Andrew Brown wrote:
It's not really a query. I'm thinking out loud. Ian Lynch made some good points about OSS applications best understood as a strategic collaboration between behemoths like IBM and SUN. But that's not how Eric Raymond would see it.
Bingo! ESR's thesis was based on the notion of the "user-programmer". The same people who used the program hacked on it as well. That was how the Linux kernel came to be. That's how all those GNU/Linux utilities were written. Regular folks that simply used the program without any meaningful contribution were practically irrelevant.
AFAICT, OpenOffice.org is almost unique in the world of open-source. The closest equivalent would be the Mozilla/Firefox/T-bird projects.
Chad, if you're still following this thread, this is why ODF is so important. I agree that for the normal "average" user ODF is pretty much irrelevant *at the moment*. But taken in the context of Sun's overall strategy, the very real needs of governments and large corporates, and looking forward a number of years, success in driving the wholesale adoption of ODF in those markets will drive a stake into the heart of Microsoft's very real monopoly in office systems. Give people a first-class, cross-platform, office suite and a first-class, cross-platform, Internet suite (Mozilla/FF/TB, etc) and you have a large class of computer users with no real need to pay MS for copies of Windows either.
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