain of proprietary licensing are "power users," and they usually have some Linux distro installed already. With them, though, there is a substantial fear of ditching proprietary software entirely, but that is the same story we have dealt with for years.
Palm trees and 8
In my opinion, the reason those apps do not exist is that consumers really only care about 4 apps at most, and that number is really reduced to one app in this day and age. There are plenty of things I am doing with free/open source software that are could not be done without spending a fortune on proprietary licensing, but they are things that consumers do not care about.
This is the history of much or our technology. New things are developed out of public sight, by people who want them for their own narrow purposes. Thus, most people would tell you that the World Wide Web was invented by Microsoft. In fact, it started of at CERN, a totally meaningless name to 99% of the Web's users, to make it easier for physicists to share their experimental data, research papers, etc. Outside of the geek community, hardly anyone has ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee, and he wouldn't make it onto any lists made by anyone not involved in Web development.
This is the norm. Last night I was at an event where I was approached by several people who told me how much they appreciate my web site and the things I've done for them. I won't mention the topic, because it's just one of many similar stories. This includes my usual explanation that I really did it for my own nefarious purposes. I'd found a growing number of sites that had data of a sort that I find useful. I made a sort of combined aggregator/index/search site, because I was annoyed with the time I was wasting trying to find things on those other sites, and decided "This is a job for the computer". I set it up as a web site so that I could use it anywhere that I had Net access. I mentioned it to a few colleagues, who mentioned it to a few others, and now it has between 5000 and 1000 hits most days. It's not a huge commercial thing, and probably never will be, but it's useful to a few tens of thousands of people (much less than 1% of the world's population).
Of the many such online development, most of them are free/open source because they have no obvious commercial potential. Eventually, a few may reach some sort of public notice. At that time, the commercial world will probably pick up on what has happened. A few corporate giants will to buy them out (or reverse engineer them) and commercialize them. This will probably include incorporating them into the big, monolithic apps that we're all familiar with. People will say how wonderful this new thing is that corporation X has invented. And they'll say that the Open Source stuff is still irrelevant, because it doesn't provide anything that people want.
These predictions are fairly easy, because it's how things have always been done. If you dig a bit, you can probably find examples in whatever area you're intimately familiar with.
The really glaring example is the "Windows" GUI that's been so much discussed here. Insiders know about the Xerox PARC project that started it all. But probably even most /. readers don't know about its origins, because they only know the decade-later version commercialized by Microsoft, and they judge everything else by how well it mimics this particular offshoot of the original project. This is, of course, a loser's game, since you can't possibly track a moving target whose future moves are secret. But it's likely that right now there are a few small projects underway that, in a few more years or decades, will suddenly appear in the public eye as a huge improvement, to be taken over by the corporate marketers and sold as their marvelous new development. But it won't be produced anyone trying to clone the current market leader.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.