OSS and Linux coming through

Roxus sent us a nice little article in the Melbourne Age extolling the Virtues of OSS. It's a nice little article. Nothing remarkably insightful or new, but further proof of what we already know.

Comments

"Conventional wisdom"? Yuck!

[Lalo Martins]

Conventional wisdom suggests you carefully guard your source code

Why do people always tend to lose sight of what is "conventional"? "Guarding" source is a recent trend, started in the late 70s; computers are here because before that it was "conventional" to share. Copyrights are here since the Renaissance when the press was invented; arts are only here because, before that, it was "conventional" to share. And I fail to see any "wisdom" in not sharing... is there? Why are people's heads so fscked up? Yes, I'm starting to believe in the results of the IQ poll. Perhaps we are here because we think, we are able to see what for us seems obvious but for "them" seems to be a wonder. Go figure.

Slight nit: who made the abbreviation "OSS"?

[Bruce Perens]

As far as I can tell, "OSS" was first used in the Microsoft Halloween documents to refer to Open Source. It happens that "OSS" is trademarked by someone else (see OSS.com). It would be nice if we could just refer to it as Open Source and not abbreviate.

Bruce Perens

Exponential growth

[Your own stupidity]

Exponential growth is not sustainable. Eventually it will have to plateau out. The article predicts outstripping all Microsoft OSs in about four years. After that point, there will be relatively few people to assimilate, and the curve will start to flatten.

This gives us one to two years to develop the "killer" desktop, one that beats the Mac (a much better environment than Windoze, all stability issues aside). Linuxconf has come a long way, but needs more polishing, and COAS sounds promising. System configuration is probably still the area where the most improvement can be made. (I'm still getting a good feel for the new linuxconf that comes with RedHat 5.2, as I usually do my system configuration stuff with vi...) Will GNOME 2.0 (or KDE 3.0) be it?

Linux itself is rock-solid. We just need to make it a little more accessible for the clue-impaired. That, and help out the Wine developers, cut off Microsoft at the knees...