hi, > But my original statement about Sun and IBM, on the one hand, > and Microsoft and Oracle on the other, holds water, and I believe, > is a reflection on the difference in the corporate "souls" of > these two groups. > > Pablo
i think the prime movers of these companies have big influence on this: Sun, Google, and Yahoo (Im not sure if yahoo has a good soul) founders are from stanford university so they carry with them their academic culture... FSF idea is patterned from the idea of publication... peer-review process which is common in research communities. in japan, big corporate names like sony, hitachi, etc... fund research lab in the universities because they know that open access to ideas/knowledge hasten the process of research. i disagree to the idea that FSF has no significant contribution... its philosophy is pervasive and i think many scientists/engineers/students have benefited on this... maybe they use the tools of FSF to create new inventions... but im sure these FSF softwares contributed to many research outputs. many rich countries are producing huge amount of data of the brain, genes, etc... and open them for public access.... so that other countries (like india and maybe philippines in the future) who cannot afford to produce these data can help in the analysis. sharing of data and knowledge is vital to hasten progress.... i think this is the power of FSF. individuals can contribute... because of linux, no need to work in private companies to have access to UNIX. because of open source like mysql, octave, etc... individuals can be productive without spending so much money to contribute knowledge. -ppp _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
