 The Sorry State of the Open Source Today
April 15, 2007
■ Published simultaneously in The Jem Report and on beranger.org. See the page footer for the legal notice.
ForewordI have been using open source software since the beginning of 1995. It was about Linux (starting with Slackware, after an initial apprenticeship with SLS), then some FreeBSD and NetBSD, to continue with several Linux distributions. What a choice! The future was bright, as the Linux kernel experienced a lot of improvements, the number of the distributions climbed up to the sky, advanced desktop environments appeared, and the StarOffice suite metamorphosed into OpenOffice.org, a very decent alternative to Microsoft Office.
In those times, the possible adoption of Linux or of FreeBSD wasn't hindered by any patent issues: the SCO Group was still living from software, not from lawsuits, nobody was questioning the possible inclusion of Microsoft software patents into the Linux kernel, the restricted multimedia codecs weren't an issue either (what codecs?!), as the desktop was not that multimedia, after all. And Linus Torvalds was living in Helsinki.
We're now more than a decade later than the moment when I judged the open source to have gained a decisive momentum — 1996-1997, when Slackware was the reference, Red Hat was "the other choice", KDE and GNOME were just emerging, Walnut Creek was selling CD-ROMs, and SunSITE mirrors were the home of most of the relevant software. The worst thing that happened was that Yggdrasil Linux died. But the Earth kept spinning...
Ten years ago, Perl was the cherished jewel; now, the gourmets are enjoying Python, the teens are into the PHP-mania, and the most trendy are going Mono. The question is not anymore Emacs or vi?, but SUSE or Ubuntu?
Actually, Linux is now at 15, and Debian Etch was just released. Novell made a deal with Microsoft and no Armageddon followed, so why do I believe that the open source is in a sorry state?
As with many other things in life, gradual changes are never properly noticed, then it comes a day when something like 9/11 or something like Katrina happens, and we're all bewildered: how could this happen? Were we that blind?
We usually are. We're just humans.
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