2016 Year in Preview: The Future of Open Source

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of Open Source

jack.chaney56 — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 21:43:13 GMT

This is a minefield of conspiracy theory and conjecture. The open source community has always been under attack by the mainstream. The age old question, "why do you put forth such a great effort if you never intend to get paid for it?" is the drone since the early days of GNU and the spawn of Linux. Major businesses are always talking down open source with the comment "if it breaks, who is going to support it?" So what happens then? When the initial developers get tired of the fight, or decide they have a need for a chunk of money, they relinquish their creation to another, who does not always have the same altruistic ideals.

The history of MySQL is the classic for this. What was once free and run under the GNU licensing, is now available for a minimal support fee. Xenix tried to sue Linux for encroachment until they discovered the Linux community had extracted the component, repaired it, and replaced it in their archive, under license. Microsoft has finally backed off much of their "crush, kill, destroy" tactics, and decided to open the source for a significant portion of Windows OS. Maybe because they lost their Monopoly case and ran out of appeals.

I have said before, innovation does not come from mainstream. Technical leaps come from the hobby community, always! The reason is you can't have any major progress without incurring risk, and major industry does everything it can to reduce risk, so it becomes self defeating. With little exception.

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of Open Source

shabaz — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:05:05 GMT

It's been fun seeing this Year in Preview 2016 series [mention:d8b5a813a1e6481d9b41301209fb5392:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] !

Lots of interesting topics. It gets people out of the comfortable zone to make predictions, and also during New Years hols it has provided a lot of interesting material to read as a result!

p.s. also the creation of the banner by reusing the Year in Review 2015 one is very efficient! [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-09e7d2ef-08cb-4862-9a62-e8ff14d3f739/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of Open Source

balearicdynamics — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 09:46:25 GMT

I think that most of the future of OS, especially OS hardware depends mostly by us. Excluding some obvious classes of contexts keeping technology open implies a lot of advantages. In the meantime - especially in the case of OS Software - a bad education of the users tends to be saw as "free" without a clear idea of what does it means "open".

I have registered in my life a lot of patents (many of them already sold and all are alive on the European Patent Database). Just for this reason I am aware that this is not the way for protection nor a good management of the intellectual property. What I think it is needed is an an always more diffused education on what "Open" really means.

Enrico

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of Open Source

DAB — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:23:18 GMT

I see one major issue that will limit open source products and that is the security issue.

Granted, you could pour over the schematics and code to ensure that there are no back doors, but the casual user will have neither the skill or capability to do this vetting.

The second issue will be reliability and repair. Assuming that all projects are not throw away items, where do you get them fixed if they break?

I know that a lot of technical people do not consider these issues, but if open source is to grow, it needs to penetrate the mainstream market.

So we will have to see if open source grows or contracts over the next year.

DAB