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Open Source
You can read about and listen to a musician for years but until you see them live, you really don't get it.
You can read about the beatuty of Rio or Cape Town but until you go there, you don't really appreciate it.
And so it is with open source. I've been reading about open source for about ten years. I've pushed all my companies to move from microsoft to linux, from Oracle to MySQL, etc. I thought I got it.
Using Firefox has cracked open my mind to this open source ecosystem. You don't like something about the product, you create an extension that fixes it. And publish it for the rest of the world to use.
As Kim Polese said at Web 2.0 today, "The rules of open source: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it."
I am selling all my microsoft stock tomorrow. They can't comepete with this tidal wave of community based software. It's too powerful.
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» Re: Open Source from schadefreunde
I don't think anyone is going to blast that Open Source has a place in corporate IT, except MSFT. I think there are some good reasons to use it in developing a platform or product, though Jeff has raised some... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 8, 2004 5:45:30 PM
Posted October 7, 2004 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Another analogy I love is:
If you describe ice cream it's cold, wet, sticky and makes a mess.
You'll only "get it" by actually experiencing ice cream by tasting it.
People I know have been raving about open source for years. To me it sounded great in concept but until now I wasn't willing to try it thinking it would be too much hard work to learn. With Firefox I thought - it's a browser - how hard can it be?
For the mass market, Firefox could be the breakthrough where people "get" what opensource is by experiencing it.
I certainly know that's how it happened for me.
James
Alternative Energy Blog
Posted by: Alternative Energy Blog | Oct 8, 2004 6:39:07 AM
actually, Kim is factually inaccurate with regard to nobody owning Open Source software. In order to grant a license for something, someone has to in fact own it. You will notice that the 51 (maybe 52) open source licensing agreements all stipulate that some group, company, or foundation holds the copyright for the software in question. Furthermore, they typically say that they may from time to time release new version of the software license agreement.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
I am a fan of open source, as is SAP, but caution my portfolio companies to proceed cautiously and deliberately when using open source products in their own products. There is a potential viral effect in many of the popular licenses that *may* cause non-open source products to become open source by nature of their inclusion of open source components, even though the company may have never intended this to be the case.
Keep in mind that open source as a social movement and open source as a business are two very different things.
Posted by: Jeff | Oct 8, 2004 2:03:34 PM
Hiya Fred, check this out if you have the time.
I tried submitting your blog entry to slashdot, but they didn't go for it, heh :)
Posted by: Chris Holland | Oct 8, 2004 2:48:53 PM
I think the potential for open source to be widely used is certainly high - but the challenges for enterprises to switch to open source is really formidable. Freely made available software like Star Office itself with the backing of sun could never make it to centerstage - It would be nearly impossible for various open source software(thought there may be many liking to make this happen) to get any significant global share - they can give a fighting chance only if these come under a common foundation and provide reassuring faciltieis for support and extensions. I guess that marketshare for opensource like Apache webserver at 68%( as per netcraft) is possible amongst other things due to a good organisational framework that supports it.
Posted by: Sadagopan | Oct 9, 2004 11:43:17 AM
You know many traditional products are open and extensible. Plug-Ins, add-ins etc. are all examples of providing a rich extensibility model. So the idea of tweaking/changing the behavior of an application is not limited to the open source domain. In fact, I'd argue that in may ways a well thought out extensibility model which allows "safe" customization of an application without exposing low-level details is much less fragile and beneficial.
BTW, I think FireFox is very cool, but I should also point out that Microsoft exposes their entire HTML rendering engine as well and many cool browsers and extensions have been built around that. I use one called Avant Browser and love it.
I think open source is cool, but it is not a replacement for professionally developed, packaged applications and all the support that goes with them.
Shaun
Posted by: Shaun Sullivan | Oct 11, 2004 9:30:46 AM
"Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it", (abbreviated NEA), has been around for a little while. I see it as a useful way of summing up the core virtues of the Net and open source.
More about it at World of Ends.
Yes, it's not accurate, but neither is "Land of the free, home of the brave." But there's plenty enough truth to both sayings.
IMHO, anyway.
Posted by: Doc Searls | Oct 19, 2004 8:20:42 PM
http://edgarshoe.com/wwwboard/messages/1968.htm complimentwhosewondered
Posted by: plight | Oct 2, 2005 9:28:04 PM
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