Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 08:02:22 -0000
On 9 Dec 2003 at 8:44, Raj Mathur wrote:
A number of fallacies apparent here:
1. Software will not be innovative without grants or
commercialisation.
There are enough examples of innovative software being developed
without injection of capital from any party. Apache is probably the
first that springs to mind. Another is OpenSSL. Could you explain
how these don't meet your innovation criterion?
I would actually have said "software will tend not to be innovative
without grants or commercialisation". OpenSSL is well written and
eminently usuable, but it implements something not of its own
creation by any means - it's hardly innovative and does nothing
previous software hasn't done (their style of C is very close to my
own and I was writing software of that style well before it came into
existence). Apache is a good example of incremental innovation, as is
GCC. Neither involve much step-change innovation.
Step-change innovation would be exampled by Plan 9, the ReiserFS
Reiser is working on right now, parts of the Boost library and the
GNU Hurd when originally proposed (a project which like all step-
change innovative GPL projects has serious difficulty with
maintaining momentum). Please feel free to supply any step-change
innovative GPL project you know of - I have found none which could
maintain the rate of innovation when its developers exceeded two.
A common mistake, mixing up commercial with free (as in freedom). Free
software may be commercial, the GPL doesn't prevent you from
exploiting free software for money.
Why don't we see companies beating down the door to generate GPL
software? Therefore it's a very poor method for making money.
OTOH if you mean proprietary when you say commercial, I take serious
exception with your views. The notion of proprietary information has
only been around a hundred years or so (I'm no historian). Before
that all art, music, technology and writing was free as in freedom. We
ourselves imposed restrictions on the freedom of information and now
we turn those restrictions into holy cows that may not be touched or
whose existence and relevance questioned.
Actually, information has been tightly controlled since civilisation
began. Indeed, what makes one civilisation able to conquer another is
entirely proprietary information.
I do believe that hoarding information is incompatible with being a
good citizen of any sane society. We do see further because we stand
on the shoulders of giants. The whole FLOSS movement and its products
are only a trivial example of the innovations possible when technology
(in this case the Internet) and freedom work together to permit humans
to collaborate in ways that weren't possible earlier and let them
self-unfold (<g>) and express their basic instinct for sharing
intangibles.
You can believe what fairy tales you like. Information is and always
has been the ability to exert control over others. It is probably
even more precious than money. It will always be controlled.
Perhaps the period 1970 to 1990, when hardly any one was questioning
the proprietary software model of business, was an anomaly in our
history, and 20 years down the line we'll all look back and wonder how
we could ever have permitted companies to exist at the cost of
individual benefit.
A very European viewpoint. I completely agree that software has poor
legal support and that that support is suffocating the art of
software to the detriment of mankind.
Note that not all business is affected by freedom of information: only
businesses that depend on making information proprietary. Heretical
as it may sound, the ``lifeblood'' of our society can continue pumping
and circulating just fine without the existence of MS, Oracle and
Pfizer.
If the Iraqis had had the information to build H bombs and rain them
down on the US, do you think the US would have tried to occupy their
oil fields?
It's exactly the same all over history and the world, just smaller
gaps of information and the inbalance is less obvious.
Cheers,
Niall
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