hi all I've kept out of this, but comments below, sorry Tom, Linux is open source (it was written, quite recently in the history of unix, because there was *no* open source unix), but unix is not open source, never has been. Proprietary all the way as far as I know:
http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html Funnily enough unix had its own standards argument which was why they introduced Open Standards. This did not mean free or non commercial. it meant agreed standards, much like H.264 and MPEG4. I will keep out of this now, 90% of what is getting written is either wrong in fact, bordering on tabloid, or just hyperbole (much like this sentence really). Regarding Doomsday. 1. There are hundreds of similar examples (got any beta domestic video tapes under your bed?). 2. The issue was they picked a technology that was not the future and was minor. 3. there are thousands of open source projects that have died, and will die, those that survive do so because they reach a critical size, ie they are minor and will go nowhere. 4. Same argument for the Doomsday project, if they had got the technology right, then it would have continued/survived (just as yes, I can still just manage to get my domestic beta video tapes onto other media). The issue for survivability is uptake. In 1993 on the web most in media did not see it as having a viable commercial future, if it remained only for hobbyists/geeks/tech types they would have been right. Mosaic was invented, (http existed well before Mosaic, we used Lynx to view webpages) and the web very quickly became compelling. If mosaic - a graphical browser - had not come along, well, who knows but the internet could have remained a small, busy, vocal place for academics and geeks. On 7 June 2010 17:56, Tom Sparks <tom_a_spa...@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > the open source community are only one who can keep project going for > decades > eg: unix started in 1969 and is still going today > cheers Adrian Miles http://vogmae.net.au [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
