Re: [MLUG] Open Document Format in Minnesota?

["Vern Green" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years, you've seen
it happen, so you should know the answer to that question.


> Lets put it another way, OpenSource is an interesting notion, but most
> of the best innovation is coming from the closed source community.

I'm not seeing that.

 

Well, most of the innovations mentioned on this board are coming from Apple. For some reason Apple seems to get a free pass when competitive practices are brought up, why is that? The iPod is extrememly proprietary, the iPhone is proprietary.

 

On the other hand, I am not seeing anything from the open source community that is all that innovative. I see a lot of projects out there that are trying to do things that have been available for a long time. Today we were talking about an OpenSource calendaring solution, this is an area for HUGE advances to be made, and yet we are still dealing with products that are far behind anything Microsoft has done with Outlook and Exchange.

> Companies like NetApp, Microsoft, Cisco and Apple to name a few, are
> spending tons of money on R&D to be innovative, that expenditure demands
> a return on investment that frankly cannot come from the OpenSource
> community.
>
> I would be interested in hearing thoughts on this.

Well, you can focus on a few individual projects and see that some of the
very best stuff comes out of companies that spend millions on R&D, sure,
but look at all of software as a whole.  How much of the best stuff that
you use is open/free and how much is proprietary?  I can tell you that for
me there is a mix and some of the very best software, and most innovative
software is open/free.

 

I have to say that very little I use from the Open Source community is all that innovative. I would like to see examples of Open Source projects that are truly unique, or that are blazing the trail in some new grounds that make life better for the computing community.

 

There might be some things happening in the mobile computing environment that I am not aware of, but I have not seen too much from the open source community that makes me want to say "WOW!"

--
Thanks
F Vernon Green

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