Linked by David Adams on Tue 28th Oct 2008 16:14 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.
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Member since:
2008-10-28
VCN might be open source now, but it sure didn't start that way. Even reaching for Wikipedia is enough to find out that:
"VNC was created at the Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab (ORL), which was then owned by Olivetti and Oracle Corporation. In 1999 AT&T acquired the lab, and in 2002 closed down the lab's research efforts.
[...]
Following the closure of ORL in 2002, several members of the development team (including Richardson, Harter, Weatherall and Hopper) formed RealVNC in order to continue working on open source and commercial VNC software under that name.
Several other versions of VNC have been developed from the original GPLed source code."
Being pedantic here, I know, but it really troubles me when journalists (and I'm using the term liberally) don't even bother to spend five minutes to get their facts straight.