It may be intereting to note that these two Switchers are long-time (pre-OS X) Mac users, and were not part of the more recent and largely unremarked-upon migration of Unix geeks to OS X.
Re:not the first!
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Technically it's the second part of a two-part hackathon. The first part was held (as you rightly mention) in Tucson, Arizona. Following that, everyone was given the chance to go home and catch their breath, and now it's on to the part two.
The original intention was (I believe) that part one would be "talking" and part two "hacking". But as it happens, a lot more got done in Tucson than most attendees anticipated.
I agree 100% with the sentiment. In fact, industry pundit Bobby Cringely wrote about this exact same thing just after the release of the Halloween document. (Anyone remember that?) He writes:
"How can free software be threatened by commercial software? Linux and Apache have no market share or profitability goals, so they can't be threatened in these areas." [... ] "The threat only exists if we accept Microsoft's view that market share matters. Yet the whole key to the success of Linux and Apache is to not care about market share. "
"Chase the dream," he urges free software devotees, "not the competition!" Words to remember!:-)
As a BSD user, I am of course interested to see what effect the wider publicity geberated by MacOS X will have on my favourite family of operating systems. But if you ask if MacOS X will harm Linux, the free BSDs, or any other piece of open software... I have to tell you that I find your question irrelevant.:-)
It's a good point, but youre missing the crux of it, IMHO.:-)
The point is that FreeBSD, in particular, is under public revision control. Anyone can submit a patch to the project's GNATS database either via a web front-end, or via send-pr(1).
The developers are of course free to ignore your PR, but it remains sitting there for the whole world to see until they either accept it, or tell you a good reason why they're not going to.:-)
Should your patch be accepted, the fact will also be noted for all time in the CVS repository.
(It should be pointed out that the revision control extends beyond just the FreeBSD kernel, and covers the entire OS, including ports, documentation, etc. This also has many implications for the maintenance of FreeBSD systems. Want your ports and documentation to be up-to-date daily, and schedule a weekly update of all system sources and a rebuild? No problem.)
In fact, it goes even further than this. FreeBSD's development methodology is multi-tiered, with a central core team surrounded by a rather large group of committers. Not only does this mean that most submitted PR's are treated quite promptly, but it also implies that an active contributor with a good track record has a decent chance of becoming a committer, should he/she wish.
The original question pretty much summed up one of the primary reasons I'm currently spending a lot more time on FreeBSD than Linux. Over and above any technical or other merits, the development methodology of (specifically) the FreeBSD project is such that it is one of the easiest and most profitable open source projects to become personally involved in.
OK, that subject sounds like FUD, but it would make one hell of an attention-grabber if used as a headline for an article.:)
I believe that a strong argument can be made that the oft-reviled fragmented nature of Unix was one of the driving factors behind the emergence of the "share and share alike" Unix software culture which many of us have enjoyed long before the term "Open Source" was invented.
(I would also list a second driving factor, namely the fact that the development of Unix was so fundamentally tied to the development of the Internet, and that Unix users therefore had a means to form a close-knit community from the start.)
For instance, compare MS-DOS. Why did the "shareware" concept take over on that even more prevalent platform and not on Unix? Why did commercial software become the norm on DOS, while we Unix users were used to the fact that whatever we really needed, we could find "out there"?
Because developers could get away with spreading their apps as binaries, that's why.
Binary code as a means of software distribution would never have worked during the early days of Unix, when almost every single installation was so highly tweaked by its local operators as to be a flavour unto itself. If you wrote something cute, you could only spread it as source. Or keep it to yourself.
Even in the early 90's you had to be the size of a Netscape Corp to be able to develop your app for several flavours of Unix simultaneously and distribute the binaries for all of these. Show me the home developer who has a Sparc, an Irix box, an HP workstation and an AIX box sitting on his desk.
If my argument makes sense, then it begs the question whether the emergence of One True Unix (read: Linux) won't have a potentailly very negative effect on what is now called Open Source software.
If it becomes easy for anyone to spread a Unix (read: Linux) app in binary format, won't we see the greed factor (profit motive?) taking over and commercial apps (or shareware or some other form of binary distribution) become the order of the day?
Or is the open source genie out of the bottle once and for all? Will the community factor mentioned above be enough to prevent this from happening?
Slashdot Mirror
The whole article was kind of believable. Up to the point where he described comingzune.com as "cool marketing".
It may be intereting to note that these two Switchers are long-time (pre-OS X) Mac users, and were not part of the more recent and largely unremarked-upon migration of Unix geeks to OS X.
Technically it's the second part of a two-part hackathon. The first part was held (as you rightly mention) in Tucson, Arizona. Following that, everyone was given the chance to go home and catch their breath, and now it's on to the part two.
The original intention was (I believe) that part one would be "talking" and part two "hacking". But as it happens, a lot more got done in Tucson than most attendees anticipated.
As a BSD user, I am of course interested to see what effect the wider publicity geberated by MacOS X will have on my favourite family of operating systems. But if you ask if MacOS X will harm Linux, the free BSDs, or any other piece of open software... I have to tell you that I find your question irrelevant. :-)
The point is that FreeBSD, in particular, is under public revision control. Anyone can submit a patch to the project's GNATS database either via a web front-end, or via send-pr(1).
The developers are of course free to ignore your PR, but it remains sitting there for the whole world to see until they either accept it, or tell you a good reason why they're not going to. :-)
Should your patch be accepted, the fact will also be noted for all time in the CVS repository.
(It should be pointed out that the revision control extends beyond just the FreeBSD kernel, and covers the entire OS, including ports, documentation, etc. This also has many implications for the maintenance of FreeBSD systems. Want your ports and documentation to be up-to-date daily, and schedule a weekly update of all system sources and a rebuild? No problem.)
In fact, it goes even further than this. FreeBSD's development methodology is multi-tiered, with a central core team surrounded by a rather large group of committers. Not only does this mean that most submitted PR's are treated quite promptly, but it also implies that an active contributor with a good track record has a decent chance of becoming a committer, should he/she wish.
The original question pretty much summed up one of the primary reasons I'm currently spending a lot more time on FreeBSD than Linux. Over and above any technical or other merits, the development methodology of (specifically) the FreeBSD project is such that it is one of the easiest and most profitable open source projects to become personally involved in.
Free source for DICE, compilable on Amiga, FreeBSD & Linux.
OK, that subject sounds like FUD, but it would make one hell of an attention-grabber if used as a headline for an article. :)
I believe that a strong argument can be made that the oft-reviled fragmented nature of Unix was one of the driving factors behind the emergence of the "share and share alike" Unix software culture which many of us have enjoyed long before the term "Open Source" was invented.
(I would also list a second driving factor, namely the fact that the development of Unix was so fundamentally tied to the development of the Internet, and that Unix users therefore had a means to form a close-knit community from the start.)
For instance, compare MS-DOS. Why did the "shareware" concept take over on that even more prevalent platform and not on Unix? Why did commercial software become the norm on DOS, while we Unix users were used to the fact that whatever we really needed, we could find "out there"?
Because developers could get away with spreading their apps as binaries, that's why.
Binary code as a means of software distribution would never have worked during the early days of Unix, when almost every single installation was so highly tweaked by its local operators as to be a flavour unto itself. If you wrote something cute, you could only spread it as source. Or keep it to yourself.
Even in the early 90's you had to be the size of a Netscape Corp to be able to develop your app for several flavours of Unix simultaneously and distribute the binaries for all of these. Show me the home developer who has a Sparc, an Irix box, an HP workstation and an AIX box sitting on his desk.
If my argument makes sense, then it begs the question whether the emergence of One True Unix (read: Linux) won't have a potentailly very negative effect on what is now called Open Source software.
If it becomes easy for anyone to spread a Unix (read: Linux) app in binary format, won't we see the greed factor (profit motive?) taking over and commercial apps (or shareware or some other form of binary distribution) become the order of the day?
Or is the open source genie out of the bottle once and for all? Will the community factor mentioned above be enough to prevent this from happening?
Just wondering...