Talkback Central: Open source movement is far from a road to nowhere

In rebuttal to John Taschek's column "Open source is (so far) an open road to nowhere" ZDNN reader Phillip Renouf, offers his own opinion on the open source movement.

The open source movement is far from a road to nowhere. Not only have there been a lot of highly successful and widely used open source (or free) software packages, you make some bad assumptions and generalizations about the open source movement and its proponents.

First of all, Mozilla is not a waste of time. While AOL may have tied Netscape 6 to a bunch of proprietary services, the point is, Mozilla is not Netscape 6. NS6 may have Mozilla parts, but it is not Mozilla. While you don't think Mozilla is anything special it is quite a big deal. The browser itself is groundbreaking! It is, and will be, one of the first browsers to support the standards. Even more than that it is lightweight, quick and fairly reliable even in its Alpha stages.

You can look at it as AOL using open source programmers instead of paying someone, but you are missing what is happening. Those programmers aren't just offering their assistance to AOL, they are taking a piece of software they use and putting in it the features that they want to see. On top of that, if I have a feature I want to see in Mozilla that no one else has done I can download the source and add it myself. If Mozilla doesn't add it to their distributed version it doesn't matter, I still get the features I wanted. That is one of the large motivators of open source.

Now, Mozilla isn't the only open source project around. A lot of the programs that make the Internet work are Open source (or free). Apache, Sendmail, GNU and Samba are just some of those programs and Apache and Sendmail are some of the most recognized and highly used programs on the internet. Do not base your assumptions about the success of the open source movement or the free software movement around the success or failure of Mozilla or even Linux. There are other open source operating systems that are very good and highly popular such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and soon Apple's Darwin.

If you would like to get a good idea of why open source works I suggest you talk with Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. Those three individuals are very good at explaining this topic and will give you a good cross section of personalities in the open source and free software communities.

Also, as Richard Stallman will tell you when you talk to him; the free software movement (which the open source movement grew from) didn't start with Linux, it started in 1984 with Richard Stallman. The fact that it has lasted 16 years and is becoming very popular with the users lends credence to it's usefulness and stability.

Phillip Renouf is a Systems Engineer/Network, residing in Canada.