Reuters is releasing a version of it's market data feed for Linux. Why? The economy, stupid. :-)
The down economy is hitting everyone hard, and expensive Windows and RISCy workstations are first on the chopping block, being replaced with computers that were built last week and a linux distribution released yesterday morning.
How did we get into this predicament? Irrational exhuberance that brought way too much capital to the tech sector, increasing demand for expensive hardware and software that really wasn't necessary in the first place. A few years pass, and the little fish die leaving the big fish hurting. A few more years pass, and Open Source gets a few more features implemented and a few more bugs squashed, and ya know, it's a great way to trim costs and bring those over-inflated budgets back to reality.
Ironic, yet fitting in a perverse way.
I've been saying this for over a year now. Last year, I heard a lot about the "failure of open source". I wanted to shake them by the lapels: "hello, EVERY company is going tits up, not just those selling open source. AND, furthermore, it's not open source that's going tits up, it's the dickheads who can't run a business. Open source is software. It can't fail except if it doesn't work. Otherwise it just is.".
I ranted like that and a lot more.
The other thing that causes me to break out in rants is the "open source has to react to
That said, I really see a lot of value in people like Miguel de Icaza. People who use proprietary systems and can say "hey! There's something here worth adopting" and point us to the good bits. Nobody wants to reimplement every piece of shit idea that Microsoft comes up with, but the law of averages means that the odds are good that eventually Microsoft will have an idea that is technically smart as well as satisfying to the greedy monopolists at the helm. And Miguel and his ilk will say "this is good, let's do this" and lo, we will.
--Nat
(reading Free as in Freedom, the bio of Richard
Stallman, and really enjoying the new perspective. He's so hard to take in person, but the older I get, the more of his values I share.)
Re:It drives me nuts
jdavidb on 2002-05-17T12:23:26
People who use proprietary systems and can say "hey! There's something here worth adopting" and point us to the good bits.
Since you mentioned RMS in a positive light, I'll say that this is really a great common quality between him and Miguel. I really respect the desire to create a free clone of something good, and I think UNIX was the appropriate choice in the 1980's but parts of Windows or MacOS are the appropriate choice now. While I will remain a Perl programmer, I like what I've seen about the
.NET platform and look forward to a free version of it taking off. (If the GUIs from .NET are more responsive than Java/Swing, I wouldn't mind seeing my entire desktop and office suite in .NET.)
