Not science against business [LWN.net]

Not science against business

Posted Jan 19, 2006 19:05 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786)
In reply to: Not science against business by leonbrooks
Parent article: There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet)

My main point about the article was that Open Source working like internet is old news and the article writer had completely missed the sosiological and legal aspects. (nobody should be so dumb as to think that they wouldn't/couldn't have effects at economic scale)

Especially GPL and the ideas behind it have been very important. If Linux hadn't used GPL and BSD wouldn't have had the legal troubles that it had at the beginning of 90's, Open Source might not be where it's now, because then BSD with BSD license would have been the most popular free Unix.

BSD ideals differ quite a bit from Linux/GPL:

While technically excellent and allowing everybody to use the code almost as they wish, BSD really works like a cathedral/meritocracy,
Whereas Linux encourages sharing and invites people to join.

Without this invitation to join in, Open Source wouldn't have achieved the popularity it now has.

When young/idealistic developers in the early 90's looked at how they would license their code, well... BSD license really doesn't encourage increase of Open Source like GPL does (i.e. match the ideals of the developers) and I think without GPL and Linus' example of its use, many developers would have chosen their own licenses.

End result could have been legal quackmire where code of one project is not compatible with another. If Open Source wouldn't have spread as fast as it did + projects been compatible with each other (+ FSF being there to help), it wouldn't have appeared as good contendor for Windows (at server side) and therefore commercial investments into it would have been less etc (vicious circle instead of a virtuous one).

With BSD as the major free Unix, Apple OSX might have happened a bit earlier though, but Apple's not that much very pro-Open Source (in the sense of new contributions instead of just using and sometimes improving existing projects). :-)

The idea that Open Source would grow just because people think that "We could as well Open Source our SW because we cannot profit from the source ourself" is absurd. Open Sourceing code is a lot of work:

You need to document it so that others can understand it
You need to have public website, mailing list, bugtracking system and version control (sourceforge, berlios, savannah help in this)
You need to dedicate somebody competent as a contact person for the software who will (at least occasionally) answer to questions about it, check bugs, apply patches, develop the code further etc

Without something like GPL encouraging the "potluck profits" your way, this would never work.

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