Re: [unrev-II] Open Source

From: Lee Iverson (leei@ai.sri.com)
Date: Fri Aug 03 2001 - 09:59:23 PDT

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    In message <002b01c11c13$1ed95340$ef1fb0d8@md656>, "md656" writes:
    >Open sourcing, IMO, is a bad idea. Do you remember Unix? Unix was first
    >distributed with its source code. This let many developers change the code
    >to suit there needs, which led to huge number of incompatable versions of
    >Unix. Developing for Unix means nothing unless you specify which version of
    >Unix. This will happen to any project made to be open source.

    Is this a troll? In any case, forking is a well known phenomenon in
    open source projects and as long as the project is well run, not a
    serious risk.

    The biggest problem with the original Unix code was that there was no
    community built around it that was able to feed work back into the
    original code. This actually happened because the Unix licenses were
    not open source, simply available. What actually happened was that
    various licensees took the code in different directions without
    sharing the results *because* the code was not open source and thus
    not shareable.

    Real open source projects minimize this risk enormously. Forking is
    actually rare for active, community-supported projects.

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Lee Iverson SRI International
    leei@ai.sri.com 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park CA 94025
    http://www.ai.sri.com/~leei/ (650) 859-3307

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