The Problem With Dan Lyons' Article

The Problem With Dan Lyons' Article

Posted Sep 4, 2006 19:07 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: The Problem With Dan Lyons' Article by mmarq
Parent article: The New Barbarians (Forbes)

Users, i mean general users, couldnt care less !. Most people just want things to work and dont care how they work or why they can have trouble. The rational of the inherent complexity of IT solutions is something most users will discard to the responsability a 3th party... or under the rug! They(general users) simply dont read licenses and dont care in a dumb hyperpragmatic attitude. Ok, professional data centers do care, but there is a huge gap between them and the massive general approach, making "easyer" but inferior technical solutions so powerful!..

Right. But things can't just work when the organizations providing such software are sued left and right for licence or patent violations. The 3rd party has to be able to survive.

True, current laws are creating a complete mess, and show that they were created for the printing press technology. But it will take a few decades (at the very least) for open source and similar ideas elsewhere to become powerful enough to dictate their replacements.

It is this gap that "Open source" as a *software engineers movement*, has to cross to get to the masses. It could be hard considering the "Open Source" circumstances, but when engineers start to address "users" as general, and not as someone in a familiar zone, they will be positioned to lead with strategic concerted efforts... otherwise it will continue to be so easy to FUD them and their propositions.

This is no engineering problem, it is a legal gap to be crossed. Just look at the current crop of anti-OSS FUD.

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