Just a quick follow-up on the notion of "life will find a way". Yes it
will, but life is often cruel, unjust, and life favors the strongest
and most powerful and lucy one to survive--not necessarily the
best. Thus life on its way to the better can take substantial
deviations for years, decades, centuries, ...
OSS projects can be significantly harmed by even the slightest
discreditation through court proceedings or "won't work" beliefs
heralded in magazines. The FreeBSD project is an example. Back in
1992 when the BSD UNIX operating system was first deployed as an
open-source project for the PC platform, everything was looking very
promising. Linux was still quite unstable and a hacker's project while
BSD could build on a code base that was proofed and debugged for more
than a decade already. BSD was known to be stable and good, all that
was left was to fix the interface to the PC hardware. It should have
been a home run.
But, there was this nasty lawsuit against UCB for releasing 4.3 BSD
Net/2 and 4.4 BSD with some minor parts of propriertary AT&T code in
it. As everyone knows, the problem was resolved in the following
years, leading to BSD 4.4 lite (without having any noticable impact on
the functioning and quality of the code.) But these months of court
proceedings were really hurting the *BSD projects, Linux was selected
by by the magazine editors to be the hype of the next years, and so
the industry went with Linux and, by and large, ignored the free BSDs.
The market is very sensitive, like a grizzly bear it smells open
wounds over many miles distance. Unlike a grizzly bear the market will
not attack the wounded individual, but it will avoid it (which is just
as bad.) If there is any principle in the market, then it is "to
avoid possible loosers." Even if the loosers aren't really loosing,
they can be vitally hurt due to being avoided.
Now that's for big multi-purpose OSS projects, and one could argue
that it's enough that one OSS OS (Linux) had still become very popular
in the market. But, the question is (1) has life gone straight or did
it take a diversion? And (2) would a smaller and more specialized
open-source project have survived the court proceedings and period of
avoidance?
If I were to invest a real living on an healthcare OSS project I would
be very, very cautious (if not downright pessimistic.) Because if I
invest in this, I must win the game and I can not settle with being
happy about another OSS project to succeed during the period that I am
bogged down by lawsuits. So, who wants to be the first?
regards
-Gunther
Gunther Schadow ----------------------------------- http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu
Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
1001 W 10th Street RG5, Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------- #include <usual/disclaimer>
