Snoopy’s Home

Coming Tuesday, June 17th: Firefox 3

Where the hell is Google Browser Sync???

Don’t fail me, Google!

I have to admit that when I first saw this quote from Ted’s blog on Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, I was quite confused (another GRE reading comprehension?). So I follow the link and read the original text. It’s a long email in 1996 from Bryan Cantrill, a Solaris Engineer to David Miller, a core developer working on sparc related linux kernel. Most of the email is quoted in which David talked in detail about some inefficient kernel mechanisms of Solaris compared with Linux. Then, at the end of the email comes the most amazing part, unquoted, from Sun-based Bryan

Have you ever kissed a girl?

What the heck!

Anyway, it’s an old story happened 12 years ago. Two(?) years ago, Sun published OpenSolaris. Four months ago, they aquired MySQL, one of the most successful community-driven open source projects. However, as a commercial company, Sun doesn’t seem to truly embrace the open source camp, instead it’s more like they just want to take some advantage. OpenSolaris is slow in development progress, and there are complains. For MySQL, they announed some of the new features will not be available for the open source version. Open source people are suspicious about Sun’s intent. Personally I think Sun will not be able to get what they want, unless they change their closing-too-long-time mind.

These days, open source projects like kernel, apache, Firefox, MySQL are everywhere. People are using them (say browsing internet) all the time even if they are not aware of their existense. For all these great projects, I likes Qt a lot, powered by Troll Tech and of course KDE community. I see Qt as a successful business model to make everybody happy. A company who’s employing people to improve the code constantly, a bunch of developers from open source community who contribute and give feedbacks and suggestions, and end users who get most out of the combination of the two.  There are always suspicion on Qt’s license issue (that’s why there are Gnome ), especially after Troll Tech acquired by Nokia. But it seems they handle these quite well. As a result of the effort from both commercial company and open source community, KDE 4.1 is coming up with the bleeding-edge technology very soon. And thanks to it, I get a slot from this year’s Google Summer of Code to improve KGet, a opensource downloader based on KDE/Qt.

Economically, Open source projects are actually introduce more competence into the market. Coz once the source code itself is available to everybody, company who want to make money have to concentrate on service. The end users immideately have bunch of choises instead of been bounded to the sole company owning the source (M$?). Actually they can even hire their own people to work on it if there is a need! More competence may mean less cost which is a good thing.

There are also people who disagree with the open source trend. The professor who taught me advanced C++ once gave his opinion on open source trend in class. He saw open source as something directly opposed to the get-most-money-if-you-can moto held by commerical companies. He even had a quite conspiracy-theroy-like opinion that these industrial giants like IBM, Nowell are backing up open source projects merely as a kind of power to undermine Microsoft. At last he concluded, since so many smart people are contributing their brain power to the open source trends, it’s hard to forsee what will happen.

Having said all these, as a non-native-speaker of English, I would still like to know what’s the meaning between lines for the sentense ‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’ at that context. Is that something like ‘You nerd, have you ever got a life?’

Comments are most welcome.

This will be my second blog which is in English.