Journal gateman9's Journal: OSS software is more than just Linux
I guess some people completely missed the boat on OSS, and it seems that some KDE developers are in that group. The whole point was to give people something for free-to-cheap that they could modify for their own ends, should they desire to do so.
Stallman may be a fanatic, but he has a point. OSS is more than just the platform you run it on. That's why it's called GNU/Linux. Linux is the kernel, and as far as true GNU apps are concerned, it doesn't matter a tinkers-damn what the kernel is. I can take a true GNU program, and if I have a POSIX compliant compiler to compile it, I can make it run on any kernel: BSD, Solaris, AIX, Linux, Hurd.
The point of OSS is choice. Do I want this super-huge commerical CSS application suite that does things 1,2, and 3 for me, but also does things 4-200 that I don't need? Or do I want this simple OSS application that does things 1 and 2, and we can reasonably make it do thing 3? Most people will choose the first choice, because most people are lazy/stupid and very consumeristic. But there are some people who will choose the OSS, because they like a bit of a challenege and/or they are cheap. What the choice is is completely immaterial, especially in the context that there is only one commercial vendor in the market. If there is no alternative to that vendor, then the choice does not exist, therefore, it perpetuates a monopoly.
The comments on the Ask Slashdot entry that point out that the particular OS should be unimportant are right. The OS was envisioned as a helper to the user/programmer. If one helper is better at some task, use that helper, if another helper is better at another task, use that helper. The point is that what lies underneath should not matter, what the user/programmer uses should be universal. This was one of the points of UNIX and the development of C: you could sit at some IBM iron or some DEC iron, or whatever, and if it was UNIX, you would program the exact same way using the exact same tools. It seperated the OS from the iron. What we need is a way to seperate the programmer from the OS.
As a final note, I'd like to reference a bit of OSS software that runs on many platforms and many OSes, anbd it makes its developer happy. Yes, I'm talking about TeX. Pick someplace, and I bet you TeX can run on it, if it already doesn't. TeX is run by professionals (I asked my school's newspaper, and while they have their own layout app, it generates data to be used by TeX, much like LaTeX) and amatuers alike on an incredible amount of systems and OSes. Ask Knuth if he cares that TeX running on Windows may hurt *nix. The point is that it offers everyone a choice over what type-setter to use.
The point of OSS is to really help as many as possible. To confuse this with helping one project or another is foolish. Apache helped people because it offered a web-server that could compete with commercial offerings (and beat the pants off them) on all the platforms the commercial software ran on. And if Apache runs even better on a *nix platform, well that's just a happy side-effect that may encourage Apache users to switch to a *nix to get even better reliability and performance.
Saying OSS should only be done on OSS systems is a form of vendor lock-in and suicide for an OSS project. If you can encourage users of all possible systems to develop ans use your OSS app, you have a wider base of potential help. If you say only those using an OSS system can develop and use your app, then you are offering most an non-choice. They will stick with the commercial vendor that offers on their system. And the commercial vendor will absolutely crush your app.
This is why I use Emacs. Stallman didn't really give a flying fuck where Emacs ran as long as it was compiled with GCC. And if the GCC wasn't on a POSIX system, that was okay, because GCC only supports POSIX libraries, and it moved people towards POSIX. When I use Emacs, I get the same editor no matter what the system (the exact look of the GUI being dependent on the windowing system). Things like Emacs and vi and their six-million clones are one reason why there is no commercial makret for plain text-editors (that and text editors are reasonably simple to write). Here, OSS apps removed a commercial market (I have seen specialized editors for sale that do syntax highlighting and compiler tie-ins, but this is a micro-niche market, and the players in it are slowly going bankrupt).
Just remember this little nugget: OSS is about choice and providng that choice as many places as possible.
Stallman may be a fanatic, but he has a point. OSS is more than just the platform you run it on. That's why it's called GNU/Linux. Linux is the kernel, and as far as true GNU apps are concerned, it doesn't matter a tinkers-damn what the kernel is. I can take a true GNU program, and if I have a POSIX compliant compiler to compile it, I can make it run on any kernel: BSD, Solaris, AIX, Linux, Hurd.
The point of OSS is choice. Do I want this super-huge commerical CSS application suite that does things 1,2, and 3 for me, but also does things 4-200 that I don't need? Or do I want this simple OSS application that does things 1 and 2, and we can reasonably make it do thing 3? Most people will choose the first choice, because most people are lazy/stupid and very consumeristic. But there are some people who will choose the OSS, because they like a bit of a challenege and/or they are cheap. What the choice is is completely immaterial, especially in the context that there is only one commercial vendor in the market. If there is no alternative to that vendor, then the choice does not exist, therefore, it perpetuates a monopoly.
The comments on the Ask Slashdot entry that point out that the particular OS should be unimportant are right. The OS was envisioned as a helper to the user/programmer. If one helper is better at some task, use that helper, if another helper is better at another task, use that helper. The point is that what lies underneath should not matter, what the user/programmer uses should be universal. This was one of the points of UNIX and the development of C: you could sit at some IBM iron or some DEC iron, or whatever, and if it was UNIX, you would program the exact same way using the exact same tools. It seperated the OS from the iron. What we need is a way to seperate the programmer from the OS.
As a final note, I'd like to reference a bit of OSS software that runs on many platforms and many OSes, anbd it makes its developer happy. Yes, I'm talking about TeX. Pick someplace, and I bet you TeX can run on it, if it already doesn't. TeX is run by professionals (I asked my school's newspaper, and while they have their own layout app, it generates data to be used by TeX, much like LaTeX) and amatuers alike on an incredible amount of systems and OSes. Ask Knuth if he cares that TeX running on Windows may hurt *nix. The point is that it offers everyone a choice over what type-setter to use.
The point of OSS is to really help as many as possible. To confuse this with helping one project or another is foolish. Apache helped people because it offered a web-server that could compete with commercial offerings (and beat the pants off them) on all the platforms the commercial software ran on. And if Apache runs even better on a *nix platform, well that's just a happy side-effect that may encourage Apache users to switch to a *nix to get even better reliability and performance.
Saying OSS should only be done on OSS systems is a form of vendor lock-in and suicide for an OSS project. If you can encourage users of all possible systems to develop ans use your OSS app, you have a wider base of potential help. If you say only those using an OSS system can develop and use your app, then you are offering most an non-choice. They will stick with the commercial vendor that offers on their system. And the commercial vendor will absolutely crush your app.
This is why I use Emacs. Stallman didn't really give a flying fuck where Emacs ran as long as it was compiled with GCC. And if the GCC wasn't on a POSIX system, that was okay, because GCC only supports POSIX libraries, and it moved people towards POSIX. When I use Emacs, I get the same editor no matter what the system (the exact look of the GUI being dependent on the windowing system). Things like Emacs and vi and their six-million clones are one reason why there is no commercial makret for plain text-editors (that and text editors are reasonably simple to write). Here, OSS apps removed a commercial market (I have seen specialized editors for sale that do syntax highlighting and compiler tie-ins, but this is a micro-niche market, and the players in it are slowly going bankrupt).
Just remember this little nugget: OSS is about choice and providng that choice as many places as possible.
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OSS software is more than just Linux
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