1997 In the spring, some leaders of the free software community gathered in California. This community includes EricRaymond, TimO 'Rerlly, Larry Augustin, the president of VA Research and others. They are concerned about finding a way to promote the idea of free software to those who have avoided it before. They worry that the anti-business creed of the Free Software Foundation will keep people away from free software.
At Eric Raymond's insistence, this group of people agreed that what they lack is marketing activities, and the purpose of marketing activities is to win creativity, not just market share. Finally, the result of the discussion produced a new term to describe the software they promoted: open source. They have formulated a series of guiding principles to describe which software qualifies as open source software.
Bruce Perens has done a lot of basic work to define open source software. One of the official goals of GNU project is to create a free operating system as a platform for running GNU software. From the traditional point of view of softwera boottstrapping, L inux has become that platform, and Linux was created with the help of GNU tools. Peirens used to be the head of the Debian project, and the Linux distributions he managed only included those that were in line with the spirit of GNU. Perens has clearly stated this position in Debian social contract. The definition of open source software is the direct product of Debian social contract, so the spirit of open source software and GNU is in the same strain.
Compared with GPL, the definition of open source software allows more freedom of authorization. Especially when proprietary software and open source software are mixed in the software, the definition of open source software allows greater mixing based on them.
Therefore, open source software licenses can convincingly allow the use and re-separation of open source software without considering compensation or credit issues. For example, you can get the source code of the great Netscape browser and publish it as another software (perhaps proprietary software) without informing Netscape. Why does Netscape do this? There are many reasons, most notably, it can win more market share for its own customer code. These codes work very well with their commercial software. From this point of view, giving up the source code is a good way to build a platform. This is one of the reasons why Netscape people don't use GPL.
This is no small matter in the club. 1998 In the second half of the year, there was an important debate. The threat to Linux was so great that the Linux community almost collapsed. This crack is caused by the appearance of two software systems, GNOME and KDE, both of which try to establish an object-oriented desktop interface. On the one hand, KDE uses the Qt library of Troll technology, some of which belong to proprietary code, but it is stable and mature. On the other hand, GNOME decided to use GTK+ library. Although not as mature as Qt, it is a completely free library.
In the past, Troll Technology had to choose between using GPL and maintaining its proprietary software status. The rift between the dwarf and KDE will continue. But after the appearance of open source software, Troll still controls the technology they want, but for those who want Qt to meet the definition of open source software, Troll can change their licenses. The rift between two important parts of the Linux community seems to be closing.
References:
/question/ 1262597.html
Significance of open source software
In AMD's long journey to catch up with Intel, there is a widely circulated saying: "AMD's existence is not only supported by AMD customers, but also a blessing for Intel users, because it suppresses Intel's high-priced monopoly." Similarly, open source software is the same as commercial software, especially for those with monopoly nature, open source software is more meaningful.
Don't you see that under the pressure of IBM, Sun and other companies to promote OpenOffice system to become an industry standard, a stubborn person like Microsoft still wants to confiscate MS Office? Obviously, with the popularity of open source software, commercial software has not only been compressed for development, but also prompted software manufacturers to continuously reduce software prices, bringing obvious benefits to consumers.
Mr Kapor, who is also the president and chairman of the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF) and the chairman of Mozilla Foundation, said that the two foundations are not trying to create new killer programs, but to use the open source software model to weaken Microsoft's monopoly position in the fields of web browsers and email software.
In fact, for some developing countries, or countries with underdeveloped software industry, open source software has also created a late-comer advantage and provided opportunities to catch up with and surpass the software industry in developed countries. After all, for a developing country like China, the development of software industry is seriously lagging behind. It is almost impossible to catch up with a big software country like the United States by relying entirely on domestic funds and talents. It can only be an ideal at best. But if we can increase investment on the basis of open source software, this ideal can be realized.
& ltFONT face=Verdana>。 Of course, it must be mentioned that some insiders doubt whether open source software will stifle the efforts of domestic software people. Just as AMD provided us with X86 technology some time ago, some people worry that it will make people lose interest in studying Loongson. Some people think that if the software like MS Office is open source, then Microsoft can't invest a lot of money to develop and upgrade, which will indirectly hinder the development of the software industry. These remarks have some truth, but the significance of open source lies in exploring new industrial models, and this spirit of exploration is exactly what our generation encourages.
Profit model is the basis of open source software development.
On the morning of August 3rd, Mozilla Foundation, which is famous for its Firefox browser, announced the establishment of its subsidiary Mozilla Corporation to invest in profitable business activities. As a well-known open source software organization, Mozilla's behavior has attracted many questions. People have this reaction because they believe that the original intention of open source software is free and open source code. Mozilla's behavior seems to undoubtedly violate one of the two laws of free.
However, it may be a misunderstanding to think that open source software is free, at least for now. Let's briefly scan the current operating mode of open source software: First, the software is completely free, and the follow-up service is charged. Like red hat Linux now, this model is used. However, not every open source enterprise can use this model, and only industry leaders like Red Hat have such capital. Second, the software is free and there is no after-sales service. After the software market matures, it makes a living by selling patents. The representative of this way is Foxmail. Third, apply the service delivery model. In this model, software and services are free, and enterprises pay the usage fee by time. These are the main operation modes, and other modes are actually the evolution and variation of these modes. It can be seen that open source software itself is indeed free, but the original intention of developers is actually to make profits through follow-up services or selling patents. At this level, there is no free lunch.
Of course, some real free open source software is not excluded, but it can only be some small software. These softwares can be developed without too many people, and they will not need too many people to maintain and upgrade in the future. For some large-scale software such as operating system, it is impossible to become free open source software at present. Therefore, if open source software can't find its own profit model, it will be difficult to survive, let alone develop. Telly, executive deputy general manager of Shanghai Winning Bid Software Co., Ltd. said, "Although the domestic Linux market in China is rising rapidly now, the whole market capacity and market are not big enough to support the huge Linux family of nine domestic enterprises." The subtext behind this sentence is that it is obvious that enterprises still have to rely on Linux to make profits.
In my opinion, the significance of open source software lies in caring about the open source of source code, and free can only be said to be a statement of it, not a substantive meaning. Therefore, if open source software enterprises want to survive and develop, they must find their own profit model. However, at present, the profit of open source software is too small. Even an industry giant like Red Hat only achieved a turnover of $200 million in 2004, so how can you imagine the performance of other companies?
In fact, there are few open source software institutions and enterprises at home and abroad. The reason is that these institutions and enterprises have not found a feasible profit model, so they do not have enough funds to support the sustainable development of enterprises.
Advanced talents are the bottleneck of the development of open source software.
As I said at the beginning of this article, there is a shortage of senior talents in the open source software industry at home and abroad. At present, the unanimous view of the open source software industry is that there is no shortage of talents, but quality. In fact, this sentence should be more accurately expressed as: there is no shortage of people, what is lacking is talent. According to industry analysts, the profit models that open source software can think of at present are all enterprise-oriented. However, the current open source enterprises are generally small in scale, ranging from several companies to dozens of companies. However, large enterprises will distrust such small enterprises, including software enterprises with hundreds of people. Luo Wei, director of marketing and channel of Novell in China, said that Novell bought SUSE two years ago because of the need of business development, on the other hand, it actually had the motivation to expand its scale. At present, Novell has thousands of people around the world. Through this expansion, Novell just wants to put very good technology on a solid enterprise platform, combine the two, explore a new and better way, and provide a good method for enterprise-level support.
However, although the development of open source software is almost synchronous with that of commercial software, or even earlier, it really appeared in the form of industry, but it only took decades. In such a short time, limited by the scale, it is impossible to cultivate a large number of open source software talents, and the lack of open source software talents further restricts the development of open source software, forming a vicious circle that open source software is currently facing. At the same time, because open source software itself is free, there is a funding bottleneck for start-ups. Without the capital injection of investors, it is difficult for enterprises to continuously provide high salaries to their employees, which is actually an important reason that restricts the development of open source software. After all, top managers are trained from ordinary employees. Without a large number of reserve teams, where do senior managers come from?
At present, although the salary of senior managers of open source software is very high, it is only a handful. For ordinary employees, the salary is actually not high. Therefore, from the perspective of the industry, the lack of open source software may not be talents, but funds. Why don't men have wives? If the open source software industry has money, why don't they have anyone?