Re: An open letter to the debian community
On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Or, if you wish, there is a place in the world for closed source
> development and middle-ground products which aren't really Open
> Source, and aren't really Closed Source. This may not be what one
> prefers, but it is a fact of the world that Debian lives in. The
> important bit that Debian and the OS community needs to take note of
> here is in helping to form that middle ground and ensuring that the
> not-quite-open licenses (of which there will undoubtedly be many)
> are not excessively offensive.
Even RMS himself recognizes this. That was the reason for the LGPL. Win
the big battles and then mop up the little ones later. Get Linux on every
webserver first ... then worry about the applications and pick them off
one-by-one.
Embracing commercial software at first is the path to eventually winning.
Let the commercial vendors in ... let them penetrate deep into linux. Then
surround and destory them with free alternatives once you have them
committed to your platform or convince them of the benefit of opening up
the development of their applications through example.
The idea is to get the commercial apps off of proprietary operating
systems onto Linux and then get them to open up the applications once they
see the success of the operating system. Trying to browbeat too much now
to get ISV's to open up their applications can chase them away from linux
and can cause the movement to wither before it even really gets started.
You can win every single battle and cost yourself the war if the opponent
declares victory and leaves the field. Commercial applications attract
more people to Linux. More bright people with a lot of experiance. This
gives the movement the chance to benefit from the expertise of these
people in that they will contribute to the improvement of the software
that IS open sourced.
If you chase them away with political slogans and refuse to accept the
applications they need to get their job done, they will ignore you and you
will be at a loss without their participation.
Bottom line is that there are a lot of good people out there in industry
and Linux (and Debian) need them a lot more than they need Linux at this
point in time. If that can be changed so that they DEPEND on Linux,
getting their input to improving it is a lot easier. I say go ahead, let
them in. We will change them a lot more than they will change us.
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