Open Source

Can the open source movement adapt to include a sustainable commercial products? - -that is an old question perhaps and have been asked on severa occassions since the Open Source started. Well, I think eventually it will, but not yet. Yes, that was pretty vague. But you have to look at the big picture here. At some point, I believe that Open Source and closed source software will have to learn to work together as the lines between the two continue to blur.

In the 1960s and 70s, all software was open source, so customers could customize for their exact needs. With the rise of packaged software, that trend waned in the 80s and 90s, but it has now re-emerged with the rise of Linux and the internet. These days, a broad range of open-source infrastructure software, tools, and applications is available.It's interesting to compare the commercial software space with that of open source. Distros add packages all the time, and it's seen as a positive thing. The current trend is for companies to give their closed source products to the open source world to be bundled with distros, the complete opposite of the Apple situation, so obviously there's a different dynamic in open source.

History goes back to few decades of development, since 80’s. Richard Stallman , GNU Manifesto, Project and The Free Software Foundation, Linus Torvalds, The Linux Explosion, Netscape and Open Source, Eric Raymond, and his The Cathedral and The Bazaar …..and the list goes on..

I am not saying anything new; but a mild compilation of the follwing sites :-

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar http://www.opensource.org/history.html
http://www.opensource.edu/
http://www.opensource.org/osd.html

http://www.freestandards.org/en/Main_Page

http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html

I am ardent fan of what is OPEN SOURCE..and my blogsite also uses the Creative Commons license from http://creativecommons.org/

Open sorce or free/libre domain is talked in te software environment. But I argue, what about the folklores of the grand-mother days, what about the recipes passed onto form the mother to the daughter? Are they not open source?

Well..that is another story..but Sean Madian of OSDL agrees no less.....