[OFB Cafe] Resurrecting an old debate

[Jens Benecke]

Am 17.11.2011 um 16:24 schrieb Donald Spoon:

> Hello Jens,

Hello Don!

Wow, this took longer than I thought.
I realize I just don’t have enough free time during the day any more to be answering dozens of long mails. This was quite different when TechTalk was still active with over a hundred mails a day and I was still working at the university. :-)


> Glad to hear you are getting on with your life in such a spendid manner.  Welcome to home-ownership! <grin>

Thank you!

> A house has to have kids...  (wink-wink)

Well. :-)
About 10 years ago I said to my parents: if they ever want grandchildren, they’d better not ask us about a schedule!

I have a feeling this doesn’t happen under pressure, and so far this is exactly what happened with most of our friends: whenever both of a couple are pursuing a career, it can take a year or even longer until there is a pregnancy. And we both have full time jobs right now. So don’t hold your breath! :-)


> I'll answer your question with another question.... What makes you think that he OSS movement is the operant rather than the resultant?

It depends on the point of view. In some respect, everything regarding society is just a „result“, if only a result of the societies’ existence.

> I think Linux and it's cousins (BSD??) have had a wide "effect", just not the one visualized by many early developers.  As a desktop, it has always been second tier, but as a server system, and embedded system it has become top-tier.  A "work-alike" is now on the Macs, and what about Android storming the cell phone appliance world?  Beowulf Clusters??  Many small universities now have "super computer" capability that was beyond their reach before.

I guess it’s the old truth: those who do not understand Unix are forced to reinvent it, poorly.

> But these are just examples of the "trees", I think you should back off and focus on the "forest“!
> The "forest" for me is the general drift towards more and more collaboration in society.

I can see what you mean, but is this really the forest or is it just a group of bushes? Or, to stay within the analogy of operant vs. resultant, is it the tree or is it the soil it is growing on?

Collaboration has become easier because the means (media, communication paths) are there, and therefore there simply is more of it. I do not see society as a whole being more collaborative than in the past. I think due to the availability of media communication between people has changed, but I wonder in which direction.

Of course there are advantages. Almost everybody has mobile phones nowadays and sending and instantly receiving documents has become a commodity. I remember when I was in elementary school and we had to write reports, that we met in the afternoon and the one with the best handwriting had to write what we drafted. The report was rewritten three times before we could hand it in and producing photos to glue into the pages took weeks and cost money (development, film, etc).
Today, everybody stays at home, everybody opens Skype and Google Docs, everybody writes at the same time, and photos are just made and copied into the document almost instantly.

But at what cost? When we collaborated like this in the past, we had lunch together, looked at photos together and after work went outside to play football. Today, pupils collaborate using Skype, and afterwards "meet" on Facebook and/or WoW, where they have 1234192314245 „friends“, most of whom they have never met in person.

Are we paying for more collaboration by doing less conversation?


> In many ways, the OSS movement is just a group pooling their resources (in computing) to achieve a group goal... a "better" OS. (BTW what is "better"?  fuzzy math maybe needed?)

I don’t really engage in OS wars or discussions any more because 80% (at least) are just a matter of taste.
Everybody uses the operating system he or she deserved. ;-)

Of course Linux (as a special case of the whole OSS movement) has played, and is still playing, a special role in the computing world. It is less an OS than a living organism. In a way, OSS grows organically while commercial software is designed to be sold. Linux will still exist in a hundred years, in some form or other, because it is not a product designed for a specific purpose (like MacOS, iOS or Windows), but rather follows an evolutionary development.


> Speaking of the disappointment of UN-fullfilled dreams  (Linux Desktop) I mentioned before, I don't see it as a "failure"!  The fact that the general ideas of OSS have been accepted by society and the product adapted to other environments says it was quite a success!.

Linux and OSS in general have reshaped the IT landscape in ways never before imagined.
I still have old computer magazines, and some newspaper articles, from before OSS was widespread enough to make a difference, and I tend to smile when I read the predictions made there, because they just forgot one major player which didn’t exist then. The internet was another one.

Still, I think it has mainly reshaped the IT landscape, not exchanged the actual companies within it - which is maybe what some people expected.
OSS was never fit to „destroy“ Microsoft or IBM or SAP. These companies eventually learned to adapt, embrace and use OSS techniques and principles to their advantage and in the long run so everybody benefits. Of course, this did not happen overnight (see e.g. Microsoft’s half hearted attempts at propagating „Shared Source“) and there were failures on both sides. But nowadays, Microsoft donates code to Samba, and actually sells Linux to their customers!

I’m actually happy that most commercial companies learned to cooperate with OSS and didn’t see it as something they must fight at all costs, like Microsoft did at first: there are still lots of areas where the open source distribution model just doesn’t work - eg. because the target user base isn’t technical enough to contain enough interested programmers. We still need commercial companies providing complete solutions, not just software.


But back to my original question:

Obviously OSS changed the world. It doesn’t dominate it, but it definitely made a sizable impact, even without counting desktops.
But did it change it for the better?

With Linux running in just about every appliance and most of the mobile phones, what is the difference for „the masses“? Do they care that their TV / phone / router / internet provider runs an open source OS? Does it make a difference to them that the source code is available with a very liberal license?

In theory it should (competition is always good), but did it?


> That's my two cents off the top of my head... It will probably change tomorrow so don't bother making me defend it! <grin>

Too late ;-)


Regards

-- 
Jens Benecke - jens at spamfreemail.de - www.jensbenecke.de
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