Survey On the Future of Open Source, and Lessons From the Past 97
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Oram reports on the quality, security, and community driving open source adoption. 'All too often, the main force uniting competitors is the fear of another vendor and the realization that they can never beat a dominant vendor on its own turf. Open source becomes a way of changing the rules out from under the dominant player. OpenStack, for instance, took on VMware in the virtualization space and Amazon.com in the IaaS space. Android attracted phone manufacturers and telephone companies as a reaction to the iPhone.'"
Re:Consistency (Score:5, Interesting)
The facts don't support your claim.
Traditionally, it's been common to view price as a motivating factor, since open source software is often free. Last year, freedom from vendor lock-in was cited as the the primary goal.
This year, however, freedom from lock-in dropped to No. 2, while quality, which was in third place last year, was named the most important factor behind open source adoption. The availability of vendor support, meanwhile, is now a point of much less concern than it used to be.
Re:This isn't always good though (Score:4, Interesting)
Android gives users more control over their hardware and their user experience. It also presents a more diverse and meaningful set of choices.
A lot of people like to whine about Android fragmentation and then ignore how badly forced OS upgrades can run on an iPhone.
Even without Google trying to emulate Apple. Android provides a useful and distinct alternative.
There is nothing about Google engaging in Apple style megalomania that will improve my user experience as an Android user. Those perpetuating the usual FUD in this area never highly any actual real consequence of this so-called tragic fragmentation.
Re:Consistency (Score:4, Interesting)
People willing to spend $2000 or $600 on a bit of software are very resistant to change. It doesn't matter what license the alternative uses.
The problem isn't the "quality" of Free Software alternatives but the fact that NO alternative of any sort will be considered acceptable because software consumers tend to have a mentality fixated on single brands even when the data formats involved don't have any inherent lock-in.
Shills with no money but lots of free time to post on web forums help contribute to the sense of "single brand ineveitablity".
Re:Consistency (Score:5, Interesting)
All that proves is that Free Software is more transparent.
Re:Consistency (Score:4, Interesting)
yea, but there's just as much crap closed source products as well. The only difference is you can see the garbage in an open source product. My employer has gone from being very annoyed with having to deal with open source licenses and trying to get the whole idea of "it's free, we can't negotiate the license, there's no support contract" though their approvals process... to now just having a check box for which GPL version it is and an automatic approval process. It's great now. Granted we're limited in the scope of what we build with a GPL product. If we're building something that hundreds of people will eventually depend on and we have no way to back out... then that project is going to get a lot of scrutiny. The one good thing about closed source vendors is you can sue them if shit hits the fan.