God bless the Open Source movement. Along with Jason and Stewart, without whom this website would literally not exist, open source technologies like PHP and MySQL provide the back-bone for what you see her at PL.
And, hopefully, I'll implement a brand-spanking new online store that is also open source. AND I prefer to typeset books with LaTex, another open source project.
My webhost uses Linux and Apache along with a myriad of other acronyms for other open source programming stuff... And then I think about the fact that I can't get off my lazy butt and do a single thing for the open source people.
Of course everything else in society that I enjoy is from the efforts of others; my education, public roads, what have you. It is just that open source is so clearly voluntary and largely unpaid. It scales so well because the reproduction cost is so low.
What a strange model: no one get's paid, yet people still work on it all the same. But maybe what's really happening is that open sourcers are just cutting out the middleman (money). For instance, if we all wrote books and didn't get paid that wouldn't be so bad really (and wouldn't be so far from the way things are now for a lot of writers) as long as guilt or inspiration worked just as well to convince people to work. Money isn't the imporant thing; motivation is important. If you're motivated by guilt to work is that really any better or worse than being motivated by greed?
Posted by John on March 27, 2004
Tags: Blog
Comments on specific paragraphs:
Click the
icon to the right of a paragraph
Comments on the page as a whole:
Click the
icon to the right of the page title (works the same as paragraphs)