will gomez wrote:
Dear Linux peoples,
I'm a Sydney researcher investigating what software firms/organisations do to innovate. I would appreciate your help with the following 2 questions:
(1) Do you consider 'Linux' or similar 'libre' software an innovation of the software industry? Why?
Im many ways it's Back to the Future, when software was written by hardware firms and given away for free so that the hardware you purchased would be useful. One view of Linux development is as a loose cooperative venture by hardware companies to maintain a common Unix-like operating system.
You need to show care in assuming that the 'software industry' had the primary role in the development of free software. Samba, Apache, BIND, BSD Unix and many other project were started by the university sector. They were often progressed by sole traders and small companies working for a small client base. Even now a large amount of free software is written by individuals as a hobby. This is not to say that those hobbyists are unprofessional. Surveys show that most are experienced programmers pursuing a hobby. This isn't unusual -- sailors of huge steel boats often sail keelboats on weekends, soldiers on vacation often work for aid organisations, lawyers often do pro bono work. So you need a pretty broad view of the 'software industry', broader than that which appears in the trade press. Better to think of a 'software ecosystem'.
(2) Is there an Australian 'coordinator' or representative company working in linux environment? If yes, please indicate contact details.
If you view Linux as an operating system, then there is no coordinator of Linux. There are coordination activities for particular components; most famously, Linus Torvalds coodinates the Linux kernel. Coordination activities are usually looser than those of commercial software projects. For example, often relying upon concensus and guidance rather than managerial command. Many projects don't have a coordinator, but a small coordinating cabal, which a membership that slowly changes over time. Your question about a representative company is odd. Apply the question to Windows and you'll find yourself asking if Harvey Norman or EDS more representative of a company working in the Microsoft environment. Similarly, although there are many companies in Australia working with Linux none of them would be representative of the entire sector. Finally, I would be cautious of the word 'innovate'. By definition software development firms develop software. Many attempt to pass this necessary development off as 'innovation'. Most new software features are not innovation. And most innovation in the software sector is old or obvious. For example, the idea of the screen representing a desk was an innvoation, the laser printer, LANs, and file servers all shipped in Xerox's Star of 1975. We're still extending the 'desktop' metaphor (such as the useful 'tabbed browser windows' of 2000). That's refinement -- not innovation. Even most operating system concepts are old. Linux is a Unix work-alike, an operating system which was had its fundemental concepts working in 1972 and shipped outside of AT&T in 1975. UNIX in turn used concepts from the Multics project. Similarly, IBM's OS/360 had most of the features that exist in today's zOS by 1971 (although, like UNIX, almost all of the subsystems have been re-written at some stage). But OS/360 itself was based on concepts from previous operating systems dating back to the mid-1960s. -- Glen Turner (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936 Australian Academic and Research Network www.aarnet.edu.au -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
