[TriLUG] Open Source book

[Tim Jowers]

Matthew,

What I've seen is this:
1) Open Source as an original SW dev model. SMTP, FTP, other RFC-driven
protocols and related products. Pre-dates many commercial models.
2) Open Source as an education void. Alot of people got involved in Linux in
this way. better than FreeDOS I guess. :-)
3) Open Source as a building block. Linux really benefits from this as it
must be solid for so many other apps.
4) OpenSource hero model. One guy does a great thing and it becomes widely
accepted. Very common model.
5) OpenSource evolution. Forks often die. Market picks easiest to deploy.
Many projects are started but only a few gain traction. Good ideas
implemented in fringe language X are adopted into standard language J.
Apache is another example of a group which subsumes ideas. As is Sun.

It would be very interesting to see an in-depth analysis of some of the
major OpenSource projects. I'm not sure the consulting model works long
term. But OpenSource does. The models which to me seem destined for failure
are those which somehow copyright their work or offer cripple ware. Also
those that start a brand new project rather than contributing to others
without a really good cause. As it is, the Project Management is  weak and
the sense of community very limited in many projects.

The HP Open Source book by Martin Fink is about how to run a computer
company bundling Open Source. I guess only server vendors have read it. I
thought Succeeding with Open Source was pretty good. More from an IT mgr
perspective from what I remember.

IMO, there is waning need for commercial SW for new deployments. The
stalwarts maintain arguments like "we know how to use it", and "we are
already using it". These are non-arguments long-term. I've used Windows,
Office, and Windows-based software heavily over the last three months on
this project and been very disappointed. Almost daily I encounter outright
bugs and bad design. This weekend I was even conscribed to network a printer
in Windows at a friend's house. They'd tried for weeks to get it working.
Somewhere between the domains, file sharing, file sharing also needing to be
enabled in a network applet and a registry fix I got it working. Wasting
time with Windows really makes me appreciate the simple and superior design
of GNU/Linux. I really, really like the package add features of Linux. This
is like a new paradigm and sure to help OpenSource take over sooner rather
than later.

My $.02,
TimJowers


On 8/14/07, Kevin J. <mrkevinj at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> You can try this book: http://producingoss.com/. It is required reading in
> the open source intro class at Clemson.
>
> Kevin
>
> "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of
> thinking we were at when we created them." - Albert Einstein
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Matthew Sites <matthew at computermc.com>
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 2:34:32 PM
> Subject: [TriLUG] Open Source book
>
> Does anyone know of a good book that explains the open source model
> and why it works?
>
> -Matthew
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