The author complains: "The idea seems to be that Open Source is better than closed source because you can "tinker" with the code. But how many people actually do this? Hardly anybody in real life"
Depends what you mean by 'hardly anybody' - sure, Joe Average user isn't going to be recompiling OpenOffice before writing a letter. But I'm sure I suspect many tens of thousands developers have benefited from tweaking open source software at some point, and in many cases have submitted the patch back to the project.
The bigger point though, is that there are millions of developers out there, who can *potentially* fix a problem. And if the issue matters to one of those developers enough, there is nothing fundamental standing in the way of getting it fixed.
Compare that to the world of commercial software, where if there is no business case for making a fix , or if the company that makes the software has gone bust, you won't get a fix, period.
This doesn't mean that OSS is perfect, or bug free. But it does mean that users of OSS benefit indirectly from the ability of others to make changes and fixes to the code, even if they themselves don't have the ability or inclination to do so.
(e.g. this is it a large part of the reason that an OSS package like Imagemagick supports just about any image format under the sun)
The PLoS information site indeed runs on Linux, but it's perhaps worth mentioning that the PLoS Biology journal itself runs on a rather less open platform. Kudos to PLoS for their launch though.
For more on the ever-expanding open access movement in science, see Peter Suber's excellent blog: Open Access News.
Since JDeveloper is 100% pure Java, it actually already can be made to work on OS X. Oracle don't currently tell you how, but there are details of how to get it up and running here:
Slashdot Mirror
The author complains:
"The idea seems to be that Open Source is better than closed source because you can "tinker" with the code. But how many people actually do this? Hardly anybody in real life"
Depends what you mean by 'hardly anybody' - sure, Joe Average user isn't going to be recompiling OpenOffice before writing a letter. But I'm sure I suspect many tens of thousands developers have benefited from tweaking open source software at some point, and in many cases have submitted the patch back to the project.
The bigger point though, is that there are millions of developers out there, who can *potentially* fix a problem. And if the issue matters to one of those developers enough, there is nothing fundamental standing in the way of getting it fixed.
Compare that to the world of commercial software, where if there is no business case for making a fix , or if the company that makes the software has gone bust, you won't get a fix, period.
This doesn't mean that OSS is perfect, or bug free. But it does mean that users of OSS benefit indirectly from the ability of others to make changes and fixes to the code, even if they themselves don't have the ability or inclination to do so.
(e.g. this is it a large part of the reason that an OSS package like Imagemagick supports just about any image format under the sun)
The PLoS information site indeed runs on Linux, but it's perhaps worth mentioning that the PLoS Biology journal itself runs on a rather less open platform. Kudos to PLoS for their launch though.
For more on the ever-expanding open access movement in science, see Peter Suber's excellent blog: Open Access News.
Also, check out the other major open access publisher, BioMed Central. BioMed Central launched in 2000 and has already published more than 3000 peer reviewed biomedical research articles.
Since JDeveloper is 100% pure Java, it actually already can be made to work on OS X. Oracle don't currently tell you how, but there are details of how to get it up and running here:
http://www.mactelligence.com/info/Java/
If you have a subscription to Nature, you can get a rather more accurate summary in this News and Views piece.
The research article itself is here.
The research article is available from the Genome Biology web site here.