OSS collaboration software follows historical office software trend
The open source software (OSS) community needs to go back to the
basics of the software industry and think long and hard about where
software as both an industry and an avocation is going. When it does it
will find out that the community was a mostly unwitting pawn in a
10-year marketing and political/regulatory campaign to attack Microsoft
and promote the market capitalization of other public companies. The
detour in software development best-practice improvement and new
software functionality that resulted has harmed the software industry
as a whole a lot more than it harmed Microsoft.
As a result, everyone in the software industry will lose because
software itself will be marginalized within the bigger information
technology (IT) and even bigger broad technology picture. That
marginalization—e.g., embedding special-purpose software into
appliances will likely become the norm instead of using general-purpose
software—may have happened anyways but the OSS community hastened
the outcome. Its “us vs. them” thing over intellectual
property, this or that vendor’s choice of how to market its
products and/or services, OOXML and other useless Open Standards
activity, degrees of quality control, “Halloween memos,”
SCO Unix, free vs. open, and especially Microsoft ad nauseum has left
the open source concept an asterisk in what historians will write about
the by-then dormant software industry in 2050.
In fact, “them” is not always Microsoft. In open
standards discussions (which has become intertwined with the open
source community and culture because that suited the marketing and
political/regulatory campaign noted above), it is free-market OSS guys
vs. controlled-economy OSS guys. What the movement needs now in the
21st century, if there is to be any chance to reverse the
marginalization, are the “the cream will rise to the top”
OSS guys, leaving behind the whole 1980s-era OSS “free
beer” guys vs. the 1990s’ OSS “bazaar” guys.
The OSS community needs to recapture the era before Microsoft even existed and Richard Stallman was in high school when Dennis Ritchie—one of the “inventors” of UNIX—said
(according to the Alacatel-Lucent web site): "What we wanted to
preserve was just not a good environment in which to do programming,
but a system around which a fellowship could form." If that sounds
familiar, it is not from an early Free Software Foundation meeting in
1985 but it is what Ritchie and fellow UNIX inventor Ken Thompson felt
when they were writing UNIX and C around 1970.
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