Slashdot Mirror
The New Struggles Facing Open Source
An anonymous reader writes in with this story about the open source movement's contentious beginnings and the points of trouble it faces today. "The early days of open source were fraught with religious animosities we feared would tear apart the movement: free software fundamentalists haggling with open source pragmatists over how many Apache licenses would fit on the head of a pin. But once commercial interests moved in to plunder for profit, the challenges faced by open source pivoted toward issues of control. While those fractious battles are largely over, giving way to an era of relative peace, this seeming tranquility may prove more dangerous to the open source movement than squabbling ever did. Indeed, underneath this superficial calm, plenty of tensions simmer. Some are the legacy of the past decade of open source warfare. Others, however, break new ground and arguably threaten open source far more than the GPL-vs.-Apache battle ever did."
Because "the cloud" offers outsourcing of the hardware management, something that wasn't really practical before. That's a big win for customers, especially smaller ones.
And yet nobody here would bat an eyelash if he had swapped "LibreOffice" and "Office 365" in his example - he'd be lauded as an Open Source hero and voted +5, Insightful
Now you're being ridiculous, mod points aren't the same as 'being lauded as an open source hero.' I don't think I've ever seen someone lauded as an open source hero on Slashdot for a comment (but who knows, it could have happened).
To further show the absurdity of your point, his comment is currently modded at +4.
Frankly, I wish the mods paid more attention to examples of reality given in posts, but you can't have everything.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I was actually going to point out that probably 98% of the Office 365 (Word) users out there would be entirely fine using whatever the most recent version of Word was in 2005. I wrote plenty of stuff in Word in the early-late 90s when I was in school. Lab reports including Excel graphs, etc.. Nearly everything that annoyed me about Word and Excel in 1995 still annoys me about Word and Excel in 2015.