Open Source Wave
Open Source is no more geek’s job! Linux and other OS projects are already working in this model from years and now many commercial players are joining ‘em. This is really interesting. I get to much surprised when I see Microsoft is also trying to join OSS. Well, already they have made their couple of projects as open source and now they are also commenting on the “Shared Source”.
The shared source is something more liberal than the closed source but not the fully open source. Still, this may be first step towards the open source. In last week, in some conference Microsoft spokesperson also mentioned some drawbacks of the open source (Click here for actual news). Now that’s partially true. To add the proper value, you may need to charge customer sometimes. But hey, that’s one clause under open source too. You can modify the code and sell it but you should also provide the modified source code. I don’t see there is any wrong thing done by the Red Hat about which people are talking in the news. Moreover, we shouldn’t at all forget that Red hat’s remarkable contribution in making Linux popular and they contributed a lot by standardizing a Linux distribution. So if some people don’t like that Red hat made few of its Linux distributions paid, I disagree with them. Red hat has done nothing wrong and still they are following the OS license. One more news struck me hard, that came from Sun Microsystems. A legendry operating system with more than $500 million research is now available under open source license. (See Tom Goguen speaking about this on this). Now that’s great, a real open source and liberal license. There might be various good or bad reasons about why Solaris is being made open source. Being an end user, I enjoy its presence in the open source. Now I believe there is a good competition to Windows Server side by Solaris joining OSS. I will not say people will wipe out commercial server line by Solaris or Linux but certainly it will have effect. I believe the open source nature of Linux made it very popular and this popularity contributed a lot in the fast pace development of Microsoft too. Without such a tough competition Microsoft wouldn’t have seen this day. Welcome aboard Solaris!