Re: free vs commercial
ken keanon wrote:
> Let's swing to the higher end of the spectrum, that of innovation. One
> thing that can be safely said about the 'free' software world is that
> it has not led in innovation.
Nonsense. There are many highly innovative pieces of free software,
e.g.: TeX, Plan 9 (now), Inferno, GNU hurd, bittorrent, python,
wordnet, ...
Most academics want to release their work as free software. In many
cases, members of commercial research labs want to release their work as
free software, and do so when they are not prevented by their employers.
The free software I develop is innovative. I also take ideas freely
from other sources, and synthesise them, in order to create the best
work I can.
What you won't find in (most) free software is lots of "innovation"
designed to wow the user and sell products when in fact they are
essentially useless.
> Firefox? Apache? Openoffice? All these have commecially innovated
> counteparts that existed before them.
The first graphical web-browser, Mosaic, was highly innovative
free-software. It had a time as proprietary software (netscape), now it
is free-software again (mozilla / firefox). So, Firefox is not an
imitation of preceding commercial software, it is the direct descendent
of the original graphical web-browser. It used to be commercial
software, but before that it was free software. Microsoft's IE was an
imitation of netscape.
Apache is not only free and popular, it is technically superior to other
web servers.
Openoffice is primarily intended to replace an existing product without
too much culture shock, but it does have some innovative features.
It is arguably more important to have free-software equivalents for
popular proprietary software such as UNIX and MS Office, than to have
innovative new software. You can read about RMS's opinion on
innovation:
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html?page=2
20 years ago, many pieces of existing free software depended on the UNIX
/ POSIX platform. Without GNU/Linux and the other free implementations
of UNIX, which are admittedly more imitative than innovative, it would
not be possible to run those programs on a free operating system.
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