Long Live Closed-Source Software?

EvilRyry writes "In an article for Discover Magazine, Jaron Lanier writes about his belief that open source produces nothing interesting because of a hide-bound mentality. 'Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.'"

Re:As a creative open source developer...

[Hognoxious]

But there's nothing in Apache that makes you stand back and say, "Wow! That's absolutely brilliant thinking!"

Whereas for a closed-source equivalent one only needs to look at clippy.

Re:As a creative open source developer...

[Hognoxious]

In any case, Haskell is open source. So is Erlang.

Perl too? Though if the interpreter's anything like what it interprets, maybe it doesn't make much difference [/me ducks for cover].

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique

[Heembo]

"Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique" WHAT? Have you actually looked at any of the linux source code? It's a complete mess with different styles, coding conventions and comments. It's a mess, at best. You want polished? Look no further than BSD. They pier-review the code (polish) on a regular basis. Now thats a real OS.

In other words... DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection.