[plug] hello, troll

[Leon Brooks]

> ZDNet: PC Week: Open source is (so far) an open road to nowhere

John Taschek, your 'open road to nowhere' looked so much like a simple
inflammatory troll that I was at first inclined to simply ignore it. But
heck, you may simply not know. People really can be that dense, y'know?

> What amazes me the most is that open source has gained so much
> momentum without showing any goods.

60% of all webservers in the world are Apache
(http://www.netcraft.com/survey/), which is Open Source. There is no way
of counting the working SaMBa file-and-print-sharing installations -
millions, at least - Open Source. Throw in half a million IP addresses
running the PHP web scripting module (http://www.php.net/usage.php3) -
1.5 million domains - Open Source, a pretty good 18 months' work. Most
of those PHPs will have an Open Source SQL database like PostGreSQL
(http://www.postgresql.org/) behind them. Then there's (the
much-awarded) Squid, OpenSSL, BIND, OpenLDAP, and countless other
utilities to consider. Your own web service may use PERL somewhere -
Open Source. No goods? Mmmmm... suuuure...

Client software is harder to count, since sales, as such, either don't
exist, or represent only a small fraction of the actual installations.
Products like The GIMP, Gnumeric, XMMS, ncftp, KDevelop and so on must
run into tens of millions each, plus there are hundreds of smaller
products like BlueFish, Xplorer, POVRay, OpenSSH, VisualTCL and so on in
the thousands-to-millions range.

Did you simply not look, or were you relying on another ignoramus's
opinion?

> In two years, one of the more high-profile open-source projects -
> Mozilla.org - has released exactly zero legitimate copies of its browser

In order to beat this, Microsoft (http://photo.net/bg/) had to _buy_ a
browser (SpyGlass, a derivative of Mosaic) which had already been worked
on for many years, and shaft the company they bought it from (This deal
(http://www.3pco.net/guides/wnv02n22.htm) was for a percentage-of-gross
payment, then MS started giving away IE for free almost immediately -
this kind of thing seems kind of habitual for MS), and it still sucked
for far more than two years (verion 1.* didn't even do tables! Even KFM,
the KDE File Manager, did tables when it was less than a year old).

BTW, I don't think there _are_ any illegitimate copies of their browser.

> It's an operating system, and OSes aren't a threat to anyone - and
> if they were, it surely wouldn't be a good thing.

Alternative operating systems are a dire threat to people who would
rather lock you in to their own products. Free operating systems are a
dire threat to people who would rather sell them to you. It surely would
be a good thing to threaten a monopoly, especially given one particular
monopoly's track record of staggering indifference to the welfare of
customers, partners, their own staff, experts on their side and in the
end even itself.

I note that much of the Javascript on the web page in question is
clauses to cope with bugs in various closed source browsers.

Your article was a faux pas. Please don't do another like it. In fact, a
public retraction would be in order, and probably would be applauded.

-- 
Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.