[Bf-docboard] [text proposal] Paragraphs on Open Source

[Bart Veldhuizen]

Avi,

did you talk to Steve about combining your text with his?

Bart

On Wed, 2003-01-01 at 17:51, Avi Bercovich wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm new to the list and haven;t (yet) got all the various docbook bits
> and pieces installed on my machine. DocBook/XML/LyX etc. is a pain to
> install on IRIX :( So here's a couple of paragraphs for Chapter One in
> ASCII - the data-exchange format of Kings.
> 
> There may be room for a paragraph on Blender as a unique thing in Open
> Source as its community bought back the code. But I;m not sure if the
> blender example will ever be followed. Claiming that it is the way of
> things to come and therefore extra important wrt OpenSource may be a bit
> tenuous so I left it out.
> 
> I'm also considering writing IRIX installation instructions. If anybody
> is already doing those let me know. I'm sure I can find something else
> to do :)
> 
> grts,
> 
> avi
> 
> ----
> 
> About Open Source.
> 
> Open Source is a set of rules that aims to ensure the free movement of
> Software amongst all involved parties. For a full telling of the
> fascinating story of how this idea came to be you might want to read
> Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers". For those of us who just want to
> get on with Blender here's the short version.
> 
> In the good old days computers where chunky big things that needed a
> good deal of experise to use. This information was very hard to come by
> and involved lots of not-sleeping and eating of bad pizza. Sharing
> information and programs was therefore the natural state of things
> amongst users. Change came to paradise when people decided there was a
> lot of money to be made in computers. Users became clients and clients
> became dependent on whatever they had invested large sums of money in. 
> 
> Meanwhile, there were also people who really hated to see the spirit of
> sharing and community go. Some people decided to keep on sharing, not
> too bothered about the fact that this was now piracy. Others decided
> that sharing only worked if the software was really free. So a man named
> Richard Stallman decided that the way forward was to rebuild all the
> necessary software from scratch and make sure that it could never be
> 'locked up' again. With such software, clients would become users once
> more and users would again form communities which was the whole point
> anyway. Stallman started his epic programming quest in the mid-80's by
> founding the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Its GNU project (1) is now
> one of the most important collections of software in the world. 
> 
> Arguably more important than the GNU software though, is the license
> under which this software is released. The GNU Public License (GPL)
> ensures that any software it covers remains free and available to all.
> The way it works is that the original programmer gets the copyright to
> the software, but he must provide the full source to the user or another
> programmer who wants to modify the original source. The original
> programmer must also allow unrestricted distribution of the GPL-ed code.
> In turn, as long as the user and next programmer acknowledge the
> original authorship and all that that entails, further use and
> modification is permitted. This form of licensing thus widens the circle
> of users it serves, which in turn encourages more sharing. It is
> punningly known as 'copyleft'.
> 
> Because of the FSF's uncompromising attitude to its ideals and the
> consistent use of the word "Free" in all its communications, some people
> argued that despite its technical merit Free Software would never make
> it big in the Real World(tm) of the commercial enterprise. It is one of
> the great ironies of the American way that "Free" with regard to
> software has come to mean "No Money involved, we're not interested"
> rather than "For the love of a non-proprietary world". The arguments
> raged for several months in 1998 and after some bitter fights the term
> "Open Source" was coined. There has been a lot of powerful pointing at
> suits and journalists since then and now "Open Source" is perceived by
> those who matter as the technically excellent not-for-profit anomaly
> that can magically reduce the TCO of a company's IT operations. 
> 
> Mission accomplished.
> 
> FOOTNOTES:
> 1. Full details can be found at
> http://www.fsf.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
> 2. The Open Source interpretation of the Free Software ideal can be
> found at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php. 
> 
> -----
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-- 
Bart Veldhuizen <bart@vrotvrot.com>