Ad: Save with State Farm® Insurance
ie8 fix

tim o'reilly

The ironic rise of the Mac among open source developers

I've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference for years and have watched an interesting thing happen. A rising number of attendees have come with Mac OS X-based laptops. In fact, throughout the tech world, you see a dramatic increase in the number of people toting Macs. Why?

The Mac, after all, is a closed platform, just as Windows is. In fact, arguably, Apple is a more proprietary company than Microsoft has ever thought of being, controlling hardware and software alike. Just look at how Apple has managed its iPhone product: developers were initially shunned, and then they were allowed to crawl onto the device through the browser (and not a community-based browser like Firefox, but rather through its own Safari).

As a die-hard Mac addict and open-source advocate myself, I was thinking this morning about why the two increasingly converge, despite all the ironies and conflicting approaches. Here's my best guess.… Read more

Tim O'Reilly argues that reciprocity for SaaS would have killed GPL, but would it kill the web?

I was disappointed to wake up to this from Tim O'Reilly, commenting on why GPLv3 was right to abandon the attempt to rein in free-riding SaaS companies on open source software:

Web-delivered applications are just too important to too many people for the horse to be taken back to the barn. It would have been a death blow for GPLv3, making it impossible to adopt.

I'm actually not sure where Tim falls on this. When I initially commented on his blog, I read the above to suggest that a) the web is different and b) SaaS companies need not abide the same rules as non-SaaS companies vis-a-vis open source.

Reading his comments again, it feels like he's actually just saying that GPLv3 would have died in the face of opposition from Google et al. had the Free Software Foundation pushed the issue. That's certainly what Eben said at OSBC and I can appreciate the quandary.… Read more