The Blazing Trail of Open Source Development
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 09/28/2006 - 13:31
It's often said that open source doesn't innovate. It imitates. That's certainly what the proprietary software industry would have you believe. Looking at the activity in some of the most prominent open source projects in use in enterprises today, it's tempting to agree.
For example, although open source databases are incredibly popular for all kinds of mission-critical applications, neither MySQL or PostgreSQL is really doing anything that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase haven't been doing for years. Similarly, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite is an impressive example of community-driven development, and yet its only real purpose is to create a free, standards-based clone of Microsoft Office. Even Linux itself is an attempt to rewrite Unix as free software.
None of this discounts the fact that open source has blazed a trail or two of its own rather than simply following the pack. The Apache Web server is a prime example.
Everyone is copying...
The people who claims that FLOSS is the one that copies everything can't know the business at all. Everyone borrows and some claim they invented it in the first place. It's how the industry works.
I really liked the article.