While Linux is by no means complete, the broad strokes have been filled in: the operating system, the server software, the database. But at the same time, the stereotype of the lonely programmer working in the wee hours is seriously outdated. The second generation of open source projects responds to specific business demands, and the people building these applications are getting paid — even if the code they write will be free.
The Changing Face of Open Source
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
lonely programmer working in the wee hours
Thanks, but I’ve got to work on my school project. I’ve been told to use methodology X, and we picked a couple of open source projects, and it has been a right mother trying to reverse engineer them enought to figure out how to get a piece of SQL to the db server.
Not to wax cynical, but the lack of real documentation either means they’re developing as fast as they can type, or methodology X is more of a consulting lure than a proper open source project, e.g. gcc or the kernel.
Business models are fine, as are licensing philosophies; you’ll get nothing but agnosticism out of me on that. Being used as the professor’s guinea pig, though, bites.
OK, enough ranting, we hack now.
Love,
Chris
Great, so just because the source is available corporate slavery is suddenly ok?
It is a stereotype that open source programmers pimple faced college
kids. Most of the programmers were always older folks working in corporations.
I don’t think the stereotype was ever true. It was just FUD that was spread by opposing camps. Free Software was started by an extremely intelligent hacker and was continued by well respected and intelligent hackers after him. A lot of FLOSS hackers started free software projects in grad school, and while that is rather young, it is far from pimply-faced high schoolers. It’s just another attack used by people who have no valid reasons to attack FLOSS. Besides, if it was a community of pimply faced high schoolers would it really matter? Isn’t it the code that matters?
You’ll probably be surprised to learn that he is an athiest [1], over fifty years old, and possibly deranged or senile.
Stallman is neither deranged nor senile. Obsessive, yes. Deranged, no. He believes strongly that free software is essential to personal and societal freedom, with good justification. He stands his ground and fights relentlessly for people’s freedoms. If you consider that a problem, there are some holidays you might want to consider not celebrating.
An atheist, not athiest. And what does that have to do with anything? Do you think we should judge people by their religion (or, in this case, lack thereof)? I think we have some more fundamental freedoms to work on with you.
You might wonder how I can make such bold claims
No, I don’t. There are no bold claims here. Just some boring ad hominem attacks, the last resort of a person with no good argument.
At the top of my list of people that has had the biggest influence on OSS are Stallman and Torvalds. I wonder where Linux and OSS would be today had it not been for Stallman. What did he do? He wrote the GPL, emacs and gcc among others. Besides from starting the OSS movement. He says he’s an atheist. He’s obviously also very bright one. Maybe that says something about religions. But that is a different topic.
You’ll probably be surprised to learn that he is an athiest [1], over fifty years old, and possibly deranged or senile. You might wonder how I can make such bold claims, well – I’ll show you. http://www.stallman.org/extra/personal.html. Read all about how he calls Open Source his “baby”, and explains to any prospective mates (hah!) that his attention will be divided. Obviously this man has degenerated to a nearly catatonic state, and is probably not aware of his surroundings or the implications of his statements. Not the person I would want to lead my “movement.”
That whole post was hot air. The only “damning” evidence you provide is that he is an atheist, except that means nothing. Personally I think people who believe in organized religion tend to be more cracked out than atheists. Analytical people tend to come down hard on religion because fairy tales don’t cut it for an analytical mind.
And NO, I am not an atheist, but I beleive they are closer to the truth than anyone who has perverted God into a force to oppress others.
In an essay (I believe it’s called “In the Beginning there was the Command Line”), Neal Stephenson identifies Linux’ three “fathers” as Linus (obviously), RMS (for GNU and the GPL) and…Bill Gates. His argument is that Gates was instrumental in making the IBM PC platform the success it was – and that without the existence of the cheap PC architecture at the time, Linus wouldn’t have embarked on his project to make a UNIX-like OS for a PC.
…and enough with the RMS character assassinations. Yes, the man is quirky, and probably not very easy to work with – a description which befits a very large number of brillant minds (as do atheism and agnosticism).
This has become hilarious. If Mr. Anonymous wants to talk religion we can do it on a back channel if he so wishes. I’ve studied religion for probably longer than he’s been alive. For now we should keep this on subject. Being an atheist or anarchist or politically inept or whatever doesn’t make one stupid. In fact, as A nun, he moos stated, the most brilliant minds in history have been a little weird, and usually not mainstream thinkers. In fact we wouldn’t have science at all if we didn’t let these people think outside the norms, especially religion. Does the name Galileo ring a bell?
ESR is a Wiccan? Far out…
“the man is a chicken-sacrificing,”
In the link provieded, doing a search for sacrifice or chicken yielded no results. He did say he was Wiccan, however he explains that this is not in the same sense of the word most people know it as. The same could be said for “hacker” vs. “cracker.”
“and is also known to carry weapons”
So what if he has a gun? A lot of people have a guns. In fact I have a gun (I hunt deer). Does this make me especially dangerous? I would like to think not.
“apparently idolizes Linux Torvaldses”
If you look, the page is under the faqs directory and unless you have been living under some troll rock in some far off reaches of the web for the last 5 years, you should know that FAQ means Frequently Asked Questions. This means a lot of people ask him about Linus and so he got sick of answering all of them individually and just put up a page about him. Maybe the real people you should be worried about are all the people asking ESR about Linus.
Please stop pulling conclusions out of thin air and just stop reading Linux/FOSS news. I dont know if you like Mac or Windows, or just prefer bashing all things open source, so here are a few links for you:
http://www.winsupersite.com for you Windows people
http://www.macworld.com for you Mac people
Is there some kind of appeal process for moderated comments? While I understand that my comments may be inflammatory, I think this is a valuable topic worth addressing.
You answered your own question. Your comments are inflammatory and not at all related to the topic. You fail to realize that the ability to develop software has nothing to do with religion or politics.
Galileo was religious.
That was the best…
ROTFL 😀
Galileo was religious.
Galileo was punished for believing in the Coperincan view of the world. Furthermore he believed that reality could be discovered through science and that religion could not uncover the truth about reality. The pope had different ideas and imprisoned him.
It is very sad that what could have been an intelligent debate over an important issue degenerated so badly.
Are the enemies of open source so badly out of relevant arguments?
I know, large companies hiring developers to write OSS is a mortal danger for the proprietary model.