Also, with many notable and important exceptions - such as Perl, X-Windows - most OS and Commercial products are clones of commercial products that did the original innovation. Examples include Oracle and PostgreSQL (DB2 clone), Mac/Windows/X-Windows (Parc clone), etc., etc.
This says to me, innovation is not as important to the marketplace as incremental features, support, training, documentation, availability of developer support, likelihood of survival.
So, when evaluating products on these parameters, many times a commercial product will still win. Many times it will not. In the long run, Open Source will probably clobber all commercial products for horizontal/commodity items (OS, RDBMS, GUI, programming languages, etc.). Commercial products may be able to hang on in vertical niches.
This is about rational decisions on the part of systems buyers, not good vs. evil. When the players, such as Oracle do their utmost to de-stabilize markets, they are inadvertently promoting Open Source. Let 'em. However, I've seen open source developers get political too.
take it easy, Charlie
P.S. it was a great weekend up here in Boston - at last!
At 04:00 PM 6/13/2003 -0700, Ranga Nathan wrote:
This is an OT rant! Netgeek and dskippy, are you listening? This is the convert talking!
I admit I grew up using proprietary solutions for as long as I can remember. But the last three years of development using Linux / Apache / Perl / MySQL has changed me so much that anytime someone brags "we have proprietary technology" I cringe in revulsion. Ok, I should be realistic. But seeing the unashamed arrogance that pervades software industry and the gullibility of big corporations, I wonder if people realize the cost of proprietary software to the society at large. Take for example the Orace -> PeopleSoft -> JD Edwards dog-eat-dog show that is going on. Oracle wants to see Peoplesoft ERP solution extinct bu buying it out. In that process they can extinguish JD Edwards as well.
Now the user community is running scared not wanting to touch any of them! Is there a message somewhere? Hey when Tcl developer got out of business, did Tcl disappear?
Someone ought to pick this up and send a message to the corporate world. I fight the corpos as much as I can but it is like fighting the city hall.
Good weekend all!
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