Killing the open culture?
Saturday, July 8, 2006
It’s bound to happen. With both Microsoft’s Vista and Apple’s OS X hardware requirements are steadily increasing. Vista will single handedly make more hardware obsolete than any other OS before it. Hardware is becoming obsolete at a pretty fast rate and I’m betting that’s a windfall for Linux. As more people move to Linux, and other open source solutions, so will developers. I’m not understating the fact that there are plenty of brilliant developers already working within the open source sphere, I’m just stating that even more will make the move in the future. As more people move to Linux, and the culture becomes even more vibrant, more of the larger manufacturers will stand up and take notice.
What’s going to happen as the larger, heavy-weight, companies produce Linux solutions? I’m guessing that twenty years ago it became difficult for the smaller developers to compete with larger software manufacturers because the amount of code required grew. As the amount of code grew so did the required amount of developers. I’m also guessing that there will be less of a reason to write open-source code, because a larger companie will already fill the need. So far the people behind products like Linspire have bet that a companie can produce something better than the group. From where I’m standing they’ve been wrong. I’m in love with Linux and open source software in general, but is my evangelizing actually killing the culture?
Cananonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has just announced that they’re including closed-source commercial software in their paid repositories.