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

Re: OSS religion in USERland? C'mon!

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/8/2000; 7:07:16 AM
Topic:OSS religion in USERland? C'mon!
Msg #:20988 (In response to 20984)
Prev/Next:20987 / 20989

First, watch for the Radio UserLand tip jar. We will eventually ask for money.

About Stallman, I'd like to understand the history, but I think it is just history now. Looking forward, we'd like to include Python in Frontier, and we're going to do something about it. I think it'll be good for Python, I know it will be good for Frontier. I don't want to see anything get in the way of that.

Talking with Petreley yesterday, it was a real heart-to-heart. I read all his writing about OS/2 and Microsoft in the early 90s, but said that's over now, Linux is doing great, and Microsoft can't stop it. The evil in the software industry is gone. IBM is playing the open source game, they're behind Linux and are a constant thorn in Sun's side re Java. The world has reconfigured.

We all have common interests, if we're on the side of freedom. Some of Stallman's attitudes, if he's got good intentions, are out of date, are responsive to conditions that no longer exist.

The GPL barrier has come up in other offline discussions, related to music technology. GPL seems to have become a knee-jerk, and it creates barriers to commercial and open source collaborations.

BTW, as I said to Petreley, there are other issues that are of more concern to users than having access to source code. What about having access to our data? When I use a web app, I want to be able to download my data. How many services offer this? I lost my calendar on Yahoo a month ago. Gone, the bits forever missing. Is this a serious user-level issue? You bet it is.

Anyway, thanks for the high-road discussion, despite the "interesting" title for the thread.

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