Both sides come out swinging in the open source battle (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

Here's an opinionated column on ZDNet about proprietary software companies and how they deal with free software. "Each of the 'open source' parasites is happy to ride on the backs of the millions of developers around the world who worked to create products like Linux, MySQL, and Apache but not nearly as willing to open up their own products to either help these same developers learn about their inner workings or help to enhance them. With all this lip service about openness, it seems that each of the companies playing in open source is basically in it to get a free operating system (Linux) or access to free application software (Apache or MySQL) that helps them sell their proprietary products without having to invest significant money for their own R&D."

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Both sides come out swinging in the open source battle=PARASITES (ZDNet)

Posted May 14, 2003 16:29 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

That's why OPEN SOURCE should concentrate on the less (perhaps) stimulanting and less job opportunities side of desktop computing....

...every common computer user could benefit instead of only big companies!...

...almost every achivement in computational machines and software would be usefull to the very large majority of people around the world...

...any anouncement of a supercomputer running Linux (the "top" open source OS) is half a defeat for the Open Source/Linux movement, because it serves only private interests betraying the majority of Open Source programmers that are in projects like Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla and the thounsands of new applications that pop out every year, and are denied "one more" place to run...

...i'm not biased against "servers", but IMO it's almost a certainty that a totaly dedicated "Desktop Open Source Effort" could certainly, in normal circunstances, erase M$ from the OS business, there is nothing nowadays that prevent, par example, to M$ take a much superior Linux Kernel and sell a , for all important considerations including servers, totally proprietary OS, erasing in substance that way the all open source/linux movement...

...if "conspiracy" is a commom word nowadays, i would not be suprised if there are agents fuelling the war in all sectores of open source,..if not, at least it's a Major Point and IMO the most damaging in M$ FUD arsenal...

Both sides come out swinging in the open source battle (ZDNet)

Posted May 14, 2003 17:02 UTC (Wed) by llywrch (guest, #9903) [Link]

> Have you seen a source code license for Sun Solaris or Oracles
> namesake database? Of course you havent, because you cant get it.

I haven't seen source code for the Oracle DB, but I have seen Solaris source code at least once. (IIRC, it was their 2.4 release.) It's not hard to get ahold of: you just need to spend about a quarter million dollars, & they'll deliver it to you. And as far as I know, you can make changes to it for your own use -- at least that's the impression I had at the time -- but they insist on being the exchange point for any changes you would like to share.

Unless Sun has changed things in the last five years (I hear they've lost a few sales lately, & they may be rethinking just how much access they've offering to their software), they've always been willing to sell their source code to a customer.

Such an obvious error: maybe this writer should do his homework first.

Geoff