Delays in Open Office.
Microsoft gaining back Server Marketshare with Win2003 Server.
Is it just me or was Open Source overhyped and underdelivering?
Apples put it to good uses but Open Source alone doesn't seem to be putting large Developers out of business. Discuss.
Comments
Originally posted by hmurchison
Microsoft gaining back Server Marketshare with Win2003 Server.
In what areas?
Here's the Veritest pdf
http://www.veritest.com/clients/repo...s_netbench.pdf
Like any Technology. Open Source was the darling "buzzword" to use. But Open Source on it's own doesn't seem to have gained much traction. The coveted apps still seem to be apps that people must pay for.
Open Source just seems to lack the fit and polish. The final %20 that makes a product either good or great. Plain or Posh.
Originally posted by hmurchison
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9333
What does that have to do with market share?
It's not in the web server market that Windows is gaining.
Apache is at it's all time high:
Q: Is Open Source Dead?
A: In short, no it's not and in fact you couldn't be more wrong.
First of all, before all the hype about open source, it provided us with UNIX (before AT&T closed it again), zillions of utilities, TCP/IP, and threading. It currently offers the most secure OS (OpenBSD), the OS family with the best uptime (BSD again!), the foundation of the best and most popular UNIX distro (OS X - hey, BSD again!), the hands-down favorite for web serving (Apache)...
Furthermore, the metric you offer (whether open source apps are bankrupting commercial developers) is specious. Whether, for example, the software in electronic balloting machines (or for that matter, the hardware) should be proprietary is a debate that has nothing to do with profit and everything to do with transparency and accountability. There are certain things that are better done in the open source style, and certain things that aren't - ergo, OS X, which has both. There are ethical and pedagogical advantages to open source - GNU provides a more or less full set of functionality which is freely available and able to be run on modest hardware, and which is therefor not a burden to schools and individuals who couldn't afford to buy commercial software anyway. As for pedagogy, a whole generation of CS majors learned system software design by studying the UNIX source, and how many web designers learned their trade by going to web sites they liked and clicking View Source? (Where would the web be if HTML and its associated technologies were obfuscated, patented binary formats?) Like HTML, and unlike any commercial binary, open source code can be adapted by a particular person or company for their particular needs - and it can also be built for particular hardware platforms.
Last, of course, open source does not mean free-as-in-beer, or non-corporate, or anti-corporate. It means that the source code is available. IBM is invested in Linux because it's profitable (commercial Linux distros are not free), not out of the goodness of their hearts.
So no, open source is not dead. It's not dying. It's doing very well. Even if at some point the mainstream interest in it wanes, it will continue to be the vital movement it has been since the mid 1970s, and I predict that it will continue to be one of the most fertile wellsprings of innovation in the industry, as it has always been. Even when it wasn't a fad.
Originally posted by stupider...likeafox
I've deleted the rant I wrote, but here's the point of it.
Q: Is Open Source Dead?
A: In short, no it's not and in fact you couldn't be more wrong.
It's not a rant SLaF. I know you're a big Linux supporter and I ask this question in all honesty. I guess I expected more of a Big Bang with Open Source but the reality is that it's still evolving. In way it feels dead but perhaps to a layman like myself just the overhyped expections are dead. I like what Apple has done with OSS but I wonder if one can truly get a competitive advantage by giving away the source code.
With all of these worms spreading around ... it would be Microsoft's profits and perhaps future which should be in question.
Barto
Answer: No, none. It's predominantly server warfare.
On the other hand, Wal-Mart is expanding its Linux offerings.
Curiouser and curiouser...
I kind of see the evolution of Linux similar to biological evolution (Screed says risking an Origins Debate Flamewar). There's a broad diversity of life (almost too diverse) but the dinosaurs (Microsoft, Sun, other large commercial software houses) still walk the land masses.
Too many people were wishing for the Giant Anti-Trust Asteroid to wipe the slate. Forget the Big Disaster Scenario. As I said in another thread, too many of my fellow IT people have swallowed Redmond Kool-Aid. They expect and accept the worms and the viruses.
Screed
Originally posted by hmurchison
Delays in Open Office.
Microsoft gaining back Server Marketshare with Win2003 Server.
Is it just me or was Open Source overhyped and underdelivering?
Apples put it to good uses but Open Source alone doesn't seem to be putting large Developers out of business. Discuss.
Originally posted by serrano
Open Source doesn't just mean linux--or even full applications. A lot of small pieces of Open Source code, like SAMBA, are finding their way into a lot of commercial software. Even SCO, who currently trying to sink the GPL, actually uses Open Source tools in their UNIX.
If you believe that it will kill Microsoft, yeah, you were probably mistaken. But Open Source continues to provide a lot of value to end users and software companies alike--and in many ways is leading the way for commercial software to follow.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Delays in Open Office.
(checks).. nope, open office is still working fine for me, both linux and Mac versions - 1.1 for mac will be out soon - great.. Oh, you mean a Quartz version! I'm not sure that the speed of a port of OO to a proprietry windowing system has much to do with the success of open source in general.
Apples put it to good uses but Open Source alone doesn't seem to be putting large Developers out of business. Discuss.
Open Source will never put large developers out of business. Thats not the point of it - Open Source provides handy tools to put together and sell commercially (look at all the great stuff at the apache project).
Now the 'Free Software' movement - that has the goal of eliminating the need to develop 'non-free software', but 'Free Software' isn't the same as 'Open Source'.
As Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds ;-)
Originally posted by hmurchison
I guess I expected more of a Big Bang with Open Source but the reality is that it's still evolving. In way it feels dead but perhaps to a layman like myself just the overhyped expections are dead. I like what Apple has done with OSS but I wonder if one can truly get a competitive advantage by giving away the source code.
I'm feeling more constructive after a night's sleep so here's some thoughts on the matter:
As a software developer who has been following the whole free and open-source software thing for years, I am continually *amazed* by the gains it is making.
The biggest bit of hype I've heard (I think it referred only to Linux but I'm going to apply it to all F/OSS) is: "it cannot be over-hyped" and I agree. It is already making waves but it's going to hit the IT profession like a tidal wave in the next few years and change the world in the same way that the internet has. No matter what the hype I think it will outdo it (there's a bit of a logical paradox there but never mind).
Now you can look back 10 years at the crazy things people were saying about the internet and claim that it hasn't lived up to the hype, but on the other hand it has totally exceeded expectations in so many unpredictable (keyword!) ways. Example: I overheard two middle aged women discussing downloading their favourite songs from Kazaa the other day. If you think about it from the perspective of 5 or 10 years ago then how crazy is that, and yet it is becoming "normal" now.
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So I think your main mistake is judging F/OSS by the standards of proprietary software which has a rather twisted business model (see Microsoft). The old cliche: If you play the game by your opponent's rules then you've already lost.
So your definition of "app's" where you don't see any F/OSS is key, since shrinkwrapped software apps are the very last place you will see fully Open-Source (and particularly Free) Software. On the other hand Apple (and basically every other Unix vendor) has built it's proprietary OS on top of F/OSS.
Luckily for F/OSS the boxed software market, though visible to the public, is miniscule compared to the money to be made elsewhere in software development.
So there are far more important places where F/OSS will touch your life as a non-programmer, places where you will be paying good money for Free Software:
Your government (fed, state & local) and everything related (education etc.) will almost certainly be adopting F/OSS in the near future as nearly all of them have published position papers recommending its use, saving you money as a taxpayer and increasing their accountability to you as their ultimate employer. This is far more true if you are a European or basically any country but the USA but it is still a definite trend even there.
Mostly any piece of consumer electronics you buy will have F/OSS software within it, currently everything bigger than a phone is a candidate but this will limit will shrink in time. Currently you have PDAs, Watches, iPod knock-offs, Stereo Systems, Tivos etc. with more to come especially as Sony Phillips etc. have joined together to define a common software baseline using Linux. Apparently it has completely destroyed the competition in the embedded market
Walmart and many other large corporations are switching to F/OSS for their back-end systems because they have enough clout to break out of the choke-hold that the proprietary companies had on them, once they switch their suppliers and smaller competitors will go next. Again the savings are passed onto you and this process has already started.
All Disney animations (including Pixar's) and I would imagine any other big animation studio or effects house will be done on F/OSS software using tools like Python (which Disney has invested a lot of effort in), Linux render farms, Gimp, Film Gimp and Crossover Office a.k.a Wine to run Windows Photoshop Binaries on Linux workstations. This switch again has already started with proprietary operating systems apparently already the ever decreasing exception.
Every good service on the net is based on F/OSS. Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, even Hotmail. They are all running on Open-Source systems and some of them even make money. And then theres half of all sites running on Apache.
People tend to get the impression that F/OSS supporters live in some kind of a post-communist, star trek inspired, hippy daze where money is an outdated concept but one of the key motivators is the very capitalist anger at being exploited by fat, lazy, monopolists who expend more effort trying to lock you into their system than meeting your needs. Microsoft is 80% lawyers and salesman and that is *not* a made up statistic. Coincidently they also make slightly more than 80% profit on their OS and Office suite which they use to try and buy more monopolies.
Now Microsoft can use that profit to convince the world that F/OSS is an un-american cancer out to eat your precious intellectual property but this is simply untrue for the many people and corporations who want to sell a service or good and simply use software as part of the manufacturing process. They will produce, or pay others to produce the software they need. Only those who sell shrink-wrapped software have anything to fear as that model will become more and more of a niche, consisting mostly of games.
F/OSS is all about the free (there's that word again) market and lowering barriers to competition. The very thing that is supposed to have provided the economic engine that propelled the USA to its position as the richest country in the world. Don't underestimate it's power to do the same thing again.
MITRE (who? ) report on F/OSS in the military:
http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_paper...are/index.html
Various stories about Sony and Linux:
http://old.linuxworld.com.au/comp.php3?coid=241
Disney and Python:
http://python.oreilly.com/news/disney_0201.html
Disney and Open Source:
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/06...3.shtml?tid=23
Dreamworks and Linux:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6103
Pixar and Linux:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983898.html
US Navy, Apple X-Serves and Linux
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/32211.html
Open Source in Government:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1189755,00.asp