Superior model ? Hardly...
Posted May 24, 2007 20:12 UTC (Thu) by
oak (subscriber, #2786)
In reply to:
Superior model ? Hardly... by khim
Parent article:
A day at the Open Source Business Conference
> If you'll think about successful FOSS projects - they are either
converted former proprietary projects (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc) or
reimplementation of proprietary projects (Linux, GCC, MySQL, etc). In rare
cases FOSS dominates the niche from the start to finish (web-servers: from
NCSA httpd to Apache), but it only happens when initial design is simple
enough and can be done without massive effort.
These are the new FOSS projects. There are a couple of good examples of
successful projects 10 years earlier (mid 80's); TeX typesetting system
and the X Window System. I wouldn't call neither simple, they were quite
massive by the standards of the time when they were created. At that time
there were no proprietary alternatives to them I think (e.g. TeX used
bezier curve strokes to describe its fonts in 1984). Both were created in
the university environment.
I'm personally still using X daily and TeX weekly, and both are also
used commercially. The TeX project had last known bug almost 20 years
ago (it hasn't change much since then). What proprietary software can
claim the same track record?
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