Re: good references re. ontologies for S*m*ntic W*b
Joshua,
On Thursday 20 January 2005 10:27, Joshua Allen wrote:
> > I would suggest the development models for the three most
> > successful open-source projects: Gnu, the WWW, and Linux.
>
> If I may elaborate...
>
> First, the WWW is not about open-source; it is about open protocols.
> If it had been about open-source, it would have been a dismal
> failure. Open protocols achieve interop and economies of scale by
> allowing all parties to come together regardless of how proprietary
> or "free as in Stallmanism" their code is.
>
> The other two examples given of successful open-source products are
> simply examples of people taking successful proprietary products and
> giving them away or cloning them. Unix and all of the successful
> Unix utilities were successful long before Stallman and Torvalds
> decided to inject "open source" into the discussion. To claim that
> "open source" is in any way responsible for the success of Unix or
> any of the Unix utilities; piping model, etc. is just a gross
> misreading of history (not that you are making this error). It also
> dishonors the memory of the true innovators who brought us all of
> these things which Stallman and Torvalds so happily appropriated.
>
> And to take your point perhaps further than you intended, the success
> for all of these has nothing to do with "open source". All software
> applications compete for user's limited attention spans, and the only
> ones that succeed are the ones that successfully attract users. It's
> really irrelevant how the software was written, and only mildly
> interesting that successful application which attract OSS attention
> do so in most cases only after becoming successful.
Not knowing you at all, I'd have to say you sound like some kind of
Randian.
These points have some validity, but they are considerable
overstatements themselves, as well.
Open source is not a fad or even a style, it is an alternative model for
software development with significant genuine advantages over
proprietary development, at least for many classes of software.
It also demeans the contributions of people such as Torvalds and
Stallman and the sizeable body of programmers involved in open source
projects to say that what they did was rip off Unix. They recognized
the value of the concepts that constitute Unix and related tools and
created implementations of those concepts that were not under the
control of a corporate entity.
Two direct and key consequences of open source development is that
progress is more rapid and quality and reliability are better.
There's a good deal of innovation in the Gnu tools not present in their
AT&T Unix-inspired counterparts. Likewise, there has been a great deal
of improvement in the Linux kernel that occurred quite independently of
the development in its proprietary Unix counterparts.
It is by no means "irrelevant how the software was written." That is
tantamount to saying that development methodologies are irrelevant, and
we know perfectly well how untrue that is.
The state of software in general and of the Internet itself are much
further ahead for the introduction of the concept of open source
development.
Randall Schulz