The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) has a great segment dissecting the criticisms/wild flames put forth on a series of shows on the TWIT network. Wanted to add a couple comments missing from their discussion.
First of all, the Mac Break Weekly show apparently spends some time bashing the open source community, calling out Drupal, and how difficult it is to solve "simple" problems like uploading images for blog posts. In practically the same breath, the hosts claim that the open source community never has any innovation behind it. Irony drips:
- In the world of content management systems (CMSs), most of the innovation starts in open source projects these days, and Drupal is at the cutting edge of this with its powerful system of taxonomies, and hundreds of add-ons freely available.
- I can think of a grand total of 2 proprietary CMSs that have anywhere near as widespread use as most of the open source CMS systems. One has turned open source itself: Movable Type. The other is Sharepoint, and it's widespread because Microsoft has shipped it out on lots of its server products.
- Complain about usability all you want, but name a proprietary product as powerful as Drupal, that's easier to install, administer, and configure.
- The TWIT.tv site itself is running on Drupal.
So let's talk a little about innovation. While Photoshop may still dominate the world of graphic design, but the lines aren't so clear when it comes to animation. The Blender project recently released its second short animated film, Big Buck Bunny. While you might argue about the strength of its story, you cannot deny that the technical effects are as stunning as any major animated film coming out from the big studios. And it was created by 7 people in 9 months, using open source software. Even the big studios like Pixar, Dreamworks, and Industrial Light and Magic rely on open source software to deliver their magic, such as CinePaint, POVray, and several others.
On the subject of innovation, KDE4 is breaking new ground and stirring up controversy, laying a bedrock that promises the ability to do things beyond the standard "Desktop" paradigm that was invented over 30 years ago and we've all used ever since. Meanwhile, the GNOME team is working on creative ways to embed web applications into your desktop.
But the real innovations of the open source community are all a few layers deeper in the application stack, all the plumbing that powers the Internet. Microsoft itself borrowed its early networking stack from BSD, one of the earliest open source operating systems. Domain Name Service (DNS) and email were first implemented on the Internet using open source software (BIND and Sendmail).
The open source community tends to snicker whenever Apple claims to be innovative. Its core "innovations" were all invented somewhere else:
- The Mac Desktop interface borrowed heavily from Xerox PARC labs
- OS X uses BSD under the hood
- "Spaces" were in use in Unix systems for a decade before they arrived on the Mac
- The "Time Machine" functionality in Leopard is standard in many source code management tools
To its credit, Apple polishes these features better than anybody else, making them easier to find and use by normal people. But many, if not most of its innovations come from somebody else.
Read the previous post for more discussion about Linux support.
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