On Thursday 25 October 2007 08:34, ~:'' ありがとうございました。 wrote:
> the most significant issue is that no open source project outside
> possibly wikipedia is truly popular.
I'd hardly say that the internet, email, web, DNS & etc are hardly not
mainstream and not popular. It's next to impossible to use the internet and
NOT use open source. Sendmail (email) is older either of the terms of free
software or open source, and has always been open source (was termed common
sense back then).
The BSD TCP/IP stack likewise has been around for a very long time and a core
part of Windows for a long time. Mac OS X is underpinned by open source, and
if you removed the open source elements you'd be left with a pretty shell.
Sendmail, along with the original TCP/IP stack set the tone for a long time.
The term "free software" was actually much later to the party (which started
sooner) than people generally realise. (Not to do it down, but pointing out
that this all started from pragmatics not politics)
The Net Gear routers given away for free by Sky & AOL (among others) are all
linux based (meaning a very large chunk of the UK actually has linux in their
home and doesn't realise it).
The web itself is largely powered by open source webservers with apache the
most notable, but a significantly chunk of the tail after that is also open
source.
This mailing list you are using to talk to people with is Majordomo which is
open source, which is written in perl, which is also open source.
Facebook, which has more people on its systems than live in many
countries (it's into the top 40 last time I looked), is an application that
again depends upon open source in many different layers. (There's more
people in the UK on facebook than live in Ireland)
Is facebook itself open source? No. Could it exist without open source?
Doubtful. However open source becomes the commons upon which the next
layer of proprietary apps get written: (cf google docs, yahoo maps, facebook,
etc).
To suggest that Wikipedia is the only popular open source project misses just
how widespread and widely used open source is, because you're missing the
fact that without open source, we simply would not have the world we live in
today.
I'd also contest whether Linux & friends aren't mainstream when I see in WH
Smiths *Computer Active* doing a Linux special. (I'd expect a number of other
magazines to do that, but not Computer Active.)
This is aside from things like the OLPC project distributing soon millions of
laptops (entirely OSS based) to developing countries[1] and companies like
Asus developing systems like the EEE PC which will be distributed in the UK
by RM Machines (to schools (probably paid for by tesco...) ) among others
which boasts it's Linux based. (and looks pretty cool)
[1] What's the PC term for this these days? :-)
I could go on, but at the end of the day, a large amount of infrastructure
these days that people use (be it in Flickr, google, Mac OS X, etc) is based
in open source. Remove it, and you're left largely with templates, data
without databases, pretty skins and logic which doesn't control.
Also, Firefox is significantly more popular with the average user than you
might expect.
But all that said, your mail client adds the following header:
* Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.2)
So it looks like you're using the Free BSD derivative Mac OS X. Probably the
most popular incarnation of FreeBSD - with the open source base here:
* http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
But then, Macs aren't popular are they ? ;-)
Ever-so-slightly-teasingly-devils-advocately-ly,
:-)
Michael.
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