[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
Was it something I said? Last week, I wrote about ways in which
Open Source development might be vulnerable to both external
subversion by a motivated competitor, and to what I claimed was an
inevitable deceleration of software projects into which no money is
being poured. But what got me in trouble with so many readers
weren’t these ideas, but my use of the word ‘nobodies,’ referring
to Open Source software stars in the making. This wasn’t meant to
be offensive. It simply represented my belief that until you are
‘somebody’ in any field, you are nobody. I know I was. Some people
think I still am.“Semantics aside, this week I proposed to take the other side of
the argument–that Open Source is here to stay. And of course it
is, in that nobody is trying to make it illegal to give away
software. But will Open Source be as big a factor 20 years from now
as it is today? It can be, I think, if Open Source remains true to
its roots–that is if we can even remember them.“Free software has been around in one form or another as long as
there have been computers. Whenever a teacher of computer
programming shows his or her students a particular algorithm and
one or more ways to implement it, those students are being given
free software. Go forth into industry, my children, and reuse this
code. Of course, that was in an era when we still believed software
couldn’t be patented.“Silly us…”