4 ms·

What large software firm publishes their own open software? Is there ANY? Maybe Redhat... If you ignore the fact that they haven't released any new technology

What large software firm publishes their own open software? Is there ANY? Maybe Redhat... If you ignore the fact that they haven't released any new technology in quite a while unless you call adding a number for Fedora distro advancement. Buinesses make money, your business doesn't survive by products, moral fortitude, even customers, etc. It survives by making money. That's why RedHat OS isn't so great, they don't build anything they just maintain it for their customers. They simply don't have the money to develop on new products then throw that investment away by casting it to the general internet community where it will be repacked and sold as an original piece of software, or forked and tangled. If we ever see a large company make a significant contribution, it will probably come in the form of a platform for capturing the community work into proprietary system on private hardware. Open sourcing your company is one step away from throwing in the towel, in the current economy.

mindcrime 14y ago
That's why RedHat OS isn't so great, they don't build anything they just maintain it for their customers. They simply don't have the money to develop on new products then throw that investment away by casting it to the general internet community where it will be repacked and sold as an original piece of software, or forked and tangled. Red Hat sell a lot more than Linux. They've open sourced a TON of stuff they either wrote or acquired. All (or at least most) of the JBoss stuff was developed by JBoss and open-sourced, and Red Hat have acquired other companies (or bought products from other companies) and released their stuff as OSS (or kept it OSS if it already was). Cygwin and FuseSource come to mind, and they bought the old Netscape Certificate Server code from that weird Novell/Sun spinoff that had acquired that code at one time (can't remember the name right now, sorry). If we ever see a large company make a significant contribution, it will probably come in the form of a platform for capturing the community work into proprietary system on private hardware. We've already seen big companies contribute OSS code, sometimes significant amounts. IBM, believe it or not, have released a lot of code as OSS, Google have done so as well, Novell have, and Sun Microsystems released nearly all of their stuff as OSS before the Oracle acquisition. Now you could argue that Sun is a bad example since they failed, but you could also argue that they were failing long before choosing the OSS approach. There are also contributions to the OSS world from Netflix, Oracle (gasp), even Microsoft.
- IheartApplesDix 14y ago
  I don't recall arguing that there are no OSS contributions, so I took the liberty of ignoring your comment.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    Heh, no worries. We probably don't actually disagree that much. Things like "significant contribution" are subjective anyway.

mindcrime 14y ago

That's why RedHat OS isn't so great, they don't build anything they just maintain it for their customers. They simply don't have the money to develop on new products then throw that investment away by casting it to the general internet community where it will be repacked and sold as an original piece of software, or forked and tangled. Red Hat sell a lot more than Linux. They've open sourced a TON of stuff they either wrote or acquired. All (or at least most) of the JBoss stuff was developed by JBoss and open-sourced, and Red Hat have acquired other companies (or bought products from other companies) and released their stuff as OSS (or kept it OSS if it already was). Cygwin and FuseSource come to mind, and they bought the old Netscape Certificate Server code from that weird Novell/Sun spinoff that had acquired that code at one time (can't remember the name right now, sorry). If we ever see a large company make a significant contribution, it will probably come in the form of a platform for capturing the community work into proprietary system on private hardware. We've already seen big companies contribute OSS code, sometimes significant amounts. IBM, believe it or not, have released a lot of code as OSS, Google have done so as well, Novell have, and Sun Microsystems released nearly all of their stuff as OSS before the Oracle acquisition. Now you could argue that Sun is a bad example since they failed, but you could also argue that they were failing long before choosing the OSS approach. There are also contributions to the OSS world from Netflix, Oracle (gasp), even Microsoft.

IheartApplesDix 14y ago
I don't recall arguing that there are no OSS contributions, so I took the liberty of ignoring your comment.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Heh, no worries. We probably don't actually disagree that much. Things like "significant contribution" are subjective anyway.