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A Decade of OSS, 10 Years After the Summit
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 07, 2008 11:00 AM
from the has-it-been-that-long dept.
from the has-it-been-that-long dept.
Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"
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Submission: A decade of OSS: 10 years after the FSF summit by Anonymous Coward
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Huge success (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What acceptance, where?
Let us see...
In industry?
Lots (I'm not going to bother to list, we all know where to look) of companies use OSS technologies for routing, traffic shaping, VPN, etc...
In commerce?
I've seen countless websites run on Apache which I've bought products from, you?
In the media?
In the home?
Tivo uses Linux, plenty of games use Vorbis...
I'm sure plenty of people could come up with better examples than I have. Maybe you're looking for huge sweeping changes at once but generally these changes are
Re:Huge success (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a huge Linux fan but, despite the progress it's making, the truth is that it has not yet gained widespread acceptance as a desktop OS.
Of course, it does appear that GPP misunderstood moderatorrater's post as implying that Linux had desktop acceptance when in fact, he'd admitted just the opposite...
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To be fair, GPP was referring to Linux on the desktop. With the exception of gaming, the examples you game were not desktop apps - And most gamers use Windows.
Fair enough
Re:Huge success (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Huge success (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Huge success (Score:4, Funny)
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you're dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
I may be trolling or flaming you, but that doesn't change the fact that you're dead wrong and missed the meat of my post.
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Re:Huge success (Score:5, Informative)
Almost all of the supercomputers run Linux or BSD.[1] [top500.org]
As John Ousterhout said: "The second problem I have seen (really more of a limitation) is that open-source software hasn't broken out of the "tools and systems" arena."
So while I can give you that, it makes me think about Apache, Firefox, MySQL etc.
So, yeah, "open source has been a ridiculously huge success".
Parent
Re:Huge success (Score:5, Informative)
No, I don't think the picture is like you paint it.
I don't work for free. I prefer to write code that is released under the GPL, but not for free. Someone pays me to write such software because they have a use for it. In the past, too much of the code I've written for employers ends up rotting. They change systems, and bury or destroy old stuff for a variety of reasons that are mostly antisocial. It can be good to make a fresh start, but that's not what concerns them. They worry that competitors or lawsuit minded customers could do something with any such info. They are dismissive of reasons why it would be to their benefit to not lock up or destroy old software.
Avoid reinventing the wheel? That's the broken window fallacy. We don't like that when businesses try to pull that crap on us. A good example of that is being pushed to buy our music collections all over again to get them in a new format, as happened in the move from vinyl to CD, but which shouldn't be necessary to go from CD to mp3 or even worse from mp3 on old computer to same mp3 on new computer. Except possibly some tit for tat retaliation, most of us are not going to be hypocrites and try to pull that on businesses! We will show them a good example by not being antisocial. Yes, there can be some short term gain to sharp dealing, but long term, it's foolish. Just look at Microsoft. Yes, I know they've been very successful, but where are they going? You should not fear that we'll run out of work to do either.
Don't own our own work? Darn right! But no one else owns or can own it either. Unlike some businesses, we relinquish control and require they do so too, so that all our customers need not fear that someone will make abusive but legal (maybe) use of copyright to deny them use of software they have purchased. Otherwise a rival may be able to hurt them by acquiring the rights in some fashion, either by forcing them or us to sell the "ownership" of the software, or by buying us. Or fear that there will be no choice but to start over if the main programmer is "hit by a bus".
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*Amazing* spinoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
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This sort of thing is why I prefer 'free source' to 'open source'. We encounter internal politic and lobbying poisoning the well for developers and authors with different
I remember those days (Score:5, Interesting)
That was even before MS had killed off all of its serious competitors.
Then there was just MS and Windows developers. There were a few areas of competition but Windows was just a far cry above what DOS programs were doing at the time. Do you remember paradox? Qbase? WordPerfect? WordStar? Novell? 10Base5 ethernet?
I'm quite glad that OSS has made it this far and one so much.
10Base5? (Score:3, Informative)
List your project (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yay woot let's give ourselves some publicity for once! We don't do that often enough. Well except me cause I cunningly put the link to my main project in my signature..
Re:List your project (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:List your project (Score:4, Informative)
ZEUS-MP [umd.edu] -- Not originally mine, but I've done a lot of work on it and released this version of an older parallel MHD code for astronomy.
Misc. Free stuff [umd.edu] -- bunch of perl and python scripts along with some LaTeX macros (including one for making business cards).
Sadly, with all the work trying to finish my dissertation these days I haven't updated anything in a while.
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http://plugdaemon.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://amberlist.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I've also spent an awful lot of time lately on Speedtables.
http://speedtables.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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Mine is VIPS [soton.ac.uk], an image processing system with a spreadsheet-like GUI targetting large images (images bigger than RAM) and multicore (it has a fancy automatic threading system).
following, not leading (Score:4, Interesting)
The Internet's a newcomer. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Last ditch effort for companies going south (Score:4, Interesting)
> The third thing that has negatively impressed me is
> that open source is often used as a desperate last-ditch
> effort for loser software. If a product is doing poorly
> in the marketplace, sometimes companies release it as
> open source, hoping that will somehow magically revive
> it and make it widely used. This almost never works.
Does this guy not realize that Firefox was born from Netscape going south? I'm sure there are other examples out there, but how obvious does one need to be?
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Does this guy not realize that Firefox was born from Netscape going south? I'm sure there are other examples out there, but how obvious does one need to be?
Well, unless I've completely missed my Firefox history classes the original Netscape Navigator code that was supposed to be NN5 was so horrible that it was all scrapped, rather than released. So yeah, it became the rallying flag against IE but I would hardly call Mozilla a revival of the Navigator in the sense he's thinking of. Still, from the business side you can always try to fly when falling off a cliff and from the community side the alternative would be that it went quietly into the abyss. Worst case
Preaching to the choir (Score:4, Interesting)
Er, no.
I still, on a daily basis, run into people who would rather buy software than use OSS alternatives because they firmly believe "you get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not even talking about fellow IT professionals.
Among them, I get much more polarized attitudes - They either embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck the system).
Me, I'll just use what works. Sometimes that means paying for software, but I can usually find something comparable and Free (and with a price tag of "free", I give "comparable" quite a bit of leeway).
Correction to the article title (Score:5, Informative)
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Open Source 'half-century' coming up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even people talking about f/l/oss before these events seem to miss it. for example, Ousterhout's comment "When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world."
The Software Tools applications and libraries date back to the '70s. So does Emacs. So do the enormous collection of software published in Dr Dobbs' journal. So do the DECUS and other user group tapes. Much of this was game software, but it also included free compilers and interpreters (Forth, Small C, Tiny C, Tiny Basic, Tiny Pascal), editors (including emacs), operating system monitors (and early attempts at UNIX workalikes), and networks. Usenet was an open source project, and there were soon open source gateways between Usenet and networks like Fidonet... and one of the earliest Usenet groups was "net.sources".
I would say the first open source decade was the '70s, though in a way it's as old as the computer industry: "in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years" -- Richard Stallman. It's been argued that it wasn't really until the '70s that closed source really got under way, so one might say that it was the creation of a binary, non-shared, closed-source software industry that created what became the open-source movement (under whatever name you like).
So depending on whether you include the '60s, we're coming up on the end of the 4th or 5th "open source decade", the '00s. Not the first.
So YOU'RE the guy to blame... (Score:4, Funny)
I realize that a creator is not responsible in any way for the various ways in which is creation is used. But I have to wrestle with Tcl code every day because it was packaged with a large commercial application my team supports. Its strength is also its weakness: almost anyone can learn to use it (and frequently badly).
And why is the Tcl interpreter so brain-dead? Consider the complaints from the interpreter when encountering "unbalanced grouping symbols" that are contained within a comment. Most parsers throw out all contents of a comment as soon as it's identified. But if you have an expression like
set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
it will refuse to work. WTF?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The only WTF is that you've failed to fully grasp how Tcl works. Tcl requires something of an experienced and open-minded perspective. You can't take what you learned in your C or Java class and expect Tcl to work the same way.
There's a reason why comment parsing is the way it is, and generally speaking it's a good reason. Much like there's a reason Python uses whitespace for indentation. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but it serves a purpose. And much like Python's use of whitespace, Tcl's comment beha
I'm to blame as well. (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's simple. Deliberately so. It's inspired by Lisp.
There's 11 rules that define the complete syntax for Tcl, everything else including control structures is built up on top of that.
I'm responsible for some of the complexity that IS in there, originally there wasn't a distinction between {...} lists and "..." strings at all: I'm the one who suggested that variable substitution be allowed inside "...".
But if you have an expression like
set foo "bar"; # (oops forgot a closing paren
it will refuse to work.
No, that one's OK, but if you have
set foo "bar"; # {oops forgot a closing brace
it may not work.
The reason is that the parsing of comments happens at the block level, but the parsing of blocks happens at the list level. So {# this list happens to start with "pound sign"} is a list. The fact that that list might happen to be code as well doesn't make a difference when it's parsing lists.
Parent
It's all lists and strings. (Score:3, Informative)
set foo [list {#valid list item} {bar} {baz}]; # { unmatched brace in a comment produces error here
There's no distinction in Tcl between {#valid list item} and {#a code block starting with a comment}.
Here's another example that might help you understand:
Open Source is new? (Score:5, Informative)
You've missed a lot of computing history. Maybe the capitalized phrase "Open Source" was new, but the practice wasn't. For instance, before the mini/micro-computer "revolution", I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which used VM as their main OS. VM originated in academia, and its source was always available to anyone interested. Of course, not too many people wanted it unless they had an IBM mainframe. Most such installations had a VM guru on the staff, and the VM gurus I knew were quite open with their source.
Around the same time, on one such machines, the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's unix system, which ran on VM of course. When we asked about source, the reply was "That's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." "Open Source" may not have been a catch phrase yet, but Amdahl was happy to have customers with employees who could read the source, since that made their support job a lot easier. In fact, I sent them a kernel bug fix about a month after we got the system installed; I got back a nice "Thanks!" letter and was added to their published list of code contributors.
A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name. Software vendors routinely gave source to customers who wanted it, with the expectation that customers would find and fix bugs and maybe add new features. One of Microsoft's innovations was to hold their source as proprietary, so as not to allow customers to improve the software. A lot of people were amazed that customers actually accepted this. You heard a lot of questions like "Would they buy a truck or car that couldn't be worked on by any mechanics except the manufacturer's?" But then, when it became clear that Microsoft had gotten away with such a dodgy scheme, it was quickly adopted by others, so that customers would have to pay them for patching up the bugs.
It still sorta amazes me that customers can be so dense as to pay money for products that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer (and usually now not even by them). So much for the economists' idea of a rational marketplace.
Computer Magazines (Score:3, Insightful)
This article is nuts! (Score:5, Informative)
No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.
Bruce
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bruce, as people have repeatedly pointed out to you on slashdot, the term "open source" predates the OSI by several years. I know that people have repeatedly pointed out to you that the term "open source" in terms of available, distributable source code was used years before OSI purportedly came up with it. A search on
Re:This article is nuts! (Score:4, Informative)
Before the Open Source Initiative was founded and the Open Source Definition was published, the term "open source" was commonly used to refer to a form of military intelligence, and that meaning still survives. There are a few references - not a ton - before that date to "open source code" to refer to published source code, but with no rights connected with it. The campaign started in February 1998 and "Open Source" gained a specific meaning at that time.
I understand your point. I just don't feel it's important, because until the start of the campaign the phrase was not particularly important. So, you can stop now. Also, please do me a favor and don't try to remind Richard Stallman that the two words "free software" were said in combination before his campaign, and meant something else. Of course they were. But you'd just be annoying him for no reason and he might not be as nice about it as me :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Parent
Open Source and credit for the past (Score:3, Insightful)
Free Software was the first campaign to clearly associate rights with source code. Publicly distributed source code existed even before then, and sometimes had rights that complied with the OSD. The OSD was written to fit existing licenses, primarily BSD, GPL, and Artistic. Although Richard had published an article about the four freedoms in GNUs Bulletin number 4, he didn't maintain any publication ab
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly enough, the Open Source Definition - and thus the "philosophy" of Open Source that the article discusses predates the founding of OSI by some 8 months, and thus the summit referred to in the article by 10 months. It was complete by the end of June, 1997, as part of Debian's promise to the com
Reply to AC (Score:3, Informative)
Dear AC,
The reference you refer to [google.com] uses the words "open source" in a sense closer to the sense of "open source military intelligence", which was a well-known usage at that time and still continues to be used. It means something that has value but wasn't taken from a secret source. In early February 1998, the phrase gained a new usage which was promoted by the Open Source Initiative.
I will not, however, take any credit for the usage of "Open Source" in a series of articles by one "Viole
Re:Long Live OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just wanted to talk to somebody
Sounds like an extrovert who got lost.. Ever heard of IM [slashdot.org]? ;-)
Re:Long Live OSS (Score:4, Funny)
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