lundi 4 février 2008


What the top industrialists could not achieve with proprietary software and financial capital,
free software has demonstrated with community development and intellectual capital.
While this article gets me excited about open-source software, and helps me to better understand the how, what and why of this revolutionary idea, in a way I am not surprised at its success.
The word on everyone's lips for the past 50 years, but increasingly in recent times, is "globalization". True to the concept of all people, all economies, all governments and all countries being tied together in one great big community, open-source has created the opportunity for those with hidden talents, unexplored interests and just plain lots of time on their hands to tackle all the glitches and problems that just can't be handled by commercial industries. If software is designed to help human beings to work better, why are these same people not allowed to contribute and help perfect and fix this software? 'For the people, by the people' seems like a much more effective and fair way of doing things, and according to the statistics presented in this article, there is proof that open-source is a far superior alternative to traditional commercial production.
At the same time, I'm not sure that open-source can stand on its own, without the industrial side to software, without some form of control.
Perhaps that is a opinion based on what I'm used to seeing in the world, and I will be proven wrong; it just seems like some structure is necessary to keep order, and to create a norm that can be followed and built on.
One thing is sure:

"The software industrialists have massive financial capital and a 30 year head
start on legislating proprietary interests over social interests. Those in the free and open source
movements have the benefit of new intellectual capital born every day and a firm grasp of how
increased, rather than decreased freedom improves innovation, quality, competition, and choice."
What do you think?

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