On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Josh Cohen wrote:
--]If the market was "controlled" by open source, we'd all be
--]at the mercy of a bunch of power hungry 13 year olds just
--]like EFNET.
You can say lots of stuff about EFNET but the damn thing has been up and
working for the last decade plus.
YEs the EFNET admins are mostly a bunch of egotripping aholes of the first
degree, but the truth of the matter is it works DESPITE their actions.
I do have to agree witht he picture of the top level of OSS, and yes it
does have a top level. Its rife with infighting, egotripping and
destructive eleteism. BUT but but.....The projects themselves are the real
deal.
Scrap off the top level of nimrods who are making a living off of doing
OReiley shows and the Geekcircut and you find some gifted, taleneted and
very cool people making the whole thing happen. Projects like GIMp and
Lynx and a plethora of little one off projects .. these far outwiegh they
craload of dung that gets excerted by Stallman and the other figureheads
who make OSS seem to be in practice more intensley rigours than a old
Soviet Style reeducation camp. ("you must realize the right thinkingness
of the cause comrade, you must purge yourself of all external forces that
would take away from the cause, you must dedicate your mind and action all
towards the cuase..etc etc")
Heck, if you open your scope just a bit more to folks doing projects that
dont nessecairly open thier source you will find projects being done
around the tech that have truly taken on a life of there own.
Winamp?
Apple is now even jumping on the mp3 wagon , a wagon not created by but
greatly exapnded by Winamp. Winamp did for mp3's what Ford did for
gasoline. Justin and Tom over at nullsoft really gave the world something,
and then rather than resting on thier laurels put out Shoutcast and then
sneaked out Gutella.
What about the hordes of apps like pkzip, little apps that did one thing
really really well. These apps didnt come out of big corps but were
hatched by small teams or lone coders.
In the end , for me, OSS is less about the availability of the code as it
is the accessability of innovation.
Innovation, its made from peeeeeeeeeeeeoeeeoooople.
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