| sundialsvcs |
01-29-2006 11:03 AM |
It might be said that Linus Torvalds "got the ball rolling," but the single most important thing that he did was to provide the work-product, without legal restrictions (but while retaining legal rights), on the Internet. Thus what was created was a collaborative development environment. It does also mean that Linus is not a mogul who drives a two-hundred-foot yacht, although the commercial impact of what he started is much greater.
If you look at the roster of names in the source-code, you will of course find hundreds of names; not only of individuals but also corporations. So there is not a single individual who "did it all," nor is thee a single corporation. And that, really, is the whole point. Linus is famous, not for being the uber-geek, but for dropping a pebble into a pond and then declining to build a fence around the expanding waves. That was the spark. The newly-created Internet provided fertile grounds for the subsequent explosion.
Now, you can decide for yourself whether this has anything at all to do with the simultaneous "software-is-free" argument that seems to be roiling on alongside it. In my opinion the two arguments are quite distinct. In my opinion, the Linux project simply altered the definition of "what do you charge for?"
No one, who collaborates on the Linux project or uses its work-product, charges either for the work or for the work-product. They do charge for their expertise in other areas, for "whatever they do for a living," but not for their work on Linux itself in its many parts. They are legally blocked from this.
So what you have is a symbiosis in which "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Where no one is having to re-invent the same wheel over and over again. Given that software, far from being "free," is actually atrociously expensive if paid-for in the usual business model, this distinctively different financial approach has some badly-needed advantages to the earlier status quo. And one of its very important advantages is that, unlike some of the "free beer" arguments that seem to be bouncing around, this one has proven to be commercially viable and to provide a meaningful framework for international cooperation.
If you want to see just how distinctively better this approach is, look at Microsoft's recent experience with Longhorn. It started out with the usual pantheon of amazing promises, and then, one by one, those features started to drop away. What finally shipped, as Vista, basically contained none of these "swell, new" features. Meanwhile, in the same amount of time, look what Linux added. Many of the Longhorn features are already available in the Linux camp. So, if we expand the picture from a simple examination of technology to a view of the Microsoft (traditional) approach as a business, Microsoft is seen as being forced to spend a tremendous amount of money, and to exert a tremendous amount of developer effort .. to accomplish decidedly less than Linux is doing, in decidedly more time. I don't think we've heard nearly the end of this yet. Microsoft isn't an incompetent company: it's just a traditional one, in what has ceased to be traditional times.
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