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Moving Forward in Open Source |
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Source: CIOL - Posted by Alex
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I started my career with PCQuest as a Linux hacker 10 years ago. Since then, I've seen considerable amount of development happening in the Open Source space, especially in Linux-- high performance clustering, security and forensics, and virtualization. But despite that, I am a little disappointed about how things have actually moved in this domain.
I think we are losing the value of Open Source. The core objective of Open Source has been to let people learn the internals of a software application with the help of source code, and improve it further so that everyone benefits.
But gradually, this focus has shifted from developing and contributing to the community to using it as a free alternative to software applications. As a result, everyone wants a free application today, but nobody wants to contribute to its further development.
Let's understand this with my favorite example-Anaconda installer for RedHat based Linux distros. Anaconda is a fantastic piece of software, but it lacks documentation. So to modify it, you have to be a reverse engineer, and not a software developer. Therefore, contributing to its further development is difficult.
There are many other Open Source applications with a similar fate as Anaconda-no documentation, so further development is difficult. Perhaps that's why we see so many Open Source projects available for download, but there's no further development happening on them. If this continues, we might soon be left with corpses of half baked projects. Another one of my favorites has already died due to lack of contributors--OpenMosix.
Read this full article at CIOL
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