Cameron Laird's personal notes on Open Source Software

Table of Contents

Introduction

This pages amplifies on the SunWorld article of March 1998.

The news of Netscape's Mozilla announcement

Well-capitalized corporations such as Netscape receive publicity.

Leading actors in open-source software

[explain others]

O'Reilly's Open-Source Summit

A number of publications covered Tim O'Reilly's Summit Conference:

Articles on related aspects of OSS

We often write on free software. Among those articles, "Works Great, Costs Less" is a practical look at getting free software to work for you, while Linux versus NT is a popular comparison of two competitors for server and desktop duty.

In 2000, I began a monthly column called "Open Sources".

Background reading on OSS

Tim O'Reilly does his usual magisterial job of explaining OSS, in this case for Esther Dyson.

Glyn Moody covers OSS in accomplished prose for New Scientist, and Harvey Blume aptly tells its story.

I like Rick Moen's coverage of ESR's silverback counsel.

"The Diary of an Open Source Project" is only one of the several important and informative papers on Open Source Con Zymaris has written.

OSS's home page.

Among other elements in Jeff Ubois' description of OSS's acceptance, he quotes my provocative rhetoric.

The "Hello, 'open source'" manifesto recites the essential chronology, names key players, sets the high-level agenda, and explains how to hyphenate correctly the adjectival form.

Frank Hecker's Business of Open-Source Software

Open Source Revolution

One of my personal interests in the OSS enterprise has to do with re-using cultural constructs across communities. In particular, much of the labor of freeware has traditionally had to do with maintaining sources (especially extensions) and documentation. Perl's CPAN has been hugely successful with the former, and Linux seems to have the best solution for documentation. It's painful to see almost all the communities continue to struggle with the indexing and maintenance issues that have been solved at least once.

Readers with a practical interest in freeware should know of the index to already-generated binaries I maintain.

Alex van der Wyck wrote,

Include lynx to the stuff you're talking about
in response to the article. He's right that there are several other pieces of open-source software that are in right use. As it happens, lynx is my browser of choice, the one I use for over 90% of my browsing.

Larry Virden wrote an "ask not what your freeware can do for you" manifesto for the MacTcl mailing list.

I like Rachel Chalmers' coverage of one episode of the Bruce-Eric-Richard soap opera.

R. Brock Lynn advocates different roles for GPL, OSS, ...

[definitions]


Cameron Laird's personal notes on Open Source Software/claird@phaseit.net