The documentary
Revolution OS discusses the inception and growth of free and open-source software. It highlights the factors that motivated programmers to create alternatives to proprietary software while releasing its source code for everyone. While open-source software has its benefits, one of its inherent weaknesses is the lack of innovation. For the purposes of this post, a software is considered "innovative" if it is the first of its kind. Open-source and free software lacks innovation because it is an
alternative. It aims to be better, cheaper and more open than its closed-source counterpart, which means a predecessor must exist.
Chris Kuchin and I had a discussion about this, trying to find an example of open-source software that wasn't first preceded by a closed-source/propriety version. Unix inspired GNU. Linus Torvalds patterned Linux after the kernel run on university computers. And despite its overwhelming success, Apache began as an alternative to Netscape Enterprise Servers.
Examples of this trend are even more prevalent today:
Opera/Firefox/Chromium -> Internet Explorer/Netscape
GIMP -> Photoshop
OpenOffice -> Microsoft Office
SVN/GIT -> SCCS (Although Oracle recently released the source in 2006)
Blender -> Autodesk Maya
However, its important to note that the lack of innovation/originally is in no way related to quality. I regularly use both closed- and open-source software every day. I believe that the competition between the two represents a healthy relationship that further improves the quality of software for all end-users.
It seems that "Opera/Firefox/Chromium -> Internet Explorer/Netscape" seems to be bit different compared to other four.
ReplyDeleteCould you expand on that more? Surely there are differences between the software listed, but point was an open source web browser was not the first web browser.
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