Actuallity does not meet theory
Posted Mar 8, 2004 19:41 UTC (Mon) by
NZheretic (guest, #409)
Parent article:
From code war to Cold War (BBC)
I have already replied
You write: "But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too."
For at least four years, freely licensed software has been widely deployed displacing software from Oracle, Adobe, Apple and other proprietary software vendors. Yet, instead of threating lawsuits, Oracle, Adobe, Apple and other vendors such as Realnetworks, Novell, Sun, IBM etc have done the complete opposite, they are actively engaging the open source developer community.
Oracle has provided clustering support for the Linux kernel under the GNU GPL ( General Public License ), making it available for use for all open source databases.
Why? Oracle gains more from the open source community than it loses from the competition.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracleopen/chapter/ch01.html
Oracle has also begun to offer a new services, under the title "unbreakable linux", http://partner.oracle.com/linux/
Adobe provides the Postscript and PDF standard under a royalty free implementation license. This dispite losing a lot of the PDF generation market to Ghostscript. Why? Overall, Adobe gains more by the PDF format being adopted as a defacto industry standard. Adobe,like Oracle can also gain more from providing interfaces for open source tools.
http://opensource.adobe.com/
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/devtrack/theater.html
Apple has released the kernel of its OS under an open source license.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
OpenDarwin provide compatable forks of MacOSX core products.
http://www.opendarwin.org/
"Many OpenDarwin members are either Apple employees or Darwin Committers, who have an active interest in merging technologies from OpenDarwin.org into Darwin and Mac OS X releases."
There is also a massive library of freely licensed applications available for the MacOSX...
http://darwinports.com/
Realnetworks is developing its next gneration of mediaplayer under an open source license...
https://helixcommunity.org/
RealNetworks has awarded the Xiph.Org foundation one of its Helix Grants to support continued development of Ogg and other freely licensed codecs.
http://www.vorbis.com/
It's an established fact that Novell, Sun and IBM have tied their future into Linux and the GNOME Desktop environment, both GPL or LGPL licensed. Sun has release the Openoffice.org source under a dual LGPL license.
Almost all major proprietary software vendors, with the exception of Microsoft, have begun to dive in or at least dip their toes into freely licensed open source. Some may adopt a hybrid approach mixing closed and open source or adopt non-free open source licenses or just proprietary programs to Linux. However all know that thay will face competition from GPLed alternatives.
To quote myself...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98803&cid=8429381
QUOTE
The role of open source development, under commons preserving GPL or LGPL licenses, in driving Linux adoption should not be underestimated. Though few companies will be anxious pay for software developed from scratch in the current slow economic environment, they don't have to. One of the key advantages of free licensing over proprietary solution development is the simplified legal invocations without the hassle of NDA'a and intellectual property cross licensing. It encourages both organizations and individuals to participate in the full knowledge that none of the participating parties can deny access at a later date though threat of intellectual property lawsuits or licensing.
The end user rights granted by the GPL and LGPL even extend to vendors of proprietary software, who may even be producing software that is direct competition with open source software. There is nothing to prevent proprietary software vendors from *linking* and distributing LGPL licensed code with their software, as long as are willing to distributed the LGPL'ed source code to the end users. There is nothing to prevent proprietary software vendors from *bundling* and distributing GPL licensed code with their software, as long as are willing to distributed the GPL'ed source code to the end users. As mentioned above Microsoft already does this with the GPL licensed GCC developer toolkit.
Even with a full GPL, the proprietary software vendor can strip out the required functionality from GPL sources and create separate standalone application that runs as a mini-server, callable via command line and passing data via pipes or even shared dynamic memory to the proprietary licensed application.
...
But more importantly, by 1871 Horace Greeley also wrote: "This Daniel Boone business is about played out."
In the same way, the last decade's Linux customer base can be seen as the self reliant pioneers. The "Do It Yourself" attitude and habit was learned from a time when "doing for themselves" was the only option. This is no longer the case, there are plenty new settlers and far many more willing to migrate, who are all too willing to pay for hardware, support, customization, collective development and even quality proprietary licensed products.
UNQUOTE
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