A letter to Obama

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/open_source_letter_to_obama/

by rogercosseboom • 17 years ago

18 17 17 years ago

theregister.co.uk

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

The most striking thing about this list of signatories is how none of them seem like open source leaders. The actual letter is here: http://consideropensource.blogspot.com/

As I read down the list I nodded my head when I came to John Newton of Alfresco but for the most part my reaction was "Who?" and then I'd look at the company names and go "Who?" and finally there's Unisys.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

It's sort of ironic that they're using blogger to publish this, which of course isn't open source...

jrockway2• 17 years ago

You've never heard of Ingres?

But anyway, yeah. It's hard to find time for both coding and writing letters (that will be ignored) to the President. A classic example here is ESR -- he spends a lot of time advocating open source, but doesn't spend much time writing software. (OK, OK, he wrote vc-mode.el and maintains fetchmail. Even I do more than that!)

The free software movement doesn't need you to write letters. The free software movement needs you to write excellent free software. The rest follows naturally.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. Eric Raymond is close to useless. He managed to attach himself to the free software movement, rename it and turn it into being all about him. And he's written almost no software.

swombat• 17 years ago

"You can put the best engineering in the world into your product, but if you don't know how to market, your project will rot in the source repository."

Worth pointing out that this applies to commercial software too. If you can't market your stuff to your target audience, you fail...

rbanffy• 17 years ago

It will rot until someone needs it. Isn't this a beautiful form of preserving investment and pooling resources across barriers of time?

jrockway2• 17 years ago

I've found that marketing is vastly overrated. I think people think it's important because Ruby on Rails came out of nowhere and had good marketing, but that was just a rare special case. Most of the time, people will find your open source project and start using it without fancy marketing.

An example of this is the Perl OO library, Moose. It started out as some code factored out of our internal apps. Other people liked it and contributed code. Now it's the standard way to do OO in Perl. The only marketing that was done was talking about it on IRC and doing some conference talks. And oh yeah, the awesome single-page website (http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/).

ja2ke• 17 years ago

A good Perl library is going to be found by programmers, because (at least in my experience) programmers read docs. Especially when searching for good feature sets.

With software aimed at end users (or businesses, at least business purchases made outside of IT/dev), you can't expect them to come to you, you have to go to them... or have fairly amazing word of mouth.

dreur• 17 years ago

Why making a comparison with handicapped people ? ...

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

What I read between The Register's lines is:

Dear Mr. President: Open Source groups don't advertise in The Register. Let me tell you who does...

tptacek• 17 years ago

Lame. Dziuba could probably give a fuck about advertisers in The Register. That he clearly doesn't give a fuck about writing anything but linkbait is the real critique of this article.

tel• 17 years ago

Ah, yes, open source electronic medical records - a panacea for the health care industry. Vendors have been pushing this one for years, with little success, as they don't understand that the inefficiencies in health care keep a lot of people in work.

And inefficiencies in health records kill a lot of people just the same. But, you know, vendors don't get the market.

TheWama• 17 years ago

An interesting data point in the electronic medical records discussion.

Those (admittedly few) primary care practices which choose not to interact with the insurance companies, and operate on a cash basis, also happen to be the ones who are pushing through higher efficiencies through technology. Hello Health (https://www.hellohealth.com/), in Brooklyn, uses and develops a medical web platform through its software arm, Myca. Qliance (http://qliance.com/), in Seattle, has been using an electronic records system from the start, which was described to me as "just a glorified CMS".

It does seem strange that paper is the word of the insurance world, and I don't know the industry well enough to explain the problem, but it seems the problem may have something to do with the doctor-insurer dynamic.

ori_b• 17 years ago

Oh. It's by Dziuba. No wonder it reeks of envy and poor writing.

FraaJad• 17 years ago

From the article ... " They have used Microsoft and others in the past, and they works...". What? Are they even proof reading this thing before hitting `publish`?

That para onwards, its all old fashioned FUD.

Ardit20• 17 years ago

Open Source means free right. People like free so why should it be any different for the government. If they can work on linux rather than spending millions on window software then that's good right loads of money saved for tax cuts or new jobs or something.

I do not quite get it though why do people spend so much time programming excellent software to only then give it away for free

c00p3r• 17 years ago

This is well-paid well-written text, nothing more.

The goal of open source is that you can avoid any payments to big-shots like RH or MS or Sun because of the really huge community. There are no problems with OSS if you can read and write queries to google search.

It is not about sources, it is about community - free support.

About medical records - it can be easily attached to google's or facebook's profile. =)

A letter to Obama

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