To show off, demonstrate their ability, practice with something and share it with others, or hope for monetary contribution.
How many people are interested in doing this compared to the number of people who use software?
I have a computer with Ubuntu on it because I had to get a new hard disk and didn't have a system restore disk. It's OK for limited use but it seemed like whenever I researched some solution to a problem it would involve messing with the code. I would go to the user forums and have no idea what they were saying. I'm sure you, Jesse and other computer geeks would be all over it but I didn't feel it was suitable for the average user.
I hope things work out for you, both the business in general and the software angle. I can see how open source software would be attractive to people who are interested in perpetuating and improving it. However, I think the average user is only attracted by the free aspect. Some things that are free are great but in some instances you get what you pay for.
Our company has a couple of its intranet sites running PHP, but the vast majority is either Microsoft .NET or Java.
I'm currently developing internal web tools on PHP, but based on the outcome of a meeting my boss's boss had yesterday, we might be working with corporate IT to get the tools 'corporatized' for mass distribution, so that could mean a total re-write for a non-open-source platform. Web platforms are a bit different than desktop applications, though.
As far as desktop apps, I can't think of a single open-source app that is supported by our IT dept. The company I work for is in the top-5 employers in the world, so I think we qualify as an 'established' company.
More explanation?
The majority of the websites on the internet are using open source web servers and open source operating systems. Most of the DNS servers are open source as well. Same for the database servers.
IOS is open source?.... There's a whole lot of closed source software powering the internet too.
That is the kind of IT I hope I never have to work. If there is a problem I expect the company to go after me. Some places are just a constant game of everybody pointing fingers.
So the internet is just web servers? Pfft! The internet is about ROUTING, baby! (and switching and bridging and load balancing and DNS and....)
I think I was right Routing is an exception, there is always an exception, but the point is that a lot of serious business is done with open source and nearly every website most people care about wouldn't work if you removed the open source software.
I meant no offense (and tried to impart that in the post). One thing I've noticed, and the reason I brought up age, is because there is a pretty big difference in what is considered "basic necessity" between generations. I've noticed, for example, that people under 35 consider a computer to be a necessity for most any efficient purposes (businesses included). People over 60 or 65, depending, generally feel that most things can be done just as well by hand with paper.
Its not a bad thing, because both are right, I was just testing my theory
All true. my client has millions in Sun hardware, and Oracle's new licensing and support model is driving us away.Just for the record, Sun is gone. Oracle bought them.
Oracle is closing everything slowly down to their usual pay-to-play model. They have no idea how to be open, nor is it their culture.
Forks are happening but without the significant financial support of Sun paying coders, OpenSolaris is doomed to mediocrity, IMHO.
VirtualBox was the best thing out of modern-day Sun, and Oracle will probably screw that up too...
Java is also under fire.
Oracle showed their method of operation with MySQL which also forked when they changed the licensing.
But we'll all get to continue to watch Sean Tucker's antics. Cash money to Oracle is what they do. Always have.
Sun's "Gold" support network was slowly outsourced to companies who hired a lot of non-Unix folks who had to be carefully managed, lest they walk in, rip out your dead drive before you could take it out of the array, and run.
And a friend who's a left-over from StorageTek and waaaay up the Sun Storage foodchain warned me that he's worked numerous "Your data is just... Gone..." tickets since ZFS was released.
Huge escalated tickets when running ZFS which the Sun Engineers couldn't recover ANY data in giant systems. In fact, he's younger than 40 and worked himself into what his Doc described as a stress-induced stroke. There weren't any "community" folks fixing the real problems deep in ZFS, that's for sure.
Sun is dead. Long live Sun.
I was tethering by running tinyproxy on it. Well, someone decided to compile Apache on it, and run a site, just because they could.
Ah yes. I remember the IOS dartboard at a former employer well. The CCIEs would throw a dart at the various versions out to see which one they'd put on the core routers for 18 data centers, because none of them were stable.
This was the early days of the 7206VXR with the first generation cards. Cisco eventually did a quiet recall on all of them because they never could run full DS3 speeds even though that was what they were built for.
I have a love-hate relationship with Cisco gear. It's its own religion and cult. I don't mind it, but I pour the kool-aid out in the bathroom sink while they're not looking.
) we were a Cisco dealer. Their stuff is interesting - Looks cool, mostly works but not 100% and not easy, royal pain in the butt to fix.
If you want to see buggy. Try some of their competitors products, like Sonicwall, or SMC.Yeah. Back when I was still involved with my business (it's still going, just without me
Despite being a Cisco dealer, we didn't sell much of their stuff because we had to support it, too.