“Winning respect is now the least of the open-source movement’s concerns. Future struggles may involve political and political challenges in copyright law or digital rights management or intellectual property issues, according to Tiemann, nowadays chief technology officer at Linux seller Red Hat.” Read the interview at C|Net.
Interview with Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The interviewer pointed out that OS/Free Software gets criticized for not innovating. Sometimes I think that this is because people are afraid to admit that OS and Free Software development models are the innovation, and the foundation for innovations.
I propose that software development is rubbing up against some limits to innovation (most of the basic stuff is done,) and all that’s really left is gimmicks.
OTOH, some genius can always come up with something totally new. What makes anyone think it can’t be a college student who doesn’t care about Big Munny, or a programmer who comes up with something totally great in spare time.
Remember, Radio Amateurs came up with Single Sideband communication. The Telco’s still use that technology in one way or another, and used it for long-haul, wireless communication for 30 or more years.
Anyone can innovate. It’s the innovator’s call whether to make the work freely available or to patent it.
It’s also worth noting that the press seems to view the “Open Source Movement” as something new. Pity. Anyone remember a language called ABC? It evolved into Python, and it was definitely Open Source.
I’ve yet to hear a really credible example of a significant “innovation” that happened inside a big company like MS. If you were to play a word association game with a typical PC user today, I think what they would say is just “Windows” when you said “Microsoft.” (And as readers here surely know, MS didn’t create the windowing-gui concept themselves.)
What they do have though is a lot of smart people in close proximity working together. Maybe some day something will come out of that, and no doubt they’ve done a lot to improve productivity for people using computers – but not to the extent that I could point at something and say it was an “innovation.”
It also reminds me of a time somewhat before the web exploded and some people had predicted that its emergence would bring about a big downfall to publishers everywhere.
It didn’t happen, I think because the still really important thing is that publishers have been playing this game for a much longer time, they have a reputation and lots of intellectual resources at their disposal to do their work. And so it is similarly with the traditional proprietary source model versus the open source one: things have definately changed, and will continue to do so in the future, but neither will probably be replaced by the other.
Well, among other innovations is ClearType, the taskbar (who thought of that? yeah yeah, it is similar to OS/2 Warp’s, NeXT’s and OS 8 stuff, but still very different), WMV and WMA, etc. I can go on and on wih the list, but my time on the Net is limited….
Other big companies, like Adobe, have even more innovation. Is there any feature in GIMP that wasn’t available in one form or another on Photoshop? Another innovator is Sun, with things like NeWS. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any innovation with open source stuff. If you look at Linux kernel, for example, you would see the most innovative stuff was actually made by programmers sponsored by, guess what, companies.
That being said, nobody really cares is open source innovates. Microsoft innovated way less on Windows than IBM on OS/2 and Apple on Macintosh a decade ago, yet it is the leader. Yet having a company that doesn’t innovate as the leader wouldn’t hinder innovation; Apple still innovated. Be still innovated. NeXT still innovated.
So really, to me, I couldn’t care less whether Linux and other OSS stuff I use is a work of innovation or a work of imitation. As long it suites me best, I couldn’t care less. And same with most enterprise customers.
Notice his character, phylosophy, etc. Geez, no wonder linux is still an underdog on general usability than windows (arghh!!! I reaaally hate to be admitting that). I think distros out there should hire a “toddler” when developing their User Interfaces. Toddlers are more intuitive than characters like this Tiemann who’s brain is has gathered so much BS already.