3rd party apps [LWN.net]

3rd party apps

Posted Jun 24, 2004 19:34 UTC (Thu) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340)
In reply to: Singapore to be 'port of call' for Linux (ZDNet) by ballombe
Parent article: Singapore to be 'port of call' for Linux (ZDNet)

mySQL is a 3rd party app

what is going to happen is that more and more 3rd parties are going to GPL release their apps. there are many that are absolute fools for NOT doing so, for example, MAS90 and Timberline. If either were to release source in PHP, Java, or Perl, their business would triple overnight as a service organization.

also, there's a lot of software that's certified by different institutes - yes, we know this certification is a joke for programs written in MS Access - but nonetheless that money needs to be recooped.

but my feeling is, the more the merrier! there will be a lot of selfish a-h's to be sure, but there will still be that 5% or so who will be giving back to the community.

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3rd party apps

Posted Jun 24, 2004 20:36 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Why MySQL is a third-party and not e.g. GNU Emacs ? They are both distributed
as part of your average GNU/Linux distribution.

3rd party apps

Posted Jun 25, 2004 1:38 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544) [Link]

> there will be a lot of selfish a-h's to be sure

This is a funny thing. I met an old friend recently who didn't like reading wikipedia because he said he'd never contribute back and he didn't want to be a sponge.

I told him, please read wikipedia, please use free software. If you never give back anything, then we've lost nothing of value, but if no one uses wikipedia and free software then they have no value at all.

The goal of GNU (and therefore GNU/Linux) is to give freedom to computer users. So if someone uses GNU/Linux, they have already contributed because they have advanced the goal of the GNU project.

If someone is wants to repay the community with money, code, or political activism, that's a great. But if someone wants to use free software without giving back? That's okay too, the more the merrier, spread the freedom.

contributing to Wikipedia, etc.

Posted Jun 25, 2004 8:38 UTC (Fri) by ami.ganguli (guest, #9613) [Link]

You might also tell your friend that he may in fact find himself contributing in some way. I was taking a Finance course a while ago and looked up some definitions on Wikipedia. One of them was incorrect and I fixed it.

Not a huge contribution, be point is that I wasn't intending to contribute - I just saw a small detail that I could fix and I did. I'm sure there are thousands of other people who do the same thing, and the Wikipedia is better because of it.

Same thing happened a few months ago with the Apache APR. I'm not really a contributer to the project, but I was using the library and realized I needed a small change. I coded it up and sent it to the maintainers. After a couple of small revisions it got in. Kind of cool. Now I can look at new versions of Apache and notice my tiny little bit of code is there.