New Software Gurus square off in a FEED dialog.
There are several articles in this FEED special issue:
“Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?” asks Bob Young,
the founder of the free software distribution company Red Hat. But
the fact is, millions of us do and without complaint. We don’t want
to know how to mount a drive, deal with a shell, or install an
operating system. We want to plug-in and produce. No surprise, the
entire technology industry has capitalized on that eagerness for
ignorance…”
“This is exactly where the Open Source movement has the most to
teach us. The coders involved, like the ones we profile here in
“The Hard Corps,” are in revolt against that laziness and false
sense of security.”
—-
“… the 1980s were difficult days for software. After years of
open contributions and loose communitarianism, code got locked
behind closed doors — often, the programmers followed.”
“For this Dialog on the free software movement, we’ve pulled
together three luminaries in the field: Richard Stallman, head of
the Free Software Foundation and MacArthur grant winner; Eric
Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and The New
Hacker’s Dictionary and proponent of “open source”; and Eric
Allman, president of Sendmail, Inc., a “hybrid” company that
provides commercial email server software built on the free
software version of sendmail that he developed…”
—-
This is a useful hyperlinked bibliography of Open Source and
Free Software articles.
Stay tuned. Several more articles are slated for publication in
this series in the next few days.