Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Open Source -- a world onto itself

Author:calvin@xmission.com
Posted:7/20/2000; 12:38:59 PM
Topic:Open Source -- a world onto itself
Msg #:18813 (In response to 18800)
Prev/Next:18812 / 18814

I don't know if I agree with this statement, or the one by tim bray on scripting.com.

The power users of OSS are the developers of OSS. eg hackers. All the other users are related in one way or another to hacking or developing...or just plain learning. It's just not the same division between corporate developers and external users. There is no magical payroll wall that has to be crossed to be a developer as distinct from a user.

I don't think OSS is like a platform, because it's much more open. Nobody can really sabotage a product release on Linux like Apple, IBM, Sun or MS could on their own platforms. Linux OSS is open. It's also young.

Tim Bray's statement that OSS doesn't do anything new is just silly. Of course OSS doesn't do anything new, neither does MS, IBM, Apple or Sun. It's the individuals in those different organizations that do things that are new. Groups, either in the form of corporations or loose federations of developers don't do new things. Individuals do...and they share it with other individuals. This is a point that is too often missed.

One of the lures of OSS is that it gives individuals some powerful control over their own work. (think perl). Larry Wall and his good friends really own perl. Sun owns java, even though it was a small group of individuals that really developed it. But if Sun wants to go in a different direction than the founders of java want to go, guess who gets fired?

I think .NET doesn't mean much to OSS developers and their friends because they don't see how it would help them. How does it help the Gnome crowd? Or Linux kernal developers?

Now if it helped some up and coming newbie developer it would gain traction over time. But honestly, .NET is vaporware. Is it happening now? no. It's something that might happen in the future. (no offense to you Dave, you're shipping stuff, xml-rpc is real but what is MS shipping?)

I also don't think that the OSS crowd thinks much of MS products. And for good reason. They routinely crash, create conflicts and allow 99% of all viruses to run rampant. (I don't run MS stuff on my mac because every software program I have installed has made my mac very unstable).

I say, just wait and see, it's early days yet.

-calvin

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