Science Fiction and Open Source

[J-Sun]

Open Minds, Open Source by Eric S. Raymond, 2005 AnLab winner for 2004 fact articles.

No idea how I missed this article on the nature of open source, its history, and its connection to science fiction for so long but I finally happened across it. ESR is, as always, modest to a fault and understates his importance (a little sarcasm there) and he doesn't consider Microsoft's adaptive abilities (though it was only compelled to adapt due to pressure from Linux), or Linux's inability to produce a desktop before desktops disappear, and neglects to mention that, while Firefox has belatedly become a success, the Netscape company collapsed, so open-sourcing the mozilla code didn't really do them a whole lot of good. But it's still an excellently written and mostly correct article, leaving aside the IP debate which he wisely just hints at rather than taking up directly in his article as it'd skew the piece. It is a bit long, perhaps, with the most interesting historical bits being saved for the section under the third header and the most specifically SF bits being saved for the section under the fifth but the whole thing builds well and they are in their appropriate places for maximum effect even if you have to wait for them. Anyway, I thought it was interesting and thought any fans of either SF or computers or both might, as well. If you do, don't miss the good links in the references for further reading.

(Disclaimer: I'm writing this in Seamonkey - the true successor of Netscape - on Slackware Linux.)

 

[J Riff]

Was gonna mention SeaMonkey. Is it working well lately? Might install it someday.
Kubuntu Linux saved an old PC here, it was the only OS it would accept, and allowed me in so I could get XP on der. Speaking of obsolete.

 

[J-Sun]

Was gonna mention SeaMonkey. Is it working well lately? Might install it someday.

Yeah - it's become a lot more like firefox (the student has apparently become the master) under the hood (and even a little in certain aspects of the UI) as time has gone on but it's still mozilla/seamonkey and works well for me.

Kubuntu Linux saved an old PC here, it was the only OS it would accept, and allowed me in so I could get XP on der. Speaking of obsolete.

Yeah, Linux used to be fantastic for preserving old machines and certain distros or configurations are still good for that. Surprised Kubuntu would do it, though, as it's a pretty heavy setup - but sometimes it's not just resource intensiveness but simply getting along with the hardware. I've set up an XP box recently, myself - I got a free Lexmark win-printer with a computer years ago but never messed with it until I decided I wanted to play with the scanner part. It's kind of funny: it claims to require XP and then they discontinued it so it doesn't really work on anything else. I might have been able to get it working otherwise but the path of least resistance seemed to be just plugging it into an XP system. As far as Windows goes, W2K/XP is about as good as it gets, old or no.