Open Source Movement

[varalu 0]

Here is a small text that tells why "Open Source Movement" may fail...
http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil/essays/opensoft.txt

nice one. The author is Kapil Hari and is a faculty in The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Regards,

[osknockout 0]

Umm... I highly disagree with that essay. I admit that I have a rather strong bias here as I'm a big fan of the open source movement, but I have to say that trends and facts show the complete opposite of the author's points.

 

Unfortunately, for the OSM the governments, legislatures and courts of the day are (by and large)

sticking behind or side-by-side with the PS; even in countries with strong democratic constitutions and institutions.

Um... did anyone NOT expect that? Of course they're still sticking with the proprietary systems! Look at the market share

of linux! Look at the market share of anything that's not Apache and you'll see that it isn't that much. What matters rather

is the fact that the rate of market share change (dM/dt anyone?) is positive in the favor of the open source movement.

When the market share is strong enough, then we can expect change in policy to occur.

 

One possible reason is that government is run by old people and they stick with other old people (actual age is not what is relevant here; this age being "in the mind").

Maybe it's just the fact that I live in the United States and I'm getting WE WANT CHANGE everywhere I go in relation to politics...

But still. Ad hominem. Come on, really, it's not like the old always refuse to embrace the new.

 

Another possible reason is that the OSM is spending so much time

"doing things" that they haven't spent enough time "fighting the

fight". They care more about technology than about causes.

 

Three letters for you. FSF. Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman anyone?

We fight over license issues all the darn time. Heck, half of the BSD people want to switch from the gcc compiler suite to pcc is because pcc has a BSD license.

We wouldn't have the sheer variety of licenses - or half of the license wars - if people didn't care about the causes.

No, we like to think about the causes a lot, thank you very much.

 

(To summarize the third argument, the author states that the osm could go down because the corporations get threatened and the government acts for them)

- I don't see this one. At all. Last time I checked, IBM has embraced a good bit of the open source movement.

Google contributed to the search features of sqlite. GOOGLE engineers have contributed to the SEARCH subsystem in sqlite.

I'm not seeing much of a threat problem except with Microsoft and their ilk, and I do believe most people have a negative reaction towards said corporations.

 

The "Internet" has become, like so many media before it, a "spectator sport".

Which is why we have a blog being made every second...

You know... interactive systems? No, I'm gonna go with the internet's become more interactive than ever before. I mean, just look at sites just 5 years

ago as opposed to today. There's been a lot of content growth because of interaction, not because of pure write-and-receive methods.

 

There is a bigger dream. One that will probably be more difficult to achieve. That finally, in this case the creative revolution that was to be unleashed by Gutenberg will actually take place. That the democratic institutions will find that the PS are actually hindering the creative freedom of a *large* section of their population. That

is the great GNU hope---the spectator will start to play.

The spectator has started to play. Democratic institutions are starting to see how proprietary systems are in fact hindering, and where not people are starting to notice for themselves. This revolution's already begun, it's just a matter of following through. Edited March 28, 2008 by osknockout (see edit history)

[arnz 0]

Having not read the entire essay, still there are the hard core programmers or those with creative minds that would want to change a particular aspect of a program. Open source programs and management systems gives those type of people the freedom to do so. Sure, the market sure may not be much right now, but the demand seems to be there for it.