

Linux in Information Week 9
Mark Bickford writes "There's a nice column in Information Week titled "Linux Takes Shot at Making History." Refreshingly FUD-free, and the author is the Executive Editor of the magazine. Maybe a sign of some pro-Linux spin in '99? "
Freeware vs Free (Score:1)
Although Linux costs nothing to use ("free beer") it's greatest strength is the open source and GPL licenses. I think this is a rather major point that tends to be glazed over and not mentioned in articles.
Not worthy of /. (Score:1)
Don't forget that not all
I find it curious... (Score:1)
Now, that's some interesting maths.
Definitely worthy (Score:1)
There aren't enough of them around here in any shape or form.
When OSS doesn't work, why not? (Score:1)
One obvious course of failure is to argue endlessly on mailing lists and then not write any code, as Alan Cox pointed out in his "Town Council and the Bazaar" editorial on /.
A related failure is being too ambitious at the start, something I've noticed a lot in the Python community. Someone has a simple idea, and asks for suggestions; people then point out all sorts of special cases that should be handled (what if you're on Windows or Mac? what if you're building a really large system? what if ...). This makes the implementation job look so difficult and frightening, so no one does it.
OSS also needs to have the right architecture, I think. It has to be either small, or large but strongly modularized so people can contribute little things. For example, it's relatively easy to write a single device driver, Python extension, GIMP plug-in, or Emacs mode; let enough people nibble away for a few years, and you wind up with a very capable system. Something like Samba or Wine may be so monolithic and large, by the very nature of the problem being solved, that it's difficult for people to contribute. The initial Mozilla code was tangled, having many complex interdependencies between modules, but they've been successfully working on cleaning up the code base.
This may be another OSS benefit; to succeed, projects have to pay more attention to software engineering virtues such as modularity and clarity. Badly-structured commercial projects may just barrel ahead anyway, because they have outside forces pushing them onward; badly-structured OSS projects probably just die.
Offhand, I can't think of other OSS projects that have sputtered along, failed, or fallen into decay; can anyone think of more?
Linux already made history... (Score:1)
The real test case for Linux is when MS emerges from the court case virtually unscathed. What happens then?
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OSS *does* work (Score:1)