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Over at O'Reilly John Mark Walker has produced a lovely history of the open source movement, one it's hard to take issue with, and which I encourage anyone not familiar with software history to read right away.
But his headline is deliberately provocative, and slightly misleading. The headline reads, There Is No Open Source Community.By this he means there is no single group or cabal driving open source. Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman don't hover over some kettle casting magic spells. The open source movement has no central point of direction at all. It's an economic movement, driven mainly by the Internet, which has pushed the value of programming down toward zero, and which continues to transform the world around us.
For a lot of people Open Source is a political/religous ideology. The idea of trading what many people call Open Source was , in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just something you did because outside of Mainframes and microcomputers - there was no operating system..
I can only relate what I know; when I started digital electronics, passing programs along was simply something we did. I grew up in a place where computers were not normal. I discovered a great deal when I left that place. I was - stunned - to say the least; when I followed the BSD and UNIX wars shortly thereafter.
I have filled a lot of roles since then, I have troubleshot circuits down to - literally - their base components, I have written/fixed an endless number of utilities and ultimately wrote a kernel interface.
I would like just one person (Bruce Perens comes to mind) to actually elaborate on this post - Open Source is not revolution: sometimes it is just natural.
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I can only relate what I know; when I started digital electronics, passing programs along was simply something we did. I grew up in a place where computers were not normal. I discovered a great deal when I left that place. I was - stunned - to say the least; when I followed the BSD and UNIX wars shortly thereafter.
I have filled a lot of roles since then, I have troubleshot circuits down to - literally - their base components, I have written/fixed an endless number of utilities and ultimately wrote a kernel interface.
I would like just one person (Bruce Perens comes to mind) to actually elaborate on this post - Open Source is not revolution: sometimes it is just natural.