guardian.co.uk — "open source" - has been confined to software through such brilliant communal projects as Wikipedia, the Firefox browser (which now has 21.5% of the global market) or the Linux operating system. Interestingly, such products don't appear in the figures for gross domestic product (GDP)...
Mar 4, 2009 View in Crawl 4
dexx4dMar 5, 2009
@mrsteveman1So maybe it's not that one is better than the other, but that different tools are right for different situations. In some situations, you need a tool that's backed by a company's QA process. In other situations, you're willing to put up with a few "quirks" in exchange for the tool being cheaper and for the ability to modify and upgrade the tool yourself.In one of the links from the article, they built an open-source tractor. There's a video of it breaking in half, but they had the ability to take it apart and fix it. They saved several thousand dollars on it, but it breaks. However, when it does break they can fix it rather than needing a mechanic.Same thing with software.
mrteaMar 5, 2009
nopeespecially when there's closed source hardware
Closed AccountMar 5, 2009
Games are written to be sold for profit. Windows is the most common PC platform, therefore most games are written for windows. FOSS that is written by paid programmers for big companies is software that they need because what's available doesn't quite suit their needs. They can take code from other projects and modify it etc.
waspbrMar 6, 2009
project venus?
Closed AccountMar 6, 2009
lol @wendall911 You are misinterpreting everything i'm saying due to your lintux fanboyism. Apache has nothing to do with the popularity of linux as a mainstream computing platform (i.e. WHATS ON YOUR LAPTOP). *nix has run the internet since the dawn of time, I'm glad it still is, but you are missing the point. I'm not talking about running webservers, where people HAVE to have some technical knowledge to make it work. I'm talking about the DESKTOP and CONSUMER applications here, aka THE MAINSTREAM.I f**king run linux, i love it, and i know how kickass it is. But yes, if you aren't comfortable dicking around with computers all day, there is no way i would recommend it to you. Ubuntu is the closest linux has come to being something the general masses can use, but it is still far away from being easy-breezy OS X or even any flavor of Windows.I mean holy s**t, support for Wifi out-of-the-box (so to speak) wasn't even a reality until the last couple releases. Get your head out of YOUR ass.
Closed AccountMar 21, 2009
I've met Vinay. He's a very determined individual, and my money's on him changing the world yet with those Hexayurts. Compared to the s**t poor people live in right now, one of his Hexayurts is a castle, and unlike most "help" for the poor, this is both cheap and easy for them to do themselves. <a class="user" href="http://hexayurt.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hexayurt.com/</a>
Closed AccountMar 21, 2009
Vinay's really into the Hexayurts, not OSes.
secrityMar 21, 2009
Red Hat is not one one of those "massive companies with many other sidelines" that you speak of. As a matter of fact, the company I work for has paid a rather large sum of money to Red Hat for support.