Topic of the day: Craig Mundie’s (Microsoft) speech about open source.
At the beginning I must tell you that I do believe in Karlgaard conspiration theory made public in Forbes.
I’m almost crying, we are insiders. Most of us know what is Open Source, how it works and why is good. Unfortunately business leaders, does not. Most of them are taking Bill Gates and Microsoft as some kind of oracle, and follow their suggestions blindly. It does not make any difference that Linus is right, that Newton and Einstein has done more for humanity than any company. Business is about profit not about humanity, they don’t *care* about humanity.
I guess, Open Source will continue it’s way, out of any commercial and business interest, just like it was at the beginning. I’m onlyv sorry for companies who invested in Open Source, because their effort is shadowed by Microsoft. I would like only to mention IBM and Sun for their involvement in Apache projects or Intalio which made: Castor, Open-EJB, Tyrex and many other companies.
Myself I co-founded a company just to be able to use Linux full time and do Open Source full time. If there was a moment at the beginning (1999) when I show a future for the company, now my hopes are fading away, Open Source in Business game is over.
Perens: “There are companies that see Free Software, especially GNU/Linux, as an interloper to be shut down, a competitor to be eliminated. Some of these companies have increased the rate at which they file new patents. It’s not impossible that these companies and their business partners could start going after Free Software developers, en masse, with patent infringement lawsuits. Since essentially none of us can afford to defend ourselves, most developers would be forced to cave in, withdraw their software, and stop participating in Free Software development.”
discover: “Fullerton hoped the transmitter would do what he had been told was impossible- send time-coded ultra-wideband electromagnetic pulses, rather than continuous radio waves, via the backyard antennas. Ever since a professor at the University of Arkansas told him that such pulses could not be used to transmit a clear signal from one antenna to another, Fullerton had been obsessed with proving they could. Five years later, here he was, standing in his yard under the moonless sky with a smile on his face, listening to his favorite band: “Waiting for the break of day, searching for something to say . . . “
There are two things I like about this article. First it proves that if somebody thinks something is impossible that is not necessarily true. Second the implications of the technology. Imagine a wireless home with 40 Mb/s transfer rater or an personal radio station.