IBM lecture(s) rant

[Alexander Maryanovsky]

I found the lectures today rather unimpressive, although the event itself was quite nice and well organized.
Some specific notes:
1. The "Ila" guy seemed to misunderstand the whole "use Linux in govt." proposition. This has been discussed a lot, but worth repeating:
His argument was that if Linux is good, it should compete and win based on that, and not on a law. This is all well and nice for private
organizations and people, but for the government, one of the *features* of Linux and OSS is their openness and auditability. Therefore, the
law is doing just what he suggests should be done - the best OS is being chosen based on its features, where "features" is not restricted
to technical superiority. Basically, for the government, the openness of Linux is just as important as the technical advantages are, if not
more so.

Especially disappointing was Moshe Bar's lecture. I've only heard about him until now, but since he teaches the "OS design" class in TAU (which I'm going to have to take for my degree), I assumed he's more knowledgeable that that. Of course, it could also be that I'm the ignorant and uninformed one, in which case, I'm sure you folks will be happy to put me in place :-)

2. Nobody is making money from selling Free software? This may be true per se, but it's a very bad statement. There are many companies who are making money *developing* Free software, so who cares if they're not *selling* it to make the money? The important thing is that valid business plans of the type:
1. Develop Free software.
2. ???
3. Profit.
do exist, by replacing the question marks with something reasonable.
Examples? I was going to say "RedHat and Trolltech", but since Moshe already replied about RedHat, I'll put up Trolltech as an example. Theirs is the most viable business model I have seen so far for developing Free/Open source software. For those who don't know, Trolltech give away Qt under the GPL (and the QPL), but also sell it to under a different license you if you want to avoid the "viral" nature of the GPL and make your own changes without having to release them.

3. Linux is Open Source? FreeBSD is Free Software? Am I missing something here? Last I checked, Linux was GPL and FreeBSD was BSD, making Linux Free Software and FreeBSD OSS. I would've believed it was an honest mistake, unless he repeated it (in various forms) so many times. The "Zend" guy seemed much more proficient regarding the GPL/LGPL/BSD than Moshe Bar...

4. OpenOffice a fork from last available open version of StarOffice? I'm not 100% sure that it's not true, but AFAIK more than half of the people working on OO are Sun's people. From what I understand, StarOffice is just OpenOffice with various useful add-ons... Am I wrong?

5. The Theodore Ts'o lecture was of course much better, but too business oriented for me. I would've preferred to hear about Linux kernel development, relationships between the main developers, perhaps his stand on the BitKeeper issue, etc. Not his fault of course... this is
what he's been asked to talk about by IBM.


Alexander (aka Sasha) Maryanovsky.


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