Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Open Source -- Open Minded?
Author: Geoff Allen Posted: 7/21/2000; 11:23:56 AM Topic: Open Source -- a world onto itself Msg #: 18888 (In response to 18854) Prev/Next: 18887 / 18889
Great questions. I suspect you'd get a range of answers if you asked on slashdot, including several that would make Richard Stallman sound like a capitalist pig.I'll comment only on one of the questions:
Six years ago, open source projects I worked with were aimed at solving fresh, unsolved problems. It seems today that OSS is often involved in making knockoff replicas of software to give away for free. To what degree do you think that OSS should focus on providing free replacements for existing solutions, and to what degree focusing on new challenges?
Absolutely! I've been a Unix system administrator for 11 years, and have been using open source for all of that time.
Why was Perl created? (Because Larry Wall needed to munge some data.)
Why was Linux created? (As an experimental project by some guy in Finland.)
Why was Apache created? (Because a few people wanted to add some features to the NCSA web server, which was the standard at the time.)
In each of those cases, someone (or a group of someones) had something he wanted, and did it. They then chose to share the results with anyone else who might find them useful/interesting.
Now, why are Gnome and KDE being created? (Beats me! To clone Windows' UI and "bring Linux to the masses", I guess. How about trying something totally different? Be bold! Take the world by storm!)
I think Open Source works best as geeks sharing their toys, and then looking over each other's shoulders and saying "why don't you do it this way?" (done by submitting a patch).
At it's worst, the modern "Open Source movement" degenerates into a political/religious quest for world domination, bent on unseating the current superpower.
Me, I just like using Perl, and linux, and apache. And I like being able to tweak things if I need to.
Geoff
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