Christopher Mahan wrote:
What I am about to say is fairly brutal, so if you're already upset,
don't read further.
You make some dramatic statements. However, I think some of them are off
somewhat. I wholeheartedly agree that open source needs to be embraced,
and quickly and aggressively. I also agree that (sadly) code quality
doesn't get you anywhere unless it is combined with outreach and
marketing to build momentum. I am aware that us nerds have a tendency to
stay in our little corner, caring about details and quality in code,
feeling smug, while out there in the real world, others steal your
thunder and make you irrelevant.
Now for the parts that I disagree with. You talk about "embracing the
open source community and GPL(v2)" as the (only?) way to reach the
"millions of hackers" out there. Firstly, I have to object to your
equation of the open source community with GPLv2. There are lots of
successful open source offerings out there that are not GPL-ed
(remember, this started off as a discussion about dual-licensing
OpenSolaris with CDDL and GPLv3). You even mention some of those
projects in the examples with your website work. Secondly, there aren't
millions of hackers out there who would be actively improving
OpenSolaris. Linux doesn't have millions of hackers. The realistic
number for the group of developers who will actively contribute is
small, it is more likely in the hundreds at any given time. I think this
is one of the misunderstandings between the developers on one side and
the advocates or marketing folks on the other side: the target audience
for active development is not that big. The target audience for *users*
is big. You need to be careful to not try to push the development
community and infrastructure into a marketing tool to reach the user
target audience. They are seperate.
- Frank
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