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Re: [microsound] OS (openly suspicious)



On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 18:27, Phil Thomson wrote:
> Yes, OS is great. No doubt about it. I just think it doesn't always
> measure up to its own rhetoric. I still encourage people to think about
> this, even though my "openly suspicious" post elicited almost no
> response.
> 

I don't understand your point at all.  "Open source" means different
things to different people, and to me is more than mere rhetoric.

I find it hard to understand why you would be suspicious about people
who enjoy writing software.

I know you can't apply one paradigm to everything: open source software
is not always appropriate in every situation for a number of reasons,
and no one is saying it is.  (I bought a copy of Reason this year, and I
often find myself voicing the virtues of open source software!)

Despite that, using open protocols and standards is of paramount
importance.  I can think of no example where this isn't the case.  It's
well known in cryptography that publicising your protocols/algorithms
does not weaken an implementation's security.  It allows more people to
analyse the algorithms and prove their robustness.

Other examples include web standards.  IE and Netscape managed to cause
many difficulties by trying to outmanoeuvre each other by changing how
things like JavaScript worked in the past.  Now standards have been
decided (eg, ecma script in this case), and other web standards are
maturing, cross-platform web sites and web-based applications are more
feasible and mature.  Due to this it's also becoming easier to develop
web-based systems for disabled users.

I know I digressed slightly there, but there's no big mysterious
confusing rhetoric about open source software to me.  Occasionally, open
source projects outgrow their simple roots as academic projects or
hobbyist projects and become widely used in business.  Like Apache,
Linux, MySQL, Postgres, Putty and FreeBSD for example.  But This doesn't
mean open source development is the One True Answer for all software
projects.

It does mean, however, if you're sensitive about your intellectual
property and worry that it might be misused, and like the idea of other
people reading your source code, you can use the most appropriate
license to express this.  I personally prefer simply placing my little
hacks in the public domain.  If a company derived a product from one of
them and made billions, good on them!

-- 
http://alex.bash.sh

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