Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ESR talks in Dublin

Posted by Hemos on from the preaching-to-the-masses dept.

egnarts writes "As some people know, ESR gave a talk in Dublin last Thursday, the Irish Times has this perspective on the event. " As always, good to see more and more people taking this stuff seriously, and the meeting sounds like it went really well.

1 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. It's happened already! by davew · · Score: 4

    The talk was fantastic. He never stooped to Microsoft bashing, but when asked, he convincingly drove home the very why he thought MS would be come irrelevent: it's happened before!

    Eric told us a story, of the three ages of networking.

    The first age, from about the mid-sixties until some way into the seventies, networks were a big experiment. IP was around, but TCP wasn't - the top layer was NCP.

    Then networking got popular and companies like DEC and IBM and countless others brought out their own proprietary protocols. And you had to choose. And if you chose DECnet over another, you were making a bet that DECnet would eventually succeed and the others would fail, because they were all incompatible and you could only talk with other DECnet users.

    So the market split into a series of monopolies where the cost of moving from one protocol to another was way too high to justify the advantages. And like in any monopoly situation, prices proceeded to rise.

    And then along came this strange little open standard called TCP. Because it was open, it started to spread, and because it spread, prices started to fall.

    So while the costs of the proprietary systems were continually rising, the cost of running a TCP network kept falling, until the difference was greater than the cost of transitioning - at which point the bottom fell out of the proprietary protocol market! (and ESR practically leaped off the stage, and I nearly fell out of my chair).

    And so it's not just that it looks like open systems will prove themselves over closed systems - it's that it's already happened.

    That's just one small part of an amazing talk. I've never seen anyone who really believes in Open Source as strongly as he does, or argue its merits as coherently. If you listen to him for a while you can't help but think a little differently about things when you leave.

    Dave

    --