Posted on 06/26/2002 2:06:20 PM PDT by ThePythonicCow
The Open Source Russell Pavlicek |
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Shred that paper AN OPINION IS a funny thing. Two intelligent individuals can look at a set of facts and develop two very different opinions about the matter. As someone who writes about his opinions, I hear from reasonable people with differing opinions every week. As the saying goes, it's all good. What annoys me, however, is a professionally written opinion that seems to ignore more facts than it acknowledges. Such is the case with a curious work titled "Opening the Open Source Debate," issued by a think tank called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in Washington. The paper presents the strangest opinion about open source that I have read in years. In the late 1990s it was not unusual to read reports about open source written by analysts who clearly did not have a good grasp on either the community dynamics or business issues that surround the subject. By 2000, however, more informed analyses became the norm. But this new white paper is a flashback to the bad old days. It contains many deficiencies -- more than this short column can address. For example, in the section titled "The Myth of a 'Public Software' Community," the author bluntly declares that open source is the place where techies play with concepts until they find a way to make money and then abandon it to pursue closed-source alternatives. Author Kenneth Brown states, "One could joke that open source has been a bridesmaid but never a bride." Never a bride? The paper ignores the fact that a huge portion of the Internet is powered by open-source technologies such as Apache, Sendmail, and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) -- the most widely used server-side scripting language on the Web, surpassing Active Server Pages, according to Netcraft. And there is no recognition that the main competitor to Windows these days is Linux -- built by the very community the author declares as "mythical." |
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