Steve Jobs quaking in his boots was Re: GPLv3 - Update was: Re: [LINK] the slow motion gpl trainwreck

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 11:50:07AM +1000, Deus Ex Machina wrote:
> Brendan Scott [brendansweb at optusnet.com.au] wrote:
> > Ideology not only causes inconvenient fact blindness it also causes 
> > irrelevant fact obsession.  Most of the anti-FOSS stories are pure  
> > ideology.  They would be funny - if it wasn't for the harmful       
> > effects on investment and innovation they have.                     
>
> I am nost sure what you mean, there is virtually no innovation in
> foss that I have seen, perhaps you can give some concrete example of
> this amazing "innovation" that foss is creating? what exactly are you
> talking about?

here's just a small selection out of many.

DNS. internet mail (from sendmail to postfix - all open source). web
servers starting from the CERN httpd and NCSA http, right up to modern
web servers including zope and the most used web server of all, apache.
other internet services such as ftp, ntp, rsync and many many more.
the squid proxy.  Internet Relay Chat and other instant-messaging type
services.

web applications such as blogs, forums and content management systems.

most internet services and protocols have been developed as an open
source effort. the internet itself was developed as a collaborative open
source effort.

all of the above types of software were developed first as open source
projects. then copied by commercial developers when they noticed they
were popular. in some cases (i.e. BSD licensed software) they didn't
even copy them, they just took the open source code, made some changes
and re-issued it as proprietary software. e.g. the bind DNS server for
windows and early mail servers for windows (forked from sendmail).


there's also a lot of innovation in free operating systems like linux
and freebsd, and in graphical environments including X, Gnome, and KDE.

it's hard to say whether the end user applications like word processors,
spreadsheets, databases, were developed first as free software or as
proprietary products. depends on exactly what your definition of them
is.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)