To: Open source advocacy in education and government <open-source-now-list redhat com>
Subject: Re: [OS:N:] Developing for developers and users
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:32:33 -0400
Matt Frye wrote:
I think the point that Nielsen is making (and that Kim already made)
is that there _are_ better methods out there, but developers aren't
taking advantage of them.
And these methods are ... ?
There is not much "innovation" per se in software, mostly incremental
improvements. I'm perfectly ok with that, standing on the shoulders of
giants and all that.
My expectation toward OSS is not to have "innovative" softwares based on
new paradigm, it is to have access to robust software that get the job
done. People want/need a word processor. OpenOffice provide that. I
can't blame OO.o for providing a rip-off that happen to be useful to
people. Actually, it is the right thing to do.
Innovation is not mutually exclusive with usefulness, but I'd rather
have a useful non-innovative software than a (mostly-) useless
innovative one.
BTW, OSS *does* produce innovative stuff. I think we can agreee that
one of the most important breakthrough in how we use software and
computer, in the past decade or so, was the Web. AFAIK, the Mosaic web
browser and NCSA httpd *where* OSS. The best implementation of a web
browser and web server today *are* OSS. This is just one example.
Attachment:
signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature