All Your Links Are Belong To Us! If you came by way of a search engine and did not find exactly what you were looking for, try the Incomplete Index People who may think me ungrateful rather than incompetent Mike Whybark Paul Frankenstein Happy Tutor Brian (646 in 212) Ravenwolf Liz at Zeebahtronic pinax at Goliard Dream Jim Ken Goldstein, Jim-Dandy Research Squirrel Graham Leuschke Sasha Castel Aaron Haspel Hands Free Smart people I ought to read more Doctor Weevil Live from the WTC I, Cringely Neil Gaiman Paul Graham Those who have cared to comment Charles Hornbell mobius one at the 44 Bill Hayduk Well-connected Roland Tanglao Jenny Arts and Letters Daily BoingBoing Can’t help myself Da Mox Da Meesh Da Sinfest Da Fuzzies Da Game Self-linked... creepy, or crappy? Home Hostage to Crap Computationally Minded Commonplaces (old) Commonplaces Livejournal

Confusing article on Scripting News. They love Apple, but why?. Is it me or is it weird that so many open source purists, people who swear by it, argue it to death, and would die for it, seem to like Apple, which isn't open source? Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe it makes sense, if you need to charge for the software (so you can pay the engineers, for example), to hold on to the source. Hmmm. Sorry. Apple does have an open source   underlayer to its operating system. BTW, imho, "open source" is a vestige of dotcom mania. Sure, you can do anything with free money, but that's over, for good (fingers crossed) so let's get real, okay? Thanks. One more thing, open source zealots, like all zealots, checked their minds at the door when they joined the party. They're anti-intellectual, can't handle disagreement, are about anything but freedom. Now it comes a bit clearer. Dave Winer has mistaken the Open Source movement with the Free Softwaremovement. Free Software folk tend to be zealots, much as Richard M Stallman is a passionate zealot about freedom and how software can promote it; they rail against proprietary software, and have designed the GPL license to ensure that no proprietary binaries can be developed from it without the possibility of distributing code. Open source folk, such as Eric S. Raymond, are more um, open to business (and thus proprietary) use of open source code, embracing, along with the Gnu Public License, the MIT, BSD, Mozilla, and Apple Public Source License, which covers the Darwin OS underlying Mac OS X. (Darwin encompasses the Mach microkernel and the BSD Unix, which were open sourced using the BSD license I believe). Open source folk are all about freedom. Dave’s railing against the anti-freedom aspect of open source is probably directed at the “viral nature” of the GPL, something Richard M Stallman purposely designed into the license. He has often had harsh words for the open source movement, which he feels does not do enough to promote the freedom of developers. A bonus BTW -- to people who are borderline open source zealots -- consider this. In the late 90s open source defined a club that excluded many well-intentioned hard-working developers. Now it no longer has the power to do that, because the hype is over, and the money that was funding it is gone. So if open source, as a cause, tries to pretend that the barriers still exist, you only cut yourself out of the mainstream, and become more and more irrelevant. “Free software” did not so much define a club as a mechanism for marketing—a way of hyping products and bad business models. And here's the most important point. There's lots of work to do. In Washington they're passing laws that any developer, whether he or she develops open source, should be working to stop. The fact is that if you use a computer, you probably depend on some of both kinds of software -- so stop seeing the world so black and white, stop seeing an enemy in anyone who dares criticize the most bizarre zealotry, relax, and see that the world is a lot bigger than it may have seemed. Now, really, have a nice day, no kidding. No argument here. And probably not from either the FSF or the open source movement, or even Apple: note prominent quotes from the FSF and Apple at the Digital Speech Project. © Copyright 2002 Richard Allan Baruz. Last update: 11/17/02; 2:12:07 AM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.