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

Open Source -- a parallel universe

Author:Scott Hanson
Posted:7/20/2000; 8:58:04 PM
Topic:Open Source -- a world onto itself
Msg #:18839 (In response to 18800)
Prev/Next:18838 / 18840

(I'm not an open source developer, but I guess since I have a @debian.org email address, I can pretend that I am.)

In one sense, one could argue that the Internet itself is open source, with its RFCs and open protocols, so that anyone who sends and email or browses a web page is an open source user. But I digress...

My theory is that open source seems so strange and exclusive to people like Dave because it is not just a different world, but an entirely different universe. People there eat different food, breath different air, and dream different dreams. There is no concept of users. If you have a feature request, the answers are likely to be 'Use the source, Luke' and 'Show me code'.

They have no grand vision of how computing and networking can change the world, they just want software that works. The really great open source programs like perl or sendmail came about because someone had a specific task to perform and decided to extend their tool to the general case. (Although for Linux, I'm not sure what specific task Linus Torvalds was trying to perform when he was writing 0s and 1s to his monitor. Was he already bent on "world domination"?)

Anyway, when parallel universes come into contact, the result can be wonderful, but will most likely be disasterous. I'm guessing that when Dave said he wanted to be friends with apache, apache had no idea what he was talking about. Like the aliens in "Independence Day", they had no idea what friendship is and came out blasting. Show me code!

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