Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) To : comp.programming From : Randy Howard Date : Sun Sep 18 2005 11:16 pm Richard Heathfield wrote (in article ): > Randy Howard said: >> I have no problem with his desire to have more free software >> available in the world. What I do have a problem with is the >> 'make all the other kinds go away, by force if necessary' >> aspect. > Right. The more choice we have, the better. Provided legislation doesn't get > in the way, open and closed source can compete on one obvious playing-field > - usage. It's somewhat surprising that a vocal portion of the open source crowd seems to think they have to force commercial software to go away through legal purposes, or a moral noise attack akin to the "Don't wear fur" crowd, which of course is comprised of people wearing leather shoes. :-) > Right here, right now, I have just about 100% open source usage, so for me > open source is winning. I was headed in that direction for a while, until I bought a Mac to see what all the hooplah around OS X was about, and it won me over almost completely for my own use after using it as an experiment for a little over a month. I have other systems up and running for development purposes with various OS's installed on them, but for my 'home' system, it's a slam dunk. It's basically what at least a few Linux distros should probably look like by now if they didn't suffer from the 'too many cooks' problem so badly. I run a lot of open source software on it, but basically, it's an OS 'worth paying for', whereas Windows, in any flavor, is not. > About the only cloud around is the lack of a Linux > driver for my camera. Grrr. Not being able to get support for the Broadcom 54g wireless chipset under linux without running Ndiswrapper and Windows (64-bit in my case) drivers underneath was sort of the last straw. Taking a look at the infighting in some of the large open source development communities (for apps, the kernel group seems to be pretty well behaved) makes you wonder if the open source effort is headed for a collapse from the egos involved. In effect, it's a behavioral problem, large scale projects really do need a strong, central leader, (like Linus for the kernel) to keep the hordes under control. A lot of open source projects aren't that lucky, and the usual result is "screw that guy, let's fork". Look at how many flavors of CMS system are out there now, basically all from *-nuke ancestry, and they even have forks within the forks. Mambo blew up recently, Xoops appears to be in trouble, etc. This childish stuff of course causes the commercial players to live longer, and look better than they otherwise would, especially to enterprise customers. Take one look into the 'forums' on a large open source project website, observe all the infighting, and it makes just about any commercial outfit (apart from MS of course) sound appealing in comparison. -- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) .