Was 2007 the 'Golden Age of Open Source'? (linuxjournal.com) 42
Just a few months ago, the editor of the recently-departed Linux Journal wrote that in many ways the golden age of Linux and FOSS was 2007. "Linux was now mainstream in corporate IT, and it was much rarer to meet much resistance when you wanted to set up Linux servers, unless your company was a 100% Windows shop... FOSS companies were making a lot of money, and developers were being paid to work on Linux and FOSS full time."
He also wrote that when Linux Journal later folded (the first time), "It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win."
And he offered this final assessment in April: Today, Linux has wide hardware support, and a number of vendors offer hardware with Linux pre-installed and supported. The internet itself is full of FOSS projects, and one of the first things people do when they are about to start on a software project is to look on GitHub to see if anything that meets their needs already exists. Linux absolutely dominates the cloud in terms of numbers of VMs that run it, and much cloud infrastructure also runs FOSS services. Linux also is in many people's pockets and home appliances. Linux and FOSS are more ubiquitous than ever.
Linux and FOSS also are more hidden than ever. So many of those FOSS projects on GitHub ultimately are used as building blocks for proprietary software. So many companies that seem to champion FOSS by helping upstream projects they rely on also choose to keep the projects they write themselves proprietary. Although Linux dominates the cloud, more and more developers and system administrators who use the cloud do so via proprietary APIs and proprietary services. New developers and sysadmins get less exposure to Linux servers and FOSS services if they use the cloud how the providers intended. And, while Linux runs in your pocket and in your home, it's hidden underneath a huge layer of proprietary applications.
For the most part, the FOSS philosophy that defined Linux in its early days is hidden as well. Many people in the community tout FOSS only in terms of the ability to see code or as a way to avoid writing code themselves. It has become rarer for people to tout the importance of the freedoms that come along with FOSS and the problems that come from proprietary software. Indeed, most Linux application development in the cloud these days is done on Mac or Windows machines -- something that would have been considered unthinkable in the early days of Linux... I encourage everyone from all corners of the community not to take FOSS and Linux for granted. The world of readily available code and mostly open protocols you enjoy today isn't a given. If current trends continue, we could be back to a world of proprietary software, vendor lock-in and closed protocols like the world before 1994.
This new battle we find ourselves in is much more insidious. The ways that proprietary software and protocols have spread, in particular on mobile devices, has made it much more challenging for FOSS to win compared to in the past. If we want to win this battle, we need the whole community to work together toward a common goal.
He also wrote that when Linux Journal later folded (the first time), "It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win."
And he offered this final assessment in April: Today, Linux has wide hardware support, and a number of vendors offer hardware with Linux pre-installed and supported. The internet itself is full of FOSS projects, and one of the first things people do when they are about to start on a software project is to look on GitHub to see if anything that meets their needs already exists. Linux absolutely dominates the cloud in terms of numbers of VMs that run it, and much cloud infrastructure also runs FOSS services. Linux also is in many people's pockets and home appliances. Linux and FOSS are more ubiquitous than ever.
Linux and FOSS also are more hidden than ever. So many of those FOSS projects on GitHub ultimately are used as building blocks for proprietary software. So many companies that seem to champion FOSS by helping upstream projects they rely on also choose to keep the projects they write themselves proprietary. Although Linux dominates the cloud, more and more developers and system administrators who use the cloud do so via proprietary APIs and proprietary services. New developers and sysadmins get less exposure to Linux servers and FOSS services if they use the cloud how the providers intended. And, while Linux runs in your pocket and in your home, it's hidden underneath a huge layer of proprietary applications.
For the most part, the FOSS philosophy that defined Linux in its early days is hidden as well. Many people in the community tout FOSS only in terms of the ability to see code or as a way to avoid writing code themselves. It has become rarer for people to tout the importance of the freedoms that come along with FOSS and the problems that come from proprietary software. Indeed, most Linux application development in the cloud these days is done on Mac or Windows machines -- something that would have been considered unthinkable in the early days of Linux... I encourage everyone from all corners of the community not to take FOSS and Linux for granted. The world of readily available code and mostly open protocols you enjoy today isn't a given. If current trends continue, we could be back to a world of proprietary software, vendor lock-in and closed protocols like the world before 1994.
This new battle we find ourselves in is much more insidious. The ways that proprietary software and protocols have spread, in particular on mobile devices, has made it much more challenging for FOSS to win compared to in the past. If we want to win this battle, we need the whole community to work together toward a common goal.
Um (Score:5, Insightful)
These two stories back to back is a little much.
Seriously?
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inb4 Will 2031 be the golden age of open source?
But it provides a useful contrast (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I found the contrast between the two adjacent stories (which was probably deliberate) quite intriguing and helpful, because it showed that the correct answer to the first one was "It depends", and the correct answer to the second, something like "Yes if you value community control more than profit". Whether today we are in the golden age of FOSS or not is a value judgment that reflects an individual's basis for evaluation of the current state of FOSS.
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So what you're saying is these two posts are part of the actual meta-post?
Also undermines leading questions (Score:4, Interesting)
You may be on to something there! Whether or not Slashdot intended it as such, at least "meta-posts" would be something different for the site. Making the actual meta-post implied (as here) rather than explicit would be an interesting approach.
Note the power of leading questions, especially on Slashdot where there is a meme that assigns questions-as-subjects a default answer of "No." When we have two stories back to back posing opposite leading questions, this undermines the default answer beautifully. +1 for that.
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They could've made a single 'compare and contrast' post that offered more than two possibilities.
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Actually, I found the contrast between the two adjacent stories (which was probably deliberate) quite intriguing and helpful,
It would have made more sense for all the discussion to be in a single, well, discussion. That would have been much more convenient for users. Instead it's spread out across the two stories, in a desperate and transparent attempt to increase relevance through post count.
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Someone really wants some market research?
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And they conflict each other, and were posted by the same editor. This site is a dumpster fire.
hmm (Score:1)
2007 was the year of Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: 2007 was the year of Vista (Score:3)
Linux on the Desktop will arrive any decade now
A different view on FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux and FOSS also are more hidden than ever. So many of those FOSS projects on GitHub ultimately are used as building blocks for proprietary software.
To me this is the natural position for FOSS to be in. Build the components needed by the majority of people together, while the parts needed by only a small group of people can be built as proprietary software by smaller groups of people.
It's not so much the view that all software should be free, but more of a pragmatic one: we all need these parts, so why not build these together instead of everyone re-inventing the wheel.
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Value chain (Score:2)
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Inexplicably, QNX is still standing. Last one standing.
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That's because QNX is an RTOS. It's also very popular in the automotive world. And you need an RTOS when you're running an ECU and need to fire the injectors or spark plugs at the right moment. Being late can result in a poorly running engine to damage, after all.
I think things are better now than they've ever been. Corporate acceptance hasn't been higher, though many have instituted policies to prevent accidental license violations due to things going
Except 135 other OSs (Score:1)
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Right, a grabbag of non unix oses still manage to hang on for dear life in quiet backwaters, but all unixen are now dead except Linux and QNX.
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Ah, proprietary Unixen, that would only be QNX still standing as I said, your quibble notwithstanding.
Not a Golden Age of OSS but Dark Age for MS (Score:2)
During this time we see the rise of Apple and Linux in popularity, because Microsoft really dropped the ball.
Windows XP was starting to show its age, The Windows Longhorn project has shown to be too ambitious for Microsoft causing the release of Windows Vista, as a stop gap upgrade. Which was too radical of a change for businesses to incorporate, yet didn't offer anything really useful to the home user, other then fancy Windows graphics.
With Y2K a lot of people upgraded their systems to XP systems, and ret
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The Windows Longhorn project has shown to be too ambitious for Microsoft causing the release of Windows Vista, as a stop gap upgrade. Which was too radical of a change for businesses to incorporate, yet didn't offer anything really useful to the home user, other then fancy Windows graphics.
It wasn't too radical, it was too incompetent. Windows 7 would turn out to run on the same machines they were running Windows XP on, but Vista required too much RAM.
With Y2K a lot of people upgraded their systems to XP systems, and retired their old DOS based systems.
People were using Win9x by Y2K, which did boot from DOS, but which didn't make BIOS calls unless it was in 16 bit mode so that it could use a DOS driver.
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Windows 7, was still a far cry from the idea behind Longhorn. A lot of Longhorn big ideas such as WinFS, never really made it. The success of Windows 7, was mostly removing a lot of longhorn beta code, and replaced it with more traditional NT/XP Code. As well reset some settings levels to be less annoying. The Longhorn Code Bases was based on the idea of continued use of the Traditional PC, So its RAM Requirements were based on the trend for PC RAM... However during this time, Netbooks were gaining popu
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Then Ubuntu dropped the ball... [wikipedia.org]
Yes (Score:2)
Was gonna link this article when I saw the first story because this one is correct. Even though we technically use more open source packages these days, they're working as the backend for something proprietary. Doesn't seem like an improvement over the mid/late '00s when GNU/Linux itself was being used more often and was making gains on the desktop as Windows Vista came out half-baked, and full-FLOSS software stacks were more common than ever before or since.
News for nerds, stuff that matters (Score:2)
Not stuff that didn't even matter a decade ago.
Has anyone tried to patent their code? (Score:2)
I've been looking to use a software patent a novel framework I wrote and then open source it to see what would happen commercially. Has anyone tried doing this themselves?
FOSS Skype Replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
It was during a massive housing bubble (Score:2)
The dupiest dupe that ever duped (Score:2)
Really, two dupes back-to-back? Wow.
My grandchildren will squeal with amazement and disbelief when I tell them this almost unbelievable story.
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Just give editors a break, would you? This is more a follow up than a dupe and it was posted by the same editor.
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
He obviously can't be that dumb.
I won't be too surprised if people chime in with differing opinions. The slashdot crowd loves to trash talk the editors and will do so at the drop of a hat. Sometimes they don't even need a hat.
Misconception - Linux never about open source (Score:2)
Linus didn't create Linux to start some open source jihad against closed source or proprietary wares. He doesn't mind that it's used in proprietary systems or with closed source drivers.
"I did not start Linux as a collaborative project, I started it for myself. I needed the end result but I also enjoyed programming. I made it publicly available but I had no intention to use the open-source methodology, I just wanted to have comments on the work."
Sure, a Linux distro usually has GNU tools to make up an OS.
And you ? (Score:1)
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No, I'm a microsoft hater. I use Linux Mint on my PC and laptop, and OpenBSD on my servers. At work I was given choice of Dell with Windows or mac with OSX, so chose the osx because at least the command line is nice and it runs Linuxy stuff with homebrew.
I used "jihad" to connote the rabid disciple of Stallman/GPL
Linus isn't one of them, he doesn't care so much.
Ahhh the good old days (Score:2)
Way back in 2007 when everybody wanted to share their software out of the goodness of their hearts. Yeah right.